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ImpAtom posted:He wasn't the one who enacted global omnicide. He didn't want to destroy the world, he wanted proof that what the Endsinger was saying wasn't true. It is a terrible extremely bad awful decision but he even states part of why he wants to erase his memory is so he can work against it 'fairly.' It's still a horrible crime but it's a far cry from trying to murder everyone. I feel like this is splitting hairs. Taking the best shot they had and dunking it is MAYBE not pushing the button, but it sure is building a complex Rube Goldbergesque machine that pushes the button for him. It feels like, since the end result is the same, I don't really care if we can argue that he didn't want to destroy the world or wasn't helping the Sad Voyager Probes, because the end result was the same. Also since you brought it up, hello, I am also someone who has had to take years of medication and therapy thanks to depression, and maybe that's why I recoil here. No matter how close I ever got, and I got close, I NEVER had an asterix pop up with the text "*and take everyone else with me, since life has no meaning after all" in my head. Maybe that's why this doesn't work for me when played out so clinically and directly, in a way I've seen before many times in JRPGs, with the only caveat being sure, not the WORST version I've ever seen either. That's not a high bar tho. Vermain posted:Because "committing suicide" is both a heavy thematic topic to treat with, and because it doesn't leave much to fight back against. Again: the point of having villains that fall into nihilistic despair is to allow them to embody the concept of nihilism to give the protagonists of the story something tangible to fight against. Fighting a monster of nihilism with swords and spells is a metaphorical proxy for the (often daily) fight that people go through in trying to push back the monsters of their psyche, and, in stories like this, help to create catharsis via triumph. This is something that fantasy stories do uniquely well: they reify abstract ideas and struggles into a physical form that's clear and tangible. Yeah sorry idk, see the first block, as someone who's been there this doesn't just not do anything for me, it does the opposite. If others in the same space, either actual or previously, get something out of it: cool. I'll be happy if I'm an outlier on this one.
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Dec 12, 2021 02:59
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sexpig by night posted:Yea the 90 dungeon is fantastic at driving in 'this is what she saw constantly, forever, star after star, this is all she had to 'comfort' her as she sat alone in the darkest deepest part of space'. The guy after the second boss standing alone at the console saying 'finally, I killed them all' or whatever was genuinely rough. "I did it, I killed them all!" '...I did it, I killed them all..."
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Dec 12, 2021 02:59
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ImpAtom posted:It really seems to be love or hate and I kind of realize why I don't like it at all. I agree but that's why the other option works for me. He's not my dark self but I still sure as hell needed to kill him.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:00
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Zenowns
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Dec 12, 2021 03:01
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Yeah, I think he's fine in this expac. He is clearly set up to be your "dark mirror" not in the sense of "you both LOVE to fight (but he's hosed up about it)", but in the sense of him fighting only for himself, while you fight for others. It's the perfect thematic capstone after the Endsinger: having overcome existential despair, the question of, "How should one live their lives?" still remains. Having the idealized versions of pure selflessness vs. pure selfishness duking it out ties a neat little ribbon on the spectacle.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:02
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KazigluBey posted:I feel like this is splitting hairs. Taking the best shot they had and dunking it is MAYBE not pushing the button, but it sure is building a complex Rube Goldbergesque machine that pushes the button for him. It feels like, since the end result is the same, I don't really care if we can argue that he didn't want to destroy the world or wasn't helping the Sad Voyager Probes, because the end result was the same. I can understand coming from that viewpoint. For me the metaphor always boils down to effectively 'expanding' the idea that taking your own life hurts others. It's a despair that makes you do something tragic and in doing so hurt everyone around you expanded to a scale where you can punch it with hope lasers. A big part of dealing with depression and bad issues was dealing with the fact that my actions have consequences to others and that was actually relevant to my own therapy. I'm never someone who would hurt others (or at least god I hope not) but I know if I did the darkest things it would have a rippling effect on my friends and family and I always take that level of self-destruction as reaching that point. It's metaphor but that is what fantasy stuff is good at. It's also something I see a lot in fantasy and sci-fi so I've come to basically accept the metaphorical vs the literal because otherwise a whole lot of stories just don't make sense.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:04
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I disliked how disconnected Zenos was in the MSQ too but I do think he has one of the best lines. "This is your prey? Why is it still alive? Are you really having problems with this?" about the final boss of the storyline that's been told since day 1. That almost made up for him being completely pointless in the fight itself.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:07
