Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
I'm convinced that people don't actually read stories anymore, they just react to the moments in front of them entirely unmoored from their context.

The narrative function of utopias in stories is that they aren't possible. They're unsustainable. You can't live in paradise, because that's just not how life works. FFXIV constantly, constantly, constantly hammers and hammers this point at the player. The Ea had a "perfect" society. Didn't help. The people who summoned Ra La had a "perfect" society. It didn't work. The narrative purpose of Amaurot's flailing at armageddon was that they were trying to return to perfection at any cost, which again is impossible. Now, quibble with how muddled that portrayal gets in the story, sure. But pretending like Amaurot was a perfect society that was just murdering one subversive away from staying perfect, and you're the person for whom the point of utopian narratives goes whistling straight over your head. There's always juuuuuust one more adjustment to be made. Just one naysayer to murder. Just one policy to update. These stories have been with human society for thousands of years because they're telling you that thinking Utopia is just around the corner is nonsense. Stories are just as much theme as they are sequence of events, and modern fiction criticism fixates unhealthily on the What over the Why. It's not that the sequence of events is unimportant, it's that the story is trying to tell you something.
The 'narrative' can say what it likes, though the writers themselves are on record as stating that there's rarely a defined 'good' or 'evil' within the setting and merely matters of perspective.

Venat isn't some brave hero who saw what others did not. She's an individual who denied her people the opportunity to properly prepare themselves against the threat of the Final Days. The Plenty is a separate world to that of the Ancients and there's no established guarantee that the Ancients would have gone in the exact same direction. The Dragons, too, had a paradise but lost it to war through no fault of their own. Nor does it really align with what the Sundered are doing, given that the trend so far has been for the Scions to move from region to region and establish their own version of 'paradise' upon everybody else with the majority of grit within each nation eroded away or removed entirely in the search for a 'better tomorrow'.

The writing isn't particularly deep or consistent, either. If it's 'bad' for the Ancients to bring back their loved ones, then why is acceptable for the Scions to do the same? Using the power of the same entity who prevented the Ancients from doing it, mind you. If anything, that can be taken as Venat admitting that her methods were incorrect after all and that doing everything possible to preserve one's loved ones is the correct route to take.

Which it is - because there's no reason for anyone to just roll over and die and accept that their friends, family and neighbours 'need' to be wiped out to make way for someone else.

I don't think the story knew what it was doing in the finale and it certainly didn't commit to the 'themes' that it put front and centre. Having done many of the side quests, I noticed that many were about accepting death and moving on - which is all the stranger when that, conveniently, never applies to the Scions or City State leaders.

Each to their own, though, I suppose. Nobody is even obligated to agree with the 'themes' pushed by a story, at any rate. Different characters and factions resonate differently, after all.