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

[CrownySuccubus]

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Just gonna say that I agree with you 100%, and that's pretty much what I said in another thread.

"Everyone else has also done bad things" isn't a catch-all justification that each side is right. Especially when the entire point of FFXIV as a story is that the Eorzean city-states are trying to make up for the wrongs they've done, which is certainly NOT the case for Garlemald at present. Even if we were to take this argument completely at face value, though, Garlemald is still worse. They have done every single bad thing that the individual city states have done (except maybe primal summoning), but have also done more atrocities aside from that. There is also a matter of scale -- as bad as Gridania's racism may be, Garlemald has still basically spread a campaign of cultural genocide across multiple continents. You might be able to pass judgment on Uldah for wiping out an entire city, but bringing the same judgment upon Garlemald brings up the immediate question "Which one?".

It's not being free of the Ascians that allows Garlemald to heal, though. It's being free of any form of government whatsoever. This is evident from the actions of the Legates in EW; even with the Empire in such a shattered state, the military-based government was still operating under the core value of war. Garlemald was, first and foremost, a military dictatorship that respected only martial strength; most other industries and facets of its society were likewise judged by how useful they were to their military operations. This absolute faith in military might also determined who ruled the country as general-in-chief (Solus and Varis both earned their crowns through military might, and part of the reason the country fell is because the Legates went to war with each other over a power vacuum).

Even being reduced to a crippled, hopelessly underpowered military wasn't enough to deter most of Garlemald from their ways -- the whole point of the Anima primal was that the people were sure that their warrior king Varis was still alive and would unite the military, punish the traitors, drive out the foreign occupiers, and restore the Empire's hold on Eitherys. It's not until Anima is dead, their Legates have all surrendered or killed themselves, and there is absolutely zero hope of restoring the Empire to what it was that the surviving Garlean populace takes any steps in an alternate direction..