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Count me in for the 'love' side of (literal last duty of the game spoilers) Zenos' Vegeta style 'turn up to shout 'are you seriously going to lose to THIS you pussy?! Hell no, I'M the one who gets to kill you, let's team up on this bird' and ending with just kinda a sad, very desperate, battle for him where you get the chance to go 'yea, adventuring and kicking rear end is fun, I'm still gonna kill your rear end though' and share a smirk is just really on brand. I like Zenos, so I'm already predisposed to enjoy it, but his last moments just being quiet reflection on realizing he's never had any happiness except for brief flashes when he fought us, and asking if we've had a happier time with the same kind of life...I dunno, it worked for me. He didn't get what he wanted, there was no grand enlightening or true bliss or anything, just a sad man with nothing left asking the only being on the star he considers anywhere near a peer 'hey...are you as empty as I am or have I just wasted my life?' He loses, in every way, and knows it. The memes of 'lol look at my lalafell kicking him in the dick' aren't just memes, he got the WoL, the most powerful being in the universe at the moment, into the primal knock down drag out fight he wanted...and we beat the poo poo out of him. No prize, no flash of beauty, no thrill of victory, get dunked on by my potato healer and die alone in space you lovely nihilistic fascist.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:07
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Hellioning posted:I disliked how disconnected Zenos was in the MSQ too but I do think he has one of the best lines. What I am hoping for with Endsinger EX is that the minstral gets confused with the mention of Zenos showing up and then you fighting him and it's some weird double-team battle between Shinryu and Endsinger.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:08
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ImpAtom posted:What I am hoping for with Endsinger EX is that the minstral gets confused with the mention of Zenos showing up and then you fighting him and it's some weird double-team battle between Shinryu and Endsinger. I'd love that, even just as a single extra attack to deal with. Just 'wait, Zenos showed up? You mean to fight you right? Yea you obviously mean he joined the fight to try to finish you off while distracted.' sexpig by night fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Dec 12, 2021 |
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Dec 12, 2021 03:12
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ImpAtom posted:What I am hoping for with Endsinger EX is that the minstral gets confused with the mention of Zenos showing up and then you fighting him and it's some weird double-team battle between Shinryu and Endsinger. Yes, that would be excellent.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:13
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zenos makes it canon that the wol is a savage raider and I'm glad of it
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Dec 12, 2021 03:17
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cheetah7071 posted:zenos makes it canon that the wol is a savage raider and I'm glad of it No, Zenos makes it canon that people think the WoL is a Savage raider. Very different.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:22
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Bruceski posted:"I did it, I killed them all!" this is gonna sit with me for a long long while
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Dec 12, 2021 03:27
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Ok I gotta ask. why are people using spoiler tags, in the spoiler thread.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:36
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Ok I gotta ask. why are people using spoiler tags, in the spoiler thread. because people wanted to talk about the part of the story they were up to, before anybody had finished, and it stuck prooobably we can stop now? especially if we change the title to "seriously, there are untagged spoilers here"
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Dec 12, 2021 03:38
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I mean, there's at least one person here today who's only completed zone 5, so it's clear that not everyone is done done. Personally, I've reached being fine with talking about names, feelings and all that while avoiding actual plot points. Without context, names like 'Jullus', 'Elpis' and 'Meteion' are not spoilers, even if events surrounding them are, so you can talk about them in generalities as long as you don't hit the actual events that are spoilers. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Dec 12, 2021 |
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Dec 12, 2021 03:41
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Cleretic posted:I mean, there's at least one person here today who's only completed zone 5, so it's clear that not everyone is done done. Yeah, I feel like the congestion is impeding a lot of progress so probably better to keep the tags.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:43
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You know, I just realized, that this means there is one man who got everything he wanted, including leading to the world being saved. You might not like his methods, but the gods, he got results. You could also just say everyone else was 
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Dec 12, 2021 03:45
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Yea nobody's going to, like, get punished, spoil away untagged, but I think most of us are just being polite about endgame stuff for a little bit as we all catch up thanks to servers imploding and all.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:45
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Eimi posted:You know, I just realized, that this means there is one man who got everything he wanted, including leading to the world being saved. You might not like his methods, but the gods, he got results. nevermind guys, EW was a bad expansion, maybe worst of the entire history of MMOs 
