On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Anonymoose]

This is monstrously long, and for that I apologise.

<butterfly meme pose> "Is this a challenge?" <laughs nervously in "this post is even longer">

When I <snip> join a thread and express my views therein <…> I assume it's a given that I'm responding in reference to the OP and what has already been posted

Lurina had the right of this one; I held off on doing Pandae until Saturday, and then the response was a general commentary on the thread topic (“On Themis 6.4”) with simultaneous regard to (A) the first 200 posts in the thread (B) things said on the same topic in other active threads, and (C) things said on the same topic on Discord/Twitter.

(A half-joking reply to your statement that you hope you don’t meet certain representatives of certain perspectives: Avoid Twitter.)

I was aiming to highlight that “jumping in here”-ness by opening with the “here are some loosely-organized thoughts regarding the big picture of where I see Themis 6.4 existing with regard to various perceptions/factions I’ve seen since that cutscene” thing. Results were admittedly mixed.

That would be the main reason it feels out of step with the current page of discussion. It’s not really aimed at any person or perspective in particular, but aggregates a few different observations from on the way through the first 200 posts, other active threads, and other media. I'm turning into a broken record, here, but if something said doesn’t represent one's personal experience, it probably wasn’t a reply to something that person said, but I will further adjust my approach to reduce the probability of, "That doesn’t line up with my experience at all, he must not be talking about me has completely failed to characterize me".

at least for me. It's like, you developed these two incredible characters over the course of an expansion and built up to such a moving and impactful ending for them both, why was there any need to undo all of that bring them back to have them agree with our course of action

This is one place that I feel that one’s preferred lore factions (and perceptions of whether the story does them justice) do impact the “literary analysis” effort, as well. I’ve also seen, for one (bad) example, individuals from among the radical anti-Ascian camp watch the same scene and conclude that the writers were “giving these irredeemable characters the kid gloves treatment just to appease their angry fans”.

The only thing our three perspectives could ever find common ground on is that the scene had high “campy anime energy” – which I think was probably deliberate, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Given the way I choose to enjoy the game, myself, I saw it quite differently. Where some see the point being that they come back to agree with our actions and/or vindicate Venat, and some see the point being that they rehabilitate irredeemable characters, I ended up seeing these scenes as the writers giving the ancients – the people who lost the most, who suffered the most, who were now very popular with the fanbase – the opportunity to actively contribute, on screen, as their pre-warped selves, to the defeat of the thing that ruined their lives. In some language clients, Hades himself struggles to understand why he’s there, joking that he’s the keystone holding up the conjunction and that he can’t be sure whether Venat is mocking him or offering him an olive branch. I saw it as the narrative saying, “if this is supposed to be about everyone coming together to resist the end, it’s going to be about everyone coming together to resist the end, cheesiness be damned”.

As an interesting aside, I also don't feel like a distinction existed between Emet-Selech prior to his defeat in Amaurot and after, and I kind of (very low level) feel like it's a little unfair to his character to suggest there was

I think my experience of the story forces me to see a (small) distinction (that intersects with a few others story beats), to some degree. First, from the “writing style” angle, there’s the running tendency of the story to give the defeated a moment of clarity in their final moments. This arguably manifests in a unique way for Emet-Selch’s case, as I think some (myself included) would argue that he’s not really having a moment of new perspective, but just dropping the act. I don’t think anyone would argue, at least, that Emet-Selch spent a good deal of his time in Shadowbringers being externally uncompromising regarding things about which he was internally conflicted.

But, second, I like to combine a bunch of different perspectives into a unique personal interpretation (which I am not claiming it’s anything more than a personal interpretation).

I like to bring together Emet-Selch’s self-confessed tempering, his externally rigidity, his internal conflictedness, Yoshida saying how he truly wanted to re-evaluate the sundered and was deeply disappointed in the outcome, and Elidibus’s assessment of his final request into a single personal interpretation that he was so bound by these circumstances that he (whether consciously or not) set impossible-to-meet expectations to ensure his failure to be convinced to act outside of his duty. For that reason, I think there is a distinction between pre- and post-fight: his willingness to acknowledge.

