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

[Daralii]

Between Wuk Lamat I see some parallels with Ysayle. Both were idealists who believed strongly in fighting for their own people.
What HW did very well is how Hreasvelgr totally shredded Ysayle's imagined utopian vision of how Dragons and People can live together.
That scene where he told her how stupid she was... it was shiver-inducing; it was both terrible and wonderful to watch.

Wuk Lamat should have had some similar type of awakening where her "childish idealism" is crushed / pulverized into smithereens... and then through some incredibly arduous transformation she can be redeemed or something (like, going off screen for a while)
The way how her untested idealism goes unchallenged really weakened her impact as a character -- also leading to very little character development.

Wuk Lamat's probably the only idealist main character that didn't get her teeth kicked in by reality, which makes that aspect of the story stand out that much more.

[Gaddes]

Between Wuk Lamat I see some parallels with Ysayle. Both were idealists who believed strongly in fighting for their own people.
What HW did very well is how Hreasvelgr totally shredded Ysayle's imagined utopian vision of how Dragons and People can live together.
That scene where he told her how stupid she was... it was shiver-inducing; it was both terrible and wonderful to watch.

The interesting thing about HW though is that Dragons and People CAN live together, but just not without fundamental changes to society to enable that; certainly the Ishgard of the past with their dark secrets and corruption couldn't accomplish it, but we're actually on that path now, post-dragonsong war. I think the important difference though is that an idealist is not a bad thing so long as they are realistic about what needs to be done to bring about that change. Aymeric is possibly my favorite idealist in the game. He had some pretty lofty ideals about radically altering Ishgardian society, but through some tumultuous ups and downs and his own experiences, he knew that in order to achieve that some pretty substantial work had to be done to get that goal started, and the effort needed to maintain that goal (hence why he's still practically chained to his desk to this day ). He was willing to roll up his sleeves and get to work with actual plans, not just simply hugging it out and eating tacos.

[sylphlands]

I mean he did say it right in EW, he's our mirror. I liked him for his simplicity.

Because sadly from my personal experience in-game, I met alot of people who hate Zenos. My first 'friend circle' was so allergic to him they felt entitled to attack me as a person for my morality for being excited to see a "objectively badly written character" and to spoil the ending of SB for me when I was still in HW. I know he's a divisive character, I find that interesting about him, but from my experience I feel like loving him is an unpopular opinion and he constantly gets compared to Emet-Selch.

I kinda felt that maybe the story means alot to people that they feel strongly about such characters to be quite interesting but I'll forever be salty that people attacked me for looking forward to him and stripped me from the one thing I looked forward to....I just thought everyone hated him because that's what I personally experienced and saw, that people just want him to stay dead because it's a relief, he's that character you hate on I guess.

Seconding all this! Zenos is my fav character after Ardbert, I think he's incredibly well-written and an excellent foil for the WOL but he gets shafted so often by fans (and sometimes the writers tbh, I was frustrated in the Endwalker patches partially because of this). He has so much more complexity than people give him credit for, and I hate seeing him get misrepresented as someone who "loves killing" when we have actual in-game dialogue proving that's not even his primary motive. Going from a character as interesting as him to the two-bit zero-dimension characters in Dawntrail was one of my biggest disappointments and it only made me miss him more, among many other great characters that were killed off.

[Hallarem]

There would've been more meat to Zenos if there would've been a... I don't know, GARLEMALD expansion where we'd get to look at the royal family, the nobles, the political turmoil, instead of ALL OF IT being done in the backround and them using ZEnos as a convenient "Oh ooops he destroyed Garlemald offscreen" button because they wanted to rush two expansions into one in Endwalker to rush for.... Dawntrail? (That didn't end up too well, though we got patches still coming.)

I didn't like Zenos, but I respected him after our first "final duel". He was an honest animal. But when they resurrected him, and worse yet, DIDNT DO ANYTHING with him for the longest time I really started hating him. He was eating screentime, doing nothing. He lingered around for far too long like a wet blanket, because I'm a 100% sure the writers had no idea what to do with him. THeeeen he barged into the last duel, and gave us a "devs talk to you" speech breaking the 4th wall. That wasn't ZEnos talking, that was the devs.

Don't get me wrong, he's cool, his english VA is amazing, but damn oh damn does he suck as a part of the story after Stormblood aside from anything than bringing the "cool".

Even the devs give you options to answer 10 different colours of "Go away" "I've had enough" in the speech options. That should be hint enough.

[MoiraTerrwell]

What we saw was that Zenos had learned, in his own unique way, what it means to care for someone. His former demands of “I WILL have my contest!") changed to sincerely offering the WoL to share in the only form of happiness he understood. And he was finally able to see WoL as their own person. The way he referred to the WoL as “Adventurer” demonstrated that he understood there is a part of WoL that's difficult for them to express in the midst of all the heroics that were, more often than not, forced upon them. And we directly, and indirectly, gave him a purpose to live. It's what makes him an intriguing character.

That's kinda what gripes me the most of the entirety of Dawntrail. Everything we learned was that we were going to be going back to our roots and be adventurers. Yet from 90 to 95 we're babysitting, at 95 in Shaaolani we get to adventure with Erenville (and handle feces. That bit was fantastic), and immediately go back to world-ending-problem and babysitting again.

