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re: Ancients and the treatment of animals, I said it a while back but Hermes' comment that animals don't see death as beautiful and instead see it as extreme pain and fear really was all I needed to just agree with his whole Deal. not the end result but like, yes, exactly, even things that aren't intelligent or have souls shouldn't be disappeared because it's presumably an absolutely terrifying experience. and if the response is "well sorry we can't let the hypercompetent predator into the environment" my answer would be that we shouldn't be treating the creation of animals as a cosmopolitan trend-chasing hobby.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:04
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kitten emergency posted:sure but there’s been enough subtle orientalist-adjacent takes over the past hundred pages or so that I found it lol-worthy. Considering the number of people who can't understand the games plot or themes I don't blame Ibble for thinking it might be a cultural disconnect even if it isn't!
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Dec 19, 2021 00:14
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Countblanc posted:re: Ancients and the treatment of animals, I said it a while back but Hermes' comment that animals don't see death as beautiful and instead see it as extreme pain and fear really was all I needed to just agree with his whole Deal. not the end result but like, yes, exactly, even things that aren't intelligent or have souls shouldn't be disappeared because it's presumably an absolutely terrifying experience. and if the response is "well sorry we can't let the hypercompetent predator into the environment" my answer would be that we shouldn't be treating the creation of animals as a cosmopolitan trend-chasing hobby. It definitely feels off, but I'm not prepared to fully condemn them because the logistics of creating a species out of nothing but aether are far enough beyond our experience that there might be something we are missing here. I think the intention was that it be just foreign enough that we don't fully know how we should feel.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:15
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Oh, so the Loporrits are moon hobbits. https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Replipirarucu From the fishing log. Replipirarucu quote:An ancient wavekin concept, this species was revived through equally ancient processes. Its odd coloration, however, is new─an apparent result of lackadaisical Loporrits breaking for second breakfast whilst they were meant to be overseeing the fish's reconstruction.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:17
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Zeruel posted:"this creature is hyperaggressive to the point where it threatens to wipe out all life in the vicinity, and it will then starve to death"
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Dec 19, 2021 00:19
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Endorph posted:look zenos did a lot of things wrong but theres no reason to call him a creature lmao
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Dec 19, 2021 00:20
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I think we have once again reached the point where people keep hammering on about 'the point', when nobody in this thread, I believe - or at least not most people - are missing 'the point', they're arguing that this text in particular does not illustrate the point convincingly through its specifics or that it unintentionally, by dint of having to balance different elements and make certain storytelling decisions that not entirely based around themes - because guess what, FFXIV is a commercial product marketed to a certain audience as well! - is self-contradictory at points which ends up painting a picture that makes some people uncomfortable based on their own experiences with similar rhetoric in the past and how it has been used. It is okay to identify the intended theme of the text, and then read closely and decide for yourself if the story is well-constructed around that theme, regardless of if you agree with the theme itself or not. I generally actually love, and hold a special place in my heart for, stories that delve into the beauty of doing your best in a highly imperfect, ugly world. (I'm an Umineko fan!) That does not mean I cannot question some of the storytelling choices Endwalker employs or attempts to apply that theme to, especially when it comes to concrete actions committed by specific characters. I can love that theme without loving every piece of work that claims to ascribe to it; I am still capable of looking at specific storytelling choices and going "wait, this doesn't quite hold up to muster." Especially in something as broad, and as heavy as this - because 'suffering' in the context of the story is applied to like, every violent crime that exists, every injustice that exists, the failure to live up to this stated creed being part of the thread of logic that ends with an entire race of people being destroyed. You should examine the minutiae, the specific, the concrete circumstances that are used as the platform as the argument. Philosophy 101 or not, it has to be applied and put to the test against the concrete, otherwise it becomes not only worthless, it potentially becomes harmful on dint of being so generalized and thus misapplied. "It's dumb to think the text is saying this because the text stated, looking at the camera, that it's not" is sort of