[Endwalker Spoilers] MSQ Hearbreak and Dissillusionment. [Personal Opinion Vent]

The underpinnings of duhkha wonderfully articulates the theme that Endwalker- and indeed XIV starting from Answers onward- expresses and the tie into Seymour and X is something I also appreciated. Thank you for the link.

The offhand mention of the Silmarillion in another thread send my brain spinning on Tolkien's Catholic sensibilities with the influence from pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon and Finnish literature and his setup for the Gift of Men (aka death) that the souls of Men, the Third Song, leave behind the confines of Arda, aka the material world, to return carrying with them the experiences to the Timeless Halls and their Creator (or the unknown oblivion, which as an atheist I appreciated). And that it is the 'immortal' elves who are trapped with the planet, being reborn into it even if they die -with or without memories immediately restored- and by the Second and Third Age have as their central vice that of being preservers- of trying to keep their world in amber to preserve the 'paradise' and reject the mortality of the world beyond Valinor. And the villains' fatal flaws of wanting to order the world to their desires with an emphasis on order. But most of, and the area where I found the two fantasy universes to align instead of just share interesting but diverging focus was in that despair was positioned as the greatest foe to overcome (i.e. Denethor and Theoden).

A lot of thought provoking things you’ve brought up here. I’ve got a 12 hour shift coming up but will reply once I get my thoughts together. I’m glad you shared your thoughts tho and I read every word!

Too much to quote. I'll start by saying while I disagree with most of it, some things I do agree.

1) I'm not a fan of being 'the one'. It's tolerable when the game offers a variety of dialog options so I can feel like I have some form of self expression, but I'm finding those to be limited with most either being the same statement worded differently or it not mattering as the following NPC dialog is the same regardless of what you choose. EW was particularly egregious when it came to dialog options being overwhelmingly affirmative to the extent I felt disconnected. I'm no longer playing my WoL, I'm playing the devs' idea of the WoL who would never say the things I'm thinking apparently.

I am torn on being Azem. While I liked the connection to the Ancient world and its characters, I do not like it being used as another form to manipulate the personality of my character. Azem is, frankly, the polar opposite of me and those traits are now being carried over to the WoL. I didn't feel like I was RPing someone else's character before, but I'm starting to now. Having said that, the tales Hythlodaeus told sound way more fun than anything I've experienced as the WoL. I would jump at the chance to play as Azem through the unsundered world with him and Emet. I just think it gets dicey when they try to merge an established character with the player character. It worked (literally) with Ardbert, but he was a separate person whereas Azem has the same gender and physical appearance as the WoL. I don't know if this is making sense. :P

2) I have to agree with Brightamethyst, too much empathy can be a bad thing. I would add that it can be crippling if you feel so much of someone's pain that it's of detriment to you as well.

3) EW made me feel rage and despair, but not in a good way. I felt both at the end of Elpis when I realized the writers weren't going to let us save anyone. Not only that, but they made a hero out of the person responsible. Fantastic. The rest of the expansion was soured for me at that point.

Similar feelings but from the opposite direction on emotional connection, amusingly. There is nobody, including Venat who I do like how she was written instead of how I feared she would, in the Ancient World -or the Unsundered World itself- that I find preferable to the characters and zones that I would be giving up. Playing as Azem is my nightmare because I could not stand that the game forced me to play with Emet or that my character reached out for him, and I find the Unsundered of Amaurot and Elpis is be somehow more alien and incomplete as immortal beings than the dragons. The only part of Azem that still feels relatable is the desire to leave Amaurot and travel among other people helping them. Azem's crystal has become the new deus ex machina that is starting to overstate its welcome, and I do wish they had not tied our WoL to Azem, but they have so I just hope that they continue to leave Azem as much a mystery as possible and move away from the Ancients in the next expansion.

MAD BECAUSE SMALL, JEALOUS OF TALL. (at least thats how it felt reading the part about Ascians being "ideal" because they are tall lol)

Quite a lot to unpack so sorry if I’ve missed something.

But I just wanted to say that from how I interpreted things Meteion and her power - her empathy - are neither evil nor dark in any way.

Rather, Meteion’s power works more like a mirror than a television. It can only reflect back what it’s been exposed to. The ultimate result of course being the Endsinger.

