Can't Stop, Won't Stop, Unsure how to stop

BASTION - FFXIV: Evercold

📢 The president must pay for his crimes! Give him what for!

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🐉🟠 THE LINDWURM 🟠🐉

-Glory Incarnate-

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I do not trust you with your own life because you are good and kind and noble--I know you would not hesitate to sacrifice yourself to save me."

highlights include:

killing the lights and fucking booking it when you defeat him, and then just straight up deserting the garlean army with absolutely no remorse or hesitation

leaving the praetorium and almost immediately posting up under a streetlight in a stupid outfit in revenant's toll like some kind of clown hooker, waiting to direct wol to the crystal tower questline JUST so he could involve himself, too

showing up in the middle of a major city not even slightly in disguise to walk up to a meeting of world leaders and say "now it's clear the problem you're having is that you haven't involved MEEEEEE"

accepting wearing an ironworks uniform but dying it red because #aesthetics

magical girl armor transformation

bonus: cid keeping his sunglasses and then just silently handing them back afterward as if they do this all the fucking time

getting attacked and injured but just refusing to tell anyone about it until he literally collapsed

sneaking out of the infirmary but not before forging cid's signature on his expense report

telling his fellow garleans that if all they were gonna do is whine and refuse any solutions to their problems they could just fucking die for all he cares

you understand how the two scions you're introduced to in the gridania start are important for at most two expansions, one of which they barely appear in, before disappearing from the story forever aside from cameos? as opposed to the scions you meet in limsa and ul'dah, who remain important for the rest of the game up til today???

I'd also love to have the story take us to a Duskwight settlement/ whatever remains of Gelmorra because like...the reality is that the origins of a lot of the issues they deal with in Gridania are sorta self inflicted. They don't live in caves and resort to banditry (hence the distrust in Duskwightes that Gridanians have) because they were ostracized and had no choice; when everyone else left Gelmorra to found Gridania, the ancestors of the Duskwights refused to leave and insisted on *continuing* to live in caves and refused to integrate into society, to the point where they'd rather resort to banditry rather than live in Gridania.

This is the context in which Valdeaulin (Gaius's duskwight companion) referred to the people of Gridania as "city dwellers" as a derogatory term in the Werlyt quests, which is the only glimps of that side of the dynamic that we really get.

But again, because Gridania gets so horribly shafted in MSQ, most people won't know any of this and because they only see the Gridanian side of things (which yes, is problematic; completely innocent people are being punished for the actions of their ancestors/ other people within their cultures which is completely wrong), and we never see the prejudice from duskwights that lead to that whole dynamic, and MSQ doesn't touch on the fact that in the past Ala Mhigo instigated a war with Gridania, and we never see what could happen if the Elementals really got pissed off at people, people just kinda see how the Gridanians treat Duskwights, Ala Mhigans, etc and brush them off as Evil Racists when the reality is way more nuanced than that.

In A Realm Reborn we get the cocky, self-righteous Gaius and the mad scheming Lahabrea

In Heavensward, we have the ever raging and prideful Nidhogg, the power hungry and corrupt Thordan and the Heavens' Ward, we get the revenge driven Estinien possessed by the uncomprimising Nidhogg reborn, coupled with the stoic Igeyorhm and a different version of Lahabrea, one more calculating and yet severe.

In Stormblood we have the vengeful Yotsuyu, her bumbling brute, the complicated Fordola, and the disinterested but honed Zenos.

In Shadowbringers we have the driven Ran'jit, the self-absorbed Vauthry, the melancholic and cruel Emet-Selch, and the zealotry of Elidibus.

In Endwalker, we have Zenos returned but seemingly even more ennui than his Stormblood encounter, he seems more inwardly inspective yet seems to miss the point of us, we got the nihilistic Fandaniel, and the cruel to be kind Meteion.

In Dawntrail, we have the boastful Bakool Ja Ja, the self-assured yet waivering Zoraal Ja, the scheming Sareel Ja, the polite Sphene, the diabolical Sphene, and the cold Calyx.

Now with the upcoming patches they've pitched the cold calculating Calyx with the solemn yet accepting Halmarut.

