Since I completely forgot to edit the original reply, here is the rest of it.



Quote Originally Posted by CyberForte View Post
Similarly, in the Lv 50, the knights who asked your help--like the Scions--proved to be good people who were willing to pull their own weight in dealing with the problem, and the accusation of Heresy wasn't actually a consequence of having helped them in any way. While your character might have personally felt backlash against the Scions, the quests themselves do not, as far as I can see, actually suggest that this should be the case for everyone.

Indeed, for me personally, the strongest argument against your claims is not the fact that the Scions gladly risked themselves to let us escape, but Minfilia's "you are my pillar of strength" scene. Given I had already felt very close to her before it, that scene--to me--cemented the sense of having a very close relationship with her, along with the rest of the Scions. Also note that the first thing she says when saved in 2.0 story, even before thanks, is that we shouldn't have risked ourselves to save her. That certainly isn't the way I'd expect someone to react to being saved by someone they saw only as a tool.
Thank you so much for saying that. I feel like many of the people who are quick to diss the Scions forget all too easily that they do pull their own weight, and have been doing so long before your character ever came along. And the scene with Minfilia that you describe was indeed strong, but the one that stuck to me the most was another: when asking you to save Thancred, Minfilia acknowledges that she's only asking you for a personal favor, and in the japanese version it's very clear that she's near tears as she says it.

Edit: I do feel the need to add that Alphinaud is the exception here--but I never quite thought of him as one of the Scions. In 2.x quests, it's much easier to make the argument that he saw us as a tool, but that has a lot to do with his particular character, being a precocious son of the very elitist Sharlayan nobility. Alphinaud in 2.x saw himself as being much more important than he was, looking down on his sister and her views and seeing us as little more than a useful tool. But even that started to change over time, and in HW it's definitely almost entirely a thing of the past. But projecting Alphinaud's attitude onto the rest of the Scions doesn't strike me as a appropriate.
Alphinaud is a kid who never saw much value in Eorzea to begin with, but *we* convinced him otherwise. He isn't really that precocious though, you can tell he's a good person who just puts on a brave face in his and Alisaie's Tales from the Calamity. Also, it isn't that he looks down on Alisaie, but rather that he is the more composed of the two and Alisaie is the more emotional one. Even so, he doesn't hesitate to lend her his aid, and let her lead the way no less, when he joins her in the Coils. From what I can see, it really is just the dub making him look worse than he is. The dub tends to make him sound a lot more flowery and eloquent than he actually is, you can notice this when the text goes on for a whole paragraph when the japanese speech is either just a few words or one long sentence.

And back on topic--maybe for others, the fact that he didn't ask much of is was why they liked Haurchefant, but that wasn't a huge aspect of it to me. And where it was, it was not in contrast to the Scions and our other allies, but rather the fact that he was much, much, much more reasonable in his dealings with us than anyone in Coerthas had been. I certainly appreciated his enthusiasm in the scene where he'd actually had to be restrained from coming to help us fight, but us that really any different from, say, Thancred's frustration over not having arrived for Ifrit sooner? And according to Edmont, he saw us as hope personified--very similar to Y'shtola's sentiment of us being the beacon of hope toward which all men are drawn. At least for me personally, much of what made Haurchefant so deeply likable was his similarity to our (at that time missing) friends in willingness to help and support us unconditionally from 2.55-3.0.
What I loved most about Haurchefant was that he was a passionate person who appeared to be bordering on the slightly unhinged. Like others, I too at first felt uncertain of whether he would turn out to be a traitor because of how flamboyant he was. As for Thancred, his frustration was less over the fact that he could not help us specifically and more with the aftermath of the fight being the deaths of several people. Not that he actually could have done anything since preventing the summoning of a Primal would have been a taller for even him.