But I don’t think Meteion herself had any ill will or hatred for the world. Rather, due to her nature being reflective, she’s only able to act in accordance with the kinds of things she saw. Due to Hermes’ misguided attempts to find the meaning of life, all Meteion saw was sights no living being should see. Civilisations brought to ruin, by poor fortune, by their own hand, by the hands of the others. Creatures whose races had lived such unimaginable lifespans that ‘living’ begun to lose all meaning. As a mirror, Meteion became a reflection of the despair, the hopelessness and helplessness those worlds felt.

But what was missing from those other worlds, our greatest weapon again the Endsinger, was Hope. And it was ultimately Hydaelyn / Venats actions, all of them from the Sundering to Hearing your Answer and subsequent return to the planet, was to nurture the hope within you. Honestly, I think you could use ‘Dynamis’ and ‘Hope’ interchangeably; our hope reacts to Dynamis, but Dynamis too is our hope . Without it, we couldn’t have hoped to defeat the Endsinger.

Empathy, when it’s purely reflective, tends to forget the most fundamental aspect of living. We face despair, darkness, and tragedy, but throughout it all we ultimately endure because even when it’s unspoken, we still hold hope in our hearts.


…that was my interpretation of things anyway

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Originally Posted by EirolOcarrol

Disappointment with EW

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You aren't alone in your disappointment, though reasons differ individual to individual. It wasn't perfect, and definitely had a meta injection of, "Accept this expansion, warts and all."

For me, it was a 10/10 all around up until about Elpis. After that, fun factor remains a 10/10, plot factor shoots down to about a 6~7/10, leaning towards 7.

Have you lost your mother IRL or has she been absent from your life? Your post's fixation on mothers and basically being a little toddler guided around by one sort of screams that to me. We all cope differently, so no judgment, and I lost my own mother last year to cancer, so I can understand that sort of loss. If it's just something you amuse yourself with though, then I'd suggest taking a step back, and taking a deep breath. Focus on the parts of the game that still bring you fun.

The things like fishing are all still there, as are the simpler stories and small things in sidequests. You can always skip the story if it becomes too unenjoyable for you. The story has hinted strongly that we will return to smaller stakes, more mundane adventures. Really, what choice do we have, when this expansion basically informed us that all of the known universe is dead, gone, or Stillgoin' on the Source?

As others have said, Empathy is like anything else when taken to an extreme. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.

Fathers have empathy, too. Many, too many, fathers have given their whole life in our cruel world for the sake of their families and loved ones. But men aren't ever going to be as welcoming as women. They deal with harshness far more often, and they harden their hearts out of necessity. And if they don't, then they spiral into insanity.

I'll also say that in that, "race of tall men" they also had tall women. They even told a love story last expansion about a couple.

And you see, you chose the word sympathize, when you said that Shadowbringers made the playerbase respect the villains more, but it actually caused many to go one step further and empathize with them. It is this empathy that has lead to so many heated debates. Approximating the feeling of their pain lead many to turn away from Hydaelyn (if they'd even been attached to her prior).

As far as your real world comparisons go... I feel they miss the mark. The tiny sliver of the contemporary Final Days that we experience was indeed brutal. It wasn't really like treating COVID19 patients though. It was much more an approximation of living through a military invasion. Hard, brutal deaths at almost every turn. Not ailing deaths in a bed. In this vein it is nothing new for the game, so I fail to understand you here, though perhaps it was the scene where the mother is killed at The Font of Maya that really pushed you over the edge on top of everything else. The game has had many occurrences of brutality and death before. Notably in the 2.55 Bloody Banquet, Lord Haurchefant's Sacrifice, Ysayle's Sacrifice, the deaths or near deaths of half the adventurers you recruited from Mor Dhona leading up to the Steps of Faith... A son forced to shoot a man he knows, then killed by Yotsuyu's guards. There are even more.

FFXIV has always shown us death, destruction, and mayhem, but it has also always chosen to champion for togetherness, peace, prosperity, and love. It's not perfect, but no story really can be.

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Originally Posted by EirolOcarrol

And with each MSQ, the content like that you made be there for, the desire to feel like you're a Fisher or a Merchant, is taken away by the ever-increasing narrative that you're not your own character. You're the hero. You're the Warrior of Light, not a Warrior of Light, THE Warrior of Light. And the Warrior of Darkness....You don't get to feel like your own character. Because the MSQ is too busy telling you how important it is to do anything. And that same MSQ not telling you that you're an individual, but telling you that you, player, are Azem...

