[6.0 - 6.4 Spoilers] An interesting video detailing Venat's polarizing reception

[Lauront]

It's interesting that he believes no TOS violations took place, but then all one need do is examine the tags still up here... or is he under the false impression that those are exempt from moderation? Either way, I do hope he gets the help he very desperately seems to need.

[Sevan]

Maybe it’s pointless to discuss Venat, many people have tried to prove her evilness and refuted every argument of her supporters. But many people won’t listen to us. This makes me realize that some people debate for the sake of truth, while others just want to prove themselves right.
Venat is the biggest problem for this game’s plot. She is wicked, but she gets defended by the main characters, making every important character seem hypocritical. She turned my beloved protagonist into a ‘mommy’s baby’. Since you can travel back to the ancient times, why don’t you try your best to save the ancient people, aren’t you a hero? If you hate the ancient people and think they deserve to die, why do you make friends with them? You are so fake, so petty, you are a stranger. On our country’s forum, everyone is discussing whether hydealyn gets such a costly protection from the writing team because she is actually yoshiP’s avatar. (In fact, this discussion has been going on for two years, and people keep bringing it up), whether she is SE’s contemptuous portrayal of female stereotypes, just like other SE games’ female characters, who are either mothers or failures, who only bring disasters to men. We are all Asians, it’s hard not to think like this.

[Sevan]

I don’t understand why many people pretend to care about new life and support Venat’s actions. If you have even a bit of concern for new life, you would realize that when Venat split the world, all new life, including those you mentioned, were split as well. If the souls of new life are thinner than humans, they only met the most miserable fate. Because the Beast Tribes are also ancient people. Look at the lalafell and lizardmen in shadowbringers. The Beast Tribes have been treated unfairly, think about the races with lower intelligence than them. And think about The Eighth Umbral Calamity,and that spaceship, it flew to the universe, and was immediately found by Meteion, it not only could save a few people, it couldn’t save anyone! If Venat was not ambitious, she was just a powerless, cruel, selfish, beauty. Just like the Japanese game makers like to portray beauties.

[LandonIXIII]

My god, The mental gymnastics that you folks make just to justify the nonsense you spew out is laughable at this point.

[JepMZ]

I still don't get why people think she's evil. So she should have just allowed mass murder of their children and offsprings to revive boomers and let their invention continue to permanently prevent life in the universe?

[the-kuponut]

I still don't get why people think she's evil. So she should have just allowed mass murder of their children and offsprings to revive boomers and let their invention continue to permanently prevent life in the universe?

What makes a person a person? Isn't it their memories? their experiences that they lived? If I killed a man, but revived him with no memories, no relationship to his former family, and his appearance is different, is it the same man anymore?

The sundering shattered the souls of countless people who ceased to exist, the sundered are not the same people who once walked the planet, even if they share souls. The cultures and customs that were there were erased after the sundering, the people are no longer the same.

If the sacrifices were going to erase the newly born lives, then the sundering erased all of the lives. The narrative's problem is that it try to justify it by saying that it is the same souls, except that's not what makes a person a person. The original person who had their own thoughts and relationships, who had their own loved ones, their own ways to live life, their own experiences and memories, it's all dead. Nothing of it remains except that they're part of the same "soul".

Yes, the sacrifices were not ideal, but to answer death with even bigger death is absurd. The sundering IS a sacrifice, Venat sacrificed the ancients (not by their will, which is why people refer to it as genocide) for the sake of the star. But that's exactly the very thing she was against isn't it?

The sundering is a direct parallel to the rejoining (the rejoining is horrible, and the game portrays it as such). Both are sacrificing lives for the sake of others. If the sundering is splitting the same souls, and the rejoining is putting them back together, then either both are horrible or both are neutral. They're the same concept, but the game excuses one (and even portrays it as heroic) while condemning the other. Which is just absurd.

Either the sundered and unsundered person are the same and therefore, neither the rejoining or the sundering is genocide, or they're different and both the sundering and the rejoining are genocide and should be condemned. The narrative can't have its cake and eat it too.

