What lore do you ignore?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

Not only that, the person who is pointing out that I'm coming at this in the opposite direction is right. I'm staring at the billion person high stack of corpses and deciding no good person does that. So this must be a bad person. They are coming at it from everything I am seeing and hearing is telling me this is a good and loving person, therefore this massive stack of corpses must be at worse a 'necessary evil.'

And for that, the writers did a very, very bad thing as there is no necessary reason to eradicate an entire people.

That is my main issue, people reading from front to back are lead to believe if a good person did something evil, then the thing she did must not be evil. I was also led to believe that. But then at the end I sat with that massive stack of corpses for awhile and everything started to stink.

So they are right, I am coming at this from the end because the longer I sat with those corpses, the more her every word and deed becomes tainted...by all the murders she committed.

She is a good person as long as I ignore everything she did, her reasons for doing it and just pay attention to the color scheme, the lip service and the power ballads. But both actions and inactions alike fall under top tier villainy.

[Iscah]

Not only that, the person who is pointing out that I'm coming at this in the opposite direction is right. I'm staring at the billion person high stack of corpses and deciding no good person does that. So this must be a bad person. They are coming at it from everything I am seeing and hearing is telling me this is a good and loving person, therefore this massive stack of corpses must be at worse a 'necessary evil.'

That's not what I have said at any point.

I am saying that according to the story there is no "stack of corpses", even figuratively, for Venat to be accused of. It is clear that the writers do not intend sundering to be equal to death, no matter what the player may think of it, and therefore it is necessary to use that interpretation when considering what characters have canonically done according to the story.

That does not mean I am condoning Venat's actions by that interpretation, or even that the interpretation is objectively wrong, only that when you are viewing the story that the devs intended to write, the villainy is not there and nobody was murdered by Venat's decision.

In a different context, if you ask me my personal opinion on the story presented in Endwalker, then yes it is absolutely a messed-up thing to have done – but I regard the fault to be laid at the writer's level rather than the character's. It was a writer's decision that sundering does what it does, a writer's decision that this is nevertheless not equatable to death, and a writer's decision that Venat could decide on this course of action and still be presented as a good character.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

That's not what I have said at any point.

I am saying that according to the story there is no "stack of corpses", even figuratively, for Venat to be accused of. It is clear that the writers do not intend sundering to be equal to death, no matter what the player may think of it, and therefore it is necessary to use that interpretation when considering what characters have canonically done according to the story.

That does not mean I am condoning Venat's actions by that interpretation, or even that the interpretation is objectively wrong, only that when you are viewing the story that the devs intended to write, the villainy is not there and nobody was murdered by Venat's decision.

In a different context, if you ask me my personal opinion on the story presented in Endwalker, then yes it is absolutely a messed-up thing to have done – but I regard the fault to be laid at the writer's level rather than the character's. It was a writer's decision that sundering does what it does, a writer's decision that this is nevertheless not equatable to death, and a writer's decision that Venat could decide on this course of action and still be presented as a good character.

Even if you can somehow convince yourself that the sundering is not mass murder, purposely sparing Emet-Selch and the other Ascians so that they can do the rejoinings most certainly is. If both of these aren't murder then there is no such thing as murder in FF14. She left alive three people to murder en masse "her children" to make her super special star child. My character carries the weight of so much death having both been the inspiration for it and the benefactor. How this made it out the writing room is beyond me.

ETA: So if someone erases your memory, reduces your intelligence to half that of an ape, mutilates your body so bad you start to turn into an animal and five minutes later you die of natural causes because they've reduced your lifespan from 70 years to five minutes, they didn't kill you? Really?

Given that Venat has to get this right on a single playthrough, it really comes entirely down to her judgement of the personalities involved. Based off of what she heard in Poieten Oikos, it probably would have made sense not to let Emet escape. But for whatever reason, she counted on him to do the right thing in the end, and it actually proved to be the winning gambit in Ultima Thule that ensured everyone's survival.

This ignores that both her rise to godhood and the creation of her champion is dependant on the rejoinings. So why assume she let him go with hope in her heart he wouldn't do exactly what she needed him to do to maintain the timeline when her every other action and inaction suggests she's attempting to maintain the timeline and any comments they've made about it tell us she's purposely maintaining the timeline? At that point you're just ignoring even what the people who wrote it said she's doing to read her as good.

[Theodric]

That's the rub, isn't it? If the direct consequences of Venat's actions had been shown in full then I imagine that would make her look worse rather than better. The game is pretty much crystal clear that acts of mass death being deliberately inflicted upon another group of beings is not something to gun for in every other circumstance outside of the Sundering. I think a lot of people were on board with the idea of accepting the Sundering as a thing that happened if it were treated as something avoidable, highly unfortunate and disgusting.

It doesn't help that for years around these parts it was insinuated by some that no matter how tragic the circumstances or sympathetic the motives, there is never a 'justification' for genocide.

