What lore do you ignore?

[Theodric]

...and at some point, if a particular situation is written badly enough then there's no obligation to just blindly go along with it. There's a big difference between the writers expecting someone to accept that, say, that there's a fictional type of berry in Final Fantasy XIV called a rolanberry and a story attempting to convince the player that sometimes genocide is the correct solution to a problem.

Maybe, just maybe, they should not have written such things in the first place. Though they did as much, nobody is denying that. There's still no obligation for anyone to like or dislike specific characters or agree with what is being written though. I'm fond of cats, if the game told me to hate cats I wouldn't agree because I like cats and no matter the reasoning I'm not going to change my mind on that.

Incidentally, I don't support genocide and I'm deeply troubled by many of the horrific events going on in the real world involving such. Though no matter how much FFXIV tries to pretend as if such horrific things are acceptable so long as a pretty mother goddess or an enthusiastic cat boy cheer them on...I'm not going to change my mind on that, either.

Though that's scale things back a bit, since one of the biggest problems here isn't so much that the writers are actually demanding that everybody accepts Venat as she is written as a good thing. They've actually made many interview statements - repeatedly posted by myself and others over the years - specifically encouraging players to come to their own conclusions about specific characters.

No, this is very much more about what certain posters here want - and that is for Venat to be considered 'right' and 'good' and that everything she did is a 'grim necessity'. Which is why the moment a new poster came here to discuss the story and express a dislike for the character in question, she was immediately swarmed by some of the regulars. Something which quite a lot of posters have experienced to the point where this forgotten little corner of the forum has become a rather notorious echo chamber in recent years.

I don't expect perfection from a setting when it comes to world-building. Yet if a game sets out to be exceedingly preachy with its supposed morals then it isn't unreasonable to expect them to be consistently applied across the board. Especially given that this is an MMORPG, one that appeals to a great many players from many different backgrounds, countries, cultures and belief systems. That's another reason why 'just blindly go along with what the story presents' does not really hold up under scrutiny.

Incidentally, I was under the impression that these situations were exactly what the ethics department was created for but that's another matter entirely, I suppose.

Personally I think the writers were banking on Venat being another Emet-Selch but due to the circumstances it didn't really land. It doesn't help that Endwalker arrived amidst a rather dire part of recent human history where people in the real world where genuinely calling for the deaths and imprisonment of anyone who disagreed with them over the pandemic and lockdowns. Not to mention those of us who lost loves one during that period aren't really thrilled by child-like stories that proclaim that some people are more deserving than others of living whereas others are just fodder to cast aside to prop up the heroes because they're extra special. Words truly cannot describe how tone deaf and infantile it all is, really.

...but more than anything, the funny thing is morality wouldn't even factor into it all that much if this forum wasn't plagued by regular posters turning every little thing the antagonists did into a huge moral drama that absolutely had to be punished and criticised at length by the game's protagonists.

I actually had rather considerable respect for those of you who I thought genuinely believed such things only to see that many then immediately turned around and declared that so long as the 'protagonists' are doing the same thing, only then is it necessary and good.

It's really just one big, giant tangled web of a mess that I do not believe the writers can truly untangle at this point...and the game isn't exactly fresh these days either. Time will tell how popular 'lol graha ate taco XD' proves to be especially with some healthy competition finally emerging on the market.

[Palladiamors]

Anything past 5.0. Zeno's revival, the Ascians being hamfisted into suddenly being a tragic ancient race of super beings with godly powers who created everything, the removal of any gods in the story, the Empire being chumped out, the Final Days being caused by an actual Woobie, destroyer of worlds, the weird way the writing suddenly started sprinting straight down trope territory...

It's all just a fever dream in the wake of recovering from the wounds inflicted in our final fight with Zenos.

