hello yes I am interested in hearing your thoughts about ei's personal story quest ending
hhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnneeee okay okay okay I promise I can form coherent thoughts about this particular thing.
So, Ei's story is all about grief, right? She's outlived every soldier she's ever fought beside, seen her closest friends fall to despair and calamity and was forced to (possibly) kill them with her own hands, and after her sister lost her life in the fall of Khaenri'ah, she wasn't even allowed grieve publicly, since her and Makoto operated as one person and now, she's the only one left to lead Inazuma. She's stoic and a little cold, but she's also a deeply sentimental person (just seeing a familiar face after a century of isolation was enough to brighten her entire soul ajknfsjfsfsjfjkrsns), and loss clearly effects her very, very deeply. She associates change with death, and thus, she strives for eternity, to lock herself and her nation into a state of ever-lasting stasis. She's afraid of death, so she's afraid of change. She doesn't want to watch her mind and her country erode and rot around her.
I think that's what makes her entire personal quest so,,, fitting? In a way? She's been defeated, and it's been brought to her attention that her people don't want the same eternity she does, but she hasn't changed her mind, and she's still pursuing eternity, even if she's not sure how to do it, anymore. That's why it's so cathartic to see her try to navigate a modern-day Inazuma, an Inazuma that's supposedly been existing in her ideal eternity since she locked herself away and continued to change, regardless. You get to watch her realize that change is inevitable and that isolating herself will only make it seem more strange and more confusing, but that change isn't totally bad, either, and some things she holds dear will actually stand the test of time without her intervention, even if she fails to recognize them, at first. It's sweet, and the tone is so lighthearted and sincere that the ending (when Ei very bluntly announces that she does not know how to feel about this and genuinely just needs time to think) feel very melancholy in a way that actually stuck with me for a couple days.
It's bittersweet. She's making progress, but she's still very conflicted. This is hard for her, and I feel like having her admit that she's needs more time and return to the Plane of Euthymia without so much as a second glance towards the Traveler was the best possible way of showing that. It's good. I just,,, I really, really liked it.
