I got sick of Za'ji and Caska stalking me whenever Maggie goes to High Isle, and I remembered that Quen shows up at the epilogue party, so I decided to run the epilogue to get it out of the way and see if its as bad as I remember... and yeah, it still honestly sucks.
Arabelle drinking the poisoned wine is stupid beyond comprehension. Like this woman is meant to be an elite spymaster, why on earth would she just drink from a bottle sent by an anonymous 'admirer', especially in a time where you know there is an anonymous order who wants the alliance leaders and their defenders dead? If we got to Mandrake Manor and found her after having been ambushed and stabbed with a poisoned weapon or having had poison forced down her throat by a masked assailant, then that would have maintained the poisoned storybeat without turning her into a moron. Elea and her Knight Commander were smart enough to wait to test it first, Arabelle should have absolutely had some sort of means of testing it... aside from making someone else drink it I mean looking at you Elea and the fact that you are representative of the problem that the Ascendant Order talks about, yet the narrative never punishes you for it
And ugh the Ascendant Lord is just. His goals don't align with his mission statement at all! He's just some pissbaby who wants to be a king, and believes that he can claim a throne he has no right to because of his mother's heritage! And that motivation would have been a decent examination of noble entitlement if the story didn't set him up as an anti-monarchist revolutionary who didn't want another empire or monarchy! Yes, I know characters can lie and be manipulative, but he goes from preaching an end to monarchies in High Isle to making the Druid King claim his rallying cry in Firesong - why would the Ascendant Order, a group founded on the belief that there should be no nobles, no monarchs, no rulers, suddenly accept this heel turn from their leader?
I think so many problems I have with Legacy of the Bretons as a whole would have been fixed if the Ascendant Order's salespitch hadn't been 'no more thrones, no more monarchs' and instead was a cult of personality that revolved around the idea that 'all these leaders suck, our guy is better because he'd be a good ruler and he cares about people! When he wins, there'll be no more unnecessary lords between us and our king, we'll all be equals and he'll make sure everyone is taken care of!'
Also a quest that addresses the fucked up cruelty of Amenos where we team up with a member of the Order who wants to find a way to reverse Processing. We were given a whole premise on how casually cruel rulers can be (Emeric's 'joke' about accidentally banishing us to Amenos) yet no means of investigating or combating it, and realising that even if you don't agree with everything the Order does, they're not wrong.
Just. Ugh. Firesong you continue to be my least favourite dlc.