Fast forward to Endwalker and...how strange! It turns out the pretty mother goddess figure didn't cause the Sundering by accident at all. It was a deliberate, purposeful act against innocents who never saw it coming. Suddenly such acts went from 'never justifiable' to 'grim and unfortunate necessity'.

I personally don't care which character or characters anyone here roots for or supports. What I oppose is the strange swarming on anyone who is even remotely critical of Venat despite some claiming to be 'weary' of discussing the Ancients. I can understand that perfectly but unless people want these circular arguments to carry over into Dawntrail as well then there really needs to be more of a genuine effort to agree to disagree.

All that aside, the situation isn't really helped by so much of the game's lore now either being at risk of being retconned on a patch by patch basis or just hidden away in obscure side stories or interview snippets.

[Lyth]

It seems like a self-defeating argument to claim that Venat's mistake was in not getting rid of Emet, Lahabrea, and Elidibus before they had the chance to destroy multiple worlds and end countless lives in the future. In a way, it assumes that the Convocation members had no agency or choice of their own because they were somehow 'destined' to turn to evil no matter what happened.

An important element of the Anamnesis Anyder recording was that Venat refused to speak ill of the Convocation despite their tyrannical conduct. The EE Vol. 3 provides further context to this, because we now know that there was a large schism in society over this decision and a significant opposition to the sacrifices that was deliberately ignored by the Convocation (p.11). She would have been quite justified in condemning them.

My impression is that Venat's believed in Emet and that he could overturn his own promised future. This did turn out to be the correct decision in the end.

[Iscah]

It seems like a self-defeating argument to claim that Venat's mistake was in not getting rid of Emet, Lahabrea, and Elidibus before they had the chance to destroy multiple worlds and end countless lives in the future. In a way, it assumes that the Convocation members had no agency or choice of their own because they were somehow 'destined' to turn to evil no matter what happened.

Back (if fleetingly) on the thread's actual premise, I'm inclined to put "Venat deliberately spared Emet, Lahabrea and Elidibus" as at least tentatively "ignorable" in that it seemed like a hastily invented answer to something the writers hadn't properly considered when they settled on the final version of the plot.

The main opportunity to clear up their explanation would have been EE3 but that part of the plot summary (on page 13) simply states that they escaped the Sundering "by means unknown" and does not attempt to attribute it to being a deliberate part of Hydaelyn's plan.

In any case that comes back to what I was saying in an earlier post, because being given knowledge of the future puts Venat/Hydaelyn in an unpleasant situation so far as making decisions that would be cruel to individuals (on the assumption that the game is not lying when it portrays her as a wise and compassionate person).

Does she really wilfully leave the will-be Ascians unsundered and tormented, or does she reason that she will simply aim to sunder all of existence and that if the future-history is true, there must be some unknowable occurrence when she does so that results in those few people slipping through the cracks?

[Cleretic]

Oh, okay, so there's no interest whatsoever in finding textual foundation. Is it fanfiction if you're clearly in no way a fan of what the writers wrote? ...and also not actually writing anything. What's the 'minimum viable product' for fanfiction as a term, anyway?

Since there's no substance or evidence to any of this, I choose to ignore most of it, and instead try to 're-reail'.

Back (if fleetingly) on the thread's actual premise, I'm inclined to put "Venat deliberately spared Emet, Lahabrea and Elidibus" as at least tentatively "ignorable" in that it seemed like a hastily invented answer to something the writers hadn't properly considered when they settled on the final version of the plot.

The main opportunity to clear up their explanation would have been EE3 but that part of the plot summary (on page 13) simply states that they escaped the Sundering "by means unknown" and does not attempt to attribute it to being a deliberate part of Hydaelyn's plan.

It is sort of a curious absence, especially now that you recall that we had 'afterlife-epilogues' from all three of those characters in Endwalker and its patches (even if Lahabrea's was somewhat nonlinear). It's a surprising gap that we never got either a story about that moment, or someone talking about it. The writers usually love circling back to Emet-Selch!

Perhaps it's sort of a functional element: by nature there must be a loophole for survival, but it doesn't really matter what that was. It's not the only one in the game, in retrospect; we don't know how the eventual founders of Gelmorra weathered the Great Flood, after all, even if we know the effective escape plans for every other successor civilization. Perhaps it also hits a problem of implicit magnitude: a means of escaping the Sundering feels too potentially huge to be a passing element, like it has to be important if it's established at all. That's either a technique with enormous potential (on either side), or a location left unharmed by a planetwide shattering, and either one sounds like it should be important. And since it's not actually important, therefore, it must never be definitively established.

To a degree, it's almost the most developer-sanctioned answer to this thread subject: a handwave specifically designed so that you may ignore it. And it's not perfect, but it might be better the way it is: it would sort of destroy the integrity that Emet's entire story is based on if he hid while all his people faced the nebulous-but-conceptually-horrifying events of the sundering, so he must therefore at least partially not be at fault. Meanwhile, Venat's story already has the splash of darkness of doing the Sundering in the first place and blaming herself for the ensuing suffering (as we saw in The Answers Walk), doing something horrible for noble reasons; a bit of 'and she might've deliberately spared people who'd go on to be real ratbags' isn't a big change to her overall colors.