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After thinking on it a bit, this is the part I agree with the most. It's like watching your character change in front of you and you're like "I'd never say or do that" but you can't stop it. I hear that there were players who complained about the character not having any expressions and they wanted more dialogue options. So I guess this was the writers' response to that. I definitely wish they had different options to choose from though, instead of like 3 options that basically say the same thing.

Also...not sure they should've had us fight the embodiment of despair itself - the scope of the story just seemed too big. So now anything we do going forward will probably feel like a downgrade to some people, because they've raised the ceiling higher and higher until we're so high that if we keep going it kind of feels ridiculous. It kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball Super, how Goku fights stronger and stronger enemies until they're fighting people from different universes and literal gods and it just gets weirder and weirder. In my opinion they should stick with more local stories. I still maintain that HW is my favorite storyline with SHB almost tied.

If the story is making you feel like this, maybe it's time to try something else? Or you could not focus on the story and just do the things you love to do in game. Before I started paying attention to the story, I still had a blast doing other things too. There are so many games out there, but no game is worth your health and peace of mind!

That was a long read, OP, and while I can't say I agree with a lot of what you said, I can say I see how/why you feel the way you do, and I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't expect my words will provide any comfort or consolation, but on the off-chance a different perspective might help, I'll share anyways.

On the matter of the WoL being Azem, I'm fairly unphased by it to be honest. Our main argument with the Ascians has long been, "We get it, you had a perfect world, we're not perfect. It doesn't matter; we are who we are and we have value in our existence, even if you don't see it." Its this thinking that has always made it very easy for me to brush off all the Azem comparisons, even the crystal as, "Okay, I have some kind of distant soul ancestry with the Azem of the last Fourteen. So what?" I don't see that as defining the WoL at all. Maybe it explains why we're drawn to adventuring, to exploring and helping others, but did that ever really need explaining? How many other ancients were drawn to that kind of lifestyle? How many other candidates were there for the role of Azem?

Our origin is unimportant and entirely immaterial to our choices, and that is the message I took from our comparison to Azem. That the likes of Emet-Selch looked at us and saw Azem was less a matter of our souls being similar, and more a matter of our chosen paths being similar. If we are acknowledged as Azem going forward in the patches and expansions, I don't see it as a connection to a specific ancient, but rather the Ancients themselves looking at us through the lens of their own culture, to understand us better, and I see that as a good thing. Emet-Selch didn't consider us worth much until he was able to see us through the lens of the unsundered world and it's culture.

This idea of, 'being Azem,' to me at least, is nothing more than another title, one among many we wear.






Likewise, I don't consider powercreep to be a big issue either. The Blessing of Light/The Echo are fairly niche power-ups when you get down to it. They save us from being tempered by primals, and it's implied allows us to get an idea of what enemies are about to do in combat (seeing markers for different attacks). We really didn't get any stronger than we've been since the game started, and if we're not fighting primals in the future, then that's half of our, "special strength," nullified. Yes, we went to the edge of the universe and saved Meteion from her ages of despair by fighting despair itself, but what I think is ignored is that the specific battlefield we fought in was comprised ENTIRELY of Dynamis. We did some incredible stuff, but could we do it anywhere? I doubt there is a single location in the universe with as much densely compacted Dynamis as Ultima Thule. The idea that we could have a slug-fight with the embodiment of despair and nihilism anywhere else and win is rendered moot when we only won because WE harnessed the power of Dynamis by embracing hope.

Now that we're back on our world? I don't think we'll be able to harness the power of Dynamis again, and CERTAINLY not to the level of OP we did in Ultima Thule.






As a last thing to discuss, and I expect this one is probably going to be the least helpful, but you did mention, quite frequently, gender in your post.

Speaking through the lens of my own experiences, I have RARELY felt like any character in this game was defined by their gender. By that I mean, almost any character could be any gender and they'd still function perfectly as is. One could argue Alphinaud and Alisae are the poster children of this very point, given how interchangeable they were for the longest time. That said, even when they became more unique from one another, more distinct, it NEVER had anything to do with their gender, but rather their experiences. You've mentioned the Ascians, in particular the Ancients as, 'Greek Men.' To be honest, I never saw that. In fact after reading your post I legitimately had to stop and ask myself, "Did the ancients even have physical gender? How did they procreate? They were masters of Creation Magic. Might they not simply have reproduced by making children via their magic?" And at that point it was easy to realize that gender roles weren't being portrayed by the unsundered at all. Hermes was a caretaker and nurturer to Meteion and all the other creations residing in Elpis, and had immense empathy whenever one had to be unmade.

