About Zoraal Ja (DT Spoilers)

[Daralii]

A less subtle way of explaining to the player why Zoraal Ja is the way he is would be with the WoL's echo.

Instead all you get is Krile's echo telling her he has a lot of scary hate. This probably makes most of the playerbase see him as simply a really evil person who is evil just because.

Presenting it without commentary might let players form opinions different from the ones the writers want you to have. A lot of writers in general(especially in very prevalent media) seem afraid of that.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I never bought his motive that he wanted to teach an appreciation for peace by conquering the world. I always assumed he was out to prove he was as special as his birth suggested and so if his father claimed two continents, then he needed to claim the world. And I was right. He didn't care about peace, he just had a ridiculously large ego.

[Post]

Well, he definitely ain't Lizard Zenos. For one, Zenos probably cared that we exist more than any other character in the story.

And Zenos didn't have identity crises or manifestations of fear or memories or loathing like Yotsuyu, Elidardbert or Zoraal Ja; he WAS a crisis manifestation for two of em.

[Xieldras]

I loved more the potential of Zoraal Ja within the Rites than whatever "writing" they came up for him. From the get-go we are told he's a warmonger (hence evil and the villain) and Krile's bullshit Echo moment reinforces his evilness while not showing it. Come to think of it, we seldom even see Zoraal Ja perform evil deeds until the latter half of the Rites so it goes from 0 to 100 fast (compared to Bakool Ja Ja who does rather unforgivable things and is then forgiven).

When you see the contestants, the sons and daughter of the Tural leader of Peace, it could have been an idea for all 3 to focus on a different way to go about a Kingdom people's happiness. You see Wuk trying to maintain a status quo she doesn't even understand, Koana wishes to expand on technologies while renouncing traditions and Zoraal Ja with territory expansion while foregoing the cost. Heck you even see people ask for more land when he comes out the castle gate. A good opportunity to show the cost of expansion and the issues that arise when a Kingdom that grows too fast is in need of it, as Tural is about 80 years old (very young for a Kingdom). All this while he's carrying the Other title, the "Resilient Son", that puts a ridiculous amount of pressure on his shoulders. A pressure he can't delegate or give away because of what he is, the miracle.

But then it doesn't even matter if he'd won or not, because his father already had a favorite contestant from the get-go and wouldn't relinquish his throne if not found worthy. Family drama that's worth digging there! There's no one in his family that even reaches out to him like they do strangers or even villains that nearly killed them.

That's all thrown away when he manages to get the keystones, the key to the golden city and then goes to kill his dad and attack Tuliyolall. He's now fully evil, no one likes him (not even his queen or son) so there's not a single shred of remorse or understanding from anyone when he has to be put down. He's the scapegoat in a story that says "War is bad! Peace and Understanding is good!" despite our WoL having slayed thousands to achieve that same Peace in other expansions. Complex situations reduced to black and white, easy autopilot thinking.

Then again, maybe I'm just expecting too much from FF14's MSQ. I don't know; this is all headcanon in a direction I personally find would've been more interesting than what we got.

[Midare]

Moreover, Zoraal Ja is my favorite character in the entire Dawntrail MSQ. I think Zoraal Ja is the best three-dimensional villain that we've got who isn't just a moral dilemma villain like Emet Selch.

The only thing I want to say is... I've never seen Emet-Selch as a villain, but instead, an antagonist. He would get on the WoL's way aggressively, but not with overt malice intent.

[Barachim]

The whole time I was like "this is just lizard zenos"

Lizard Vergil. They made him walk the same "I need more power." path, but with none of the hardships that led Vergil to go down that path. Zoraal Ja literally just buckled under the weight of responsibility and was a depressed blue-scaled emo boy.

[PotatoTree]

I don't like the character because his goals were:

- one is he wants to surpass his father, he has immense pressure put on him, and eventually he cracks when he can't live up to it
- another is he thinks the best path for Tuli is to go to war, see the folly of war, and be peaceful because of that

The first think is kind of cringe imo, it's such a weak motivator to go all murderous. The 2nd thing requires such a leap of logic to think it would work that it's just stupid.