[Theodric]

Oh, okay, so there's no interest whatsoever in finding textual foundation. Is it fanfiction if you're clearly in no way a fan of what the writers wrote? ...and also not actually writing anything. What's the 'minimum viable product' for fanfiction as a term, anyway?

Since there's no substance or evidence to any of this, I choose to ignore most of it, and instead try to 're-reail'.

You must have missed this, then:

The video in question can be found here, with perhaps the most relevant section being the one aptly titled 'excuses':

https://youtu.be/fsk412wCrJY?t=1101

It's admittedly a long video so it might be worth watching it in chapters but everything is sourced from the game itself, various lore related interviews and short stories. I don't know where this idea that the people countering Venat's motivations aren't equipped with sources is coming from since it only takes a look through the post history of someone like Rulakir or Lauront to see that, yes, they do source a lot of their talking points and explain their reasoning and conclusions clearly.

See, that's the thing - all of the points raised by myself and various other posters have been backed up with sources at length. We posted them for years and you either insulted us or ignored us...or scurried away pretending as if your points had not been countered. So we made a video to keep all the points and sources in one - admittedly large (but split into chapters) video for the sake of efficiency especially when this exact same song and dance has been going on for many years now, largely at the behest of those thoroughly allergic to the idea of simply agreeing to disagree on the basis that no, actually, nobody is obligated to like, dislike, or side with specific characters in a fictional setting let alone praise even their most horrific actions.

You're welcome not to watch it though please do not insinuate that these talking points are coming out of nowhere or are not based on anything outlined in the game.

My theory on how this happened was they were setting Venat up to be evil knowing we'd be killing both Zodiak and Hydaelyn, but that idea got vetoed by a higher up, so they switched up her tone without changing her actions. Cause I can't imagine from the onset they were aiming for her to be good and started with "then she sunders everyone with the full knowledge of the hell she'll be putting them through."

I think that's fairly likely. If not evil - which I never wanted her to be, for that matter - but definitely a tragic antagonist along the lines of Yunalesca who meant well but needed to be put down nonetheless. The fact that there was a major delay and a confirmed rewrite for the expansion is rather suspicious in itself, though it remains to be seen if any solid details ever come out on that front one way or another.

Well, as long as we don't do a colonialism. *begs* Please, please, please don't have us go there and colonize these people. I don't want to spend the next three years trying to explain why being a colonizer is a bad thing.

It's hard to say at this point, though my bet is that they'll attempt to be so very safe in the execution that it ends up coming off as incredibly condescending. It doesn't help that we're stuck with the Scions who have repeatedly proven to be rather...insistent on imprinting their cultural values and beliefs upon everybody else.

[Cleretic]

See, that's the thing - all of the points raised by myself and various other posters have been backed up with sources at length. We posted them for years and you either insulted us or ignored us...or scurried away pretending as if your points had not been countered. So we made a video to keep all the points and sources in one - admittedly large (but split into chapters) video for the sake of efficiency especially when this exact same song and dance has been going on for many years now, largely at the behest of those thoroughly allergic to the idea of simply agreeing to disagree on the basis that no, actually, nobody is obligated to like, dislike, or side with specific characters in a fictional setting let alone praise even their most horrific actions.

You're welcome not to watch it though please do not insinuate that these talking points are coming out of nowhere or are not based on anything outlined in the game.

I'm not going to watch your video, because I have other things to do with my hours. I'm sorry, but this subject is just less interesting than Deep Space Nine.

But those citations existing must make it much easier for you to produce quotes and citations for any claims you are making, right? I do my homework for my claims, you should do yous for yours. Give your argument the background color it deserves, in the space you're making it.

[Theodric]

G'raha is - much like Venat - conveniently written to be utterly obsessed with the player character, to an often unsettling degree at times. Ultimately, though, it's another case of protagonist centered morality. It benefits him to callously sacrifice a world he quickly writes off as 'doomed' but we know from his own words that there were those opposed to his decision. You know, people with loved ones who had survived considerable trauma but still had the drive to fight and continue to live each new day.

Which is where the dehumanisation comes into play again. 'Those people needed to die. They were doomed. They were a necessary, unfortunate sacrifice.' Your quotes, not mine.

It'd be easier to buy if the same people touting such were willing to apply that to the game's protagonists though as we know from previous 'discussions' a number of the regulars here are fiercely opposed to any of the protagonists being held accountable for anything of note, criticised for their shadier actions or let alone killed off even in a 'necessary' sacrifice.

With the way in which the protagonists are written they come across as malicious sociopaths possessed of numerous dark triad personality traits who are only in it for themselves and their favoured as well as anyone who will call them a 'hero'. It's probably not entirely intentional but the damage is done the moment a story begins framing the deliberate destruction of entire species, worlds and innocents as 'necessary.'

Which once again brings us right back to the whole 'some of you spent years arguing that there was never, ever an excuse for such things until the point where it was the protagonists having a hand in such acts!

...and so the circle continues to spin.