Building a better Alphinaud

[Brinne]

I thought the Garlemald section was extremely strong for its stark illustration of how horrifying and powerful that nationalistic indoctrination is on people, and for achieving a very compelling balance between recognizing the humanity of its civilian population and showing compassion, while not excusing their greater nation's atrocities or anyone's inclinations to make excuses for it. Garlemald's fate and outcome as an empire all the way down completely worked for me, including the anticlimactic, ignoble self-destruction. It wasn't actually a "powerful enemy for us to overcome" like it always wanted to narratively be, in essence. Instead, strip away the pretenses, and it was always - by design - a pathetic, shambling mess built on skeletons and deliberately harmful ideology, and the simultaneous complicity and victimhood of its populace as a result is a complex issue with no easy answers. I felt for a lot of the Garlemald NPCs because they were so irrational, hateful, flailing, and self-destructive - and it was a complicated feeling that I appreciated a video game giving me.

Some parts of Endwalker were, in fact, Good. (And some were decidedly not!)

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

And they pay very strong focus on that particular element. Isghard's xenophobia or Ala Mihgo suspicious toward turn-coat is NOTHING comparing to Empire's indoctrination. This was illustrated in the EW's MSQ when the woman risk taking her sick sister escaping to the wild rather than receiving help from the "barbarian". If the Eozea army was shown to have any connection or in a cahot with the supposed-regicide, that will not end well.


I don't know why people are acting as if EW is like the end all for the Empire story. If anything, FF14 is known for to pace out the story over a lonnnnggg time. We just finally put the final seal on Isghard's redevelopment. Doma is almost there but Ala Mihgo is still a WIP. I wouldn't be suprise if the conclusion to the Empire story will only be seen in 3 expansion packs away. There are still a lot of material regarding Garlmean, like Corvos where they were driven off, and Goug which was their ancestral home. The current identity of the Garlmean is an Ascian construct to serve as tool for the end of the world, my guess is the resolution to the Garlmean would be they try to trace back their original identity as a race of people.

I do wonder if our Pro-Garlamald friends considered that.
Not like the expansion is done anyway, and its not like we ever revisit areas later...
Bah, thats thinking to hard and rationally

[CrownySuccubus]

I do wonder if our Pro-Garlamald friends considered that.
Not like the expansion is done anyway, and its not like we ever revisit areas later...
Bah, thats thinking to hard and rationally

To be honest, I think their core complaint is that Garlemald flat out lost in the first place -- not just in battle, but in every respect. Based on past posts, they seemed to want the narrative to validate the Empire's ideology and nationalism, at least to the degree that it's "equal" to the Scions' (especially Alphinaud's, to bring it back to the title) principles of peace and global cooperation, which they have demonstrated repeated contempt for. That, I assume, is why there's constantly a push for more "isolationism".

[Rulakir]

The Garleans have no reason to like or trust the WoL. They should hate us and they do. I didn't see this as propaganda as much as a reasonable reaction give our actions. You have to remember that from their POV the Scions are the bad guys. They are essentially an Eorzean city-state sanctioned terrorist group who have attacked/destroyed Garlean facilities, defeated/killed some of their respected/beloved leaders, and been responsible for deaths of their countrymen in the thousands at least. All largely thanks to the Scions getting their hands on a superhuman weapon of mass destruction (who some could argue is little better than a trained dog who'll sic on command). I'd be pretty bitter about that too and especially loathe to accept assistance from a couple of idealistic teenagers.*

Like I said, I'm not even a fan of Garlemald. Much like the Ascians were generic villains in the background until ShB, to me the Garlean empire was a generic military threat. I personally didn't feel they were fleshed out enough for any meaningful story one way or another (despite ample opportunity to do so), but I appreciate that EW at least tried to make them something more (or I suppose more specifically that Ishikawa humanized them). I just think that tribalism should not have been unexpected, especially given Garlemald's history, and that would've been present even without the supposed "indoctrination".

