Meteion vs WoW's The Jailer (Spoilers)

[kpxmanifesto]

She wasn't even an antagonist. She was saddled with the negative emotions of hundreds of races and was merely directing the wave of negative emotion. Her mental process literally snapped and the Final Days was the result.

We were not fighting an individual, we defeated an amalgamation of all the despair felt by all the various races that she encountered in her journey.

In defeating that, we showed her that despair and self destruction wasn't the only path.
Effectively giving the answer to the question she was sent to the stars with.

I've seen other people say what you're saying before, but I'd have to disagree with this interpretation/opinion. The whole "Meteion wasn't the antagonist, it was negative emotion" interpretation comes off as unreasonable. If Meteion never existed, the final days never would've happened. Negative emotion would always exist with or without Meteion. The whole FFXIV story would never have happened without Meteion.

[Brightamethyst]

World of WarCraft does have some good expansions - Wrath of the Lich King and Legion are definite high points - but most of the time it's just going to kill a baddie trying to cause lots of death and destruction with no other goal. "He went crazy and evil" is also often used as an excuse to fight lore-important characters (BC Illidan, Malygos, etc).

To be fair, as an excuse for plot stuff "because Old Gods" and "because Ascians" aren't that different.

[Bright-Flower]

To be fair, as an excuse for plot stuff "because Old Gods" and "because Ascians" aren't that different.

In a sense, but the people the Ascians manipulate tend to have motivations beyond 'they were corrupted/driven insane.'

[JeanneOrnitier]

To be fair, as an excuse for plot stuff "because Old Gods" and "because Ascians" aren't that different.

The Ascians have motivations, the Old Gods do not. They're just evil because evil. The people the Ascians manipulate also have goals of their own and believable reasons to fall into the Ascians' trap, instead of just "evil crazy cultist got mind controlled by a tentacle monster".

[Cilia]

To be fair, as an excuse for plot stuff "because Old Gods" and "because Ascians" aren't that different.

The Old Gods do (or rather did; they're all dead / defeated now) have motivations, they're just either petty or alien. Their personal goal is to restore Azeroth to how it was before the Titan Ordering of the planet so they can go back to warring against each other using bugs and bug-men as proxies; past that, as agents of the Void they aim to unmake reality because they find it offensive. (Hey, you want Lovecraftian horrors? You got 'em.)

Zovaal suffers a similar problem. He was the judge of the dead until his ego got the better of him, so his fellow Shadowland rulers stripped him of his authority and bound him in the inescapable Maw, crafting a new Arbiter using a stolen fragment of his soul. His whole motivation is to shatter the cosmic order and reforge it so all bows to his will; why he sees a problem with said cosmic order, beyond his ego saying he could do better, is thus far unexplained, and that's if they bother to give him a deeper characterization than "he's arrogant." (Sylvanas actually wants to shatter the cosmic cycle of life and death because people are consigned to a given afterlife by the Arbiter, but to anyone not keen on her sophistry it's plain she's just salty about her atrocities condemning her to the Maw (re: Hell).)

... and that's not getting into the whole host of problems with WoW's current story direction, which I don't feel like chronicling here because this isn't WoW.

Conversely all the people offered power by the Ascians had some greater personal goal they were working toward. The Ascians themselves had personal goals behind all the death and destruction, which turned out to be relatable when we finally learned what they were (even if the price they were willing to pay was unconscionable). The few crazy cultists aren't a huge threat. There isn't anybody you have to fight because they "went crazy and turned evil," because no antagonist in this game has been portrayed as wholly evil and irredeemable - not even Zenos as of Endwalker's end.

Meteion is kind of thrown in there, but the consequences of her actions were alluded to in the previous expansion's story, you spend time getting to know her, and much of what happens to her is a tragic accident born of Hermes' naivete and love of life. Zovaal is just Sylvanas' mysterious benefactor in BfA who was retconned into being the true mastermind pulling the strings of every conflict from behind the scenes, and wants power for its own sake. Other than being a bit of a retcon, the similarities between the two are superficial at best.