ridiculous on a media criticism level. It's why the idea of "how do we make cool 'war is bad' media without glorifying war?" is a question that comes up constantly. In the case of FFXIV, oftentimes the inherent, unavoidable complication to its themes is that, by dint of being an MMORPG that wants as broad an audience as possible, and wants to make that audience happy and feel powerful. This means there are certain lines they can't cross in terms of questioning your role as the protagonist, your special ability to challenge 'despair' via being the protagonist who can defeat anything, and making you feel heroic, and feel good about the allies you have. This does not mean that it can't still be a great story within those confines, and it often - usually, even - is, to a genuinely impressive degree. It's also not invalid to look at certain attempts to wrangle within those confines of specific story arcs like Endwalker and things like its treatment of Venat and the Ancients, and pin down "This feels internally inconsistent, and I think this is partially coming from a place where Venat is a player ally who Believes In Us and the Ancients, for better or worse, are the opposition we are asked to defeat, and that is leading to a certain contortion where the narrative is very quick to look for and emphasize sympathetic reasons for Venat's actions and look for reasons to emphasize the flaws and inevitable downfall of the Ancients." I think it's okay to consider, and react to, and challenge those aspects. Raelle fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 00:23
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Raelle posted:I think we have once again reached the point where people keep hammering on about 'the point', when nobody in this thread, I believe - or at least not most people - are missing 'the point', they're arguing that this text in particular does not illustrate the point convincingly through its specifics or that it unintentionally, by dint of having to balance different elements and make certain storytelling decisions that not entirely based around themes - because guess what, FFXIV is a commercial product marketed to a certain audience as well! - is self-contradictory at points which ends up painting a picture that makes some people uncomfortable based on their own experiences with similar rhetoric in the past and how it has been used.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:33
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While it's totally fine to argue a text has failed to adequately convey its intended message, lord knows we all gently caress up at communication, it's important to actually root those criticisms in the text itself. I wonder how many people did not realize Elpis was intended to show some of the sorts of suffering the Amaurotines could inflict because they did not understand when Hermes was describing the distinction between arcane entities and lifeforms, that meant everything in Elpis had a soul and could thus experience suffering. It's important to understand each character and their actions in the work within the broader context of that work. They exist only as extensions of the story's narrative.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:33
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Well a part of it is that these are related but distinct discussionsn about, technically, different topics. There's a discussion about Venat, there's a discussion about EW's core themes, there a discussion about Amaurotine society. As they're all linked it's very easy for crosstalk to run everyone around in a circle.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:33
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Raelle posted:I think we have once again reached the point where people keep hammering on about 'the point', when nobody in this thread, I believe - or at least not most people - are missing 'the point', they're arguing that this text in particular does not illustrate the point convincingly through its specifics or that it unintentionally, by dint of having to balance different elements and make certain storytelling decisions that not entirely based around themes - because guess what, FFXIV is a commercial product marketed to a certain audience as well! - is self-contradictory at points which ends up painting a picture that makes some people uncomfortable based on their own experiences with similar rhetoric in the past and how it has been used. No not all readings are valid no matter how many lines of text you jam out to try and justify it.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:40
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I'm after a discussion about how nightmarishly stupid gridanian society is in the wake of the tank role quest, but alas the woobie chronicles simply take up too much oxygen for any other topic to survive
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Dec 19, 2021 00:42
