What lore do you ignore?

[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.