Is the WoL actually good though?

Aren't the Scions the MOST guilty of 'x is bad thus all examples which resemble said thing must also be bad'?

They have declared that summoning primals is not allowed. They do make exceptions when the Primal is on their side, but that just makes them hypocrites.

I suspect that what is and isn't a 'double standard' is going to differ from person to person. With personal beliefs, backgrounds and cultural beliefs factoring into things. As I've said in the past, I'm not exactly outraged by anything that happens in the game itself. I like darker stories. My opposition is entirely based on the habit of framing bad things as 'good' or 'necessary' when the protagonists are indirectly and directly involved but always pushing it as 'unacceptable' or an outright caricature if the antagonists are doing it.

Personally I'm more of a fan of the game just presenting things in such a way as to allow individual players to draw their own conclusions about any given event. I like to be entertained first and foremost, though I also like that sense of 'consistency' to be in play.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Aren't the Scions the MOST guilty of 'x is bad thus all examples which resemble said thing must also be bad'?

They have declared that summoning primals is not allowed. They do make exceptions when the Primal is on their side, but that just makes them hypocrites.

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...No.

It's more a matter of education in this respect; when we first met them they were universally against primals on a base scientific level. This remains true, as primals that aren't Zodiark and Hydaelyn are universally dangerous and bad for the environment (and Zodiark's not exactly free of sin in that regard). What they learn over time isn't 'sometimes primals are okay', but rather that primals are a symptom rather than the cause, and that primals can only be appropriately handled by preventing the reasons people are summoning them in the first place. Ysayle's a big, understated part of that, essentially being the human face of primal summoners to prove to us and the Scions that they are, indeed, people.

You might have noticed that by the end of Endwalker Ifrit is no longer a problem, and the reason isn't because we murdered all his followers. It's because we have taken away the need to continue summoning Ifrit. A kind response to an unkind problem, because the Scions and the Warrior of Light are not cruel monsters.


I don't know why I'm saying this, because I fully expect your response to be ignoring this point and to instead bring up another bad faith argument that's refuted in the story itself, but there it is.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Aren't the Scions the MOST guilty of 'x is bad thus all examples which resemble said thing must also be bad'?

They have declared that summoning primals is not allowed. They do make exceptions when the Primal is on their side, but that just makes them hypocrites.

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By StB we clearly distinguish primals by nature of their summoning and their intent. In ARR you’d have a point, a point I might add that the narrative directly called out and has been resolving since. By the end of the Endwalker we are summoning primals with the aid of those tribes. That’s called character growth, for both sides of the conflict.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I suspect that what is and isn't a 'double standard' is going to differ from person to person. With personal beliefs, backgrounds and cultural beliefs factoring into things. As I've said in the past, I'm not exactly outraged by anything that happens in the game itself. I like darker stories. My opposition is entirely based on the habit of framing bad things as 'good' or 'necessary' when the protagonists are indirectly and directly involved but always pushing it as 'unacceptable' or an outright caricature if the antagonists are doing it.

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That framing only works if the context of the situation does not change things. We can recognize that in general killing someone is bad, but in some specific contexts that it can be morally justified. That’s the problem with these equivocations. They strip valuable context that needs to be considered.

One of the problems in outlining various ethical frameworks that can be used to solve a problem is that people with only a superficial understanding of the subject come out thinking that moral nihilism is somehow egalitarian, when it's really just antisocial. There may be more than one 'right' answer given context, but there definitely are wrong answers as well.

That being said, this game is rarely presented as a conflict between 'good' and 'evil'. It's more a clash between open-minded and close-minded, of idealism vs. broken cynicism. The vast majority of our 'victories' come from winning over the antagonists' hearts, and seeing them come back as friends and allies in subsequent stories. Everyone is good deep down, even the villains! It's the exact opposite of the tropes that most RPG developers have been pushing for years, trying to outdo each other with progressively edgier dark fantasy. It's really nice to be able to take a break from that, in line with this series' heritage.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

One of the problems in outlining various ethical frameworks that can be used to solve a problem is that people with only a superficial understanding of the subject come out thinking that moral nihilism is somehow egalitarian, when it's really just antisocial. There may be more than one 'right' answer given context, but there definitely are wrong answers as well.

That being said, this game is rarely presented as a conflict between 'good' and 'evil'. It's more a clash between open-minded and close-minded, of idealism vs. broken cynicism. The vast majority of our 'victories' come from winning over the antagonists' hearts, and seeing them come back as friends and allies in subsequent stories. Everyone is good deep down, even the villains! It's the exact opposite of the tropes that most RPG developers have been pushing for years, trying to outdo each other with progressively edgier dark fantasy. It's really nice to be able to take a break from that, in line with this series' heritage.

