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

[CrownySuccubus]

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, and that that isn't a valid lens from which to view the story that could help clarify a few points to people. I've seen discussion in other circles about the Buddhist angle in particular, and I think it can be interesting for media to be a platform to understand other perspectives on broad questions like "suffering." Particularly if it paves the way to a conversation - almost all of the points you outlined there, I can think of some angle in the Western culture I grew up in in that basically leads the same conclusion and ultimate goal, frankly, of abetting of existing power structures. But the specific problems I have with Endwalker are ones I have almost never encountered to this degree over decades' worth of slurping up Japanese media like the nerd that I am. You can say that certain forms of the abuse apologism can be contextualized to a certain extent by understanding the cultural history it originated from, but that doesn't make it a "fundamentally Japanese" approach to take by any means, or make it any less a baffling choice that it went as far and as grotesquely as it did. Even in FFXIV itself, I would argue that the approach to Venat and the Ancients stands out as strange and callous and mean in a way we haven't seen before - that the story seemed to be attempting to reject in most other instances, if anything.

I'm not saying you're doing this, but I'm just fundamentally uneasy with accepting a stance that hems pretty close to "the reason this story seemed morally repugnant and approving of an abusive attitude to you is because it's so Japanese." Alarms just begin instantly blaring in my head, particularly in this day and age.

I mean, I could also go on at length about how Western/American media gets its own cultural values wrong (for example, Detroit: Become Human is a master class in not understanding how civil rights movements work). Or that one issue of Batman where Tim Drake tries to tell off a teenager for smoking weed and accidentally proves why it's actually not that bad. Saying a work hamfists a cultural morality into its story badly isn't inherently criticizing the culture itself. For example, I can point to Persona 3 as much, much better game at tackling the concept of Mono no Aware or...hell, if we're looking within the same franchise, Final Fantasy VI.