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.

[Lunaxia]

[taps] Is this thing still on? Forum access there? Okay, good! Before it runs out, then -

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

It would appear I met my match! (And I actually have no problem with long posts myself, but my own experience has taught not everyone feels that way so I frequently feel obligated to offer a word of warning, hah.)

I was aiming to highlight that “jumping in here”-ness by...

In that case, I admit I feel a little more justified in my disgruntlement in my original response lol, because my impression that you did originally unite several very different perspectives and assigned to them the same basic rebuttal when they're different trains of thought entirely (very, very loosely connected by a single thread of "I feel like the Ancients got screwed over") and didn't merit that association was the correct one. I do now acknowledge you weren't directly responding to my or necessarily any other given poster's thoughts with your original counter points, and they were a general address... but I think it remains that you did dismiss the more valid reasoning that was very much already there in favour of responding to a more abstract and unfavourable sort that the posters were not out of line for objecting was making something of a distortion of the primary visible agruments being put forward. It already being a sensitive issue due to other camps needing far less incentive to stop taking contrasting view points seriously, maybe the strength of the response becomes a little clearer to understand, but it is a wariness that can be abrasive and confusing for those who genuinely did not come with such intent - which in the event that was true, was why I wanted to explain in the first place. Anyway, you've clarified and explained your side to me, so it's settled as far as I'm concerned.

This is one place that I feel that one’s preferred lore factions...

If I'm being honest, that argument isn't unfathomable to me. I do personally feel the scene smacks more than a little of fanservice to appeal to fans of that part of the story, and ironically I do think Emet-Selch (poor Hyth, what did he do?!) got the kid gloves treatment at least insofar as his role in Garlemald over the course of EW, to the point it became a little hilarious how they would flat out try to avoid naming him over the course of the Ilsabard segment (though admittedly the end of the world was not the place to throw it in his face, either.) I understand why other players enjoyed the ending, of course, and I understand what the writers wanted to achieve with it, but like many other aspects of the story, I don't believe that makes it a good choice, just as with Eli. I'm not saying Emet should been ignored completely or forced to sit in the corner and think about what he's done; I just think it's the entire scenario combined with, as you so succinctly put it, that bizarre "campy anime energy" that altogether felt like this weird, awkward mishmash of conflicting story beats rolled together into one pot to make something moving! Because we're all Working Together! that for some wound up necessitating a dismissal of too much of what had come before. Unmitigated cheese isn't everyone's bag, and I'd argue that in regards to climactic endings, it wasn't typically SE's bag either, which is the driving force behind what made the ending (amongst other writing choices in EW) a little harder to swallow for some. Endwalker's tonal dissonance (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view) is a lengthy and controversial enough topic on its own, though.

I think my experience of the story forces me to see a (small) distinction...

I actually agree with you on pretty much all those points regarding Emet's character, and in particular the idea of his standards being intentionally impossible to meet from the outset was one I've long harboured. It's like as not just nitpicking over semantics than any genuine disagreement, though I'm a little unclear about "his willingness to acknowledge"; what exactly are you referring to there?

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

By road to recovery, I mean more from a practical perspective than an emotional one. The world had begun to flourish, the Final Days had been averted, their numbers could have increased given time - what I mean to say is, as a race, they were not immediately physically doomed to die out, or anything like that.

And ahhh... [angrystitch.gif] To be frank, I have a lot of problems with that scene to begin with, not least because it diverges significantly from what we've been told prior by just about everyone outside of Venat, and it inevitably becomes a sticking point in these arguments as your personal interpretation of it is what the justification for the Sundering effectively hinges (or fails to hinge) on. As far as I'm concerned, we already knew the world had recovered to some degree; we knew there was an ongoing debate on both sides as to how to proceed. We knew there was a considerable amount of time between Zodiark's summoning and Hydaelyn's, and how the battle of Hydaelyn and Zodiark played out over several days. So the sudden framing of it into a case of Venat being surrounded by Zodiark fanatics incapable of handling their grief amidst the wreckage of the Final Days was inexplicable to me. Who even were those people? Weren't the Convocation the ones who summoned Zodiark to begin with? Why was it so one-sided in terms of putting forth both sides of the schism? What did they hope to gain from all of this these changes and omissions and not emphasising more on what happened here, if it wasn't what I feel it was - which is wedging Venat further in beween a rock and a hard place than the story had previously ever suggested, in order to make her actions feel more "comfortable" by comparison? I know what the writers are hoping I'll take away from that scene, but contradicting themselves to point the narrative in what feels a rather singular direction isn't doing a very good job of selling the reasoning behind all of this (Endsinger was coming! They couldn't handle it! They had no choice! etc.) that they're trying to, and the need for that reframing of events gave me cause to think, personally, that they may have realised Venat's actions did not feel particularly sympathetic enough without it. And that's where they lost me.

Some players argue symbolism or simplification, to be sure, and that's one way to look at it, but it felt so clumsy for what I'm accustomed to from the story and hit just the right set of notes to push a particular perception that I can't really bring myself to agree with it, and even if I were to, I'd still feel unsatisfied for the basic reason it was done pretty poorly and quickly for such a pivotal plot point. A miss across the board, as it were.

To follow on from this, you argue further on that it's uncharacteristic of the game to push any one given stance, but I think that is exactly what they did do here - I also agree whole-heartedly it is not (or was not) characteristic of FFXIV to do so, and it's that point of conflict which is exactly where my issues with EW stem from, and why - to circle back into a very convenient and neat little loop to the original topic of the thread - the necessity to bring even the "villains" towards this line of thinking felt all the more gratuituous and frustrating. So much of Endwalker is used to uphold what to my view is a very nebulous argument, to deliver on what they likely hoped would be an uplifting and heartfelt conclusion to the saga, but in their mission to do this, they sacrificed too much and prevented key parts of the story from being able to truly work - or at least feel like something I could buy into.

From my perspective, ... 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.

I mean! That's a very generous interpretation of the events of the game, Moose. I could counter that those killed by the Rejoinings were simply thrown into the recycle of rebirth ahead of their time for a greater purpose and they'll just reborn into better versions of themselves anyway, but we both know that's not a fair or accurate judgement. As Shadowbringers took pains to tell us, a life lost is still a life lost, a life that deserved to live, and a culture lost is just that also, and that goes for both sides of the coin in regards to Venat and the Ascians. Even if you were to make an argument for Venat in terms of the Endsinger battle, that cost still shouldn't be dismissed or mitigated, and it goes back to my issue with the very confusing leniency with which the writers (and groups of players) treat the erasure of the Ancients in contrast to other races and scenarios.

And the real tragedy there...

There is a lot to say on the subject of the G word in the context of this discussion, but on that I'd invite you to check out other threads still ongoing that discuss this in more detail: not because I disagree with you, but because they touch on the subject in a far more concise and eloquent way than I could manage, and you might find some common ground with other like-minded posters there.

Also:

(Avoid Twitter.)

(I need no encouragement on that one, have no fear.)

And Brinne, you have far more patience than I could ever hope to have.