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This is true, but it's also an angle that came to the story over time, which leads to trying to do better by what was done wrong before. I believe it was around Shadowbringers when they said that they wanted to do more of what you're talking about than putting more 'good vs. evil' into the world. And knowing that's when they made that call, you can actually see the difference; we go from Heavensward and Stormblood against different shades of classic evil (specifically the fantasy staple 'evil dragons', the JRPG staple 'evil church', and the all-forms-of-fiction staple 'evil empire'), then we have Stormblood's patches as a gear-shift where they try to explore that maybe the Empire is more complicated than that. Then comes Shadowbringers and suddenly they're trying to humanize the shadowy ghost wizards (and, to be honest, may have succeeded too hard), we get more exploration of the Empire's people as people rather than disposable soldiers, and then Endwalker brings us to an entire stable of psuedo-antagonists with the central tenet of 'nobody is inherently wrong or evil, but some of us had to make some REAL heavy decisions'. And as I've mentioned before, it was a very smart move of them to make that journey an in-universe thing as well as an out-of-universe one, so that we actually CAN address the kinda-shifty stuff that happened in the past.

I don't think I would've done entirely the same thing as them in their position (they've had to humanize some people who did EXTREMELY inhumane acts), but I can certainly respect the choice on the whole.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

...No.

It's more a matter of education in this respect; when we first met them they were universally against primals on a base scientific level. This remains true, as primals that aren't Zodiark and Hydaelyn are universally dangerous and bad for the environment (and Zodiark's not exactly free of sin in that regard). What they learn over time isn't 'sometimes primals are okay', but rather that primals are a symptom rather than the cause, and that primals can only be appropriately handled by preventing the reasons people are summoning them in the first place. Ysayle's a big, understated part of that, essentially being the human face of primal summoners to prove to us and the Scions that they are, indeed, people.

You might have noticed that by the end of Endwalker Ifrit is no longer a problem, and the reason isn't because we murdered all his followers. It's because we have taken away the need to continue summoning Ifrit. A kind response to an unkind problem, because the Scions and the Warrior of Light are not cruel monsters.


I don't know why I'm saying this, because I fully expect your response to be ignoring this point and to instead bring up another bad faith argument that's refuted in the story itself, but there it is.

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Preventing the reasons people summon primals would not go well. Primals are summoned in response to suffering and conflict. And if we were to remove suffering and conflict we would all commit mass suicide cause the plot said so.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I suspect that what is and isn't a 'double standard' is going to differ from person to person. With personal beliefs, backgrounds and cultural beliefs factoring into things. As I've said in the past, I'm not exactly outraged by anything that happens in the game itself. I like darker stories. My opposition is entirely based on the habit of framing bad things as 'good' or 'necessary' when the protagonists are indirectly and directly involved but always pushing it as 'unacceptable' or an outright caricature if the antagonists are doing it.

Personally I'm more of a fan of the game just presenting things in such a way as to allow individual players to draw their own conclusions about any given event. I like to be entertained first and foremost, though I also like that sense of 'consistency' to be in play.

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Yeah, nah.

I'm not in favor of going the extreme opposite route of painting moral greyness as the only absolute. That leads to situations where you have an entire group of slaveowners, rapists, child abusers and torturers being touted as "just as valid" as the society next door of hardworking, academic, equitable farmers and philosophers that build shelters for orphans. Allowing players to "draw their own conclusions" basically means forcing said players to ignore specific atrocities.

I'm inclined to believe that the writers themselves do not think nearly so much about the implications of some of the things that they push until after they've already put it out there.

I was more referring to desperate people forced to do horrid things in order to survive rather than those who gleefully go around doing bad things with no greater purpose in mind. Both are technically bad, though a mother murdering a stranger to protect her son because he'll die if she doesn't play along is very different to someone doing it for the thrill of the hunt.

Morality in itself, however, is often very flexible. More than many would care to admit. There are countless examples of such throughout history. If a city is under siege and there is no way to escape or easily secure food, many survivors would do abhorrent things in order to feed their loved ones. Things that they did not believe themselves to be capable of, even.

EW taught me that nuance is a necessity. I don't know what other proposed solution there could be as I'm not interested in RPing a character who reacts to things in the polar opposite manner as I am behind the screen. Nor am I interested in playing through a storyline where it feels I'm not ethically on the same page as the writers. I certainly don't believe a "conflict in values" can work within the framing of black & white morality as values are subjective. It will upset people, it's guaranteed, and EW should've served as evidence of that.