Quote Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk View Post
While also dealing with a guy who lost himself to depression and alcoholism over the inability to save his loved ones, showing a mirror of Thancred's own issues and how badly he could turn out if he keeps going down his path. But "looking for rocks" is easier, I guess.
???

You just reinforced the point behind that discussion.

First, it's a weak parallel, at best. The real tension had been Thancred manically trying to inflict his own desperate, wishful hopes onto another thinking, feeling person who just "looked right" — not what might hypothetically become of Thancred himself because of his depression over failing Minfilia 1.0 ~20 years earlier.

In fact, Thancred had already become a profligate, aimless, depressed alcoholic following the incident in 1562 6AE — so if anything, he was basically just pompously-lecturing someone who was struggling with issues that Thancred had already overcome and moved on from.

His big "dialogue climax" in that scene is to once again reinforce that he "refuses to let [Minfilia's] legacy die" — which, depending on how you interpret his body-language, is either the opposite of letting go, or indicates that he's already made his decision (without requiring outside intervention)... ie, that he's not receiving some kind of "wake up call" from the sad dude at the graveyard, he's just lecturing the guy.

If Magnus had adopted some Drahn child, and was obsessively trying to make that child dress and behave like Magnus's own dead son, and got called-out for it by Thancred, then we'd have a much more interesting scene going on.

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Second, rather than Thancred himself being confronted or conflicted with, Thancred was granted Main Character Privilege to step outside the "stage" and look down upon — yet another — engineered placeholder NPC, who was swapped into existence for the sole purpose of taking abuse or confrontation, or have problems, that main characters are not allowed to be subjected to.

ie: We couldn't have someone directly lecture Thancred about where he might "end up" (despite that kind of concern being irrelevant to the story by that point anyway, since Thancred had already "gotten better" off-screen during the 3 years before we arrived in Norvrandt), or get into an argument with him about anything else, on-screen.

Instead, we could only create this disposable proxy-NPC and let Scion(s) lecture the proxy, expressing opinions in a safe way towards someone that's not important.

Sometimes, this may result in a Scion having a 5-second-long "quiet thinking" scene, before the camera pans up into the sky towards a random cloud — after which the Scion might dramatically overcome their self-doubts about something, through the power of admonishing other people.

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So once again, a Scion was positioned as the savior voice of reason, lecturing someone else — who, the plot indicates, just needed a good pep talk these past X years of their personal suffering, flaws, prejudices, etc.

And what happened?

Well, we briefly enjoyed the satisfaction of watching the Scions's usual "let me fix you" attitude fall completely flat, when Magnus basically told Thancred to eff-off. I think that was a solid idea and a good writing decision.

...However, FFXIV could only hold its breath for so long.

And so, 1 hour later, our resident grief-stricken alcoholic spontaneously-combusted into a go-getter leader who's suddenly totally inspired by his wife's legacy, totally "over" his dead child, and now full of vim and vigor for TROLLEYS because we have, once again, shown up and solved everyone's flaws through the power of lecturing them and collecting+delivering a sparkling object.