We Haven't Been Heroes In A Long Time

[Vyrerus]

For roughly about five years. I guess I can thank Dawntrail for one thing, and that thing was making it a pattern for the Warrior of Light to not be doing heroism in the grand scheme of things. We are killers, nothing less.

Shadowbringers was the mark of many things for FFXIV. A grand shift into gaining wide acclaim. Lightning in a bottle. A story of a profound and grey villain who was actually just a good man shoved soundly to the very brink, having had to watch everyone he loved watch everyone they loved die in torturous manner.

In prior storylines we had fought for the sake of nations, for the sake of others to not be ruled by despots. But in Shadowbringers we were called away across the wound in the world to one of its butchered limbs in an effort to not heal the world, but to maintain the status quo by an "erudite" sage several hundreds years far from the future.

This had several layers telling us we weren't heroes. You should be aware of them by now, but the layers being... The Sage was from a future where we had lost in spite of our best efforts, because we were ultimately just unnatural echoes fighting against the original inhabitants of the wounded world they were trying to remedy. To spite this outcome, The Sage and his cohorts spent a couple hundred years and several generations of their progeny developing time travel. Willingly they sacrificed their own present and future for the past that might be, spitting in the face of fate. One wonders how they might have fixed their own timeline, had they but lifted their hands to that task, instead of to time travel. And so the Warrior of Light was called across the wound, the dimensional gap, to The First by this time traveler to erase a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, along with all his struggles and sacrifices.

It isn't heroism to fight for bitter survival. It is barbarity. It is to become an animal.

Yet, we were implored not to judge this aspect of Shadowbringers on its face, for there was another side to the tale we had yet to hear. We were to hear it in Endwalker. It was the retort from Hydaelyn. A whimpering lie dressed to the nines. The age old herald of every villain that's ever floated amidst the pages of a story, "I did what I did for the greater good. There was no other way." And people ate it up. And the Warrior of Light was spirited off to ONE edge of the cosmos, three dimensional space being what it is, and there corrected a mistake made by a man of Etheirys and endorsed by "our mother."

In the prior story, where we abandoned all morality and heroism to fight for bitter survival, where the "jet black" villain begged of us to be strong enough to find another way forward, the return that's to sway us to believe what we did was righteous was a platitude from one of the greatest murderers in the setting. A woman who willfully sacrificed and destroyed everyone and everything she ever loved (though nothing about her character indicates that she actually knows what love is).

And so we stepped away from that grandiose tale. It had gone as far as it could go, that's what Ultima Thule's metanarrative drive was, after all. And we come down to "earthly" stakes of planting a favorable ruler who will keep the peace. Only to, of course, encounter part of a world lost in a Rejoining, just one fiber that escaped its fated demise. A fiber bearing a remnant of a people that had somehow fled onto that twelfth shard so long ago, in spite of that shard having been consumed three calamities earlier from the calamity that caused them to flee across the wound. But I suppose time travel was already running rampant in the setting, so who's to say what makes sense now, anyway?

Far from my point, we encounter this bastion of survivors. This last bastion of strugglers. Who've lived a thousand, thousand of our lifetimes crammed into the spatially dilated confines of Solution Nine and the twelve other sectors of Alexandria's spatial-temporal bunker.

And we tell them their way of living is wrong. We tell them that survival at all costs is wrong. We fight them, telling their leader that we're resolved to face them the same way we faced that good man on The First. And we do. We deem them our lessers and we kill everyone in their civilization that no longer possesses a body of flesh.

The last time the Warrior of Light was a hero was in Stormblood. And even back then, they had so much innocent blood on their hands.

We are due a comeuppance, but unfortunately history is written by the victors and we never truly lose.

[Mcg55ss]

gotta crack a few eggs to make a omelet....

[Boblawblah]

[GrizzlyTank]

They made their choice!

[Ascended_Demon]

Idk man I think we did the world a service by giving a certain someone the death they wanted. Means they won't be walking around making everyone miserable because they haven't had their weekly play date with you.

It's Zenos, I'm talking about Zenos.

[Enkidoh]

Uggh, and there I thought with all the whinning about DT's story we had actually moved passed the 'EW's story/Venat sucks!' idea. Some things just won't stay dead I guess.

[Ririta]

I'm sorry, but we need to remember that Emet was a genocidal maniac who didn't even consider us people, sure he was tempered but that's no excuse for killing billions of people for the sake of overturning the natural order. His people are dead. Unfairly, yes, but they died and their lives don't deserve to be put above anybody else's. There are still people living in the hell of the Eight Umbral Calamity timeline...

If anything we shouldn't have become "buddies" with Emet, like, ever... there's no a drop of grey in his morality, he was straight up evil.

[Nestama]

Uggh, and there I thought with all the whinning about DT's story we had actually moved passed the 'EW's story/Venat sucks!' idea. Some things just won't stay dead I guess.

One day we'll finally be able to cast Raise on that poor dead horse and see it return to its family.

[NekoNova]

One day we'll finally be able to cast Raise on that poor dead horse and see it return to its family.

I think we're past that point.....not sure there's anything left to raise at this point