On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Brinne]

My overall feelings on Pandaemonium were sort of a muted positive. To be brief, I think it nailed the overall characterization of the Ancient cast (Athena is my wife ten million times over), and genuinely huge credit to Hiroi for that. I love all of them dearly, even - especially - ones I never expected to love. It also returned to the Shadowbringers tone of emphasizing that they were good people trying to do the right thing who absolutely did not deserve what happened to them, which I appreciated.

That being said, it also left me feeling like the Warrior of Light is pretty much a terrible, garbage person who is now actively complicit with allowing the Final Days to play out unchecked and then the Sundering, now actively choosing to not bother even trying to save these wonderful people who have now all bent over backwards to help save the WoL and their people even to no personal benefit, even to their own detriment, and that gross feeling plus the MSQ being terrible right now has left me in an overall state of, finally, basically just not caring about this game overall anymore.

I can't really blame anyone for being furious that everything is still, individual characterization strength or no, being paddled into insisting "we must accept the slaughter of these people and allow it to happen with a nod and a smile" to the point of even forcing the direct victims to smile/nod to it, as opposed to that whole nonsense about "ignoring the plight of those who might be saved is not wisdom..." or whatever it was - whoever said that must have, obviously, been some kind of sucker - but, well, here we are.

Alas.

[Lunaxia]

My overall feelings on Pandaemonium...

The characterisation that was evident in the previous tiers just wasn't palpable for me. Everything, from the convoluted way the characters were set-up as "real but not really real", and their limitations as memories regarding what they can or can't do being cherry picked as and when the story needs it, to the way the writers did everything they could to remove a sense of agency from the characters post-sundering so what they went through wasn't really that bad so as to drive them to insanity/ despair, just felt like a vehicle to deliver on some faux happy ending and assert the sundering was a necessity now thoroughly validated by everyone (so stop complaining about it, okay?) There was no reason that Pandaemonium couldn't have been a self-contained arc in the past that told a story about the Ancients without all of the ugly Endwalker Ancient victim-blaming, except for the writers wanting to seize it as another opportunity to justify themselves again and avoid the grey area of Hydaelyn's decision feeling like the tragedy it was. And reworking the villains to twist them into accepting the protagonist's motives and actions (when it goes against the intial building blocks of their characters) because they turned out to be popular and wound up calling the good guys into question is terrible writing. I couldn't really take anything else away from it.

Louisoix turning out to be a sucker is probably on brand for the direction EW took the story in, if we're being honest.