Elidibus seems to understand this as well, as he calls Emet-Selch’s acknowledgement a moment of weakness (which I like to see as an echoing of Emet-Selch describing his moment with his Garlean son with the same term). The Japanese version is interesting, from this perspective. (宿願を達成するまでの長き道のりの中で、誤った見識を持つ者がいれば、それを正すのも調停者の役目。/ It is the role of the Emissary to offer correction to those with misguided insight on the long road toward our cherished desire.) Elidibus seems to know that Emet-Selch had been struggling.

I have to say, I don't think the number of remaining Ancients is exactly relevant to the discussion

(Disclaimer: Joke) I mean, it is sort of interesting that the players on that stage and the people who would become the sundered are the 25% of ancients who would be the last people on the planet to sacrifice themselves.

a fair parameter to judge whether or not they deserved to live or be wiped from existence and memory by <…> by all accounts, they had made it through the Final Days and were on their way to recovery

This is where we diverge quite a bit in terms of interpretation/perception/perspective.

I don’t know that the story stakes a claim on specifically whether the ancients were a people that “deserved to be wiped out” as much as it stakes a claim that under the tightly-constrained realities of the facts on the ground, at the pivotal moment, the attempt to lead them to a course that didn’t end in Meteion was considered a failure and the time had come to make a choice between that or trusting the future potential of those who did find strength in sorrow and joy in darkness.

I can see support for a great variety of perspectives on the debate regarding, “Was Venat wrong that the situation was beyond repair?” but I think that to claim that “by all accounts” they were on the road to a stable, long-term recovery requires a leap from that point. Especially when the last words of their society in the narrative are, “We can't accept it! We won't accept it! It will be ours again─a world free of sorrow! O mighty Zodiark, god born of our boundless faith! We bid you hear our prayer! Accept this offering of lives, and deliver unto us the lives we once had." In my opinion, the path from there to, “They’d have been fine,” is less something that is agreed upon by all accounts and more something that is assumed by some based on an aggregate of other preferred meaning-making of other facets of the story. (You actually phrase this more concisely than I did in a moment.) If one comes into that conversation with a different set of assumptions/interpretations, that individual might argue that that interpretation exists in spite of, not in concert with, some of the other scenes and lines. (Stressing again: Just a personal opinion, no claims to the contrary.)

the basic point is that a lot of the fundamentals of the argument for and against Hydaelyn come down to impressions that are unavoidable simply because we don't have a lot to go on

Yes, this.

I do not think the story provides sufficient distinction between why, from a moral standpoint, there is much difference between the actions of Hydaelyn and those of the Ascians

Agreed – ish.

I think the last three posts add up to this, but might not if you weren’t already holding certain options from the “unavoidable impressions” bin. If one’s impression is that the game stakes a claim on the ancients as “deserving to be wiped from existence” and the sundering as “justified murder”, then I think the need for that distinction becomes a lot more important for that person.

From my perspective, we have the Ascians, who saw the worlds they were destroying as a temporary aberration to be corrected, and we have the ancients, whose souls already entered into a cycle of death and rebirth as different people before Venat split them into 14-shorter-lived copies doing the same thing much more rapidly because she understood it to be the only path towards Meteion’s defeat. Every faction saw these actions and motivations differently in-world. Are any of those perceptions completely, rigidly right or wrong? Are we, the players, really meant to accept one in-world stance wholesale because of how that faction fared in the writing? I think that would be uncharacteristic of the game, and reflect more on the personal perceptions and assumptions and interpretations and impressions that one comes into the conversation with. I have my own perceptions of that, but I think they're influenced by who I ally with more than what is most moral or best defended by the writing.

And the real tragedy there, in my opinion, is how difficult that last conversation is to have at all without someone, at some point, just whipping out the g-word and defining the entire narrative based on an uncompromisingly rigid application of that vocabulary in a way that precludes engaging with the way the writing characterizes various parties’ perspectives of themselves and others in a meaningful manner, derailing that discussion in perpetuity.