If he wanted to be better than his father, and his father's whole slick was using diplomacy to bring the country together, I'm not sure why he doesn't go the route of being a even better diplomat or something.

I agree with what OP said and thought of something similar in that maybe he thought he could only unite the people by founding a common enemy to fight against.

The story would be better if instead of some paradise of peace, Tuli was at the tip of its breaking point and only barely held together by Gulool Ja Ja's diplomacy skills, but with the head of reason gone this is starting to fail. That's where Zoral's plan comes into play, he thinks diplomacy will eventually fail so it's better to make up some war with Eorzea or himself or something to unite the people against a common enemy.

[Iplewhelmed]

All I kept thinking during the later Zoraal Ja sections was "uhm okay but what happened to little Gulool Ja's mother?".

I'm serious, what's the story behind Zoraal Ja somehow getting laid? It would be one thing if he had sired offsprings for the sake of heirs to his throne, but 1) the regulator already made him "immortal" which functionally rendered the continuation of his bloodline unecessary and 2) he continually refused to acknowledge Gulool Ja as his child, so he clearly had no interest in taking advantage of familial structures as a way to remain in power. I feel like there are parts of this backstory/lore that are missing, because Zoraal Ja randomly fathering a child just seems so... out of character from what we know of him, again because he wants to keep his power to himself and not share it with any relatives (by blood or otherwise). Hell even the characters in the msq openly state that "well we don't know FOR SURE that this kid is Zoraal Ja's son but who else's son would he be?", so for all we know little Gulool Ja could just be born from a completely unrelated family and he just happens to have blue scales, just like mutations happen randomly in nature.

I have two (or rather two and a half) kind of sort of theories about it but both of them fall apart for reasons I will explain.

One is that he simply fell in love with a female mamool ja who passed away shortly after little Gulool Ja's birth and that he was so struck with grief that he couldn't bear to even look at his son since he reminded him too much of his dead wife. A variation of this theory could also be that after mating with his wife, Zoraal Ja saw his love (or just sexual attraction) for her as a sign of weakness on his part (something something love is useless blah blah I stand alone) and abandoned her and little Gulool Ja. However, since there is literally ZERO references made to little Gulool Ja's mother made by Zoraal Ja, she obviously did NOT have a big impact on his life, not even worth an uwu sad flashback or spiteful, offhand comment like "I shouldn't have knocked up that weak wench".

The other possibility is that Zoraal Ja as a conqueror, shall we say, commited warcrimes against a random female mamool ja and little Gulool Ja was the result. But that doesn't work either because again he shows no interest in continuing his bloodline, and in the case he WAS into that idea, we would probably see WAY more blue mamool ja kids running around instead of only little Gulool Ja. Unless SE plan on revealing something VERY dark in regards to Zoraal ja's character in future patches, I don't see this as a probable explanation.

Or maybe some mamool ja can do that lesbian lizard species thing and produce offspring without a mate and the resulting offpsring is a clone of its parent idk lol

[kaynide]

Honestly? I thought he was really boring.

Up to around the second act, I had thought his underling Sareel was manipulating him (and thank god it wasn’t an Ascian in disguise..ugh).

I was hoping that a) it would be Sareel that took control of S9/Everkeep, and b) that Wuk would try to redeem Zoraal but c) he is just too far gone mentally, leading her and us to deal with the “can’t save everyone” line. Maybe at best for Zoraal to die as a hero ina last ditch Vader kinda thing.

Meh. I get what they wanted, but it was pretty flat for me. He was a badass though.

[Claire_Pendragon]

I honestly felt most of the characters were interchangeable, due to how it was set up (like with your example)
I know it cant be done in the FFXIV format, but in a single player game, it woulda been cool to pick which claimant you wanted to join, and also effect which got paired with wuk in the cooking trial. There was a lot of potential. (In the cooking trial, i was hoping we paired with either ja or ja ja. i didnt care which, just so long as it wasnt koana... well that didnt happen...)