Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[Lurina]

Sorry about that.

Breaking bad is a very character driven show, yet at its core it holds there to be a universal constant. To quote Vince Gilligan:

This aspect of Breaking Bad is interesting, because it's a very different sort of argument to the ones we've been talking about so far. Endwalker's arguments are mostly asserting things about reality (suffering is inescapable, life is worthwhile despite suffering, ennui leads inevitably to loss of luster of life etc) while Breaking Bad is self-admittedly aspirational; it's not using what it depicts to argue what the world is, but more how the creator feels it ought to be. In a way it has a lot in common with heroic fantasy, albeit played in a much more high brow fashion.

I think probably most stories depict a mix of what we're supposed to understand as true and what we're supposed to understand as aspirational. FFXIV is obviously no exception to that, but I don't think it applies to the depiction of ennui and paradise.

...Though maybe the line there is fuzzier than I think, in some ways? I suppose you could say that the Plenty is a depiction of what the writers hope is true more than what they know to be true, even if it's definitely muddied up with the lesson of the story. After all, it would be bad for us to think of an existence of eternal pleasure as which would be wonderful when obviously we will almost certainly never experience it in our lifetimes, barring some sort of singularity-mind uploading scenario.

It's pure speculation, but I think a lot of Endwalker might actually be the writers working backwards from that sort of thinking. We have no choice but to accept our mundane, everyday suffering, so it's useful for us to conceptualize the hypothetical alternative as bad in its own, or else we have no choice but to carry the purposeless regret of being born into the wrong circumstances.

Now I’m going to be honest, I think you are completely utterly wrong in stating that only a few works breaks the rule. Nier pre-supposes that a life is without inherent meaning, and that without meaning or purpose life is inherently negative or painful. At no point does it justify this, it simply shows the reaction to it and the attempt to grapple with it. Persona 5 presupposes that people granted their every desire would wish for increasingly selfish things, and as a collective desire wish to be ruled. Novels like Crime and Punishment presuppose much about the nature of the world, what constitutes good, what traits humanity as a whole embodies, etc. Without these the premises for these stories would fall apart. That is where I believe your mistake is. The kinds of inferences Endwalker is criticized for are accepted in other media, baked into the very fabric of the stories themselves and yet no one questions them, until they feel so strongly about those assumptions that they can’t accept the premise.

Well, I've already talked about how Nier has many of the same problems too, but I'll hold my ground on saying that Persona 5 isn't absolutist in the same sense. Like I said in my quick post earlier, it generalizes but doesn't universalize; it focuses on individuals, and it's a fact that the human race writ large has psychological vulnerabilities to authoritarianism. But obviously exceptions are depicted, namely in, well, the protagonists.

I feel like I must've fumbled at some point, and given the impression that I think it's bad to use trends as premises, when that's not really what I mean. What I mean is that it's disingenuous to present an argument with a premise that treats a trend as absolute. A story that presents murder as broadly harmful is obviously reasonable; a story that pre-supposes (not asserts, pre-supposes) that any instance, no matter how extreme the circumstance, of a human killing another human is undeniably evil on an indisputable metaphysical level is bonkers.

I guess an obvious counter to this is that Endwalker hasn't actually meant to do that, and has just come across that way to a lot of people through trying to fit too many concepts into its script. It already walked a bit with the Omega quest, and it's possible I'll look like a doofus in a few days when the Omicron stuff comes out. We'll see.

I don't really follow what your collective expectations for the writers are and what you believe that they are and aren't allowed to write about.

I really wish you would not vaguepost like this. Since I'm the only one who's been talking about the Plenty, it seems like it must be my argument that you're calling silly, and the bulk of your post isn't that unreasonable in that context. But then at the end, you're suddenly levelling weird accusations about the aforementioned objections being disingenuous and not actually 'thematic' (none of what I've argued in this part of the conversation has even been about the themes) and once again throwing out accusations about this really just being pro-Amaurot bias (for posterity, I do not think Amaurotine society is perfect; it has several visible problems).

Again, quit pretending the people who disagree with you are a hivemind. Say what you mean to who you mean to.

P.S. I don't like these verbose "arguments by essay." I used to do the same and got nowhere with it, so if you can't be succinct I'm just going to skim through it. No offense intended. (Psssh... nothin personnel... kid...)

Personally, I like arguing by essay! Being inspecific means you can never really learn anything meaningful from disagreements. You just kinda trade vibes until you're sick of it.

It's fine if you don't, but I hope you can understand why it might be a little annoying to see someone drop in to criticize your argument while not reading what it even is.