On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Brinne]

This. So much of the Ascians' story was written with the ending already set in stone by the earlier parts of the game. The end result had to be the Sundering; the writers had no choice but to come up with something that reached that result. I don't think they did the best possible job that could be done, and they had some weird philosophical takes on things, but it's part of the setting now whether we like it or not.

Right, I don't think this is actually an unfair or unreasonable position at all, and I actually largely agree (because again, this is actually stepping into an exegetic conversation.) I've said many times I don't think the clumsy handling of the Sundering was done out of deliberate malice or anything like that, more like a series of fumbles that was handled extremely badly and reflected certain priorities over others on the part of the creative team.

But I also think this is a bit of an (unintentional) misrepresentation, again - I don't think anyone here is disputing the fact that the Sundering had to happen, narratively, and I've enjoyed a lot of discussion from different people about how the writers ended up in this corner due to approaching things in a backwards way and making things up as they go. However, I think how the Sundering was handled on a storytelling perspective, granting that the fact of it had to have happened, is still a fair topic of discussion. It is perfectly okay for me to be interested in discussing that aspect further and for anyone else to not be interested in it. I shouldn't force anyone into it who doesn't want to have it, and other people, I think, shouldn't feel the need to jump in, lash out and say it's stupid and pointless for me to want to talk about it with others who do too.

There might also be some disagreement about "if we can build a tentative agreement that it was clumsy and we all have to live with it now, how do we as fans handle it going forward?" The approach to some seems to be to rationalize it in order to continue enjoying the game as best they can (please correct me if I'm the one misrepresenting here), and some who feel better about voicing their dissatisfaction with "how it was handled" in a way they hope reaches the writers in the official forums in hopes that either they don't do this so much going forward, or maybe in hopes that future content that touches on it might help reduce the dissonance, and some weirdoes who just like going in-depth with this kind of thing with others - or anyone might have some mish-mash of any of those - but again, I think we can all be allowed those ideas on "how to approach a part of the game we're not really crazy about" while respecting one anothers' choices about it, as long as it doesn't devolve into harassment or abuse?