Quote Originally Posted by CrownySuccubus View Post
As I said, I could literally sit here all day and give a point-by-point list of all the problems with Endwalker's philosophy of "suffering-fetishism", but one of the major ones is exactly as you said. A period of time without major suffering or challenge is, essentially, just a time of normality. Acting as if a life without suffering is bad or makes people weak begs what the alternative should be: should people constantly be striving to make every aspect of life worse, just for the hell of it? If there are no sources of suffering and terror, should we make our own until we eventually get used to that, and then make something even worse just to make sure there's still a prerequisite amount of horror?
While I do disagree with fetishizing or normalizing suffering as a *necessity*, periods without suffering are actually quite abnormal. They are the improbably infrequent times when peoples manage to collectively pull ahead of a rather harsh and indifferent environment. Which tends to require so much collective education, effort, and care that they are both rare and as fleeting as it takes a generation or two to forget to maintain the edifice supporting them. Not to mention very few--if any--periods of peace or comfort weren't built on the backs of an exploited class.

I appreciate that EW tried to tackle the idea of suffering, and it did inch toward some interesting ideas. But I do think that it fumbled quite a bit and resorted to trite aphorisms to cover up a lack of follow-through. And I think one of the most fundamental missteps it made was painting suffering as *necessary* rather than *inevitable*, two related perspectives with completely opposite implications.