Quote Originally Posted by Lurina View Post
It didn't feel appropriate to put it in those exact terms myself, but, well. I definitely do think there's sometimes a settler-colonialist undertone in the way that the playerbase talks about the Ancients at times. "They were doomed and already dying out anyway", "their culture was rotten so they had it coming" "They were intrinsically defective and so had to be swept away to bring about a prosperous future" are all rhetorical beats that I've heard a lot (though more "in the wild" in Reddit or on youtube comments than here) and evoke some uncomfortable grandpa conversations.

To be clear, I don't think it's bigoted to express those sort of sentiments in this context; if anything it's the fault of the writers for making those ideas part of the setting in the first place. Players cannot be blamed for correctly understanding a story's intent, even if that intent is, well, a little careless.

But it does make me kinda uneasy.
The problem with the Ancients is that they didn't exist at all when the setting was originally created.

Then the writers tried shoehorning something into a setting's background that wasn't there before, tried to make them empathetic despite the only ones we know being irredeemable bad guys, but at the same time tried to come up with a reason for the game's original world to survive over theirs. The writers couldn't balance all of those things together and bit off more than they could chew.

People could say that the fact we're still talking about it today means that it's "good writing" but the same could be said about clumsy writing where you don't know what the writers are trying to say and there's too many mixed messages and metaphors.

That all said, I went into ShB and EW supporting the pro-Hydaelyn narrative thinking that's the angle I'm 95% sure the writers wanted to take, considering all the focus Venat/Hydaelyn got and obvious cues for the WoL and main characters being on their side. The writers just seemed to fumble making everyone feel that way while trying to juggle everything else I guess. If they made Zodiark's godhood more of a terrifying prospect, or the Stomp and the subsequent shattering of the Source being accidental or at least more of a "last resort" type of deal than an intention, I think that would've had more, but not all on the same page.