[SannaR]

Is it plot armor or tone armor? They don't have to be the same thing. What I mean by tone armor is no one for instance wouldn't get whiplash if Shaggy out of no where suddenly threw out his back the instant Scooby-Doo lept into his arms. Or that Wile-E-Coyote was a one and done after the first time he had an explosion go off in his face or fell off a cliff. Or (yes I know how lame of me) soon after the red wedding in Game of Thrones it suddenly went into a musical number. Cause that's not the tone those worlds had been cultivating. Done right a tonal shift can happen to where a story the was fun, happy and full of whimsy seemingly having few or little consequences is now one that is more gritty, dirty, depressing and realistic. The same can happen in reverse. And plot armor can still end up happening. You can also agree or disagree that a tonal shift was done well or not. People can also grow and change.

[Lyth]

Looking back on Cleretic's original statement, a request was made that evidence be provided to back up claims about the story. This is not an unreasonable expectation for anyone, and the burden of proof rests with the writer to make sure that they provide their sources. This is a good habit to get into even if you're not specifically asked to. I spend a fair amount of time backtracking to previous scenes and quest dialogue lines in order to make sure that I can provide people with a reference so that they can check any queries for themselves. It's not appropriate to put that responsibility onto everyone else and force them to wade through an opinion video for the purposes of doing your fact checking for you.

That's shouldn't give cause to be interpreted as slight, either. Repeating an opinion, even across multiple accounts, does not make it fact. I'm aware that this community has some, shall we say, 'complex histories' amongst its members that apparently still rankle from the sounds of it, this really has no bearing on whether a statement is backed by evidence or not. It also seems to me that this particular routine gets trotted out frequently as a distraction tactic when its revealed that there's no actual substance behind the presented arguments.

If anything, I think that people here have a tendency towards being overly charitable, especially when there's clearly a recurring pattern.

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?

I also feel that the provided explanation is flimsy, but they wrote themselves into a corner with the 'Unsundered' designation. It is very difficult to create a global event that specifically spares three people. It gets even more complicated when one of them is supposed to be the Heart of Zodiark, and the EE Vol. 3 states that Hydaelyn and Zodiark were locked in combat when the Sundering happened. They could try to invent loopholes to get around this (perhaps another time travel loop), but I'm actually glad that they just gave up and handwaved it rather than potentially digging themselves in deeper.

Setting aside the philosophical question of whether events are stochastic or deterministic, 'future knowledge' is really only useful if you can safely act on it. It's actually more more beneficial to be able to reset a decision, because that way you can actually test whether the outcome is better or not.

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.

[ZavosEsperian]

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.

Towards the beginning of the expansion, I had viewed Venat through rose-colored glasses because of how she was presented. These days my view is a darker shade of grey as elements present through the story would give you the ability to interpret her in a more negative/evil light. And as you have put it, the presentation itself is capable of changing someone's opinion of her to a more positive tone. The necessity of suffering she introduced along with the immediate aftermath of the sundering is extremely jarring compared to her overall messaging and causes Venat to have a large amount of cognitive dissonance. As such, it is why I am not as critical of people who view her negatively.

*snip*

If true, this would make the individuals you are referring to extremely detestable. I have said this before but individuals who behave in this way disrupt how the forums function and will cause newer players to be dissuaded from interacting with them directly. While I am not opposed to debate as people are entitled to what they think, I am opposed to people like the ones you are describing here.

Vitriolic behavior as you are describing is something I would expect out of some of the worst cesspits of the internet. It is extremely vile and the individuals who are participating in said behavior should be ashamed of themselves. With that said, I suspect they are not ashamed of their behavior either...but that is something I would not know.

My apologies you had to deal with such detestable people.

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.

Generally, I tend to lay the blame on the writers here, and as Venat is likely the most affected from this, she is a character I expect to see a wide variety of opinions about her character. It is something that has pained me greatly because it caused parts of the game that use her as a central figure to feel...incomplete or lacking to me. I have no direct issues with people who like Venat or dislike Venat, I just need some semblance of an argument where I am able to reach whatever the other person's opinion is without needing a large number of logical leaps.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Towards the beginning of the expansion, I had viewed Venat through rose-colored glasses because of how she was presented. These days my view is a darker shade of grey as elements present through the story would give you the ability to interpret her in a more negative/evil light. And as you have put it, the presentation itself is capable of changing someone's opinion of her to a more positive tone. The necessity of suffering she introduced along with the immediate aftermath of the sundering is extremely jarring compared to her overall messaging and causes Venat to have a large amount of cognitive dissonance. As such, it is why I am not as critical of people who view her negatively.

