Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
The same way you pop into threads to let people know how much you despise Garlemald and love sweet mommy Venat? Give me a break.
Bits of the Garlemald story are interesting when they're not being written as the stereotypical monolithic evil fantasy empire. While I think they were done dirty by the writing as soon as Zenos took over and they decided to wreck everything, I'm not about to go full Garlean Legal Defense Team and I think story-wise they were in the wrong and shouldn't have done the things they did. They would've been better off not listening to foxy grandpa and the Lemures and a large portion of the senate and their supporters agreed. The whole Reaper storyline chronologically started when one of the Lemures tried assassinating his own emperor over disagreeing with the direction it was going.

The writers didn't stick the landing with Venat but I still maintain that there's no way that Hydaelyn was ever going to be the villain like some people in the forums had hoped. And when viewed in-universe through our character's eyes, for better or worse she's the reason us and everything we know exists. If a shadow ghost came up to me and said that 15,000 years ago people used to have amazing powers and were 20ft tall but there was a disagreement over the end of the world where they created two gods and one side wanted to cull the new life seeded onto the desolate aftermath (that led to us) to bring back their friends versus the one who said "no you can't do that" and stomped the other god so hard that the world broke, I'd pick the side that led to me and supports me continuing to live since that's all I know. Especially when that shadow ghost wants to kill everyone to bring back his god.

The Ascians and the Garleans are the same in that both try to kill you before explaining themselves. Both are also written to be the antagonists of the video game. The writers can give them more background to make you sympathize with them a bit more and make the game more interesting than what is was in ARR, but it doesn't change that they spent the whole entire game trying to kill us and as a video game the whole point is to "win" and one side has to lose. You can write your own book where the narrative ends up different, but the story here is reliant on the medium it's being told in.