* Side note: I've come to the conclusion that I'm just too old and cynical to find adolescent idealists interesting or compelling anymore. It's another reason why I absolutely do not want Arenvald on the team since he is probably the most optimistic of all the Scions. (Please, please give me an actual realist on the team, OMG.) I really, desperately wish we could get some self-reflection like we did in early HW with the Crystal Braves (especially after the questionable ethics of EW), but it seems like we're back to a teenager's vision of the world is what we should all strive for and nothing bad will come as a result of that. In fact, Garlemald was its own fault, not the twins' ignorance and naivety!

Well you can blame Solus himself for that.
Also Solus (Hades) and and Varis died in ShB (or maybe Varis died at the end of SB, it's been awhile) not EW iirc

Varis wasn't the end of the Solus line. As far as I know, Nerva was after Zenos died unless we find out he had children or there are other as yet unidentified relatives.

[Brinne]

The Garleans have no reason to like or trust the WoL. They should hate us and they do. I didn't see this as propaganda as much as a reasonable reaction give our actions. You have to remember that from their POV the Scions are the bad guys. They are essentially an Eorzean city-state sanctioned terrorist group who have attacked/destroyed Garlean facilities, defeated/killed some of their respected/beloved leaders, and been responsible for deaths of their countrymen in the thousands at least. All largely thanks to the Scions getting their hands on a superhuman weapon of mass destruction (who some could argue is little better than a trained dog who'll sic on command). I'd be pretty bitter about that too and especially loathe to accept assistance from a couple of idealistic teenagers.*

I'm not talking about the basic fact of disliking the WoL. I actually loved the Garleans hating the WoL (more people should do it! dunk on my character and their protagonist powers! i welcome it!) I'm talking about the repeated instances of them deliberately choosing self-destruction over a chance for survival for themselves and their family members; of buying into the ideology to the point that they sincerely see the death and destruction of their country and loved ones as a better option than "submitting to the savages" or being "corrupted by magic." That one-sided understanding of what drove the wars with Garlemald that you describe is also a form of propaganda - Garlemald (again, as a nation, the general populace are largely victims of circumstance and manipulation that almost anybody would be vulnerable to if immersed in - it's part of what makes things so difficult) has very carefully nursed a persecution complex that also makes them just flat-out refuse to engage. I would say the same thing about a country pushing the line that the Garlean people are just wicked and evil and oppressive, denying the history where they were oppressed.

I strongly disagree that Garlemald is an instance you can point to as "it's all the twins' fault and the narrative blindly buys into their idealism," because the actual sequence of events in Garlemald was about demonstrating the opposite. They failed repeatedly - they failed to convince the sisters, they failed to understand the mindsets and the (sometimes futile) effort to talk through the indoctrination, they failed to judge Quintus properly multiple times, culminating in his suicide. And they explicitly blame themselves, repeatedly - as recently as the Omega quests - for those things. Even in the present era, Garlemald still has holdovers who refuse to accept help all over the zone, and the twins are having to continue putting forth their efforts.

Yes, there are times when Endwalker's shallow shounen-idealism gets very tiresome, but not so much with Garlemald, which was a pretty grim, difficult part of the scenario. More like the actual climax of the story at Ultima Thule, I think.

[Sarkany]

Zenos was old enough that it's kind of odd he didn't have a wife or kids, given that all his ancestors back to Solus seem to have been married and reproducing at about 20. Someone claiming to be his secret girlfriend/wife who had his baby would be hard to disprove. Given what we know of Zenos, someone showing up claiming to be the mother of his baby who he was hiding from Varis would seem very unlikely, but I suspect they could sell it to at least some of the Garlean populace. If they wanted to get a member of the royal family (or at least someone who claimed to be part of the royal family) back on the throne, Zenos's Secret Baby would probably be the most effective strategy. Of course, then you sink into the political quicksand of figuring out who the regent ought to be until the kid's old enough to actually govern (Zenos is 26, he can't possibly have a child who's old enough to be running a country), whether this is actually Zenos's kid, what this should mean for the woman, and so on.

