Do you think one of the Scions will die on Dawntrail

[Cleretic]

You are correct.

Remember how teleporting used to cost "anima" (life-force aether) instead of gil? Imagine someone had a demanding job, but then started doing a few teleports every morning and acting like there were no additional burdens on their body or limitations to their exertion. What if they got into a situation where those additional resources are the difference between life and death and they're not even acknowledging their loss? Even if not, that can't be infinitely sustainable. One day they have to accept that the additional burdens/limitations are real. Until then, their mother would probably be pretty concerned. It'd be easy to dismiss her at first, but not forever.

When you're not taking it literally, it's actually Matoya's most characterizing sequence. This is a brusque, flippant woman who's full of sass and acts like she doesn't care about anyone... and yet here she is worrying about Y'shtola's visible yet under-control injury, and doing the magic equivalent of freaking out when she learns one of the kids has been riding a motorcycle. Beneath everything, she's plausibly the most caring parental figure in the entire game.


As for the Scions... while I think they're never gonna do this, I want to come at this from another direction. If you kill a character, then they are completely off the board for almost all possible future storylines. In the context of an ongoing story with writers coming in and out, and characters that have been a stable if background presence for a while, that's actually pretty bad; if someone comes up with a really good storyline for a character that's dead, then that story either has to exist in a second-best form or not at all.

So with that in mind, I want to ask a question: which Scions, if they died right now, would have left a satisfying character arc? Connor on the last page is right that now feels like a very wrong time for this, but we'll leave that aside for now. Ideally, here we want people who've wrapped up their main plot hooks, and haven't gotten a new one in the meantime; if this character dies, people don't have lingering unresolved questions or wants.

So, looking at the list of still-alive Scions, I'm gonna bold the ones that feel 'done' to give us a list of Scions that can plausibly kick the bucket without screwing anything too bad.

• Y'shtola (never really had a story arc and we've never even visited her home, hopefully that changes someday)
• Thancred (Shadowbringers was everything he needed)
• Tataru (Grand Endeavors did her good)
• Urianger (I don't know what he can do but he hasn't done it yet)
• Alphinaud (Endwalker wrapped his overarching story)
• Alisaie (constantly in search of a story, none have stuck)
• G'raha (been doing nothing useful since he joined the Scions and I don't think he's about to find something)
• Estinien (Meracydia means dragons, it'd feel weird to go without our Dragon Guy)

So theoretically, you could kill half the Scions and not lose anything, but if I'm honest I'd probably nix Alphinaud from this list; he's our Politics Guy, it feels like we should have that sort of skillset in the wings.

...But I also can't help but notice that when people raise this subject, it's never 'any Scion at all', it's usually very specific ones. ...and it's usually one of the ones I haven't bolded. So I don't think people would be happy with any Scion's death.

[ViinaS]

I mean if the writer feels the need to kill off one character tho.... there's one perfect one for that.
Wuk Lamat.

[mallleable]

Nah. At worse we might get a Y'shtola corruption arc if it turns out the Dimensional Key is indeed Auracite.

[Hingner]

When you're not taking it literally, it's actually Matoya's most characterizing sequence. This is a brusque, flippant woman who's full of sass and acts like she doesn't care about anyone... and yet here she is worrying about Y'shtola's visible yet under-control injury, and doing the magic equivalent of freaking out when she learns one of the kids has been riding a motorcycle. Beneath everything, she's plausibly the most caring parental figure in the entire game.


As for the Scions... while I think they're never gonna do this, I want to come at this from another direction. If you kill a character, then they are completely off the board for almost all possible future storylines. In the context of an ongoing story with writers coming in and out, and characters that have been a stable if background presence for a while, that's actually pretty bad; if someone comes up with a really good storyline for a character that's dead, then that story either has to exist in a second-best form or not at all.

So with that in mind, I want to ask a question: which Scions, if they died right now, would have left a satisfying character arc? Connor on the last page is right that now feels like a very wrong time for this, but we'll leave that aside for now. Ideally, here we want people who've wrapped up their main plot hooks, and haven't gotten a new one in the meantime; if this character dies, people don't have lingering unresolved questions or wants.

So, looking at the list of still-alive Scions, I'm gonna bold the ones that feel 'done' to give us a list of Scions that can plausibly kick the bucket without screwing anything too bad.

