On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Loggos]

Sorry Zenos, but Themis wore it better.

In all seriousness though, Themis is everything I wanted in terms of a complex archenemy-friendship.

Of course I know there are major narrative differences between Zenos and Themis and their role in the plot and their relationship with the WoL are not directly comparable, so don't read too much into this. I just wanted to make a stupid meme. :'D

It's just that if I had to choose between one nemesis that I still somehow call my true friend I'd easily pick Elidibus/Themis over Zenos, all their (narrative and plot-related) differences aside.

Ok, I simply like Themis. That's the tl,dr.

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You can ignore everything from here on. I just need to vomit lots of words on this page to live my best Themis-liking life.

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But moving away from that (non-)comparison and speaking solely about Themis:

He actually feels like a good friend who you tragically lose to terrible circumstances that make him your nemesis.

These conflicted feelings of liking the genuinely nice Themis while knowing what and who he becomes and what actions he takes were so good.
It gives the Seat of Sacrifice boss fight a completely new emotional weight.

The situation also does feel different from Emet-Selch to me.
Pre-"I'm gonna destroy your whole world"-Emet felt more like a person I respect (and of course he was a friend but there is a bit of a ...distance for me? Though that is just my personal feeling about him).

Themis, to me, felt like someone I am actually emotionally close to in terms of friendship and mutual understanding. His disappearance after our final encounter had almost crystal-exarch-level of weight for me (only that he was gone for good), despite him only being part of one mostly unvoiced quest line.

I also saw some people pointing out how he is actually similar to Zenos because he desires to fight us to see who is stronger but ironically I feel like he is the complete anti-thesis to Zenos.

Zenos tries to force his competition (and his obsessive belief that we are friends) onto us (and I respect anyone who shares those sentiments with Zenos - I just personally don't. At all. I don't care about you, mate. Stop calling.). He goes so far to try to destroy everything we love just to get his thrilling battle.

Themis helps us (earnestly) to achieve our goals and never actually brings his desire to fight us up. He isn't obsessive, he doesn't push it and he knows those are not the circumstances to ask for a test of strength.

Maybe he'd have asked for a sparring in a more lighthearted situation. And you know
what? I'd have agreed in an instant. Sorry Zenos, can't fight right now. Testing the limits of my strength in a thrilling battle with the Emissary of the Ancients.

(Just wanting to measure your strength/being curious isn't being the same as Zenos because then almost everyone would be like Zenos and then Zenos would be redundant.
I'm sure there are quite a few characters who seek the thrill of battle and would enjoy testing their strength.
This whole idea that only Zenos ever truly understood our desire for fighting and living for its thrill because they made him so ridiculously OP that only "he could truly give us what we "want" (test our limits of strength like nobody else)" always felt so forced to me.
I really think Estinien for example would absolutely get this part of us, even if he isn't as OP.
I'd rather share these feelings with him even if he can't "test my limits of strength" as much. I don't care about Zenos' strength because there is no true philosophical understanding between me and him. The way I seek the thrill of battle differs from his. The thrill itself doesn't connect us.)

Anyways, what I loved the most is how they tied everything up, how they closed the (literal time) loop.

The gentle implication that perhaps the final stop of his fate was not just to become a terrible source of terror for the non-Ascian world.

That maybe it was a necessary sacrifice (ha) that he had to make in the greater scheme of things. That he played an integral part to ensure that the necessary events are set in motion, so that the WoL can save the universe from the very evil that threatens all of existence, first Ancients and now mortals alike.

It doesn't make his individual actions better of course. But I think it allowed him to make peace with his fate and eventually move on.

It's sad we will (most likely) not see him again, but I also think the way his arch ended was perfectly good.
I hope he'll be reborn into a happier life some day and maybe meet a future iteration of our shard to become our friend again.

[KageTokage]

He deserved better, is all I can say really.

I suppose it was a bit too hopeful to think maybe we could've created an alternate universe where he doesn't have to experience a hellish, destructive existence where his sole catharsis is that the star will persist for the time being...but he seemed potentially uncertain of that with his last words...

[RyuDragnier]

He deserved better, is all I can say really.

I suppose it was a bit too hopeful to think maybe we could've created an alternate universe where he doesn't have to experience a hellish, destructive existence where his sole catharsis is that the star will persist for the time being...but he seemed potentially uncertain of that with his last words...

The best kinds of tragedies in fiction are the ones you can't stop. They hit emotionally harder, and they make you develop feelings for the characters in a strong manner. Personally I think it's the best way to end his and Lahabrea's characters off. You understand them completely, know how they were as people, and helps you come to terms with why things had to end the way they did.

[Tehmon]

They are both my best friends.

[Lunaxia]

So apparently I'm one of the few who found the whole patch a massive disservice to his character overall, then.

I genuinely hated it, I'm sorry to say. It's bad enough Emet-Selch's character was rewritten and toned down in order to give the writers' chosen narrative surrounding the events of the story a Villainous Seal of Approval, but apparently Elidibus and Lahabrea couldn't be left alone either?

I actually liked the way his arc ended in 5.3/ Endwalker. I like that he had little regard for our optional apology, that they all maintained their belief in their actions and chosen course to bring back those they loved. I like that they were fundamentally scarred, ultimately very different people from the ones we knew in our previous life owing not just to the effects of a lifetime of misery and isolation, but because they were still irrevocably tied to the past in away that we were not and could not hope to change. What made everything about their story so moving was the acknowledgement of all of that, and that we were not who we once were either, and never could be, and that the chasm between us, while tragic, could never hope to be crossed. It was good, emotional, powerful storytelling.