Hermes was portrayed as Male as far as I could tell, but one could easily say he was very motherly towards any life created by magic. I think people will say he was more of a father figure, but is it because he himself was portrayed as male, or because of something else? How we see these roles is going to be different from one person to the other, but Hermes struck me as exceedingly more, 'Motherly,' than, 'Fatherly.'

So, I think viewing characters by their gender does a disservice to them and the writing in general. Like I said before, just about any character could've been any gender and worked as fine. Minfilia could've been an empathetic and hope-driven young man, and Thancred a hardened woman that took this orphaned boy under her wing. Y'shtola could've been a man studying under Master Matoya, who herself could've been some old man passing on his knowledge to the next generation. Louisoix could've been a woman sacrificing herself to give Eorzea a future, and becoming the Phoenix as a result of that heartfelt wish for renewal.

The gender of the characters changes nothing about the story, and that's something I've always liked about FFXIV. Other games like WoW try SO hard to make their female characters, "Strong," or, "Independent," and in the end just make them caricatures rather than actual characters. Sylvanas inner monologue about being the first female Warchief is just cringe. Y'shtola holding back the Warriors of Darkness, saving Lyse from Xenos, saving an entire culture in the First, etc... THAT is good writing. She's a character, not just a gender.





And a final note, Empathy CAN be bad in excess. Anything is bad in excess. That Meteion fell to despair is not some attack against empathy, but rather a demonstration of the dangers of extremes. One of the paradoxes that has been on my mind increasingly these days is the, "Tolerance Paradox." Should tolerance tolerate intolerance? If so, its only a matter of time until tolerance itself is lost, as the intolerant push intolerance increasingly. For tolerance to exist, intolerance cannot be tolerated.

And I'm at that point where you use a word so much it begins to lose its meaning. Anyways OP, I hope you feel better soon. We might not agree on some things in the story, but I'm genuinely hopeful you find joy again in the game.

I had legitimately written a point-by-point response to this post but I can't submit it because it's over 27k characters long, so I'll just summarize.

RE: Hydaelyn

You are an adult. You say you've been playing XIV since the beginning and played FFXI before that. So you are definitely an adult.

There's a point in our lives, when we are growing up, where we realize that our parents are just... people. They make mistakes, they have stupid opinions, they have hobbies, interests and friends that don't involve us, and we are not the entirety of their lives. There's supposed to be a point in your life where you become an equal to your parents, because you are all adults.

You are supposed to realize mommy is not "a maternal figure of empathy". She's a person, and her life is more than just being your mom. And that's OK. That's part of becoming an adult.

Hydaelyn sundering the world has a very strong connotation of "grow the fuck up". Humanity needed to stop wanting to be coddled 100% of the time, it's time to be an adult and face the world as it is, with it's joys and it's difficulties. It's also reminiscent of several creation myths that tell of "man's fall from grace" and "being expelled from paradise", which also have this connotation. Man was innocent like children, but now needs to deal with the sorrows of the world.

When you finish the trial where you fight Hydaelyn, she pretty much tells you that you're a grown-up now and you don't need mommy to hold your hand anymore. You will always be her brave little spark and she will always love you, but now you need to handle things by yourself.

RE: Empathy being "villainized" -

Empathy has not been villainized. Empathizing with others is how you win in the end. The whole zone of Ultima Thule is characters empathizing with these shades of the dead to open the way.

Quoting Alphinaud on the section right before the last dungeon + trial combo:

"As it was for the denizens of Ultima Thule that barred our way, it is not for us to rebuke and admonish. 'Twas not by passing judgement on the tragic legacies of others that we arrived at this moment. Rather, it was by opening our hearts to their dispair - by understanding and acknowledging their fates, while still refusing to share in them ourselves. To hold fast to hope, not in ignorance, but by choice."

Empathy is good. So much empathy that you lose yourself to the will of others and forget about your own is not. This was the flaw of Meteion. She was a sponge, and nothing else, and that's what happens if you have too much empathy and too little self-preservation in real life too. People will trample all over you, use you up, abuse you, and make you feel like it's your fault.

RE: Wanting the game to be like it was before and bemoaning what it has become. -

You want to go back to a world that doesn't exist anymore, which you see with rose-tinted glasses. So did the Ascians.