Quote Originally Posted by Alleo View Post
For me a death done only for emotional impact feels always cheap in a way. If the character dies so you can defeat an evil or if their death is the only way to let you life (an in this situation we could and should have defended ourselves..) or if their death truly changed the story than I can at least accept it. But death just so that we can have a personal reason to go after someone or that they can show how bad war is or to just to have us feel some emotional pain leaves a really bad taste..If he would have taken an enemy with him or if he like Moen, gave is aether so that we could defeat a Ascian for good than it would have been not that harsh. (But still very sad T_T) But killing someone of to create a feeling of vengeance and hate for another character is really the easiest way to do that and with that feels kinda cheap .

[And yes I know that a lot of people die without reason in the real life, but I don't want those deaths in a video game or book. I am mean how bad would it be if for example Aymeric dies because he slipped on the stairs or Thordan died of a heart attack thanks to his old age xD]
While I agree that meaningless death is a Very Bad Thing in fiction--personally, for me, what kills A Game of Thrones is the constant character suffering and death to the point that it becomes very blaise--I would call Haurchefant's anything but meaningless. Certainly we could try to argue that he didn't need to protect us, but there's no certainty in that. Indeed, given Haurchefant's general role, a shield-bearing warrior who can cast cure spells--he seems pretty close to a paladin, which is essentially the sturdiest role that a Warrior of Light can take on in FFXIV, and still the aetherial lance was enough to break his shield and pierce armor. And the fact that he could only react fast enough to throw himself in the way, not push both himself and us to safety, suggests that there was very little time to react, if we would've been aware of it in time to react at all. So I would say the danger that Haurchefant saved us from was very real.

That, though, is not the main point to me, nor even the emotional reaction. At least not directly--while his death serves to inflict a bitter wound upon both our player and us as a reader, I would argue that the true function of this is not pain for pain's sake but rather pain to remind us of the cost. From the very beginning, where our first defeat of Ifrit still came at the cost of those who had been successfully tempered around us before confronting him, FFXIV has made a point that victory doesn't come for free. Again and again our victories have been bought at a dearly bitter cost, and this fact is, to me, narratively very important. If we had simply won every time, without the price we paid each time, then our character would very quickly rise to the status of mary-sue, which isn't compelling at all.

No, there must be a cost for such ceaseless victory. Indeed, even for something like what happened in Ul'dah at the end of 2.55, there has been a price. Each time we have found one of the remaining Scions thusfar, their survival came at at cost. Y'shtola lost her sight, while Thancred lost his magic--we can only guess at what cost Yda, Papalymo, and Minfilia will prove to have paid when we find them as well, but I am almost certain that they, too, will have suffered something for the survival. Raubahn lost an arm, and even Nanamo--who I would argue should've stayed dead, despite that I very much like her as a character--not only lost much of her idealism for having survived, but also was forced to allow the Syndicate's continued existence.

I would argue that, unlike Haurchefant, Ysayle could never have been that cost, because, by the time she died, she was already broken in many ways. No, while Haurchefant came to the battle in which he died with the hope and expectation of victory, full of optomism, Ysayle came to her final battle with a sort of resignation. In her own words, she called upon Shiva "one final time," having made peace with her own death and accepted it. In many ways, I would argue that she chose to die, as I was significantly underwhelmed by her performance against the Gration. I can only attribute this to the fact that she had not only come there to die and make her death worth something, but because she chose to lose when victory would've meant staining her hands with the blood of countless Garlean soldiers. Ysayle's loss could not be a price because its bitterness was tempered by her acceptance and even choice of it, while Haurchefant instead left a gaping wound that nothing, not even vengeance, could so easily salve.