I'm struggling to find the time to relisten to Ethersea, but I urgently need to do so, because someone needs to write the essay about Ethersea being Griffin's thematic self-response to the plot and framing of Balance. someone needs to write the essay about the most criminally underdiscussed cross-campaign parallels in the entire Adventure Zone expanded universe — but my brain has fighting the whole concept of "focusing on podcasts" lately, and it's absolutely killing me.
...but that said. now that you've got me talking. the thesis of this essay would be: Ethersea, quite familiarly, is a story about travel between successive parallel worlds, following their inevitable destruction. it's a story about the survivors of one world starting a war in the next, introducing new magic that should not have been granted, and terribly fracturing that world, and life as the world's inhabitants knew it. it's about the long, drastic struggle waged by one of those godlike dimension-travelers, who could not tolerate the actions of the other travelers, and who fought a morally dubious fight in their own right, to stop the cycle from repeating.
however. unlike Balance, Ethersea is told from the perspective of the people whose world was embroiled in that war. the ordinary people, from a world destroyed by the actions of the visitors — the people who lost the only home they ever had. in Balance, it's a bit of a plot twist, but the story was secretly always from the point of view of the people who did the destroying, however accidentally — but in Ethersea, that entire frame of reference, the narrative focus itself, is flipped upon its head. the destroyers, and their guilt, are no longer central — because Ethersea is a story about the citizens of the world that was poisoned. it's a story about Amber, who remembers the surface, about Devo, who doesn't, and about Zoox, who was born from this terrible tragedy that took so much from everyone else's lives. and from this perspective shift, familiar roles are filled by much different characters — Benevolence and Koda, the warmonger and objector, are far less sympathetic, than, say, Lup and Lucretia.
that said, the circumstance of being flung into a new word for reasons beyond your control, reasons that almost resemble fate — having been so key to Balance — is still a circumstance given sympathy, primarily via Amber's ending. but the demigod position that Amber takes on is subverted heavily — it is presumed that Amber will be a destroyer like the Vestiges, and she has to actively choose not to be. in the instant she traverses the portal, she is elevated from near the bottom of the power dynamic, up to the absolute top of it, and burdened with immense responsibility to not let the cycle repeat. Amber suddenly evokes previous TAZ protagonists, whom she had previously been so different from, by landing in a position not unlike the IPRE on Faerun — and Amber's perspective shift, arriving only at the end of Ethersea, reveals in hindsight that a prior perspective shift had to happen for Ethersea to even be told, moving the spotlight to the people most affected by the destruction of their home.
it's almost as if Balance had been told from the perspective of three ordinary Faerunians, whose lives had been devastated, then reshaped, by the Relic Wars and their subsequent redaction. which, likely, wouldn't have worked for Balance, at least not without major plot structure changes — but was necessary to become the absolute foundation of Ethersea. if anything, when viewed through this lens, the two campaigns mutually enrich each other — the perspective of Balance offering a framework through which to examine the Vestiges, and the perspective of Ethersea calling retroactive attention to the ordinary people of Faerun. once you see it, you can't unsee (or, should I say, un-SEA) that Balance and Ethersea are truly just two sides of the same coin.
...okay. so it looks like I wrote that essay after all, just purely from memory. if I forgot a couple things about Ethersea or didn't explain things as clearly as I could have then, please be nice to me
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