The feeling of beeing Home ...

[MikkoAkure]

That doesn't change the fact that people who are fans of the empire regardless of their reasons should be treated with a bit more respect than they currently are.

You can be a fan, but it’s a bit extreme to say they never did anything wrong and act like they were maligned by the director and the writers. I’m not going to pretend the “good guys” are shining beacons of light either since they’re not. But this is still a video game, which tend to necessitate enemies, and in this case they leaned into the classic “evil empire” trope rule book harder than they did for the Archadian Empire.

It feels like people are saying that the people who made the story don’t understand it as well as they themselves do and the Garleans are some poor puppy that everyone is kicking around for no reason. Even a faction among the Garleans themselves asked “are we the baddies?” and thought that expanding past Ilsabard was a bit extreme.

The “good guys” didn’t get out of the story unscathed either. Lest anyone forget, 1.0 ended with Garlemald “winning” and meteor successfully being summoned down to Eorzea, causing widespread death and destruction across the whole continent + Vylbrand. Though the major cities weren’t destroyed (because again, video game and they needed to be reused), it took 5 years for a sense of normalcy to start coming back and the realm still hasn’t fully recovered, with Coerthas still covered in ice and a good portion of the Shroud was flattened.

Garlemald is quite clearly inspired by a combination of the Romans and the Russians, just with a technological twist thrown in for good measure. The attempts to try and tie them to a certain era in Germany's history are misguided and deceptive - usually based around taking one or two specific elements, greatly exaggerating them and presenting them as something completely different to what is actually being portrayed.

A lot of it is definitely Roman inspired: titles, scattered terminology, history as a republic, conquering stuff. With a dash of Russian flavor. But the overarching inspiration is definitely the Gestahlian Empire. Gestahlian magitek weapons are ripped straight out of FFVI and pasted in 3D as Garlean magitek. Garlemald and Gestahl are heavily dependent on classic fantasy/sci-fi empire tropes that borrow from a lot of real-world historical empires including Britain and nazi Germany. You’re deluding yourself to say that it is completely free of any influence from that and that the writers built up a whole culture from scratch that has nothing to do with alluding to it at all.

That all said, they’re still not 1-to-1 for Germany and you can’t call everyone who likes the Garleans a nazi, but it’s not some pure being that has nothing at all to do with public ideas of “evil empires” that media use as a crutch to help tell stories.