Hoo, boy. Here we are again. Another season finale, another round of "people need to die for the story to be entertaining."

Killing characters should be for more than emotional impact, though. Loss isn't felt, it's experienced. Absence creates a vacuum, and that vacuum itself becomes a catalyst for further complications. FFXIV has historically been really bad about following through on character deaths (Ul'dah was the same with or without Nanamo, nothing happened in Camp Dragonhead with Haurchefant gone, the heretics simply stopped existing after Ysayle's death, and so on), so I'd personally rather not see any more long-term potential squandered for immediate thrills. Not up to me, though.

There's also a thing I like to call "the Berserk Threshold", where Anyone Can Die itself has been played out to the point where there stops being a narrative "good reason" for killing major recurring characters, especially without repeating the same predictable beats, so stakes are kept high simply by the sheer scale of the events that take place. I think we may have actually crossed it after Papalymo's death, which is why Alisaie spent most of Stormblood taking cheap shots at the writers. But we'll see.