So I've only done the first dungeon so far and I'm on the part where the WoL helps Wuk Lamat with the Feat of Pots (the fact that we end up recruiting the elezen goldsmith who Wuk Lamat gave a pep talk to earlier was such a cute touch, I love that kind of storytelling) but already I have a theory, although I have a feeling I have a long way to go. Anyhoos, Dawntrail isn't actually about Wuk Lamat, but neither is it about the WoL either; it's actually about Azem. While I personally love how we get to follow Wuk Lamat in her story and that we have a female main character for this expansion, several female main characters in fact, Wuk Lamat herself is actually a red herring. Not that I'm dismissing her or her role of course.
For starters; it's in the title- Dawntrail. The sun comes up at dawn, and Azem's symbol is commonly thought to be the sun (like what else could it be? It's literally a planet orbiting a sun). But here's where it gets interesting- the four characters who are looking for the city of gold are each tied to it by a common thread; they're following the legacy of their predecessors.
Krile is looking for the city of gold to solve the mystery of why her grandfather Galuf was looking for it, and what was important enough about it that Gulool Ja Ja himself reached out to him to look for it, as well as the connection between Galuf, the city of gold, and the earring that came in the envelope.
Erenville is looking for it because his mentor (whom I suspect at this point to be his mother, whom I know we meet at some point, don't know when) requested him to find something that he would never find unless he broadened his horizons and went out into the world, and it was his mentor's words that inspired him to become a gleaner. But when he accompanied Krile and the WoL to Tural, he realised that this path set him back on the trail of the city of gold, and he wants to see it through to the end.
Wuk Lamat is looking for the city of gold because, while her connection to it isn't as strong or personal as that of Krile and Erenville, it's the end goal of the rite of succession, and by extension her own goal, and that is to preserve the peace and legacy of Gulool Ja Ja.
But the WoL is themselves following a legacy, which is actually quite prominent when you read into it, which I'm doing way too much but I digress. Back in Endwalker, when we summoned him back for a moment in Ultima Thule, Emet-Selch asked us about all the places we haven't been yet, and among those was the New World and its "fabled cities of gold." Post-Endwalker started when the WoL remembered Emet-Selch talking about "the ruins beneath the Bounty," which then lead to us looking for Alzadaal's Legacy (a very apt name in retrospect). And just before we set off for Tural in the very last quest of post-Endwalker, after meeting Wuk Lamat in Old Sharlayan and going on a friendly hunt with her and finding out about Krile's situation with the city of gold, the WoL again hears Emet-Selch's voice, remembering what he said about the city of gold himself.
Fast forward to Dawntrail, and not only are we looking for the city of gold to help Krile, Erenville and of course Wuk Lamat, but we're fulfilling a legacy of our own; Azem's legacy, the legacy that Emet-Selch left to us. We're travelling to a distant part of the world that we've never seen, and we're learning about and immersing ourselves into a colourful myriad of different cultures and traditions, and Dawntrail has done a wonderful job with the amount of detail thats gone into its depictions of its fictional cultures, such as the Hanuhanu and the Pelupelu, to name a couple. And guess whose job was exactly this? Azem.
The role of Azem was that of the Traveller, and their duty was to travel across the star, to study and learn about the world at large and its different people (I'm willing to believe that different areas across Etheirys pre-Sundering also had slightly different cultures, although because of the overall attitude of collectivism that prevailed across the Ancient people, the cultural differences weren't nearly as visible or diverse as they are in the game's current era), which is exactly what we're doing in Dawntrail.
Azem and their legacy is all over Dawntrail, and I have a feeling it's only going to be more prominent, going by how heavily the Azem crystal features in the marketing material for Evercold. Even in the first leg of Dawntrail, in immersing ourselves in the cultures of Tural as we help Wuk Lamat win the rite of succession (as well as being one soul more rejoined than anyone else), we're closer to our unsundered self than we've ever been. We're literally embodying Azem's Legacy, and I have a feeling that this will become more and more apparent the more I go through Dawntrail.
Seeing as how legacy is a common theme in Dawntrail and is binding our central characters together, it's only fitting that the most significant has to be the one that Emet-Selch gave to us even before we started this journey.
