Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
Though ultimately we don't need Regula or Gaius to come back from the dead. We just need someone similar to them to show up serve as a bridge between Eorzea and Garlemald. Something akin to Larsa from FFXII would be pretty neat...and part of me is hoping we'll meet someone like that as of 4.1 as FFXII - The Zodiac Age will be fresh in a lot of people's minds by that point.
Even if Gaius came back, I think I'd support a new Larsa-like figure, anyway.

As things are now, he doesn't feel any better on the Garlean throne than he does in grave. Some bells can't be unrung.

In my own little mental best case scenario, it's both. Varis is tainted by [letting Zenos get as bad as it did | repeating Allag's primal mistakes | lending his ear to the Emissary of Zodiark], our new Larsa figure is introduced in the background (perhaps a young member of a Royal Family's side branch, perhaps the legatus of one of those good legions we keep hearing about), Gaius returns as some kind of uncomfortable free agent and puts all of his energies into dealing a blow to Varis and dies (harder), our Larsa figure takes power and entreats the Alliance to put an end to the war, Ilsabard is preserved as a "proper" Empire and leaves the Eorzean and Othardian alliances to work out their own ends, and all remaining forces stabilize just in time to ally against whatever Elidibus hasn't told us he's working on.

It leaves a lot of room for gray - a lot of room for conflicting and even contradictory goals and points of view. And we'd probably have to go through Thavnair to bring all this together; that seems like a place people want to go, lol.

That feels like the key to making it work - the reins of history in the hands of man, flawed and tragic but ever striving to do better - but united against a more central and obviously unpreferrable end. It also leaves a lot of places for this threat to take root. I think it'd be kind of poetic if, in the end, the biggest existential threats of the Ascian arc all came back to Mor Dhona and Sharlayan.

But ... again ... just howlin' at the moon, lol.