#qitari

I have a degree in history and professional archivist training (aka I spent too much time in higher ed RIP) and ever since I reached the whole bit where the Qitari are like "you must pick an interpretation of history so we can restore the stelae!!" I have been internally screaming.

-Removing the stelae from it's original context? Nope, shouldn't do that. Keeping things in their original context helps us understand their purpose and use. Right there, tons of potential info lost already.

-Restoring the original?? As in, permanently altering with modern techniques a super ancient artifact??? Honey no! That's how you ruin things!

-Way to also make sure that if a modern technique comes along that would actually let us read the damn thing, it'll be unusable because someone was like "oh well guess it's unreadable, better paint over it 💁🏻‍♀️". The most basic principle of document restoration I learned is to make sure everything you do doesn't damage the original and is REVERSIBLE. Priorities and techniques change!

-The Qitari make you choose a version of history because they feel they don't have enough info to know which is actually true. So... keep looking? What the hell? What a historian would do is entertain both theories and then try to prove/disprove em as new facts are revealed. By committing to a theory before having all the data, they effectively biased their whole damn research. Now of course everything they find will support the chosen theory! For fuck's sake.

-I get the Qitari wanting a restored stelae as part of the rebuilding of their collective memory - monuments are hugely important for that. But why not make a replica to avoid messing up the original and uprooting it from it's original space? Why not make two replicas, to represent both theories and let people decide what they think themselves?

-At this point, I feel the WoL should have an inkling of what happens when parts of history are occulted or amended - just think about the Allagans, the Dragonsong War, the return to Ivalice raids... idk, I feel they should know better and at least warn the Qitari that rewriting history can go massively sideways.

-This is especially egregious since the whole deal of the Qitari is they they were the keepers of the records for the Ronkans! I guess they really did lose their trade over the years because yeesh fam, if that's how they did it back then, no wonder Ronka fell.