• Y'shtola (never really had a story arc and we've never even visited her home, hopefully that changes someday)
• Thancred (Shadowbringers was everything he needed)
• Tataru (Grand Endeavors did her good)
• Urianger (I don't know what he can do but he hasn't done it yet)
• Alphinaud (Endwalker wrapped his overarching story)
• Alisaie (constantly in search of a story, none have stuck)
• G'raha (been doing nothing useful since he joined the Scions and I don't think he's about to find something)
• Estinien (Meracydia means dragons, it'd feel weird to go without our Dragon Guy)

So theoretically, you could kill half the Scions and not lose anything, but if I'm honest I'd probably nix Alphinaud from this list; he's our Politics Guy, it feels like we should have that sort of skillset in the wings.

...But I also can't help but notice that when people raise this subject, it's never 'any Scion at all', it's usually very specific ones. ...and it's usually one of the ones I haven't bolded. So I don't think people would be happy with any Scion's death.

Just to add to that.
The only ones that have a palpable objective after Endwalker are the twins that will try to rehabilitate Garlemald to the word and Y'shtola that want to go back to the first.

[Rueby]

Nah, they've been super formuliac with the MSQ.
Scions and die don't mix, like oil and water, no matter how absurd/stupid they act, they have the same plot armor as you.

What they'll do is introduce a side character to kill later, and villains ofc, villains bad, villains get brought back as punching bags to die again. Only Gaius was lucky but he got sidelined.

Sorry short answer, no scion will die because they play it safe.
Y'shtola will never die because they use her as exposition dumper since the player is too stupid to figure out the plot themselves.
Alphi and Alisaie will never die because children and Alphi is essentially imo our 'voice'.
G'raha came back in ShB, he's not gonna die
Thancred I almost believed he ripped in EW
Urianger....likely not
Estinien recently joined us and probably will play a role in anything dragon related... like Cleretic mentioned

Not even Emet or literal despair can kill them. I can't imagine why Meteion would be half hearted, or Zenos, or Emet. It really waters down any kind of 'threat' by eliminating the 'my friends are in danger'.

[Cleretic]

Y'shtola will never die because they use her as exposition dumper since the player is too stupid to figure out the plot themselves.

So this is also an element of the Scions that I think is interesting and leads to making them constant characters: they act as broadly present and trustworthy Exposition Dumpers for specific types of information. If we're meant to know or learn a fact about the world that isn't necessarily a mystery to figure out or otherwise warrant dedicated gameplay, the Scions act as reliable sources, that we can trust will be telling us the truth. And a lot of them kinda have their own field, that sometimes overlap.

Y'shtola's our broad Magical Knowledge person; she's a walking science textbook.
Alphinaud has over time become the Politics Boy, he produces the sort of dry, theoretically available but important information that's helpful for a political plotline.
Thancred provides an interesting alternative angle to Alphinaud, in being sort of the 'spycraft' character; if Alphinaud is essentially the Wikipedia article on a country, Thancred's the one that digs deeper and finds info that isn't publicly available. A broadly similar knowledge base, but you wouldn't substitute one for the other directly.
Krile (who I forgot about in my last post) is... basically a backup Y'shtola, their knowledge bases don't differ in practice.
Urianger is kinda the Thancred to Alphinaud's Y'shtola: he's also a magical knowledge person, but his expertise comes in the esoterica that most people wouldn't know. Y'shtola's a walking science textbook, Urianger's a walking 'fourth page of google search results that finally have what you REALLY wanted'.
Tataru is a solid accountant and money person; understandably this didn't come up very often.
Estinien's broadly not this same sort of character, at least from design intention, but he does have the knowledge set of 'combat, war, dragons'; out of all the Scions, he's the guy that can tell you if a military's good or not.
Alisaie... well,
G'raha I think was kinda supposed to have an 'Allagan tech' specialty, but he only joined the main cast after Allag stopped being a big deal, and it's more fun to find a more dedicated expert for other forms of tech like electrope, so he's kinda just wound up as another backup Y'shtola that gets to say 'Crystal Tower' sometimes.

You can occasionally just not need a few of these so they'll just sit out an expansion (see: the magic types not being part of Stormblood), but if you were weighing the pros and cons of actually killing a Scion this is another element; the purely functional story aid. If Alphianud died, and we needed someone broadly trustworthy to tell us about local trade deals or something, what do we do?

[Carin-Eri]

So, looking at the list of still-alive Scions, I'm gonna bold the ones that feel 'done' to give us a list of Scions that can plausibly kick the bucket without screwing anything too bad.

