Can't Stop, Won't Stop, Unsure how to stop @stabbymage - Tumblr Blog

yannow not to be a gridania defender or anything but it rubs me the wrong way when people are like "gridania is the only one of the arr city-states which never solved its very obvious social and organizational problems and thus it's the Evil Racist One that it's fine to hate" because like. you understand that that is fully a result of the plot giving literally nothing to gridania ever, right? you understand that gridania's internal politics are never ever given the attention that ul'dah and limsa get? you understand that huge portions of post-arr and post-heavensward and post-stormblood and post-shadowbringers are dedicated to limsa and ul'dah's social issues and npcs and their relationships to each other? you understand how kan-e-senna's second-in-command, who is literally gridania's equivalent of raubahn, does not have a fucking name?

you understand how the two scions you're introduced to in the gridania start are important for at most two expansions, one of which they barely appear in, before disappearing from the story forever aside from cameos? as opposed to the scions you meet in limsa and ul'dah, who remain important for the rest of the game up til today???

yeah, i would fucking love for the main story to start questioning gridania about its institutional racism and trying to fix it, because that would mean that the main story gave a single fuck about gridania. give us some duskwight and seeker main characters please. give us duskwight and seeker lore please. give us SOMETHING. you can't even learn how gridania's government works without reading side stories, which has led to this weird misconception that kan-e-senna is like, a fascist despot who used the calamity to consolidate power!!! Give Gridania ANYTHING!!!!!

shizucheese

The most infuriating part is that Gridania absolutely should have had more of a spotlight in Stormblood. It shares a border with Ala Mhigo. It shares history with Ala Mhigo. That history resulted in some people in Gridania not wanting to help liberate Ala Mhigo because they're still upset over them invading the Twelveswood and the Autumn War, but you wouldn't know that if you didn't do the SB BRD job quests. Also, the Elementals got severely weakened during the 7th Calamity, which is why we haven't really had to deal with much related to them in ARR, but I feel like people don't really take seriously exactly what the Gridnians are dealing with if they want to continue living in the Twelveswood and why they live the way they do.

I'd also love to have the story take us to a Duskwight settlement/ whatever remains of Gelmorra because like...the reality is that the origins of a lot of the issues they deal with in Gridania are sorta self inflicted. They don't live in caves and resort to banditry (hence the distrust in Duskwightes that Gridanians have) because they were ostracized and had no choice; when everyone else left Gelmorra to found Gridania, the ancestors of the Duskwights refused to leave and insisted on *continuing* to live in caves and refused to integrate into society, to the point where they'd rather resort to banditry rather than live in Gridania.

This is the context in which Valdeaulin (Gaius's duskwight companion) referred to the people of Gridania as "city dwellers" as a derogatory term in the Werlyt quests, which is the only glimps of that side of the dynamic that we really get.

But again, because Gridania gets so horribly shafted in MSQ, most people won't know any of this and because they only see the Gridanian side of things (which yes, is problematic; completely innocent people are being punished for the actions of their ancestors/ other people within their cultures which is completely wrong), and we never see the prejudice from duskwights that lead to that whole dynamic, and MSQ doesn't touch on the fact that in the past Ala Mhigo instigated a war with Gridania, and we never see what could happen if the Elementals really got pissed off at people, people just kinda see how the Gridanians treat Duskwights, Ala Mhigans, etc and brush them off as Evil Racists when the reality is way more nuanced than that.

Honestly I'm convinced someone on the writing team just really likes Ul'dah over the other two starting city states because like...even Limsa doesn't really get the spotlight shown on it in any meaningful way until post-Shadowbringers.

warrior-of-fight-or-flight

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH HIM

erickgage

He's been hanging out with the Warrior of Light since ARR. Next question.

voidsentprinces

I uhh...huh...yeah alright.

jrpgdog

spiritbladed

something something extremely sexy when magic users resort to physical violence. yeah i have the power of god and anime on my side but i also have THESE HANDS. i cast Punch You In The Face. i take my magic staff through which i channel the vast energies of the elements and the cosmos and i cast Severe Concussion And Skull Fracture. casting time for xenoglossy too long, chose the quicker route of Stab You In The Throat.

voidsentprinces

Do enjoy that FFXIV doesn't write the same villain twice.

In A Realm Reborn we get the cocky, self-righteous Gaius and the mad scheming Lahabrea

In Heavensward, we have the ever raging and prideful Nidhogg, the power hungry and corrupt Thordan and the Heavens' Ward, we get the revenge driven Estinien possessed by the uncomprimising Nidhogg reborn, coupled with the stoic Igeyorhm and a different version of Lahabrea, one more calculating and yet severe.

In Stormblood we have the vengeful Yotsuyu, her bumbling brute, the complicated Fordola, and the disinterested but honed Zenos.

In Shadowbringers we have the driven Ran'jit, the self-absorbed Vauthry, the melancholic and cruel Emet-Selch, and the zealotry of Elidibus.

In Endwalker, we have Zenos returned but seemingly even more ennui than his Stormblood encounter, he seems more inwardly inspective yet seems to miss the point of us, we got the nihilistic Fandaniel, and the cruel to be kind Meteion.

In Dawntrail, we have the boastful Bakool Ja Ja, the self-assured yet waivering Zoraal Ja, the scheming Sareel Ja, the polite Sphene, the diabolical Sphene, and the cold Calyx.

Now with the upcoming patches they've pitched the cold calculating Calyx with the solemn yet accepting Halmarut.

