A short quest chain tackled Dawntrail's themes better than Dawntrail

[Cleretic]

Yes, congratulations. You've recognized that a constant theme Final Fantasy XIV goes back to is that bringing back the dead, by any means and name you call it, is an understandable and sympathetic motivation that will inevitably lead to ruin. Everyone wants to bring back what they've lost, and is right to want that, but grasping for it to the expense of others will only cause pain and destruction; while it's right to remember what you've lost, it's wrong to sacrifice what you have to get it back.

You might also remember this theme from:
-Stormblood Alchemist,
-Both of Edda's non-MSQ stories,
-Tiamat's story of Bahamut's summoning,
-Bozja by curveball,
-The Endwalker caster role quest,
-The Ascians.

And this is just the times I can think of that they've gone back to this particular theme. They actually do quite a lot of reiterating on a theme or concepts in a few different ways, often by having sort of a 'prototype' turn up in side content before hitting primetime in an MSQ. Consider Amdapor City Hard soft-launching Sin Eaters, the primal Eureka essentially wielding creation magic, or the Totentantz being a proto-End of Days. This is much easier to follow when there's a concrete and tangible thing rather than a general theme where it more comes down to vibes, but it also happens there; consider how every single ALC/CUL quest since Shadowbringers has been the exact same goddamn story, and that's honestly way worse than just 'constantly going back to being anti-necromancy', because it's telling the exact same crowd the exact same weirdly specific story.

And personally I liked several of those stories I listed a lot more than Stormblood Dark Knight, including Living Memory itself (you're only talking about Living Memory, by the way, this isn't true about the rest of Dawntrail). Like, once I realized Bozja was one of these stories I was in love with its approach.