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Raelle posted:I think we have once again reached the point where people keep hammering on about 'the point', when nobody in this thread, I believe - or at least not most people - are missing 'the point' I feel like this isn't true. People say they get the point but then the arguments always seem to be boiling down to "Why isn't the story more critical of the person who fought back in an attempt to stop mass murder using the only power they had available" Like there's a very significant part in the body-swap segment where you fight and kill a Garlean soldier and the story goes out of its way to emphasize that is a tragedy and if you were in your own body you might have been able to avoid it, but you didn't have the power to and so it was a choice between killing that person or just giving up and letting Zenos go ham on other people. That is what happened with Venat in a nutshell. She had enough power to act but not enough power to do so without consequences. And it seems like a lot of the arguments here boil down to trying to say that the story didn't convince them that fighting against mass murder was a difficult but worthy goal despite coming on the back of three different expansions which entirely boil down to "It is better to fight against evil, even if it costs more lives, than to let evil win." If you still need to be convinced after Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers of that point then the story isn't ever going to convince you. A lot of it seems to boil down to the argument that the story didn't convince them that it was wrong to allow a mass murder to happen and I do feel like that is a tremendous point missing. It is a given. Unless you're being strictly utilitarian and arguing that any action is justified as long as it saves the most lives and in that case you're agreeing with the Garleans that we should have just surrendered because more lives were lost in the war then would have been in instant surrender.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:42
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Really feels like people arguing against the narrative as presented are confusing their own personal hangups or emotional reactions (or lack of) to scenes as failure on the story's writing to not convey it properly and not just that it didn't work for them or w/e.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:42
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No Mods No Masters posted:I'm after a discussion about how nightmarishly stupid gridanian society is in the wake of the tank role quest, but alas the woobie chronicles simply take up too much oxygen for any other topic to survive
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Dec 19, 2021 00:45
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Really feels like people arguing against the narrative as presented are confusing their own personal hangups or emotional reactions (or lack of) to scenes as failure on the story's writing to not convey it properly and not just that it didn't work for them or w/e.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:47
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TGLT posted:Where exactly are you getting that? When Hermes is going into which creatures have a soul, he's talking about arcane entities like sprites. It has nothing to do with whether or not they survive in Elpis but whether or not they conform with physical laws. He says that creatures created spontaneously via magic don't have souls, no matter how much they resemble a normal lifeform, which to me implicates everything made out of thin air with creation magic, and that it's only after they spend time propagating and proving they can exist upon the surface that they gain souls. Hermes emphasizes that it's the star that gives true life to the creations, not mankind. He isn't even willing to explicitly say if Meteion has a soul or not, which implies it takes more than merely making a physically viable creature and boom instantly it has a soul. I feel it's important to Hermes' character that he cares so much about soulless creations - that his compassion is somewhat irrational. The creature may show pain but if it's objectively true that no soul is experiencing that pain then what makes it different from a clay model of a creature in pain? It's a way more interesting philosophical question than if the amaroutines were killing off thinking, feeling, soul-infused beings willy-nilly.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:53
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Pigbuster posted:He says that creatures created spontaneously via magic don't have souls, no matter how much they resemble a normal lifeform, which to me implicates everything made out of thin air with creation magic, and that it's only after they spend time propagating and proving they can exist upon the surface that they gain souls. Hermes emphasizes that it's the star that gives true life to the creations, not mankind. He isn't even willing to explicitly say if Meteion has a soul or not, which implies it takes more than merely making a physically viable creature and boom instantly it has a soul. I dunno if it looks like a duck walks like a duck and quacks like a duck I’m still going to feel anguish if it’s in pain
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Dec 19, 2021 00:55
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I think it did succeed at making its point and I think all the stuff people are saying about how it didn't work are either incredibly nitpicky or simply straight up wrong.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:56
