Quote Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo View Post
Once we decide to respect that characters are poorly/unnaturally written when it serves the writer's whims — such as just standing still as the big bad slowly walks past you and picks up the McGuffin of Power — we have started interacting with the story on a meta level where another aspect of the writing is inescapable: the Warrior of Light will triumph.

In other words, if we incorporate into our arguments the fact that the writers often arbitrarily have our entire team depart from common sense behavior when it serves to prolong the narrative, then to remain even-handed we should also be incorporating the fact that the writers will not write a story where our WoL does not eventually succeed, because ultimately the story is written in service to the player. They may not win every individual battle, as folks like Ranjit and Zenos have demonstrated, but we will never truly be defeated in a way that matters, nor will we ever end up in a situation where we are unable to go on to enact positive change in the world.

To be clear, I don't think there's a right or wrong path to take in regards to whether or not we should incorporate "the writer" into our hypothetical alternative narratives. But once we choose a path, we should stay consistent.
Okay, so essentially your view is that whatever the story becomes by altering it, it will warp in such a way that the WoL will win. If Sphene's new plan after we solo Zoraal Ja was to shoot us in the face seventeen times, because there was now only one person in her way, we would somehow be immune to seventeen bullets in the face.

I don't think this is an especially helpful way to approach the question, especially when you approach it as brute-force as you are; you're not providing interesting new ways to overcome these obstacles, you're asserting that the WoL would just... decide they aren't obstacles. It's also vastly at-odds with my own approach, which is to use this sort of thought experiment as a way to recognize the importance of every element of the story as we got it: that if we move the WoL away from the story path, but still expect them to perform their role, we see how important all elements of the story path are in their sudden absence.

Basically: you argue that the WoL would succeed regardless of how close they are to, for example, Krile in this story, while I argue that they hit a dead end without Krile. But neither of us are approaching this argument in a way that's actually speaking to the other party.