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Dec 12, 2021 03:46
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Fister Roboto posted:folks who started playing within the last two years. ShB was my least favorite expansion, I thought it was the worst paced one and didn't come together until the last hour of it, the Shan Yu look alike who's name I forget was just a more bland version of Zenos at that point who could LUNGE so he was REAL DANGEROUS and I have absolutely no idea how G'raha Tia is a popular character people like within ShB
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Dec 12, 2021 03:47
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Emet was more magical girl than meteion. Mets was more super robo or Shonen ending. Sorry about the bad take tho. there's a lot of rocky 4 in it too
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Dec 12, 2021 04:09
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KazigluBey posted:I feel like this is splitting hairs. Taking the best shot they had and dunking it is MAYBE not pushing the button, but it sure is building a complex Rube Goldbergesque machine that pushes the button for him. It feels like, since the end result is the same, I don't really care if we can argue that he didn't want to destroy the world or wasn't helping the Sad Voyager Probes, because the end result was the same. This maybe isn't something I should say on a comedy forum, but I've definitely had thoughts about what I'd do if there was a 'destroy the universe' button next to me in my darker moments thinking about poo poo like heat death and how many animals have to die in pain for every predator to live, etc. FWIW I wouldn't push it, because I don't think it's my call to make, but in my darker moments it's definitely been a recurring thought I've had. What makes them villains isn't that they have depression or are suicidal or whatever, it's that they're so arrogant that they think their answer to the question of suffering should be everyone else's answer too.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:15
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Like, yeah, Hermes and Meteoin aren't "realistic." They're a metaphor.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:19
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Oh yeah idk if anyone pointed this out but the diving suit guys in the first area of the last msq dungeon make namazu suction cup footstep sounds when they walk
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Dec 12, 2021 04:20
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Chillgamesh posted:Oh yeah idk if anyone pointed this out but the diving suit guys in the first area of the last msq dungeon make namazu suction cup footstep sounds when they walk I choose to believe they are namazu, whose relatives somehow ended up on Etheirys
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Dec 12, 2021 04:21
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:The reason literally hasn't changed at all since ShB you weirdo. She sundered everything because they would go on to try and sacrifice the new life to try and pointlessly grasp at the perfect days of yore and in doing so hopefully the new life can succeed at overcoming the poo poo they had failed to actually deal with without all the genocide sacrifice the new life would be.. Even Emet says they planned to in ShB. Why are you acting like that's changed at all. Once again, I'm really late to this (due to my sleeping pattern having been destroyed by this game lmao) but I think the thing people are frustrated by isn't that Venat has no clear motive, it's that the motive doesn't really work by the internal logic of the story, and the writers seem to know this and be insecure about it, since they throw in the whole "but you actually did this because people needed dynamic to defeat meteion, didn't you?" and "but you actually did this because you needed to close the time loop, didn't you?" scenes with Y'shtola and Emet respectively. Hydaelyn doing the Sundering because she wants to stop the mass-murder of the new life on the planet is weird because the Sundering is mass-murder on an even greater scale itself. Again, it identity-murdered not just the ancients, but every sapient being in the world, and the plot repeatedly emphasizes that identity death is death in this world. So like... Where does her moral high ground come from? You can see the wheels of the writing creak as the team tries to find an answer to that question, going far beyond her motives established in Shadowbringers. Idk, I don't mean to labor this point, but it is sorta frustrating to see people acting like it's obvious and everyone who feels peculiar about it just messed something. With a few days distance now, I think I feel a little less weird about EW's themes, but it's mostly because I've thought more about how difficult it must have been to weave the narrative into something coherent with all the things it had to do by virtue of its own nature of an series-ender. There were so many disconnected beats it had to visit and resolve - Garlemald, the Final Days, what really up with Hydaelyn, what's left of the Scion's arcs, Sharlayan, the thematic undercurrent of the entire plot... It was inevitable that it would end up being messy at points and leave contradictions if you squinted too hard. In retrospect, I'm not sure how much it was really trying to say that some amount of suffering is a good thing, and how much that implication was a mirage caused by them having to incorporate all this baggage into their genuinely heartfelt attempts to hit this complicated emotional note about the human condition and what it means to live, and it not all aligning quite right. I think a critical moment for me was the "when life gives you lemons" scene in Labyrinthos, when the Loporitt talks about how societies shouldn't try to achieve perfection because they'll just end up realizing it was all for nothing in the end. Coming so soon after the weird Venat monologue, it's too easy to read that as a bullet point on the notion that Some Amount Of Suffering Is Healthy, Actually, but without that context still in your mind, it comes across as a straightforwardly positive message: If you spend your whole life striving for a perfect, prelapsarian existence instead of treasuring what you have, you'll miss the journey of life for the destination and end up with nothing. Underneath everything, I think that core of it is maybe even more powerful than ShB's theme to me, but the moments it truly embodies said core feel fleeting. It's a real diamond in the rough, but still really impressive when you think about the task set to Ishikawa and the rest of the team. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Dec 12, 2021 |
