What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Teraq]

The Endsinger did nothing wrong

Honestly, I agree, in the sense that she has always just been an emotion sponge with the apparent mind of a child, sent on a mission with a dubious premise that she wasn't properly equipped to handle. I feel like there is little to say on Meteion as a character because she just... doesn't feel like much of a character to me, beyond her being kawaii uguu before graduating to Amano artwork to fit in with the two other story trials. Meteion simply is what she was irresponsibly created to be, and I don't see much more to go on there. She's Hermes's Twitter botnet that was taught by aliens to RT nihilism, and his favorite hobby happens to be doomscrolling.

(For the same reason, her still existing at the end is probably a massive risk to everyone on Etheirys. I sure hope she doesn't fly over Ilsabard!)

Don't remind me please, I'm still angry that The Sound turns out is just some broken twitter bird (made by a totally-fit-for-chief-position guy) screaming at us. I remember going into quite a deep rabbit hole discussing the Sound back in ShB, ranging from simple "it's jenova", to "it's Pandaemonium", to something something with deep symbolic meaning.

My "favorite" was that it was just a cry of the Planet because the mean Ancients were abusing it with their creation magicks. You don't understand, I need to have them deserve it instead of the Final Days simply being happenstance tragedy so I can sleep soundly at night knowing the bad guys were definitely wrong and bad!

Same with how "zodiark weave a new reality", when it's actually just "put aether bubble" and "jump start the stagnated etheirys's aether" (I mean, it's still an incredible feat, but very much less cool).

Yeah, that sure sounded cooler at the time lol. In a way, I wanted them to explain at least a little what "rewriting the laws of reality" entailed, but now that it turned out to be so completely ... mundane?, I can't help but feel disappointed. To be fair though, this applies to most of my EW experience, but I'm still salty about the complete lack of Final Eclipse, both in the actual trial and in lore as far as we know. I wanted to see it.

And we have people constantly comparing us to genocide apologist, colonize apologist, people repeteadly discuss defense of Emet as just simping and lacking real-life morality, people who openly insults and to some extent using death-threat. All of this ever since day one since ShB dropped. Even way before if we change it into discussion regarding Gaius or other villains.

One thing I noticed, however, was that some pretty spiteful and nasty accusations were aimed at anyone who ever dared to speak up in favour of the antagonists. This included death threats, homophobic comments and other unpleasant elements. Given that the offending posts were deleted, however, then such will have to be taken with a pinch of salt - though I'd like to think those who are being genuine and who have been around for a while will be aware of what I'm speaking of. Especially since some of the offending comments leaked into Reddit, Twitter and certain Discord servers.

The most fascinating thing I observed was that certain posters would repeatedly launch thinly veiled attacks and sometimes direct personal attacks at fans of the antagonists, implying all manner of horrible things about their person and real world morality. When finally those being assaulted had enough, even a minor quip in response would be treated as some deeply horrific crime and personal attack.

I wish I could say I have no idea what you guys are talking about, because I don't interact with the general fandom much, but I have unfortunately seen this on FFXIV Twitter. People quote-retweeting or outright replying with snark and abuse just to insult other people because they project the other's taste in (villainous) fictional characters onto their real-life ideals urgently need to touch real grass, in the real world that is separate from fiction. My favorite example is one particular denizen of Primal who was apparently offended by SE posting Tales From The Shadows 7 "'Ere Our Curtain Falls" because its main subjects are "genocidal maniacs". This just in: please do not give your main antagonists backstory or the Twitter Vigilantes will judge you as an author.

Is it something specific to FFXIV fandom, or just fandom in general as of late? I mean, there's always been a decent amount of people preferring the villains, right? Sephiroth, Kefka, a handful of Batman villains, Darth Vader, movie characters that happen to be played by the late Alan Rickman – it isn't exactly new. I am just weirded out by how prominent the moral crusaders seem to be in here. I feel like I need some kind of licence to be allowed to like villains, all while constantly walking on eggshells to remind anyone I interact with that I do not condone genocide as an actual person in the real world. I didn't feel like this was the case when I was actively participating in the ASOIAF/Game of Thrones fandom around 2014. Good thing, too, else I would be routinely accused of being a manipulative, back-stabbing malignant narcissist grooming a teenager, and frankly that would be a little awkward.