I don't actually hate the character. I hate the framing of her actions. No one is expecting me to accept Emet-Selch is burning babies in their cribs due to his deep love for humanity. He makes it clear he doesn't view them as human and he's trying to smash everything back together again. His actions fit his views and stated values.

Venat keeps saying how much she loves humanity, but at the same time she's responsible for the destruction of 9? 10? worlds full of people with laughter that warms her heart? And to accept that as good I have to accept that some lives are just worth less than others. And I refuse.

And her values and motives go so much against just regular human decency that people are trying to find ways to believe she didn't want the rejoinings to happen given they'd cause untold suffering and death, but that ignores her motives for the sundering. The suffering is the point. The trial to which she subjected humanity is generations of torture so that we would grow strong and overcome despair. People assume she attempts to alleviate suffering because that's what a good person would do, but no, the suffering is the point. She's hurting us on purpose because she believe trauma makes us strong. Didn't make the Ascians strong though, made them go crazy. Maybe that's why she deemed them inferior and killed them off...

Based on her values, anyone trying to improve the conditions of the world is leading us towards a dead end and the only person living like they read her rulebook is Zenos. He too is causing suffering so that the people enduring it will grow strong. But when he espouses the same values he's scary, crazy and evil. Should have put him in a white dress.

Yep, the more I think about it, the worse it gets. Every layer I peel back, just another fetid layer of unspeakable horror. I can't believe all it took was Answers to get me to buy onto this, even for a time. Nobuo Uematsu is a genius.

I have no intention to "convince myself" because I am not trying to give a personal opinion, I am trying to discuss a story written by someone else though the lens of what they appear to have believed.

And I already addressed the matter of accounting for the unsundered being another failure of the writers. If I had to give a theory to explain it within canon, I would go with my earlier speculation: Venat may not have deliberately spared them at all, but tried to sunder everything and found that they somehow slipped through unaffected, just as the time traveller prophesied. But canon has avoided addressing this, so people are going to ascribe well-intentioned or malevolent purpose to it as they see fit.




You'll have to explain how the rejoinings are in any way necessary for her "rise to godhood", given that they only happen after she has become the heart of Hydaelyn and taken over Zodiark's place as the will of the star.

Also please explain why someone whose final aspiration is godhood for the sake of it would be so ready to sacrifice herself at the end of it all, instead of seeking to prolong her reign infinitely.

Without the sunderings, we do not develop time travel to go back in time to tell her what to do and how to do it to become a god. She gives us the Elpis flower to lead us down the path to coming back to her so that the loop is maintained. If she had any motivation to break the loop, she could have tried to do literally anything differently, like perhaps only sunder the people in half if her only motivation was the reduce their power level or make sure she gets the Ascians so that her 14 worlds could develop in peace and harmony. But she doesn't want peace and harmony. She wants suffering and destruction. We can't learn the endure despair without being placed in despair. And burning out the last of her soul in a duel which spares her from having to face the people whose souls she used for 12k years and whose families she murdered in the aetherial sea AND allows her to skip out on being reborn into the torture machine of her own creation is the most Zenos act of all. She didn't "sacrifice" herself at the end. She purposely destroyed her soul for a duel sparing her the suffering to which she subjected her children for so long. Before she went, she should have told Amon how one destroys his soul to opt out of the cycle of life. That would prevent future suffering, but given preventing suffering has never really been her thing, I can see why she didn't mention it as an option.

[ZavosEsperian]

No one is expecting me to accept Emet-Selch is burning babies in their cribs due to his deep love for humanity. He makes it clear he doesn't view them as human and he's trying to smash everything back together again. His actions fit his views and stated values.