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Dec 12, 2021 04:23
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PoorWeather posted:Once again, I'm really late to this (due to my sleeping pattern having been destroyed by this game lmao) but I think the thing people are frustrated by isn't that Venat has no clear motive, it's that the motive doesn't really work by the internal logic of the story, and the writers seem to know this and be insecure about it, since they throw in the whole "but you actually did this because people needed dynamic to defeat meteion, didn't you?" and "but you actually did this because you needed to close the time loop, didn't you?" scenes with Y'shtola and Emet respectively. As far as I'm aware there's no indicating that sundering actually *killed* anyone. It just divided the world into multiple reflections which then ended up going in their own directions. We know for a fact the same life exists on different worlds which wouldn't make sense if you assume she murdered everyone. Even the same ruins are still there except that on the Source they were lost to constant calamities.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:36
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ImpAtom posted:As far as I'm aware there's no indicating that sundering actually *killed* anyone. It just divided the world into multiple reflections which then ended up going in their own directions. We know for a fact the same life exists on different worlds which wouldn't make sense if you assume she murdered everyone. I mean, it did kill people by the setting's own logic, whether the writers meant it to or not. Like, I posted about this earlier: PoorWeather posted:(The Sundering) was murder because it erased the identities of everyone on the planet, as we learn in the post-Qitana Ravel scene with Emet in ShB where he talks about how everyone retained only shattered, vague recollections of the lives of the people their souls were broken off from, to the point that they lost all civilization and went back to living in caves. It transformed people in body and mind into different individuals.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:39
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PoorWeather posted:I mean, it did kill people by the settings own logic, whether the writers meant it to or not. Like, I posted about this earlier: I don't think that's the story's own logic at all. The story is very clear that there are multiple parts of a soul and some element of the soul itself exists past death but it isn't necessarily the same as its memories.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:42
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endwalker.......... good. shed many tears, ugly cried more than once. the one npc-hunting quest in the latter half of labyrinthos sucked rear end and i dread my inevitably having to redo it on my various alts, but with that single exception*, i found the whole thing narratively satisfying and emotionally fulfilling and everything i could have wanted out of this expansion story. i need to go back to the cutscene book to get The Shot from The Fistfight which everyone else seems to have snapped instinctively, but i do rather like this angle i captured instead. lmao good job zenos, you got your rear end kicked by a BARD  *ok, if i REALLY feel like digging for something to criticize...... i have no logical explanation for this, but the music in the loporrit zone set off my fight or flight instinct like crazy and i spent that whole part of the plot with a feeling of tension and mild unease. maybe the disconnect from how unbelievably adorable the loporrits are and the constant reminder in the back of my head "the apocalypse is about to begin and they are wasting my time about it, the apocalypse is nigh and these fluffy little fuzz buns are wasting my time". or maybe it was the frustration of trying to navigate the area when you can't fly and all the doors look identical to the walls, lol. anyway i still really liked how that part of the story wrapped up, and the role the loporrits continued to play thereafter, i just consider my WoL as having gone through that whole segment of the MSQ, from zodiark getting offed to tailing urianger on the moon, while having a mild dissociative episode, for the entire duration. lol
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Dec 12, 2021 04:45
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PoorWeather posted:I mean, it did kill people by the setting's own logic, whether the writers meant it to or not. Like, I posted about this earlier: The Sundering is a difficult thing to qualify as 'death' because there wasn't a literal seizure of bodily function, it's more that conscious, continuous life just... spontaneously changed form. We don't really have language for that. And it's also hard to tell if consciousness even stopped, since we didn't exactly ask a random miqo'te how they felt three minutes after the event. It's possible that there wasn't an outright stoppage of the Ancient's consciousness, it just transitioned from one form to the next. I think that from Venat's view it is better than the Zodiark reality of 'eventually everyone gets sacrificed', though, because she's not looking at it from a perspective of 'saving the society I live in', she's looking at it from a perspective of 'saving the planet'. In essence she's holding closer to the stated mission statement of Amaurot, to live for and improve the planet itself, than Amaurot itself is; everyone sacrificing to Zodiark doesn't truly care about the life of the planet, they want to prolong the existence they knew at the expense of the planet, while Venat is regretfully accepting that, for the planet to continue, things have to change, and this has to be stopped.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:48
