A long critique of the Scions.

[SannaR]

I know I probably shouldn't and that some won't realize that part of this post will be me being snarky or sarcastic, but my dumb ass is gonna bite the bait.

First dang I thought this was going to be a critique of them over the entirety of the game and you know not just another "Scions suck and I didn't feel a thing through all of UT dirtribe." thread.

With that out of the way... Oh man I can't believe the people with PHDs and who've researched trauma are all wrong I guess when it comes to how it effects people and that it doesn't only leave physical scars. Everyone who's delt with trauma that didn't leave a physical scar I guess it wasn't real or traumatic enough... I'm a little surprised the OP didn't also add in the "if UT or the expansion made you cry or deal with grief then you are either a shill aiming at social media points and/or don't know real sorrow. Or grief cause you know..." line. That sometimes it's the scars and wounds you can't see that not only are the biggest but also run the deepest. You also seem to ignored how Urianger thought about and told the WoL and G'Raha that he probably wouldn't be able to give a good rebuttal to other arguments. So he chose to help out with the one he could since his main focus ties well into Y'shtola's.

[aveyond-dreams]

And this brings the issue that plagued the writing and the scions ever since Papalymo’s demise, arguably getting worse and more prevalent with every expansion, culminating in the story in Ultima Thule. The scions are clad in layers upon layers of plot armor, meaning that they are not a fitting representation for the suffering and challenges mankind goes through, and especially not the alien races.

The simple fact of the matter is these characters are not sufficiently well developed in order to carry out this message, to say nothing of how they managed to come away bragging about not even having a scar from this entire ordeal.

Everyone else that isn't an officially prescribed comfort character is collateral for this story. This wasn't the case in the past, but two expansions worth of no meaningful consequences for this cast coupled with insufferable teases has exhausted my patience.

Sacrifices should mean something. Theirs were meaningless. So too is all their talk about suffering and hope and despair as their fairy godmother lines their pockets with cash and gives them outfits while everyone else of interest falls like dominos around them.

I don't know how we get to the point when only the most boring and hypocritical characters in the entire game world get away with this much nonsense for this long, but that's where Endwalker left us. The conversations I've had with people who aren't under the spell of this game's former reputation as a bastion for excellent storytelling have been unanimous in one aspect - that one cannot hope to comment on things like grief or despair using characters like the Scions along with Hermes without coming across as disconnected at best and utterly disrespectful at worst.

This is the last story I would call "hopeful" in even the most generous terms and if someone tried bringing up one like it during my darkest moments that would be grounds for me to never speak to them again, because of how it truly feels like the story mocks every theme it attempts to speak on.

[Cleretic]

Protip, you can edit your first post to bypass the character limit, no need to keep making posts one after the other. And if you need to condense some parts, don't be afraid to put things in [ hb][/ hb] brackets (remove the spaces). An example.

The example.

Pro-er tip: a piece of writing this long is going to need some proper structuring and formatting. Right now it's just a wall of text, and I'm not particularly inclined to read any of it without some formatting to inform and direct me in both what I'm supposed to expect and what each individual section is supposed to be about. I can tell you went per-character, so some headers would probably do pretty well here, especially because very rarely do people read the Scions as a monolith for which we have a single opinion; people have favorites and least favorites, so it'd help a lot to tell, say, the Estinien-liker (or more likely the Estinien-hater given the tone of what I've read) where they're supposed to look.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

Just a case of the writers trying to tackle serious themes but lack the nerve and confidence to go anywhere with it, so they tiptoe back out of any stakes with their tails between their legs. Status quo is god and all that.

Still, i've started laughing in disbelief every time the pompous scions talk down to poor pissants who just need to learn how to deal. How out of touch with reality can you be to compare your own little, almost nonexistent misfortunes to the extinction of an entire world and all its unique species...
What a sick joke.

[Eisi]

Just a case of the writers trying to tackle serious themes but lack the nerve and confidence to go anywhere with it, so they tiptoe back out of any stakes with their tails between their legs. Status quo is god and all that.

Is this not neccessary because of the side content? The characters can't really have much of a personality shift or stuff like that if you have to be able to play the side content with them after any part of the story. Which is also why characters can't die once they've appeared in side content I think unless the side content itself is required for that story.

[Cleretic]

Is this not neccessary because of the side content? The characters can't really have much of a personality shift or stuff like that if you have to be able to play the side content with them after any part of the story. Which is also why characters can't die once they've appeared in side content I think unless the side content itself is required for that story.

These people are definitely mad that no Scions died in Endwalker, so I'm just zeroing in specifically on that one when talking here. I acknowledge that other arguments exist, but this is the one I'm focusing on.

