Y'shtola is a Mary Sue.

[Lyth]

Another contributing factor to the Mary Sue situation is that FFXIV is extremely unwilling to show the female protagonists in any states of emotional vulnerability, the only notable exception being Ysayle when her faith was utterly shattered. Moments like that offer those of us who may be otherwise closed off to a character a moment to potentially sympathize with them, rather than enduring another set of throwaway text boxes.

Setting aside the fact that this really isn't the case, do they really need to be emotionally vulnerable to feel like 'authentic' heroes to you, though? Sometimes heroes are just cool and closed off by virtue of who they are. This just sounds like a personal preference.

[aveyond-dreams]

Setting aside the fact that this really isn't the case, do they really need to be emotionally vulnerable to feel like 'authentic' heroes to you, though? Sometimes heroes are just cool and closed off by virtue of who they are. This just sounds like a personal preference.

Yes. Acknowledging one’s shortcomings is necessary for growth. Nowhere in the story does Y’shtola do this.

Her character is stagnant and unchanging throughout the entirety of Season 1. With a complete lack of emotional development you cannot ask me to root for a character like this the same way I root for characters like Ysayle or other Final Fantasy heroines.

This character has utterly wasted the majority of her screen time by acting solely as a means for lore exposition. Forgive me if I’m eager to replace what is little more than a voiced FF Wiki page.

Endwalker’s handling of the ending sequence is still one of the worst examples of endings in the entire series. Sacrifices that amount to nothing, plot armor too thick to be believable, all while preaching this tiresome “conflict of values” nonsense. I’m not running on EW launch hype any longer, stepping back and analyzing it in hindsight brings all of its flaws to light.

[Vryn]

Y'shtola is a character with no weaknesses, and because of this, a character I can't relate with. She is the postergirl of FFXIV, the scion you chose to put in Dissidia and sell a doll of, and yet I feel she is the most underdeveloped as a character. I then realized why. She has no vulnerabilities to speak of and even death cannot claim her.

Thancred got his development in Shadowbringers.
Urianger got his development in Endwalker.
Estinien got his development in Heavensward.
Alisaie got her development from Stormblood onward.
Alphinaud got his development through... the whole game.
G'raha Tia got his development in Shadowbringers.

Of these aforementioned scions, I know what drives them. Their worries, their fears, their goals. They feel like fleshed out human-beings. Y'shtola feels like... something else. What do we know about her other than she craves knowledge and likes to roast people? Yes, she has someone dear to her. Master Matoya, whom she trades insults back and forth with. Have we ever seen her show anything besides stoicism or sarcastic wit? Even Emet-Selch, for as sarcastic and trolly as he is, shows his emotions when it's called for. It is for this reason I won't give the writers slack on this. They are skilled enough to flesh out any character should they so choose.

I really hope SE plans to flesh out her character in an upcoming patch or expansion so that the postergirl of FFXIV can stop being the most underdeveloped scion.

She should have died in Stromblood when Zenos cut her in half.

[Lyth]

...

Character development isn't personality change. It is elucidation. People are by and large creatures of habit.

I'm not even sure what you're getting at with 'emotional development' in this context. Does she need to air her emotions publicly in order to be more 'authentic'? To cry in front of you, and daydream of Runar? You're welcome to like or dislike whichever characters that you like, but there's no deep literary standard underpinning that impulse. Just your own framework of biases.

[Zabuza]

Troll thread.

I'm not sure in what world one could read this and the replies and think this was a troll thread. Nevertheless, thank you for your amazing contribution.

[aveyond-dreams]

Character development isn't personality change. It is elucidation. People are by and large creatures of habit.

I'm not even sure what you're getting at with 'emotional development' in this context. Does she need to air her emotions publicly in order to be more 'authentic'? To cry in front of you, and daydream of Runar? You're welcome to like or dislike whichever characters that you like, but there's no deep literary standard underpinning that impulse. Just your own framework of biases.

Yes. Let her display some kind of emotional depth to and drop the sassy scholar persona for once. Let her engage in some kind of back and forth banter like Venat and Ysayle were both capable of doing.

I absolutely prefer for any character regardless of gender to display a broad range of emotions as well as believable human reactions to the story.

Celes = openly accused Terra of mocking her when she was asked if she could feel love, and eventually was brought to the breaking point where she threw herself off a cliff in one of the most dramatic moments in Final Fantasy history.

Garnet = feels the pain of being betrayed by her mother, has funny interactions as she learns to act more like a normal person and less like a Princess, loses her voice due to grief, and eventually turns out to be one of the series’ most resilient heroines.

I could name others but these are some examples of what good writing looks like. Not whatever has been going with Y’shtola for the past 8 years.

[CerusSerenade]

I'm not sure in what world one could read this and the replies and think this was a troll thread. Nevertheless, thank you for your amazing contribution.

Troll thread.

[BrokentoothMarch]

Troll thread.

Walk in front of a moving train. It's the ultimate troll.

Either way, I'm seeing a lot of hairsplitting. Whether Y'shtola is a Mary Sue or not is completely irrelevant, at the risk of moving goalposts. The point is that she's an atrocious and insipid character who's entire existence is "Have something to make dolls out of to sell to people with suspicious intent." Any personality trait beyond that is null.

[ZeraSkiratea]

It’s not foreshadowing. The devs literally said this expansion that they don’t plan things out ahead of time. They just go with the flow of the story. It was 100% meant to be Zodiark.

i mentioned "very likely retconned and very obtuse"
at the time, it wasnt foreshadowing,

in hindsight it can be considerd to BE foreshadowing, unintentionall one, but foreshadowing non the less

[CrownySuccubus]

If it wasn't intended originally, it wasn't foreshadowing. It was a loose end -- one that got recontextualized later.

Foreshadowing is a plot element deliberately put in place with a specific, intended revelation in mind. Loose ends are when you introduce vague, undefined mysteries simply for the purpose of seeing which ones bear fruit later. For example, Lost, The X-Files, Sherlock, Kingdom Hearts and a lot of stories based on cryptic plots rely on throwing as many loose ends at the audience as possible with no intention to make every single one of them pan out. More insidious writers will try to disguise loose ends as foreshadowing by "answering" these clues later, but in the case of FFXIV, the writers have actually admitted that they made stuff up as they went along. Replaying/rewatching 1.0 and ARR knowing what you know about Ascians from 5.0 and beyond is a trip, because you can definitely see what the writing staff meant when they said they just started out having "bad guys doing bad guy things" and hoping to make sense of it later.