As I believe you are an Emet-Selch fan. I will share with you a question and its answer during one of the Q&A Sessions. These questions were asked to Yoshi-P during Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII, which took place on (03/03/2022). Links will be provided should you wish to confirm what I have said:

Q: I’d be interested to know how the unsundered Ascians (Lahabrea, Elidibus, and Emet-Selch) avoided being kicked into fourteen pieces by Hydaelyn.

A: As Emet-Selch implied towards the end of the 6.0 main scenario (“So, here I am Venat. I suppose you needed me to tie it all together…”), Venat had purposefully allowed him to survive. The attack intentionally left something like an opening which Emet-Selch could just barely wriggle through. With that said, with the limit of Hydaelyn’s full power behind the attack, fine-tuning wasn’t possible and whether or not he would actually survive was somewhat of a gamble. In the end, Emet-Selch, with the help of Lahabrea (who happened to be nearby) and Elidibus (who had fallen from Zodiark’s core), was able to evade the attack by temporarily escaping to a rift between dimensions. -Yoshi-P

Link to video with timestamp at（02:51:46）

Link to Forum Post

Link to full transcription

-Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII (03/03/2022)

In the case of Emet-Selch, Lahabrea, and Elidibus, they were intentionally spared by Venat/Hydaelyn based on the answer Yoshi-P gave regarding this question. What you make of this is up to you.

And her values and motives go so much against just regular human decency that people are trying to find ways to believe she didn't want the rejoinings to happen given they'd cause untold suffering and death, but that ignores her motives for the sundering. The suffering is the point. The trial to which she subjected humanity is generations of torture so that we would grow strong and overcome despair. People assume she attempts to alleviate suffering because that's what a good person would do, but no, the suffering is the point. She's hurting us on purpose because she believe trauma makes us strong.

Once again, I am going to provide you with a question with its answer from the same Q&A session. Please note this one is explicitly Yoshi-P's interpretation of events, as Yoshi-P himself is not opposed to people interpreting events they way they want to and neither is the lore team themselves:

Q: I don’t really understand why the Warrior of Light messing around in Elpis didn’t create any alternate timelines. Can you explain what happened?

A: First of all, we’ve left that part up to interpretation.

With that said, my personal interpretation is that the past and present were always the part of the same timeline. Although there was still a possibility for the timelines to diverge, the Warrior of Light was unwittingly acting in accordance with Venat’s plans, which unified the past and present. Another interpretation might be that Venat worked really hard behind the scenes to ensure that the timeline wouldn’t go awry.

Seeing how Argos took to us on our first meeting, I’d say that proves that the past and present were already unified. -Yoshi-P

Link to video with timestamp at（03:18:39)

Link to Forum Post

-Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII (03/03/2022)

You are free to read any and all of those questions and answers and I would encourage you do so. I won't stand in the way of how you interpret the Q&A session. If you were to go off of some of the approaches Yoshi-P suggests in them, it is possible to say that Venat did indeed have some level of control of all of the events that occurred between the sundering up to the point we end up defeating her as Hydaelyn.

[Denishia]

Also on the necromancy part of things- I find the Ancient society so ridiculously failed in presenting itself as a Utopia that I wanted to stay long in gameplaywise, for the skin crawling revulsion but also because it was boring and repetitive a location, without wanting to falciliate serious societal changes as we did so in Vauthry’s Eulmore, Thordan’s Ishgard, or everywhere under Garlean occupation. And one of those key powers was the fragile monolith of their society having no healthy framework to deal with disasters or negative mental health and trauma. Pretending that they were immune to it wasn’t true and denial wouldn’t work. And leaving aside the physical mechanical problems of the plans after the Second Sacrifice and the Ascians’ plans and the moral problems- it still was going to fail because of what we learned about trauma and memories latching onto the soul. Even mindwipes don’t remove it, and that trauma that the Ancient society didn’t know how to face and thus did not want to face or acknowledge, was now a part of not just the survivors but the souls that they were looking to release from Zodiark and the souls in the Lifestream dead before Amaurot decided to act that were now reborn or about to be. Ancient society was focused on using creation magic to alter the life upon their planet in ways that their government deemed improvements. But they thought themselves and their society perfect and thus had no reason to change - so much so that Hermes had to look to the vast unknown of outer space in secret in the hopes of finding an alternative viewpoint. What would have saved Ancient Society was to change it, by being able to accept that no it was not free from blemish or suffering (Hi Erichtonios and Lahabrea) and no amount of magical power would do so. The story is framed around that fatal flaw in the Ancients. The Sundering is the extreme and desperate correction to that, per the story that is being told.

