Quote Originally Posted by SpiralMask View Post
maaan, remember when garlemald was an expansionist racist empire that had a few actual valid points that people could rally behind to lend some nuance to their stances (via gaius, his crew, and folks like mr. hydrus)? garlean meritocracy success stories and all that to really explain why everyone was so violently patriotic despite their heinous actions?

and then SB we get to see a land after ~20 years of gauis' supposedly even-handed rule and a few short ones of zenos' entirely hands-off stance and it's a barren squalid wasteland where everyone is farming dirt, with every garlean just reduced down to moustache twirling villains to the man, with one small minority of nerds in the homeland that were opposed to such rampant dickassery? that they then had to panick and try to walk back with the weapons series and when they needed to make anyone even mildly consider helping garlemald after it got it's shit rocked?


how interesting for her character's growth would it have been to see lyse roll in guns blazing only to find that the generation raised in occupied ala mhigo were doing relatively fine and didn't actually want "liberating", and having to reconcile that the dreams of her sister that she's built her entire life around following through on are different than reality, and trying to see to it that the ala mhigan culture at least lives on in her homeland despite garlemald's efforts to stamp it out--while both the rebels and the ala mhigans can agree that zenos' murderhobo self has got to go since he is running the country into the ground and nobody can really stop him due to his extreme political and physical power, and their nebulous agreement is what allows us to get into the castle to fight him with such relative ease? and how much more could the writers have gotten to lean into zenos being a hyperviolent force of nature that even his own men can't deal with if that were the case?

alas.
I will now subscribe to your newsletter and wait for your more-appealing Stormblood fanfic to be dripfed into my mouth.