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

[Brinne]

Yeah, I personally have a bone to pick with any "never strive for perfection -- appreciate the status quo" and "suffering is a part of life, so embrace it and grow stronger" narratives.

I grew up in what I thought was a privileged environment (until I grew up and learned what real privilege looked like), and later got a job that put me in direct contact with people who grew up in, or are perhaps even still trapped in, scenarios which can only be described as living nightmares. I've had to talk to and interview someone one step away from suicide one time too many (and one time is LITERALLY too many), so yeah....I have a helluva beef with any game that comes around and tries to peddle "Actually, it's a good thing for people to know suffering -- that way, they can grow strong". Yes, no. Just....eat my whole butt.

I would rather remove my own eye with a cheese grater than tell the people I've met that their suffering was "good". Yes, sometimes you have to tell someone whatever they need to hear to not let despair overwhelm them and force them to do something rash, but if there's one thing I've learned on this job:

"Copium is NOT the same as Happiness."

I also have a personal, seething hatred for these kinds of messages (along with "just world fallacy"-type threads and "protagonist-centric morality," which I consider to be my Ultimate Mortal Nemesis in storytelling), as to me, they usually amount to being transparently self-serving and trying to throw a coat of pretty, manipulative rhetoric over enforcing existing power structures or justifying why it's okay that people other than us suffer. Why it's okay to leave them in a state of suffering and not extend what power we can, while pretending "well, actually, doing nothing for anyone else or ever going out of my way for anyone else is the morally correct thing, and for their own good, if you really think about it, trust me bro." One question I usually ask when it comes to this kind of heavy-handed theming is - okay, who is this message for? Who does this narrative serve?

In Endwalker, the answers to those questions are, viewed generously, well-meaning but misguided, and viewed less generously, incredibly ugly, in the context of the Player In-Group versus People Not In The Player In-Group (the Other, Not Like Us, So It's Less Sad When Bad Things Happen To Them Versus Them Happening To Us.)

And it is really tragic to me on a writing level that Endwalker came so close to hitting on a theme incredibly near and dear to my heart - the value of living even if the shape of that living is permanently imperfect or less than ideal. The idea that even if the overall status quo of your life isn't what you may have wished for, you can still help other people, still enrich others' lives - and you can still have good moments, even if at times they seem fleeting. It is beautiful to me - and I say this with the disclaimer that lack of judgment also being very important to me when it comes to people dealing with their own pain - when someone is still able to find or construct a quiet, imperfect meaning in their imperfect lives. As I've mentioned once, I'm disabled, and one part of that is that I would indeed die horribly in a zombie apocalypse (or a post-Sundering world, lol) where I had no access to insulin - so when done well, this theme can drive me to tears like nothing else.

Hell, this is part of why Shadowbringers resonated with me so much, as much as I loved and sympathized with the Ancients. It was also very important to me that the Scions were able to look at this conflict, have no logical arguments against Emet-Selch, be forced to concede his points - and assert that they still wanted to live and believe they had the right to live, questions of inferiority or superiority be damned.

And then Endwalker took such a wild swing at this ball that the bat spun around and smacked it in the back of the head, leading to bleeding, concussions, and probable brain damage.

See, the notion that "it's beautiful when someone, despite everything, is able to find meaning in a life of hardship" immediately becomes unspeakably evil, actually, and almost weirdly fetishistic, when taken a step further into "therefore I will attempt to manufacture as much of that beauty as possible by inflicting hardship on people." That it can be inspiring and admirable when someone is able to grasp a desire to live in spite of everything does not change the fact that they should not have had to struggle to do so to begin with, and the error in mistaking those two things is enormous. Going back to the question of "who is this story for?" - it comes down to the feeling that this story is pushing hard to celebrate our specific moment, our specific way of life, our specific conditions in our specific time, injustices and atrocities and all, and therefore, whoever benefits from all those things - at the expense of any other possibilities or ways of existing, and to the point of suggesting if we ever reach a state where things could be considered better, then they should actually be beaten back down to the state we're at Right Now, So Stop Asking. There's a myriad of reasons why that leaves a horrible taste in my mouth, personally. I prefer my stories to encourage compassion and understanding, not weird self-glorification.