[JepMZ]

People are still people if you take their ability to use genocidal powers away. People who become mute or dislexic aren't suddenly not people or dead. I think the naysayers' core principle against Hydaelyn is the assumption that sundering is murder when it isn't. There is no facts that state sundering is death. Everybody got to live their mortal lives after the sundering, they just can't play being gods anymore. It's a lower quality of life, sure, but it's not the same thing as getting murdered. They still chose to live or else there wouldn't be offsprings

And there's no facts that support sundering and rejoining is the same thing. You can't just make up a rule that they have to have the same consequence when there are plenty of fiction with various outcomes of duplications concepts. If anything, shadowbringers prove the buildings are intact after a sundering, they only get killed because of future disasters, and not from the sundering itself. You don't die when your party gets sundered into two shards during a raid battle. What we do know that's given facts is that lifestream=life=sea of souls. The ascians going against the sacrificed people's wishes to save life by sacrificing the lives they saved is taking out huge portions of souls out of the life cycle with no guarantee that the souls in Zodiark could actually be restored. We already know at least one Ancient who died "naturally" during the final days, he could potentially be among the new life when he reincarnates. Without Hydaelyn's reaction, he might possibly would never had the chance to be reborn at all

[Lyth]

The first step is to determine how sundering someone or something actually works, before arriving at any conclusions. This entire discussion hinges on whether sundering someone:

• kills them
• destroys all their memories

Emet-Selch's demonstration on Ryne in the Ocular during the Shadowbringers MSQ doesn't seem to support either of these. In fact, Emet makes a deliberate point of stating that 'this singular ability strikes not at such banal things as flesh'. We also know that sundered souls can retain memories from before the sundering, including some flashbacks of the Amaurotine Final Days. The entire plotline around Amon/Fandaniel hinges on him retaining his memories of Elpis from before the time that he was sundered. So that contradicts the second point as well.

We can try to piece together an understanding of how sundering magic works by inference. Argos seems to be an early precursor to sundering magic, and his duplicates are directly referred to as 'reflections' in the quest text when you encounter him on the moon. He appears to be able to sunder and rejoin himself without consequence, and his memories of who you are seem to be still preserved across 12000 years.

During the Pandaemonium questline, Lahabrea splits his soul into two, and deliberately seals away part of his personality and memories around Athena on to one of his soul fragments. This process doesn't kill him, but does result in some memories being unique to each reflection, while others appear to be shared. He seems to be able to consciously plan for what information each fragment is able to recall. That suggests to me that memories aren't necessarily 'encoded' to a single locus on a soul (perhaps there's a degree of redundancy, if you want to use a RAID analogy). Splitting the soul doesn't seem like it necessarily damages the information encoded on it.

I think if you want to develop a theoretical framework to explain all this, you need to have a clear understanding of how memory works in FFXIV and how this relates to aether. Because the rules are different from how they work in our own world.

Even inanimate objects have memory, as seen in Venat's demonstration of the Echo on Elpis. You don't need a living being to be physically present. And we know that the sundering affects inanimate objects as well, because the geographical features of the First were all parallels of Eorzea. It's not like they were destroyed in the process. So it really doesn't seem like Sundering actually damages corporeal aether (which again, we could have predicted if we listened to Emet-Selch's original explanation).

Dying doesn't remove your memories either. Endwalker used this 'underwater' effect as a storytelling motif whenever the narrator was floating around in the lifestream, during both the MSQ and Pandaemonium. Despite being very dead, both Emet and Elidibus still can recall what happened to them while they're waiting to dissolve back into the lifestream.

Your memories have to first be 'cleansed' by the lifestream before your soul returns back to the cycle. Until that happens, you still retain all your memories. Even after being sundered, those memories are preserved unless that cleansing process occurs fully. Cue to Asahi furiously scrubbing Fandaniel's soul.

I'm curious about what happens to all those memories after cleansing, but I have a personal theory that it's something important to the functioning of the lifestream and planet, as well as this slightly vague concept of 'the Will of the Star'. I'm predicting that there's an entity that predates Zodiark and Hydaelyn that was originally meant to occupy that position, similar to how Zodiark required a 'Heart' in order to function.

Either way, the fundamental assumptions that underpin this entire discussion are flawed, and the contradictions become quickly obvious if you were asking questions rather than trying to force conclusions of your own choosing.