So I do not understand the incessant need the writers have to double back on what they previously established and consistently unmake everything that made 5.0 so great in order to loop everything neatly into a needless little bow for the sake of some cheap warm fuzzies at the end of the storyline. It's nonsensical how the characters that made a choice twelve thousand years ago to do everything they could to save the world so dear to them would suddenly be so accepting and at peace with what was done to them and how things ultimately turned out, and be borderline derogatory towards themselves for not playing ball and taking the sundering lying down. Elidibus did not need to view his actions in the scope of "saving mankind" to make them justifiable, because the whole point was that from the Ascian POV, they already were. It's just more garbage sundering apologism that drags down the entire experience.

[Lurina]

The best kinds of tragedies in fiction are the ones you can't stop. They hit emotionally harder, and they make you develop feelings for the characters in a strong manner. Personally I think it's the best way to end his and Lahabrea's characters off. You understand them completely, know how they were as people, and helps you come to terms with why things had to end the way they did.

Apologies for not spoilering. I've not posted in a while and forgotten how the heck you do it on this forum, but this whole thread has a warning, so it's probably okay.

I don't think the reason some people hope for an alternative timeline for the Ancients is because they dislike the tragic element - if anything, the need vs. need inevitability of the situation is what made them so compelling in the first place in Shadowbringers. It's a palliative care concept for the reason they were doomed in the first place not feeling considered.

That being said, I liked that this patch moved away from Endwalker's "this was all for the best in the end and couldn't have been any other way" back to Shadowbringer's more grounded-feeling "history is written by the winners", and all of the characterization was great. Themis's final scene had a very different note to Emet's farewell(s) insofar as it almost felt like he was choosing to forgive the WoL on his own terms rather than just accepting his fate. It was a strong moment that defined his character really well.

[Brinne]

My overall feelings on Pandaemonium were sort of a muted positive. To be brief, I think it nailed the overall characterization of the Ancient cast (Athena is my wife ten million times over), and genuinely huge credit to Hiroi for that. I love all of them dearly, even - especially - ones I never expected to love. It also returned to the Shadowbringers tone of emphasizing that they were good people trying to do the right thing who absolutely did not deserve what happened to them, which I appreciated.

That being said, it also left me feeling like the Warrior of Light is pretty much a terrible, garbage person who is now actively complicit with allowing the Final Days to play out unchecked and then the Sundering, now actively choosing to not bother even trying to save these wonderful people who have now all bent over backwards to help save the WoL and their people even to no personal benefit, even to their own detriment, and that gross feeling plus the MSQ being terrible right now has left me in an overall state of, finally, basically just not caring about this game overall anymore.

I can't really blame anyone for being furious that everything is still, individual characterization strength or no, being paddled into insisting "we must accept the slaughter of these people and allow it to happen with a nod and a smile" to the point of even forcing the direct victims to smile/nod to it, as opposed to that whole nonsense about "ignoring the plight of those who might be saved is not wisdom..." or whatever it was - whoever said that must have, obviously, been some kind of sucker - but, well, here we are.

Alas.

[RyuDragnier]

That just falls back into the whole badly written time travel thing across the game. Alexander was a Stable Time Loop, the whole ShB storyline created an alternate timeline where the WoL did not die (which we're on), and then us going to the past and causing events that lead to the future which wouldn't have happened unless the alternate timeline existed from the very beginning, but it couldn't unless things progressed to the original timeline's WoL dying which...results in a lot of confusion and nonsense.

[MikkoAkure]

That being said, it also left me feeling like the Warrior of Light is pretty much a terrible, garbage person who is now actively complicit with allowing the Final Days to play out unchecked and then the Sundering, now actively choosing to not bother even trying to save these wonderful people who have now all bent over backwards to help save the WoL and their people even to no personal benefit, even to their own detriment, and that gross feeling plus the MSQ being terrible right now has left me in an overall state of, finally, basically just not caring about this game overall anymore.

Saving the Ancients is an FF equivalent of the trolley problem since saving the Ancients stops our own world from happening in that timeline. G’raha can’t return to 8UC so I don’t see how WoL would be able to return to our own timeline either after causing significant world-altering changes unless we were in a stable time loop for this part of the story.

I won’t deny it’s still a giant mess, but I don’t think it’s in character for the WoL to abandon everything they know and the world they’ve lived in their whole life for the sake of the Ancients, especially when crazy world-ending scenarios are still going on in their world that threaten its existence without their presence to bail them out. Plus, the game’s nature as a living MMO won’t let that happen. Maybe there could be a future Tales from the Dawn about it though.

[Lunaxia]

My overall feelings on Pandaemonium...

The characterisation that was evident in the previous tiers just wasn't palpable for me. Everything, from the convoluted way the characters were set-up as "real but not really real", and their limitations as memories regarding what they can or can't do being cherry picked as and when the story needs it, to the way the writers did everything they could to remove a sense of agency from the characters post-sundering so what they went through wasn't really that bad so as to drive them to insanity/ despair, just felt like a vehicle to deliver on some faux happy ending and assert the sundering was a necessity now thoroughly validated by everyone (so stop complaining about it, okay?) There was no reason that Pandaemonium couldn't have been a self-contained arc in the past that told a story about the Ancients without all of the ugly Endwalker Ancient victim-blaming, except for the writers wanting to seize it as another opportunity to justify themselves again and avoid the grey area of Hydaelyn's decision feeling like the tragedy it was. And reworking the villains to twist them into accepting the protagonist's motives and actions (when it goes against the intial building blocks of their characters) because they turned out to be popular and wound up calling the good guys into question is terrible writing. I couldn't really take anything else away from it.

Louisoix turning out to be a sucker is probably on brand for the direction EW took the story in, if we're being honest.