I think that the writers tend to be less inclined towards writing a lot of major character deaths in the first place now. That's probably for a few reasons; partly just for practical reasons where a dead character for the most part can't have stories anymore, partly because it seems like Kazutoyo Maehiro was the guy that mainly wrote those and he's not writing for the game anymore, and partly because it seemed to not create the greatest working environment for the writers; I've seen interviews where some frustration (largely good-natured but it definitely seemed to be from a real place) with the experience of writing a character that they were really proud of, only for someone else to get their hands on the character and immediately go 'okay, I'm gonna kill 'em', even if you sign off on that it's not a great experience.

So I completely understand the desire to write these stories while avoiding major character deaths when possible; doing so isn't objectively right or wrong, but in this case I think it's the right call. I think it took a while for the writers to figure out how to replace that, which led to a preponderance of death-scares that largely wore out peoples' ability to believe in them (I know the line for me was 'they didn't kill Thancred in Amh Araeng, no good guy's gonna die if they passed that one up'). But I think by Endwalker they'd figured things out, allowing them to find ways to raise stakes and tension without putting a knife to Alphinaud's neck, and I think is much better for it. Not only does it lead to more interesting stories around the Scions, it also leads them to stories where death actually can matter, both by having more nuanced and interesting writing about it (Venat standing pretty strongly in that regard, and the Ancients more generally) while also being able to write scenes where death is a threat that actually DOES matter (a lot of the Thavnair revisit stands pretty strong there).

Ultima Thule never truly threatened to kill any of the Scions, and I don't really understand anyone who thinks it did; even the characters knew they weren't gonna die. The tension there comes from far more abstract places, from 'everyone is relying on me and I don't have much', especially with the factor of Azem's crystal not being a straight solution by Y'shtola's own observation.

[Iscah]

Ultima Thule never truly threatened to kill any of the Scions, and I don't really understand anyone who thinks it did; even the characters knew they weren't gonna die. The tension there comes from far more abstract places, from 'everyone is relying on me and I don't have much', especially with the factor of Azem's crystal not being a straight solution by Y'shtola's own observation.

At a story level, it was never going to kill off the Scions, but I disagree that they "knew they weren't going to die". The drama comes from the fact that the characters know there is a real chance of their sacrifice being a permanent death if you fail, but they have to take that step or there's no chance for you to succeed. It carries true weight for them, and therefore for you-the-character as their lives are at stake upon your victory – physically reaching the end of the path and also solving the riddle of how to bring them back safely.

[Cleretic]

At a story level, it was never going to kill off the Scions, but I disagree that they "knew they weren't going to die". The drama comes from the fact that the characters know there is a real chance of their sacrifice being a permanent death if you fail, but they have to take that step or there's no chance for you to succeed. It carries true weight for them, and therefore for you-the-character as their lives are at stake upon your victory – physically reaching the end of the path and also solving the riddle of how to bring them back safely.

I think this is highlighting that there is a tangible difference between logically knowing the odds and emotionally knowing them, and that stretch relating to character death is a perfect example.

Logically-speaking, they know that the odds are low; they barely have an idea of what's going on, let alone how to undo, fix or counter it, and the WoL's tools are woefully limited. But emotionally-speaking they know that we're going to manage, because we always find a way to do that. They don't have faith that they'll survive because the odds are in their favor, they have faith they'll survive because we so frequently defy the odds.

And on an audience level, especially this late in a story, we also have that tangible difference: we know what the stakes are claimed to be in-story, but we also know the writers' tendencies and have our own attachments, so we know on an emotional level what characters are 'safe' and who's not. And naturally, we weight the latter higher, because we know what kind of story we're looking at. Naturally these expectations change based on who the authors are; compare the FFXIV fanbase's 'they won't kill these characters' (although I've seen people have fairly reasonable concerns for Zero) with comic book fans going 'of course they killed Character X, but they'll be back in a couple months'--or, perhaps closer to home, people betting on which FFXVI characters are going to die with basically no story-based evidence, based solely on the fact Maehiro's writing it.

And I think the big breakthrough with FFXIV's writing of late is them realizing that, and playing to it. We know who they won't kill, and they know that we know that, so rather than banking on death scares for characters everyone knows are gonna be fine, they construct scenarios that ramp up the tension or subvert expectations in other ways. In Ultima Thule we know the writers aren't gonna kill the Scions, but we don't know how they're gonna avoid that, so the tension comes from 'how the hell is the WoL gonna get out of this one', like a Doctor Who end-of-part-one cliffhanger. And in a total inverse, I think a big reason the Thavnair revisit works is because basically nobody in Thavnair looks like someone the writers would definitely spare, it's an entire nation of characters the writers historically don't bat an eye at writing off, even if we like a good few of those characters. And while never really discussed in the space, I think Quintus is an interesting edge example: he reads for all the world like 'future boss fight' material, either in a solo instance or a dungeon, so his suicide is a genuine surprise.