[Carin-Eri]

Zenos was old enough that it's kind of odd he didn't have a wife or kids, given that all his ancestors back to Solus seem to have been married and reproducing at about 20. Someone claiming to be his secret girlfriend/wife who had his baby would be hard to disprove. Given what we know of Zenos, someone showing up claiming to be the mother of his baby who he was hiding from Varis would seem very unlikely, but I suspect they could sell it to at least some of the Garlean populace. If they wanted to get a member of the royal family (or at least someone who claimed to be part of the royal family) back on the throne, Zenos's Secret Baby would probably be the most effective strategy. Of course, then you sink into the political quicksand of figuring out who the regent ought to be until the kid's old enough to actually govern (Zenos is 26, he can't possibly have a child who's old enough to be running a country), whether this is actually Zenos's kid, what this should mean for the woman, and so on.

At one point I did wonder whether he had his sights on Fordola....

[CrownySuccubus]

Like I said, I'm not even a fan of Garlemald. Much like the Ascians were generic villains in the background until ShB, to me the Garlean empire was a generic military threat. I personally didn't feel they were fleshed out enough for any meaningful story one way or another (despite ample opportunity to do so), but I appreciate that EW at least tried to make them something more (or I suppose more specifically that Ishikawa humanized them). I just think that tribalism should not have been unexpected, especially given Garlemald's history, and that would've been present even without the supposed "indoctrination".

* Side note: I've come to the conclusion that I'm just too old and cynical to find adolescent idealists interesting or compelling anymore. It's another reason why I absolutely do not want Arenvald on the team since he is probably the most optimistic of all the Scions. (Please, please give me an actual realist on the team, OMG.) I really, desperately wish we could get some self-reflection like we did in early HW with the Crystal Braves (especially after the questionable ethics of EW), but it seems like we're back to a teenager's vision of the world is what we should all strive for and nothing bad will come as a result of that. In fact, Garlemald was its own fault, not the twins' ignorance and naivety! .

To paraphrase someone else in this thread -- if I need more cynical, "realist" worldviews, I can walk outside my door and talk to a politician. I don't play videogames to see cold, shallow reflections of the real world. I want to see worlds and people who dare to make something better.

The argument that "Silly rabbit, idealism is for kids" is, in my opinion, complete nonsense. If anything, what's more of a teenager belief is completely moral relativity. That's just lazy, because even in the real world, sometimes people (and their ideology) are just wrong. For example, there are millions of people who believe in anti-vaxx nonsense and vote for their politicians accordingly. And that is a belief that can (and has) done lasting harm.

Likewise, while I can have sympathy for the Garleans' POV, it was no less a position of cultural genocide fueled by ignorance. Even if we argue that the average Garlemald citizen views the WOL as a "attack dog superweapon", that position is still both wrong and ignorant because it overlooks the fact that Empire (for most of the story) had even stronger superweapons than the WOL, were still trying to create new superweapons, and even tried to recruit or capture the WOL multiple times. The Empire weren't some honorable underdogs who fought without the cheap edge the EA had -- they gave themselves EVERY edge they could find. So both in and out of the story, that argument doesn't work. It's pure Garlean sour grapes propaganda. And while I can understand if the averge Garlean believed such propaganda, that doesn't make it any less ignorant or WRONG, and thus why I feel it was necessary that the country's government (NOT its people -- its government) was completely wiped out.

[aveyond-dreams]

You can make benevolent heroes that aren't nearly as preachy as Alphinaud and should especially consider doing it given the age of the playerbase. I couldn't stand Alphinaud as a teenager when I first started playing. The years have not made me view him any better. Evolve and adapt.

[CrownySuccubus]

You can make benevolent heroes that aren't nearly as preachy as Alphinaud and should especially consider doing it given the age of the playerbase. I couldn't stand Alphinaud as a teenager when I first started playing. The years have not made me view him any better. Evolve and adapt.

Every character in FFXIV is preachy. Even the villains. Hell, there's a certain MEME that starts with "Tell me, for whom do you fight?"

Alphinaud can't be singled out for a trait that every single character with any sort of philosophy has.