On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Turnintino]

I'm curious what turns you off the Ancients so much, though.

As someone who was similarly uncharmed by the Ancients, I'll say that I... just found them aggravatingly boring lol. I had broader frustrations with the Elpis scenario, mostly due to a personal hatred for time travel in stories clearly not conceived for it (and only slightly more patience for stories that were, tbh), and my own Emet-fatigue (as an individual, not so much because he was an Ancient). So all of those things maybe colored my first impression unfairly, since all of it made me a lot less receptive to the basic premise the writers were trying to sell me on. But, as I said, I wasn't terribly interested in the story of the Ancients or their plight, to begin with.

If I'd ever been intrigued, it was during ShB, when they were still sort of nebulous and alien, but even then, I wasn't itching for more, and nor was I eagerly receiving what had been given to me at that point. Like my impression of Hythlodaeus and his treatment from one expansion to the next, as we'd discussed in that other thread, I don't think there's a world where an attempt at fleshing them out wouldn't have disappointed me -- even when my bar for the Ancients, in general, was lower than it was for Hythlodaeus specifically.

All that said, precisely because of my misgivings with the Elpis narrative and my general disinterest in the Ancients themselves, I haven't touched the zone any more than the MSQ and Pandaemonium required of me. Maybe a more thorough exploration would change my mind. But I won't pretend that I'm inclined to do so any time soon. And there are things about it, like the origins of the creatures we've grown to know so well, that just makes the entire world of FFXIV feel so much smaller to me, in a way that only sours me on it all the more. The zone's pretty, though!