Basically: Endwalker is the point where, after the community knowledge of 'What FFXIV Does/Doesn't Do' has been set up, either consciously or not, starts working with those expectations rather than those of someone that doesn't know their track record.

[Maxlordthe4th]

I think the story of the Scions has enough tragedy even if Thancred and Y'sh and so on are now all fairly plot-armored. Minfillia, Papalymo, Moenbryda, Ysale, Haurchefant, etc.; they have, by any reasonable standard, lost a lot of folks. They've experienced a good amount of suffering and loss and are familiar with it. They have come out of it arguably stronger, but still, the memories are there. Hell, Minfillia's final departure wasn't until Shadowbringers. That's still quite recent for everyone.

Like I don't think we need any further major character sacrifices to establish the stakes. There may be some final upheaval being planned for 7.0 but I hope it's not too traumatic. Honestly after the apocalyptic tone of the last two expansions it'd be nice to have a change of pace.

[Eisi]

These people are definitely mad that no Scions died in Endwalker, so I'm just zeroing in specifically on that one when talking here. I acknowledge that other arguments exist, but this is the one I'm focusing on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people, I don't think it's a good idea to safeguard your characters in a story like XIV's which is all about life-or-death scenarios and battlegrounds all the time.

If it was a peaceful highschool story, that'd be different of course, it's the setting that safeguards them there, not threatens them.

I think that the writers tend to be less inclined towards writing a lot of major character deaths in the first place now. That's probably for a few reasons; partly just for practical reasons where a dead character for the most part can't have stories anymore

I don't understand the reasoning. Why would a character need to indefinitely have stories?

, partly because it seems like Kazutoyo Maehiro was the guy that mainly wrote those and he's not writing for the game anymore

So someone wrote the story and then other writers didn't see eye to eye with what he originally did with it and went a different direction.

, and partly because it seemed to not create the greatest working environment for the writers; I've seen interviews where some frustration (largely good-natured but it definitely seemed to be from a real place) with the experience of writing a character that they were really proud of, only for someone else to get their hands on the character and immediately go 'okay, I'm gonna kill 'em', even if you sign off on that it's not a great experience.

I believe you are interpreting things here. Writers care about the story first and foremost, they want to tell a great tale and that's the boat everyone in the team is sitting in. Killing off a character might be good for the story.

I would really hope that the writers are writing the story they want, not the story that is most inoffensive to their coworkers. I do believe that it would be frustrating if the story gets taken in a direction you wouldn't take it in general, but in a professional environment where multiple people have a say that's how things will always be. Character deaths are not special in that regard in fact lack of character death might also sadden somebody on the team and cause frustration, right? Or any story development.

So I completely understand the desire to write these stories while avoiding major character deaths when possible; doing so isn't objectively right or wrong, but in this case I think it's the right call. I think it took a while for the writers to figure out how to replace that, which led to a preponderance of death-scares that largely wore out peoples' ability to believe in them (I know the line for me was 'they didn't kill Thancred in Amh Araeng, no good guy's gonna die if they passed that one up'). But I think by Endwalker they'd figured things out, allowing them to find ways to raise stakes and tension without putting a knife to Alphinaud's neck, and I think is much better for it.

Endwalker had a bunch of death scares tho. I don't think it was well written in that regard, just think about the In from the Cold ending.

(...) while also being able to write scenes where death is a threat that actually DOES matter (a lot of the Thavnair revisit stands pretty strong there).

I hated Thavnair part II, the amount of suffering was ridiculous to me and felt like torture porn. It probably wouldn't have if the scions didn't always come out of threatening situations unscathed, it was probably just the constrast between how side and main characters are treated and consequently what kinds of story I experience.

Reminded me of Harry Potter the seventh book where everyone dies just to show how dangerous the situation is for the plot-armored main characters. Horrible.

Also the situation in Vanaspati looked so ridiculously out of control and doomed with the literal swarms of beasts clouding the sky like that was ancient final days amounts of destructive potential, Thavnair including the southern part and Radz would have been forever lost if what we saw was actually what happened.

Ultima Thule never truly threatened to kill any of the Scions, and I don't really understand anyone who thinks it did; even the characters knew they weren't gonna die.

Big true. UT was great, would have been nice if we had lost someone who then wouldn't be physically there anymore but their memory for us to honor. Would have also been a real relief that everyone survived UT in the end.