[Eastwall]

The entire game? Cuz it is dumb to lock content behind story. I only started doing story recently with ng+ after playing it for few years. The story actually doesn't feel like a chore When l get to do it at my own pace.

[Lyth]

Even if you want to go the 'What if' route, you have an obligation to follow the restrictions placed by previous story telling.

For example, Emet makes it clear that was relatively easy for Amaurotines to identify deception. Not only did they have the power to read others' memories, but Venat gave a demonstration of how the land itself could serve as witness to a conversation that nobody else was privy to (Lv. 87, A Flower upon Your Return). We saw how quickly the Amaurotine trio on Elpis arrived at the secret behind our arrival once Venat started asking the right questions. Even revealing partial knowledge of an event effectively renders it public domain, which is quite dangerous.

We also know that any branch histories in which Hermes regains his memories prematurely are bad endings, as are any branches in which he does not join the Convocation or is ousted from it. According to Elidibus, Fandaniel was critical to the Amaurotine defense against the Final Days. As assayer of extant phenomenon, he was the first to identify that the transformations first took root at places where the celestial currents were weakest. He also dedicated himself to developing the countermeasure. This, in conjunction with Lahabrea's experiments on Archaeotania and the subsequent development of primal summoning, gave rise to Zodiark as the 'Will of the Star' (EE(3), p.10). Without his contributions, Amaurot would have perished then and there (Lv.86, Return to the Crystarium). Accidentally refreshing Hermes' memory would have been a relatively easy trap to fall into, given the nature of their society.

In the Lv. 86 quest Lives Apart, Hermes reveals that not only was Dynamis a relatively unstudied phenomenon, but that the rest of Amaurotine society had not sufficiently advanced their technological development to the point of creating space travel. This creates a catch-22. Hermes is the only person from that time period with the knowledge to create either an entelechy or a being capable of traversing space. But the very act of unlocking those memories would have rendered him uncooperative, resulting in a bad end. In effect, the only solution was to forestall the Final Days until society had developed the technology to mount a counteroffensive.

Change was inevitable for Amaurotine society. Azem's departure from the Convocation was unprecedented and challenged the foundation of their leadership. The act was so egregious that the Convocation refused to fill Azem's seat, refused to commemorate them, and henceforth referred to them as 'the defector' (Hythlodaeus, Lv.80, Etched in the Stars). We also now know that society's views were also changing in parallel to this challenge. People lost faith in the Convocation's leadership. They began to question whether Amaurot could afford to be so reliant on Creation magic, seeing how spectacularly it had backfired on them (EE(3), p.11). Times were changing, and the Convocation failed to acknowledge this and change with it. A coup would be inevitable under such an impasse, although under any other leadership it would have likely have ended in a complete massacre in the Convocation's favour.

The final potential branch point is an unexpected one. Emet, Lahabrea, and Elidibus had to be unsundered. Emet Selch needed to be present in the lifestream with his memories intact to create a way forward in Ultima Thule. Lahabrea and Elidibus also needed to have their memories be intact within the lifestream for the resolution of Pandaemonium in the present. Deviating from this would have resulted in failure of the corresponding plotline and the destruction of humanity.

When you look at it from this standpoint, it becomes obvious that you can't just meta-game your way through the various branches. A lot of seemingly 'sensible' solutions to try to deliberately alter the future would have resulted in tragedy. This is likely also why Alexander didn't meddle in the timelines, despite having the power to do so. The fact that we reached an ending where humanity survived at all was, in all likelihood, a lot of blind luck in dodging the multitude of bad ends along the way.