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Pigbuster posted:He says that creatures created spontaneously via magic don't have souls, no matter how much they resemble a normal lifeform, which to me implicates everything made out of thin air with creation magic, and that it's only after they spend time propagating and proving they can exist upon the surface that they gain souls. Hermes emphasizes that it's the star that gives true life to the creations, not mankind. He isn't even willing to explicitly say if Meteion has a soul or not, which implies it takes more than merely making a physically viable creature and boom instantly it has a soul. "Tell me - do you know the difference between living beings and arcane entities? It is the presence of a soul." ... "Be it a soulless arcane entity such as the pneuma (lightning sprite), or an ephemeral life-form such as the petalouda (butterfly), all seek to perpetuate their existence. To survive." Like even if the first gen creations don't have souls, the Charybdis that won't fly is identified as part of the third generation. As in it wasn't spontaneously made via creation magic but was bred. It's a mutant. edit: He does not say all magically created entities lack a soul. He says beings that "do not fulfill the requirement" of "[adhering] to the laws of creation" which include some things "spontaneously born of magic or natural phenomenon." He's talking about sprites, eikons, and egis there. TGLT fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 00:59
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Really feels like people arguing against the narrative as presented are confusing their own personal hangups or emotional reactions (or lack of) to scenes as failure on the story's writing to not convey it properly and not just that it didn't work for them or w/e. Good. A huge part of media's value is that interacting with it can reveal held ideas that we would otherwise take entirely for granted. If people are willing to talk about it, to further explore that dissonance, then even better.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:04
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Pigbuster posted:He says that creatures created spontaneously via magic don't have souls, no matter how much they resemble a normal lifeform, which to me implicates everything made out of thin air with creation magic, and that it's only after they spend time propagating and proving they can exist upon the surface that they gain souls. Hermes emphasizes that it's the star that gives true life to the creations, not mankind. He isn't even willing to explicitly say if Meteion has a soul or not, which implies it takes more than merely making a physically viable creature and boom instantly it has a soul. FFXIV has an extensive in-game connection to Nier: Automata. In literary analysis, I think you could argue something like "if this sci-fi novel makes an allusion to Hamlet, then in some ways the text and ideas of Hamlet can also be made to apply to the sci-fi novel on a thematic and philosophical level." FFXIV is weird because MMORPGs with crosspromotions are a new beast in the world of storytelling. But I think that, of all the cross-promotion content that's ever been put in the game, the Nier Automata stuff is the most centrally enshrined. Like, it's a core pillar of the Alliance Raids, so it's pretty deeply integrated content compared to a butterfingers mount or even the dragon quest side content (although I think you could absolutely still talk about those critically). I think the idea of Hermes' empathy for creatures that are stated in-universe to "lack souls" becomes even more interesting when you consider that the game has a significant link to Nier Automata. Nier's entire story is wrapped around the idea that "imitation" beings are fundamentally indistinguishable from "real" beings.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:04
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Cephas posted:FFXIV has an extensive in-game connection to Nier: Automata. In literary analysis, I think you could argue something like "if this sci-fi novel makes an allusion to Hamlet, then in some ways the text and ideas of Hamlet can also be made to apply to the sci-fi novel on a thematic and philosophical level." FFXIV is weird because MMORPGs with crosspromotions are a new beast in the world of storytelling. But I think that, of all the cross-promotion content that's ever been put in the game, the Nier Automata stuff is the most centrally enshrined. Like, it's a core pillar of the Alliance Raids, so it's pretty deeply integrated content compared to a butterfingers mount or even the dragon quest side content (although I think you could absolutely still talk about those critically). Nier straight up says that Androids and the Alien Machines are valid beings with valid lives, it never even questions this (compared to say, David Cage's Detroit:Become Human). Created beings soulless or not capable of thoughts and feelings have a valid right to express those thoughts and feelings and experience life as life.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:08
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Corbeau posted:Good. A huge part of media's value is that interacting with it can reveal held ideas that we would otherwise take entirely for granted. If people are willing to talk about it, to further explore that dissonance, then even better. It's good that people say why something didn't work for them on a personal level. Saying it didn't convey the message properly or clearly is an entirely different thing.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:09
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I mean even without Nier you have Vivi or Omega.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:09
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I think it'd be really neat if Her Inflorescence somehow tied into the Endsinger. When Meteion first mentioned "a race of robots that wiped out its opposition and then found itself wondering what was their purpose in living" I was like oh poo poo, are they putting nier into the main story?