The only reason why the term 'genocide' gets thrown around deliberately and inappropriately in here is because some Ascian enjoyers see it as an opportunity to pull an 'Uno Reverse' on the discussions of Stormblood from some six years ago. It has nothing to do with Venat herself outside of what she symbolizes to the protagonists. Previously, Garlemald has occupied a fairly uncomfortable space within game lore, drawing historical inspiration from real world fascist regimes and the war crimes they committed. Elidibus quite literally employed (al)chemical weaponry in warfare, in the form of the Black Rose. Enjoying the villains doesn't automatically mean that you condone such actions or sympathize with those ideologies, but it's not surprising that those discussions became heated back in the day. Either way, it's probably worth letting those grudges go if you're still clinging to them. And if you can't, well, it looks like this story is moving on with or without you.

The Sundering is a Garden of Eden story, with a sprinkle of Pandora on top. All these stories are fundamentally about answering the question of 'why does good and evil exist in our world?' and about how to transcend that. Is it a coincidence that the flower that Venat left behind for us, Elpis, is the spirit of hope?

[Alenore]

snip

In fact, your understanding is flawed. Memories are absolutely split during sundering as well.

Until one calamitous day when the world was divided across ten and three reflections, sundering the land and all who dwelled upon it.
And the worst part? No one could remember it. Not really. Just fragments and fleeting memories of an achingly familiar world...
A vision shared of a paradise lost, preserved only in song and scripture and paint...
Once upon a time. Yet here we find ourselves again. To look, learn, and remember...

He directly says people couldn't remember the past, only fragments of it (let me guess, 1/14!).


There's also the Nier recounting of events
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVZh6oZziwQ
Their memories were absolutely not intact.

Pitiful moaning of malformed creatures...

They can no longer shape words.

Language, culture, knowledge - forgotten.

Take a book, only keep 1 letter for every 14, let's see if you have something coherent in the end.
This was affecting people's memories and sense of self so badly they went back to the stone age.

Proof?
Eorzea's recorded history :
- First Astral Era : people rediscover tools, then forging, and only found town and villages here ;
- Second Umbral Era : the first form of magic reappers through prayers (thanks the Twelve I guess) ;
- Second Astral Era : steel and stonemasonry only start being developed.

Just took over an Era to actually reach somewhat medieval levels.



For all intent and purpose, they lost their powers, their memories, and their culture, were exposed to sickness, hunger and death.
Arguing that it's not genocide because "actually they still have SOME memories, and like, they didn't actually die as in their souls going back to the Lifestream to be reincarnated. And you're right using our definition of death, which is the end of life.

If you use that definition, people who turned into voidsent, sin eaters or blasphemies aren't dead : memories still on their souls, they weren't cleansed! And neither are those who get rejoined: they just merge with their counterparts on the source! Is Ardbert dead?
But somehow, I feel like if you asked random people in Eorzea if people transformed into Blasphemies were actually dead, they'd say yes. Well, it's the same in this case.

Every Ancient bar 2 disappeared in that moment. We obviously can't draw parallels from our world since magic isn't a thing, but if that happened, you'd call it a genocide as well. At the very least, a cultural genocide.

[Lyth]

We're talking about two completely different points. I disproved two critical assumptions that underpinned an earlier post using a quote from Emet-Selch and a series of counter-examples. I haven't seen any evidence that sundering someone kills them, and Emet directly contradicts that statement in the scene in the Ocular in Shadowbringers. I'm not making any kind of a commentary about societal record-keeping in a time period that the EE Vol.1 specifically refers to as 'prehistory', because that has nothing to do with individual/personal memory. If you would like to attempt to offer a rebuttal, I would recommend that you revisit those points directly, as my argument still stands, unchallenged.

As for the discussion around being exposed to all the troubles of the world, including famine, war, pestilence, and death, there's a reason why I brought up both the Pandora's Box and the Garden of Eden. These are ultimately stories about the human condition that try to explain how 'good and evil' came to be. Pandora, in particular, has a long historical tradition of being vilified. It's ultimately a philosophical point if you choose to blame her for humanity's woes, but it has nothing to do with the subject of genocide.