Where is my actual Adventure, Dawntrail at best is the Wuk Lamat Adventure, not the Warrior of Light's adventure.
I wish we were with anyone but Wuk Lamat just to get her to realise she needed to grow, her 'entourage' was so god damn strong (even when butchered) there was no way she would've lost. She should've lost.

[dies_irae]

There would've been more meat to Zenos if there would've been a... I don't know, GARLEMALD expansion where we'd get to look at the royal family, the nobles, the political turmoil, instead of ALL OF IT being done in the backround and them using ZEnos as a convenient "Oh ooops he destroyed Garlemald offscreen" button because they wanted to rush two expansions into one in Endwalker to rush for.... Dawntrail? (That didn't end up too well, though we got patches still coming.)

I didn't like Zenos, but I respected him after our first "final duel". He was an honest animal. But when they resurrected him, and worse yet, DIDNT DO ANYTHING with him for the longest time I really started hating him. He was eating screentime, doing nothing. He lingered around for far too long like a wet blanket, because I'm a 100% sure the writers had no idea what to do with him. THeeeen he barged into the last duel, and gave us a "devs talk to you" speech breaking the 4th wall. That wasn't ZEnos talking, that was the devs.

Don't get me wrong, he's cool, his english VA is amazing, but damn oh damn does he suck as a part of the story after Stormblood aside from anything than bringing the "cool".

Even the devs give you options to answer 10 different colours of "Go away" "I've had enough" in the speech options. That should be hint enough.

My theory is that they rushed to end the current arc to free up all the talents that made FF14 great. Either because they themselves wanted to move on from FF14 (YoshiP, Koji, Ishikawa, ...) ,the company decided to move them to other projects, or they wanted to leave because they did not want to deal with outside influence (consulting companies) interfering with their work.
So they "solved" every mystery/threat that was left in this arc:
-Garmelmald killed off screen
-Omicron threat killed off screen
- Hydaelyn and Zodiark
- Zenos
- Ascians
- What happened to the dragon star
- the twelve just being ancients that we help committing suicide ... (i really hated that story)

At first i thought they did that because they had this great new arc ready to go but after playing DT it is obvious that they have nothing.

[Allegor]

That's kinda what gripes me the most of the entirety of Dawntrail. Everything we learned was that we were going to be going back to our roots and be adventurers. Yet from 90 to 95 we're babysitting, at 95 in Shaaolani we get to adventure with Erenville (and handle feces. That bit was fantastic), and immediately go back to world-ending-problem and babysitting again.

Where is my actual Adventure, Dawntrail at best is the Wuk Lamat Adventure, not the Warrior of Light's adventure.
I wish we were with anyone but Wuk Lamat just to get her to realise she needed to grow, her 'entourage' was so god damn strong (even when butchered) there was no way she would've lost. She should've lost.

Personally, the MSQ should've ended around the time we even got to S9 and defeat Zoraal Ja. All that about Sphene being a Disney plot twist villain and save the Source/the remaining shards with Azem's mcguffin key should've been left for 7.1 and onwards. Dawntrail was expected to be a lower stakes/vacations/new beginnings expansion yet we nosedived back into "we have EW at home"

[DonutSteel]

the twelve just being ancients that we help committing suicide ... (i really hated that story)

I don't think I've had a bigger 360 on a story than the twelve questline.

I was annoyed at first because it was going to be one god trope I dislike for being overdone (The gods are evil and we have to kill them because we're ahh-sum), then it turned out they were just testing us which I was fine with, then it turned out to be the other trope I dislike (the gods are nice but they die shortly after meeting them).

Made worse by the fact that most of the twelve were "just there" at best, to almost maliciously negligent at worst (Nophica and Menphina being the biggest offenders).

[dies_irae]

I don't think I've had a bigger 360 on a story than the twelve questline.

I was annoyed at first because it was going to be one god trope I dislike for being overdone (The gods are evil and we have to kill them because we're ahh-sum), then it turned out they were just testing us which I was fine with, then it turned out to be the other trope I dislike (the gods are nice but they die shortly after meeting them).

Made worse by the fact that most of the twelve were "just there" at best, to almost maliciously negligent at worst (Nophica and Menphina being the biggest offenders).

I was suspecting something like that from the beginning, it was just so predictable but i was hoping to be proven wrong until the end.

I wanted them all to just become adventurers like Deryk and spread all over the planet so we could meet them in future expansions. Or they could have just used them as future trust characters so they dont have to lobotomize the scions into generic trust npcs all the time.

[DonutSteel]

I was suspecting something like that from the beginning, it was just so predictable but i was hoping to be proven wrong until the end.

I wanted them all to just become adventurers like Deryk and spread all over the planet so we could meet them in future expansions. Or they could have just used them as future trust characters so they dont have to lobotomize the scions into generic trust npcs all the time.

Admitted I was initially worried, but was so relieved at them avoiding the "evil gods" twist that I was gaslighting myself into thinking "surely they won't just kill them all off at the end either, right?"

But then I finished Euphrosyne and got that "We're gonna accomplish our dream!" line from Menphina and I was just "Oh no. Surely not..." Then they did.