No two villains are truly identical. They could of seen Elidibus and Emet-Selch's popularity and tried the past few expansions to recreate the lightning in a bottle. But they continued to add nuance or a greater element. Even with Zenos returning, he doesn't seem to be the same Zenos as the one in Stormblood. He feel uniquely grown and different from the past. Though he is trying to hit the same beats as he did before, the story is different so things are thus as well. Its a nice change of pace, that he is trying to recreate what he THINKS drew us to fight him in Stormblood and while being introspective and galling of Jullus but completely missing the entire fucking point of our past conflict.

That is to say nothing of how each Ilberd encounter feels different, the Warriors of Darkness, Ysayle, Asahi, Stormblood Era Elidibus, Golbez, all feel interestingly varied. In how they grow and how each of their appearances when set against us are different in their own way. Each no longer a single note but building into a symphony.

eyesofanother

im going to be critical of the game, so please feel free to avoid this reply if you are not looking for that in the discussion.

this post sort of fascinated me. yes, the villains are different by the standards outlined here: they are all mostly different people with different personalities and approaches. but it hardly felt to me like ive had a different villain arc since shadowbringers, if not somewhat since stormblood.

the face of the problem may be slightly different, but we have been doing largely the same thing over and over again: putting down a misguided megalomaniac person who wants to destroy large populations of people and/or land for the sake of their own agenda. and then after or slightly before we defeat them there is always some exposition into how they were actually hurting the whole time and the situation is not that simple. so that we can't feel too happy about defeating them and so that selling their outfits, minions and marketable plushies to us wouldn't be controversial.

and all of this usually then flows into us discovering a force which was above this villain who we just defeated, who is even more evil and megalomaniac, while the previous one was just a sad puppet, so the cycle may begin anew.

not that xiv doesnt have some of the more memorable and interesting villains in mmorpg history or even in ff history, but they are often undermined in post by these repetitive tendencies, making their arcs just one amidst many.

i may not enjoy the word salad that is ARR and HW writing, but they felt like they presented a more nuanced narrative each, full of politics and different active forces working for their own ideologies and ideals. yes, there was always some single guy to defeat gloriously at the end (gaius, lahabrea, thordan, nidhogg), but it feels almost diminutive to say they were our main goal, as we were also just as focused if not more on trying to repair political alliances, establishing communications, dealing with betrayals, deaths and losses, or downright making peace with other villains. maybe its nostalgia, but i remember them feeling quite different.

i may be looking into the wrong communities, because i hardly ever see nuanced criticisms of this story which address these things. the community splits into bigots who hate DT because a character was voiced by a trans woman and those who defend the game and said character like they were both real living people with feelings and have done nothing wrong.

maybe i lack the reading comprehension needed to see the right nuance, but to my eyes there is definitely space to discuss the racist and imperialist undertones all throughout the XIV story as well as the writing flaws, repetition and blatant reuse of narratives.

autumnslance

I don't think it's a lack of reading comprehension, but there is a case of not finding the parts of the community that do discuss the conscious and unconscious biases, unfortunate implications, and other failed aspects of FFXIV's writing that crop up at various times throughout.

I do think many people who complain about making allies of some former antagonists or trying to help the former Garlean Empire aren't seeing where the narrative is trying to convince some enemies to change, to stop their wrongdoing, to learn where they were misguided, and storylines about restorative justice over punitive vengeance. There's a lot there in how we tend to see such things culturally.

There's some talk about the game "missing teeth" and much of it focuses on who does and doesn't die in the story now, but I don't really think that's it; the shift from those on-the-ground, in-the-trenches political-social stories to the more esoteric high-level human condition sort of fantasy is what's jarring. The shift in the writing team's focus is pretty glaring when you step back and look at the difference from ARR-HW-StB to what we see in ShB-EW-DT. What would be several patches or expacs of debate and difficultly to resolve, if ever, is wrapped up in inspiring conversations and moments to move on to the magical danger.

And some of this was asked for; I remember a lot of the criticisms on how frustrating it was that WoL can't snap their fingers and fix something like, say, Gridania's bigotry issues. But that's not a problem an itinerant adventurer can longterm solve via simple violence. So problems like that now fall to the wayside, implied or resolved to get back to the business the WoL can handle. So we lose that grittier bit of worldbuilding. It's also, I think, just not something the current writing team is as interested in exploring. Possibly a "little of column A, little of column B" situation.

As for the repetition, there are some things leaned on heavily especially in regards to the Unsundered and some other antagonists, but having sympathetic motivations for an antagonist isn't a bad thing, when they still made their terrible choices. It's a "it could have been different, but since you won't stop..." or in some cases, such as Zenos, "there but for the literal grace of god and the support of my friends go I" situations. It's "what do the antagonists say about the heroes?" in each of these circumstances. This is really obvious in ShB, where you have Thancred foiled by Ran'jit, and their conflict a mirror of the one between the Exarch and Emet-Selch (I keep thinking I need to write a longer post about that).

Also, there's the basic nature of the JRPG and MMO genres, and I think given things they're saying in recent interviews and FanFest about needing to change things up, the devs are also noticing cycles they're stuck in. The idea of "3 trials and dungeons every other level, then a dungeon a patch and 4 more trials" in each expac has really made them twist some of the storytelling to accommodate that requirement and player expectation, and leads to some of that formulaic repetition we see. Like there are some stories that did not need a dungeon, or a trial, or even a solo duty combat. But because it's a video game where combat is a main aspect of the interactions, and players need a leveling path, it's what happens to resolve the story and sets up the antagonistic relationships to begin with.