Wow, Wuk Lamat is really single-handedly ruining the DT story...

[Remiferia]

I think trying to talk about Wuk Lamat's shortcomings in characterisation is missing the forest for the trees. The issue is that the new writing team seemingly don't know how to execute a full character arc across the form of an MMO expansion story and that is infinitely more concerning to me than one dud character.

Wuk Lamat is the worst offender because she eats up like 90% of the screen time and devours the characters arcs of everyone else in the process, but the same core writing issue can be felt with Zero, Golbez, Koana, Bakool Ja Ja and ESPECIALLY Zoraal Ja. These characters are NOT lacking, but they are explored in the most cookie-cutter, wishy-washy, half-baked ways that the players are sat here scratching our heads and making character analyses to fill in the blanks on the writers' behalf.

'You just lack media literacy!' is becoming more and more of a catch-all handwave to ignore opposing opinions on social media but this isn't a question of media literacy at all - it is a question of execution. Stories are written for the layman and not people who 'read as a writer' so if a story or a character isn't hitting with a wide swathe of the audience then there is no other way to look at it than as a clarity fault with the writing team.

Wuk Lamat is Hiroi's 'OC donut steel' whether by design or by accident and that is a failure. The Rite of Succession is a contrived mess and that is a failure. The tribes are all homogenised into singular traits that define their people and that is a failure (and also borders on problematic). The new characters are doomed to be poorly explored and that is a failure. The tonal dissonance of getting a nation together to build a train-turmed-nuclear-warhead while High School Musical plays in the background is a failure. The embarrassing contrivances needed to push the story along like letting Zoraal Ja walk free from Tuliyollal is a failure.

The writing team have simply failed. Wuk Lamat is a primary victim of a far more ominous outlook on the quality of future content, not the perpetrator of a bad story.

[Galvuu]

snip.

Having a character take that much screen time is, in itself, symptomatic. You have a varied cast, but no one's allowed to breathe. There are legitimate moments where characters want a private moment with the WoL... and Wuk Lamat just forces herself into them. I watched Cider's playthrough recently, and I didn't realize that she accompanies Koana when he asks for a moment with the WoL to give you some new gear (actually wiped from my mind... that, or I skipped that cutscene). She wasn't necessary there, she added nothing of value, and detracted from the scene by divesting it of some intimacy and potential moments of characterization and development. This happens constantly.

As for the "media literacy" comments, a lot of it feels, to me, like people using the text as an end-all justification. Like a mutated argument from scripture- the script says X, so X is true and implicitly justified... regardless of how X is portrayed, the fact that's it's often Y shown on screen, that, in the past, the story and lore said Z instead of X, and that the justification of X contradicts/retcons fundamental pillars of the past stories/world-building.
I gave this example before, but it's as if in 8.0 the story went "bananas are the source of Dynamis" and further went "actually, Meteion had a secret garden of banana trees, that's why she could manipulate it... also, the WoL is part-banana"- many people would see the contradiction and call it out, saying it's bogus. But I bet someone would immediately crawl out of the woodwork to go "didn't you read the quest?!?! It's all about the bananas, they explain Meteion had tons of bananas on the edge of the universe, and the WoL is part banana! Media literacy is dead lol!". You see this a lot if you raise an issue with the characterization, retconning or lore inconsistencies in DT (and already saw in EW).
If you stretch your suspension of disbelief enough and accept any retcon presented in the body of the text without questioning, then anything is possible really. Even the banana-WoL.

[ArcturusWhisper]

I think trying to talk about Wuk Lamat's shortcomings in characterisation is missing the forest for the trees. The issue is that the new writing team seemingly don't know how to execute a full character arc across the form of an MMO expansion story and that is infinitely more concerning to me than one dud character.

*snip*

The writing team have simply failed. Wuk Lamat is a primary victim of a far more ominous outlook on the quality of future content, not the perpetrator of a bad story.

This is actually true. Wuk Lamat is the most grating due to her hogging all the screen time with this level of bad writing. But everything else is ALSO bad, be they new characters like Koana and Zoraal Ja or old characters like Krile or the twins. The new characters all have POTENTIAL, even Wuk Lamat. She has potential, as do others. They are all valid archetype characters that could become lovely if written well. But the devs don't seem to know how to translate a character sheet into an actual character. On paper their traits all look great and it can work, but the execution is sorely lacking. The world building, the logic of the event progression, and all the dialogues, they are so often superficial and bad.

Gods the dialogues. They are in your face, like rattling off character traits to you without the actual portraying. I am actually rather endeared by Koana because he's a type of character that I do like, but he's also badly written. How he's shown to be caring about his sister is sooooo heavy-handed and ham-fisted it's giving me second-hand embarrassment. It's just all so transparent, we know what they are trying to convey, and they hit you with a dialogue/scenario with zero subtlety, and you are left with feeling ridiculous. I like what he could have been, and I headcanon him to be what he could have been, and he's better written than Wuk Lamat, but at the end of the day, the devs really didn't deliver any well-written characters. Some are better than others, but none can be considered good.

And plot holes, the abundance of plot holes! *Weeps* Why are the Hanuhanu forgetting about the way their crops are cared for? Why do the WoL and twins allow Wuk Lamat to be kidnap by some random thug? Why do the xenophobic Mamook accept outsiders within half a day? Remember how much effort it took for the Ishgardians to warm up to us? Why are all the scions and WoL just watch Gulool Ja Ja get murdered? It goes on and on...

[Kennar]

And plot holes, the abundance of plot holes! *Weeps* Why are the Hanuhanu forget about the way their crops are cared for?

I did the Vanuvanu Hanuhanu quests first and I'm still mad about it over a month later. What kills me is that Wuk Evu knew the parade float was an aetheric focus and didn't offer to make repairs until Lamat asked him to, and the head of the village outright admitted that the festival wasn't effective because they had been half-assing it for years! They have an aetheric laser (aaser?) that magically makes their crops better with highly visible and immediate results, and they just didn't care enough to do the ceremony right! "Oh, I'm sad because a storm wrecked a house and someone died. *shrug* I guess we'll all starve." And Wuk Lamat even saw the festival as a kid and didn't know anything about the damn laser beam! I don't think that's something a kid would forget!

I think that bit of poor writing hit me harder because I'm a farmer in a semi-arid region. I know what it's like to lose a crop to weather. It sucks, to put it mildly. If dancing naked in front of the county courthouse would guarantee a good rain for everyone, I would be putting on two shows a month. It would be stupid not to.