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I'm surprised when people talk about the final fight with Zenos they're usually talking about the smirk and the dialogue option before the fight, because my favourite part is the small chat we have as he lays dying. I really like the whole thing even if it's just kinda some short meta discussion. Him basically going "Ah, my mirror we both see the world in a banal and superficial way (you because this is a video game, me because i'm an rear end in a top hat) but while I was unable to connect to anyone or anything in this world and am dying empty and unfulfilled you are different. Were you able to find some meaning in this videogame?" really worked for me. The game doesn't let you answer or anything but it seemed clear it was proceeding as if you had answered "Yeah I do care about this world and its characters" considering the next scene is all the Scions saying how much they love and care about you. And I dunno I just kinda found it sweet. Felt to me like the devs were acknowledging you care about the game and thanking you for it.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:48
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ImpAtom posted:I don't think that's the story's own logic at all. The story is very clear that there are multiple parts of a soul and some element of the soul itself exists past death but it isn't necessarily the same as its memories. Even assuming everyone was a perfect copy of one another initially, they basically "instantly died" by any Ancient's reckoning, thus becoming different people almost immediately.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:48
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Ultimately I don't think it matters if the sundered is murder, per se. Venat invited unimaginable suffering into the world by her own admission. She's someone doing bad things which she desperately hopes end up for the better no matter what. I think it thematically works for sort of complicated reasons that I don't want to try to phonepost, but it's inescapable that the sundering hurt people, a lot. e: cleretic more or less said the words I would have said if I wasn't phoneposting
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Dec 12, 2021 04:49
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ImpAtom posted:I don't think that's the story's own logic at all. The story is very clear that there are multiple parts of a soul and some element of the soul itself exists past death but it isn't necessarily the same as its memories. They go into the mechanics of how souls work during the lecture scene in Sharlayan in Endwalker. There are two parts to the soul: The unchanging 'essential self', which is really hard to destroy and persists through reincarnations, and ones current identity/memories, which are lost every time you die and return to the Aetherial Sea. Even though the soul remains, the story regularly understands that loss of memories as death. For example Gaia lost her memories of being Loghrif, and the narrative is very clear that this means Loghrif is dead and Mitron treating Gaia as her is hosed up. The Sundering destroyed the memories of everyone on the planet. So by the same logic, that's death. What do you think I'm missing here?
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Dec 12, 2021 04:50
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Cleretic posted:The Sundering is a difficult thing to qualify as 'death' because there wasn't a literal seizure of bodily function, it's more that conscious, continuous life just... spontaneously changed form. We don't really have language for that. And it's also hard to tell if consciousness even stopped, since we didn't exactly ask a random miqo'te how they felt three minutes after the event. It's possible that there wasn't an outright stoppage of the Ancient's consciousness, it just transitioned from one form to the next. It's also worth noting that the Sundering was specifically stated as being the limit of Venat's power. She isn't as strong as Zodiark and the act of performing the Sundering was the only way to weaken him enough to stop him. It was an act made in the defense of life. Maybe you can argue the same for Zodiark's sacrifice but at the end of the day Ventat was acting in defense to save lives while the Ancients had a choice, they just chose to kill instead. And it's clear Ventat wasn't the only one who felt that way since the primal summoning was born from multiple survivors, not just her.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:51
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I don't think it's clear that the Sundering destroyed everyone's memories. Possibly it just made them mortal and then dying naturally afterward destroyed their memories. The story doesn't go into what happened at the precise moment their souls were sundered.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:54
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I think the best analysis of Venat is that she was, above all else, an Ancient. She viewed herself as a shephard of the star, and not a mere inhabitant. She judged her species as unhealthy to the continued existence of life in Etheirys, and remade them, the same as the animals on Elpis. The story didn't dwell on this because it's ultimately ancillary to the emotional message they were trying to convey. That is a crack or a seam in the story but it didn't bother me because, well, I didn't notice it at the time. If a story has a hole I only notice after reading hundreds of posts on an internet forum I'm not going to judge it too harshly for that.
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Dec 12, 2021 04:57
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