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Dec 19, 2021 01:17
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The Omicrons turned themselves into data, and even still felt despair enough to be recorded and recreated in Ultima Thule. And then Stigma-1 reactivated on alphatron after the Endsinger was destroyed, releasing the souls to return to their planets lifestreams; then sent the message of 'live' that got received by the copies on Ultima Thule. So yeah, the stuff about copies having a right to live is directly applicable to ffxiv even outside its Nier crossover.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:20
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Cephas posted:I think it'd be really neat if Her Inflorescence somehow tied into the Endsinger. I was so ready for them to explain that the Cardinal Virtues were white chlorination syndrome. As for going on about the themes or whatever, I recognized the theme, it's one I've seen plenty of times before and I even enjoyed it, in say the aforementioned TTGL and this expansion just didn't land for me. I absolutely view the ancients with total sympathy, Venat came off as shady to me, etc. Though I think the core reason this expansion failed is I didn't feel like there was an apocalypse, I didn't have a compelling reason to face the final antagonist, and the zone that built up to that confrontation was a total whiff. E: as an aside this is an expansion carried very much so by it's theme, while before the themes were much more background and the game was character driven and I massively prefer character driven to theme driven works. Eimi fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 01:22
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One of my favorite little moments is when survivors gathered at the temple in Thavnair resolve to hold on to life and hope, not just in trying times but as they always have.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:28
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Eimi posted:Though I think the core reason this expansion failed is I didn't feel like there was an apocalypse, I didn't have a compelling reason to face the final antagonist, and the zone that built up to that confrontation was a total whiff. Even if it was literally just Thavnair being turned into a horrifying hellscape that seems like a compelling enough reason to face the antagonist anyway. "Hey, I want to save the lives of these nice people" is pretty much all the motivation I can imagine needing in FFXIV. It's pretty much the justification I have for the various Raid series or whatnot.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:30
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I have no idea how you finish Thavanir 2 and go "eh, don't feel like anythings wrong"
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Dec 19, 2021 01:56
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Ibram Gaunt posted:I have no idea how you finish Thavanir 2 and go "eh, don't feel like anythings wrong" Moenbrdya syndrome. It would've worked better if it was someone that I knew instead of the newcomers who are here to suffer. It took 4 expansions for Moenbrdya's character to ever really pay off after all.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:11
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Yeah, I think the issue is that by going so hard on thavnair 2, any non-thavnair ramifications of the final days are basically farmed out to the role quests, which are a. not mandatory and b. (if the two and a half I've done are any indication) honestly pretty garbage
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Dec 19, 2021 02:13
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Re: soul chat, in the level 90 Healer Role Quest, when you kill Charlet, Fordola has a vision of him as a hyur walking into the light alongside two of their dead friends. This is despite blasphemies not having souls any more. I don’t know what it means but it means something
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Dec 19, 2021 02:16
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I don't think it means anything. The role quests feel like the ff14 version of reading a star wars EU novel
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Dec 19, 2021 02:20
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thetoughestbean posted:Re: soul chat, in the level 90 Healer Role Quest, when you kill Charlet, Fordola has a vision of him as a hyur walking into the light alongside two of their dead friends. This is despite blasphemies not having souls any more. I thought was explained in the Endsinger fight, that she steals their souls and was hoarding them, but after her death they were released.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:23
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thetoughestbean posted:Re: soul chat, in the level 90 Healer Role Quest, when you kill Charlet, Fordola has a vision of him as a hyur walking into the light alongside two of their dead friends. This is despite blasphemies not having souls any more. The Blasphemies in particular seem to carry part of their soul still, based on the melee quest and that they have stronger memories than the other transformed monsters/people.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:27
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A lot of what the Amaurotines considered to be truths about the soul and aether must be taken in the context of the fact that their knowledge was demonstrably incomplete. Despite being very advanced they were unaware of dynamis for the bulk of their civilization's existence. And despite the Amaurotine understanding of the soul as an aetheric phenomenon, something about sentience and sapience interacts with dynamis to such a degree that Meteion could make a case for her dynamis-based reservoir of souls at Ultima Thule as being a valid interpretation of the soul as well. And even aside from all of that, qualia must be held separate as a phenomenon from the soul, as one can share a soul with another person while being a different person with their own right to exist. The presence, or density, of a soul according to Amaurotine standards is not the be all, end all of the validity of an existence E: And depending on if you think the soul is the storage medium or the data, it's possible that a soul that was converted from aether to dynamis could be reverted back. Especially when Meteion starts singing her song of hope to jump-start planetary galactic cycles of life and rebirth again. Runa fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 02:27
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Eimi posted:I thought was explained in the Endsinger fight, that she steals their souls and was hoarding them, but after her death they were released. Seems like the cutscene should be different depending on if you do it before or after endsinger then, no? I somehow doubt it is
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Dec 19, 2021 02:27
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No Mods No Masters posted:I don't think it means anything. The role quests feel like the ff14 version of reading a star wars EU novel Fordola gave Arenvald a high five and that means they’re basically already married and you can’t take that away from me Eimi posted:I thought was explained in the Endsinger fight, that she steals their souls and was hoarding them, but after her death they were released. I thought that was the all the dead planets/civilizations, not ours
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Dec 19, 2021 02:29
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