The Bibliothecs

[Cleretic]

However, his concerns are largely petty and overshadowed by the Final Days. And Sharlayan's opening of its borders following the end of its great work basically renders the Bibliothec's whole platform moot. It could be interesting politically to see how he and others like him would respond to this, but ultimately it's not the Warrior of Light's problem anymore and we're unlikely to explore it.

Is the Bibliothec's platform moot? Or did Endwalker just constitute a rhetorical loss that they have to rebuild from? The Bibliothecs are essentially isolationist conservatives; they're a political party. Political parties don't die after one policy pillar crumbles, they're just gonna pick a new angle. Hell, they might not even need to; they might just campaign on the events of Endwalker being a mistake and appeal to a base we don't really hear much about!

'Not our problem' is a big thing here, though. I would adore a game about high fantasy election politics (in fact I did, Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing), but that's not exactly a story that's gonna give us the scale and material that people play FFXIV for; it's gonna be really hard to get dungeons, trials, raids and zones out of the Bibliothecs doing some campaigning on a new policy. I could see it being good material for a role quest, but that hits a separate problem that Sharlayan is poorly-built for that in terms of zones; it'd feel a little weird to do that scale of adventuring only in Old Sharlayan and Labyrinthos.

[RedLolly]

Is the Bibliothec's platform moot? Or did Endwalker just constitute a rhetorical loss that they have to rebuild from? The Bibliothecs are essentially isolationist conservatives; they're a political party. Political parties don't die after one policy pillar crumbles, they're just gonna pick a new angle. Hell, they might not even need to; they might just campaign on the events of Endwalker being a mistake and appeal to a base we don't really hear much about!

'Not our problem' is a big thing here, though. I would adore a game about high fantasy election politics (in fact I did, Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing), but that's not exactly a story that's gonna give us the scale and material that people play FFXIV for; it's gonna be really hard to get dungeons, trials, raids and zones out of the Bibliothecs doing some campaigning on a new policy. I could see it being good material for a role quest, but that hits a separate problem that Sharlayan is poorly-built for that in terms of zones; it'd feel a little weird to do that scale of adventuring only in Old Sharlayan and Labyrinthos.

We also bump into a Bibliotech that openly mentions he's swapping sides? It was a quest in Labyrinthos, but I can't recall what section it was from. They may be crumbling from the inside, and that would leave the most radical remain, logically.

Man, now I want us to explore it, somehow.

[Vallavia]

Is the Bibliothec's platform moot? Or did Endwalker just constitute a rhetorical loss that they have to rebuild from? The Bibliothecs are essentially isolationist conservatives; they're a political party. Political parties don't die after one policy pillar crumbles, they're just gonna pick a new angle. Hell, they might not even need to; they might just campaign on the events of Endwalker being a mistake and appeal to a base we don't really hear much about!

I would argue that such a dramatic reversal of their party's main policy platform in the form of completely open borders and taking in vast amounts of refugees and foreign students would conceivably mean that enough people in their party either switched their position or affiliation such that either the platform or the party are no longer of any significant influence. Given that the calamity they wished to address via isolation has been permanently and irrevocably averted and the entire population now knows what it was for, there's no practical reason for isolationism other than pure xenophobia (which could be a compelling angle, but they seemed to have walked back Sharlayan being xenophobic for xenophobia's sake pretty profoundly as of Endwalker). I don't think they can gather a huge deal of public support seeing the huge amount of social strain it put on Sharlayan internally, particularly given that it doesn't really seem to align with the public's values anymore: Sharlayan is currently the beating heart of international cooperation and achievement.

'Not our problem' is a big thing here, though. I would adore a game about high fantasy election politics (in fact I did, Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing), but that's not exactly a story that's gonna give us the scale and material that people play FFXIV for; it's gonna be really hard to get dungeons, trials, raids and zones out of the Bibliothecs doing some campaigning on a new policy. I could see it being good material for a role quest, but that hits a separate problem that Sharlayan is poorly-built for that in terms of zones; it'd feel a little weird to do that scale of adventuring only in Old Sharlayan and Labyrinthos.

All that said, I do agree completely, and I also don't think historically that FFXIV is exceptionally good at grand politic storytelling anyhow. The entire Before the Fall thing could have been interesting had we not been forcibly returned to the status quo in every conceivable sense merely 30 quests later, I suppose, but other than that we only approach conversations about the role of the state very briefly and in very exceptional circumstances. That, and this doesn't particularly strike me as a story they wish to tell or even really remember in the grand scheme of things going forward: I would see an Eorzean reconciliation arc long before a hostile Bibliothec takeover arc, for instance.