[Teraq]

(damn great post)

Cue Emet-Selch finally learning that neither the unspeakable extinction-level tragedy that engulfed the entire planet nor the Sundering that literally ended his entire race and culture and wiped its existence from history were random accidents, natural events or otherwise unplanned, but that both were, in fact, knowingly manufactured and inflicted upon humanity by two of his peers with full knowledge of the consequences... and he expresses nothing but faint grudging praise for Venat, and playfully chides Hermes in a single line for "making him forget" (ay lmao RIP one of the most impactful lines of the entire arc).

(While Omega does try to excuse Hermes in a way, that's a different context, as Omega was not personally impacted by his actions, and itself comes from a survival-of-the-fittest hellscape that would favor interpreting his actions the way it did.) (Meta-wise, however: Ishikawa please stop trying to push him being in any way justified please and thank you.)

GOD. That goddamned Ultima Thule scene. It's ––– I'm sorry it makes me so mad I'm not sure how to qualify it.

[Lauront]

I also have a personal, seething hatred for these kinds of messages (along with "just world fallacy"-type threads and "protagonist-centric morality," which I consider to be my Ultimate Mortal Nemesis in storytelling), as to me, they usually amount to being transparently self-serving and trying to throw a coat of pretty, manipulative rhetoric over enforcing existing power structures or justifying why it's okay that people other than us suffer. Why it's okay to leave them in a state of suffering and not extend what power we can, while pretending "well, actually, doing nothing for anyone else or ever going out of my way for anyone else is the morally correct thing, and for their own good, if you really think about it, trust me bro." One question I usually ask when it comes to this kind of heavy-handed theming is - okay, who is this message for? Who does this narrative serve?

The thing this game tends to do, which drives me insane at times, is this "this looks like that, so it's the same" (coupled with the "it's ok when we do it", which 6.1 actually managed to whip out pretty fast...), where it will take two things that aren't really analogous (someone dying in the conventional sense vs the state of the ancients in the Zodiark purgatory, to use an example here), ignore that difference and try hit you over the head with the same thing over and over, with very cheesy dialogue at times. I wasn't familiar with the term "Broken Aesop" until Lurina brought it up, but when I read through its description, it hits on so many of the weird inconsistencies in EW (generally, 14's, but EW is by far the worst) messaging. It comes across as a very hypocritical form of preaching, and yeah the term you use, protagonist-centric morality, seems apt.

I've mentioned it before but a theme I tend to detest in RPGs is the notion that it's right and proper for what I'll term "elder races" to just accept dying out and fading from the world whilst trying to present attributes such as immortality/longevity as inherently bad somehow (again with the sundered being the Goldilocks golden mean here), and depending on how they handled the Sundering, I was concerned it'd cross into that territory, as opposed to framing it the way SHB did and you articulated. I'm glad the Omega quest refuted the whole notion that there is some proper response to despair, which these alien/ancient races, lacking, could do naught but crumble. I just hope they avoid trying to realise the crypto-dystopia Amaurot plotlines through some other area, like Pandaemonium, though I'm hoping they've properly imbibed their learnings now from EW.

Cue Emet-Selch finally learning that neither the unspeakable extinction-level tragedy that engulfed the entire planet nor the Sundering that literally ended his entire race and wiped its existence from history were random accidents, natural events or otherwise unplanned, but that both were, in fact, knowingly manufactured and inflicted upon humanity by two of his peers with full knowledge of the consequences... and he expresses nothing but faint grudging praise for Venat.

(While Omega does so, in a way, for Hermes – but that's a different context, as Omega was not personally impacted by his actions, and itself comes from a survival-of-the-fittest hellscape that would favor interpreting his actions the way it did.)

GOD. That goddamned Ultima Thule scene. It's ––– I'm sorry it makes me so mad I'm not sure how to qualify it.

But it's unquestionable proof that Venat's plan is Certifiably Ironclad, that the ancients had no other way of resolving the issue, and that no other outcome was conceivable. Yes, that's the power vested in that single line of his - whether this makes any sense in and of itself, given his subsequent words, or given the refinements to it in some of the other localisations.

[redheadturk]

snip

To reference current events, this smacks to me [the argument about "You must embrace suffering", that is] of the same rhetoric people arguing against gun control and social programs are using right now. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" and "Murders are going to happen even if we ban semi automatic rifles, people will just use knives!" Yeah, so what? Our job on this planet is to minimize the suffering of other people to the best of our abilities. To do otherwise is to do a massive disservice to humanity. It's probably why the messages around Venat bother me as much as they do, it's the same rhetoric I hear in real life to justify injustices that utterly disgusts me.