• Y'shtola (never really had a story arc and we've never even visited her home, hopefully that changes someday)
• Thancred (Shadowbringers was everything he needed)
• Tataru (Grand Endeavors did her good)
• Urianger (I don't know what he can do but he hasn't done it yet)
• Alphinaud (Endwalker wrapped his overarching story)
• Alisaie (constantly in search of a story, none have stuck)
• G'raha (been doing nothing useful since he joined the Scions and I don't think he's about to find something)
• Estinien (Meracydia means dragons, it'd feel weird to go without our Dragon Guy)

Good summary!

As unpopular an opinion as this may be, I can't help but think you're right about G'raha in particular.

I mean, don't get me wrong - I like him. But his only 'purpose' since joining the Scions was to allow the WoL to fulfill the promise to have him join us on an adventure. Which he has now - several times.

I'd say he's probably the least likely Scion to die if there was any threat of that, though, since he seems ridiculously popular and the numerous players who consider him to be their husband would never forgive the Devs.

[Hingner]

Good summary!

As unpopular an opinion as this may be, I can't help but think you're right about G'raha in particular.

I mean, don't get me wrong - I like him. But his only 'purpose' since joining the Scions was to allow the WoL to fulfill the promise to have him join us on an adventure. Which he has now - several times.

I'd say he's probably the least likely Scion to die if there was any threat of that, though, since he seems ridiculously popular and the numerous players who consider him to be their husband would never forgive the Devs.

I do agree with the G'raha situation, his arc concluded in SdB in perfectly.
If they wanted to have someone to fill the 8th spot on trust, krile was already there for years and she did had more sense to be more relevant on endwalker when she became the link between Hydaelyn and us.

But you are also ritght he is too popular now to be killed off or retired.
He could have been our haurchefant 2.0 but now it's too late, i don't feel crying for him a 3rd time you know.

[Hingner]

So this is also an element of the Scions that I think is interesting and leads to making them constant characters: they act as broadly present and trustworthy Exposition Dumpers for specific types of information. If we're meant to know or learn a fact about the world that isn't necessarily a mystery to figure out or otherwise warrant dedicated gameplay, the Scions act as reliable sources, that we can trust will be telling us the truth. And a lot of them kinda have their own field, that sometimes overlap.

Y'shtola's our broad Magical Knowledge person; she's a walking science textbook.
Alphinaud has over time become the Politics Boy, he produces the sort of dry, theoretically available but important information that's helpful for a political plotline.
Thancred provides an interesting alternative angle to Alphinaud, in being sort of the 'spycraft' character; if Alphinaud is essentially the Wikipedia article on a country, Thancred's the one that digs deeper and finds info that isn't publicly available. A broadly similar knowledge base, but you wouldn't substitute one for the other directly.
Krile (who I forgot about in my last post) is... basically a backup Y'shtola, their knowledge bases don't differ in practice.
Urianger is kinda the Thancred to Alphinaud's Y'shtola: he's also a magical knowledge person, but his expertise comes in the esoterica that most people wouldn't know. Y'shtola's a walking science textbook, Urianger's a walking 'fourth page of google search results that finally have what you REALLY wanted'.
Tataru is a solid accountant and money person; understandably this didn't come up very often.
Estinien's broadly not this same sort of character, at least from design intention, but he does have the knowledge set of 'combat, war, dragons'; out of all the Scions, he's the guy that can tell you if a military's good or not.
Alisaie... well,
G'raha I think was kinda supposed to have an 'Allagan tech' specialty, but he only joined the main cast after Allag stopped being a big deal, and it's more fun to find a more dedicated expert for other forms of tech like electrope, so he's kinda just wound up as another backup Y'shtola that gets to say 'Crystal Tower' sometimes.

You can occasionally just not need a few of these so they'll just sit out an expansion (see: the magic types not being part of Stormblood), but if you were weighing the pros and cons of actually killing a Scion this is another element; the purely functional story aid. If Alphianud died, and we needed someone broadly trustworthy to tell us about local trade deals or something, what do we do?

That's a good point specifically the the "Alisaie... well".
She can do more than being the emotional support for other NPCs or the emotional valve for the team in the sense that she speeks out what everyone is feeling at the moment.
She needs a specialization of sorts.

[Hingner]

I know i titled the thred as death, but maybe retiring like Lyse did would be more viable, so we can check ont then besides not being adventuring more.