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

[MikkoAkure]

"I automatically know what this story is doing with a concept because I've seen how completely different stories do it" is kind of a weird way to engage with a text.

The whole concept of “Utopia” from its original inception is that it’s a farce, that’s the way almost every single piece of media has played it to be, and the writers even connected it directly to that original concept with its naming of the main city the civilization centered around.


The way the story interacted with the Ancients was always awkward because it was very roughly tacked on with no foreshadowing and the concept didn’t even occur to the writers until halfway through the life of the game.

The Ancients were always going to die because otherwise our characters and world going back to the very beginning of the game wouldn’t exist. The writers stumbled when trying to make a pre-existing civilization in the middle of the story that’s somehow responsible for everything from the elementals to migrating birds, made them the civilization of our enemies that have caused every bad thing to happen, but also balance that out with being empathetic and the events around them being a tragedy caused by the entity that had been unquestionably good and supportive this whole time.

[Brinne]

The whole concept of “Utopia” from its original inception is that it’s a farce, that’s the way almost every single piece of media has played it to be, and the writers even connected it directly to that original concept with its naming of the main city the civilization centered around.

I mean, it might just be a different in reading styles, but I'm not really into "I instantly know what this is doing without needing to pay closer attention because of [references completely unrelated stories] [also possibly a TV Tropes list]" and "using this Very Symbolic name means I instantly know what this is about, no further observation required." It's a bit frustrating when people point to things like that instead of anything that actually concretely exists or is illustrated in the text or characterization itself. It kind of comes back to that whole "is this a story or a list of author's bullet points?" kind of thing.

I guess some people do approach stories like they're a matter of puzzle-solving author intentions above all else, and that can be fun and interesting sometimes, but it's not really relevant to me in this particular kind of discussion - back to evaluating whether or not the Ancients really just needed to die or if they proved themselves unworthy of existing, somehow, yet again.

The way the story interacted with the Ancients was always awkward because it was very roughly tacked on with no foreshadowing and the concept didn’t even occur to the writers until halfway through the life of the game.

I have a lot of praise to offer Ishikawa in Shadowbringers with how she utilized the pre-existing traits of the Ascians to spin into the Ancients and their culture, and how clever so many of the small touches there felt, but overall, yeah. They ultimately weren't willing to commit to Shadowbringers throwing in a swerve that nobody foresaw the impact of and the reception to. Lots of short-sighted writing blunders that has left us in a really weird, uncomfortable place regarding the most significant and foundational event in the entire lore.

IIRC, it always seemed a little bit interesting to me that Yoshida (?) named Ishikawa, specifically, who wanted to use Shadowbringers as a chance to "humanize" the Ascians, down to Ishikawa pushing for Emet becoming "a part of the party" in the way he did while he had reservations about it. I suppose you could speculate all day where the cracks formed between Ishikawa going hog wild with her vision for Shadowbringers without accounting for and baking in planning for what would inevitably follow, or possibly Yoshida/other writers for being inflexible and not quite seeing what was happening in their own story and being willing to bend to it organically, or everyone's fault for not properly planning things out until the last second across several expansions, or somewhere in between.

[Lurina]

The whole concept of “Utopia” from its original inception is that it’s a farce, that’s the way almost every single piece of media has played it to be, and the writers even connected it directly to that original concept with its naming of the main city the civilization centered around.

I feel like this fanbase has collectively absorbed the superficial detail that Thomas More's Utopia is a satire and assumed it's a satire of the concept of utopias, when that's not really the case at all.

Utopia is a satire of the early Humanist movement of 16th century European society, poking holes in the contradictions between the radical ideals it had on paper, and the structural issues it refused to challenge - such as the influence of religion on government and and the social problems caused by property ownership and the emerging proto-materialist culture of the time. The Utopia in the book isn't named "no-place" because More was arguing it was unachievable or undesirable (in fact, he was almost certainly advocating for a society like the one depicted, judging by the tone and how it mocks a bunch real countries via explicit contrast) but rather because it was so alien to renaissance-era Europe that it was beyond the scope of what most people were even willing to imagine.

His point was that to attain a perfect society where no one was treated unfairly, just about every cultural sacred cow would need to be slaughtered; money, aristocracy, self-expression, Christian morality, etc. Ironically, by positing that it's wrong for the Ancients to have social and ethical systems unlike our own through a largely emotional argument (see how the critique of their custom of voluntary death is framed wholly through Hermes' visceral discomfort, without even really trying to examine it on merit), the writing is proving his point: That we are too reactionary and defensive regarding our own customs and values to rationally envision a completely different kind of society from the ground up.