No two villains are truly identical. They could of seen Elidibus and Emet-Selch's popularity and tried the past few expansions to recreate the lightning in a bottle. But they continued to add nuance or a greater element. Even with Zenos returning, he doesn't seem to be the same Zenos as the one in Stormblood. He feel uniquely grown and different from the past. Though he is trying to hit the same beats as he did before, the story is different so things are thus as well. Its a nice change of pace, that he is trying to recreate what he THINKS drew us to fight him in Stormblood and while being introspective and galling of Jullus but completely missing the entire fucking point of our past conflict.

this post sort of fascinated me. yes, the villains are different by the standards outlined here: they are all mostly different people with different personalities and approaches. but it hardly felt to me like ive had a different villain arc since shadowbringers, if not somewhat since stormblood.

the face of the problem may be slightly different, but we have been doing largely the same thing over and over again: putting down a misguided megalomaniac person who wants to destroy large populations of people and/or land for the sake of their own agenda. and then after or slightly before we defeat them there is always some exposition into how they were actually hurting the whole time and the situation is not that simple. so that we can't feel too happy about defeating them and so that selling their outfits, minions and marketable plushies to us wouldn't be controversial.

and all of this usually then flows into us discovering a force which was above this villain who we just defeated, who is even more evil and megalomaniac, while the previous one was just a sad puppet, so the cycle may begin anew.

not that xiv doesnt have some of the more memorable and interesting villains in mmorpg history or even in ff history, but they are often undermined in post by these repetitive tendencies, making their arcs just one amidst many.

i may not enjoy the word salad that is ARR and HW writing, but they felt like they presented a more nuanced narrative each, full of politics and different active forces working for their own ideologies and ideals. yes, there was always some single guy to defeat gloriously at the end (gaius, lahabrea, thordan, nidhogg), but it feels almost diminutive to say they were our main goal, as we were also just as focused if not more on trying to repair political alliances, establishing communications, dealing with betrayals, deaths and losses, or downright making peace with other villains. maybe its nostalgia, but i remember them feeling quite different.

i may be looking into the wrong communities, because i hardly ever see nuanced criticisms of this story which address these things. the community splits into bigots who hate DT because a character was voiced by a trans woman and those who defend the game and said character like they were both real living people with feelings and have done nothing wrong.

I do think many people who complain about making allies of some former antagonists or trying to help the former Garlean Empire aren't seeing where the narrative is trying to convince some enemies to change, to stop their wrongdoing, to learn where they were misguided, and storylines about restorative justice over punitive vengeance. There's a lot there in how we tend to see such things culturally.

There's some talk about the game "missing teeth" and much of it focuses on who does and doesn't die in the story now, but I don't really think that's it; the shift from those on-the-ground, in-the-trenches political-social stories to the more esoteric high-level human condition sort of fantasy is what's jarring. The shift in the writing team's focus is pretty glaring when you step back and look at the difference from ARR-HW-StB to what we see in ShB-EW-DT. What would be several patches or expacs of debate and difficultly to resolve, if ever, is wrapped up in inspiring conversations and moments to move on to the magical danger.

And some of this was asked for; I remember a lot of the criticisms on how frustrating it was that WoL can't snap their fingers and fix something like, say, Gridania's bigotry issues. But that's not a problem an itinerant adventurer can longterm solve via simple violence. So problems like that now fall to the wayside, implied or resolved to get back to the business the WoL can handle. So we lose that grittier bit of worldbuilding. It's also, I think, just not something the current writing team is as interested in exploring. Possibly a "little of column A, little of column B" situation.

As for the repetition, there are some things leaned on heavily especially in regards to the Unsundered and some other antagonists, but having sympathetic motivations for an antagonist isn't a bad thing, when they still made their terrible choices. It's a "it could have been different, but since you won't stop..." or in some cases, such as Zenos, "there but for the literal grace of god and the support of my friends go I" situations. It's "what do the antagonists say about the heroes?" in each of these circumstances. This is really obvious in ShB, where you have Thancred foiled by Ran'jit, and their conflict a mirror of the one between the Exarch and Emet-Selch (I keep thinking I need to write a longer post about that).

Can you keep up with the rhythm ? 🕺🏻🐸