I felt differently about Ultima Thule because I never read it as fake out death scenes. I didn't see Meteion as some big bad that needed to be stabbed to death, but a confused child that needed to be properly raised cause her father sent her out into the universe having done a garbo job of raising her. So I saw the loss of Scions as Dynamis Debates. And what I and thus my WoL would have been thinking at that moment is not only did Hydaelyn torture us for 12k years so we'd get good at taking it. She made sure the people on the ship were tortured in the exact right way as to be able to endure the pain Meteion came across on her journey. And it was just too well aligned to be coincidence, so I was mostly thinking about how much influence has she had over the course of our lives to shape us for this moment. Our first obstacle is survival and we have Thancred. Our second obstacle is dragons and we have Estinien. Come on! Plus I knew since we do trials alone they needed to be taken out the picture somehow and I figured this was how they were gonna do it and once I defeated Meteion I'd summon them back. And incase I hadn't figured out I had the ability to do this by myself, which I did, Y'shtola flat out tells me which makes me think the writers didn't want anyone to believe they were actually dying to make pathways. Not to mention G'raha makes me promise to bring him back and the twins are more concerned with me having to carry on alone than their "deaths" which makes me think they never seriously meant for the player to read these as deaths but instead character moments which highlighted how each Scion's journey had made them fit to defeat one of Meteion's types of despair. So when I was able to summon them all back before the final battle, I was surprised and wondered if they had made yet another trial that could be fought with NPCs. I guess I was never bored because I was instead paying attention to see how each Scion fit as the solution to each problem rather than thinking I was watching a bunch of death scenes. My WoL would have been more chill about the whole thing than the game character was, it's not like the Scions haven't been disembodied souls before. That's an average Tuesday for them at this point. And I'm holding a rock that gives form to the formless. Come on, we good. Teach that little girl how to endure trauma so we can get outta here.
While I think that explanation of Ultima Thule would be the best reading I've seen so far, I can't really agree that this was the writer's intentions, mostly because, if they had meant the Ultima Thule to represent that, they wouldn't have utterly botched the execution. Thancred's half-speech to Meteion before he was unmade was entirely generic given what we knew at that point. He basically just says "even if times are tough, giving into despair is bad" which is the absolute bare minimum take you get from his story and his character arc. Then you have Estinien to the old dragons, which, as mentioned in the video, is probably the best and most succinct. Honestly I don't have any faults in his speech and I feel his aligns the closest to your interpretation. Then there's Y'shtola, and I'm sorry, but her speech is out of left field. She gets pissed because the weird jellyfish aliens tell her she wouldn't understand their explanation for the heat-death of the universe or why they want to die. Does she say that she can't understand their simple desire to give up? Does she say that she would fight tooth and nail to figure out a solution? Does she condemn them for being narrow-minded, and not taking any chance, no matter how slight? No. She gets mad that they said she'd be better off not knowing and that they expected her to take their word for it. The thing I love about Y'shtola is that, despite often being considered, and also wanting to come across as, the composed, scholarly, refined one, she can get pretty reckless and emotional. She used Flow to save people close to her, not once, but TWICE, with only the slimmest hopes of making it out alive. If it was a matter of ideals and conviction, the supposed theme of Ulima Thule being "Hope vs. Despair" , she'd tell those alien bastards to shove it for giving up on a potential solution and just wanting to die, and then turn to the WoL and tell them that there was a slim chance they could all come back, not tell them not to try. That would've not only fit far better with her character, but aligned better with the supposed goal of being an antithesis to Meteion's view of the world. G'raha's speech is, like I mentioned in the video, a rehashing of his speech in 5.3, when he had no idea whether his gamble to survive and be revived back in the Source would actually work, so using him asking the WoL for more adventures I don't think is much evidence he expected to survive, only that he thought there might be a way to. And the twins and the WoL's interactions after that were really just not well written at all. No matter your interpretations of Ultima Thule, whether they be fakeout death scenes or some bigger argument, can explain why they decided to make Alisaie literally speak for the WoL and not even reflect, a little bit, on what happened. Same goes for Alphinaud. He of all people should've had something more to say about the situation, whether it be pointing out that hope wasn't loss or lamenting the loss of his closest companions. Hell, if we were going for the former, he could've pointed out his failure with the Crystal Braves, and that while at the time he felt hope was lost, and he was responsible for the loss of everyone, that he continued to forge onwards in the face of his despair. Under the most charitable of interpretations, I think that the writers might have wanted to incorporate some of those themes into Ultima Thule, but in the end, they were either pressured to or decided on their own to also try to ramp up the drama by making the player think the Scions might not make it to the end this time, and at best you have a segment of the story that's confused and is trying to bite off more than it can chew effectively, and at worse is counterproductive to the story of EW as a whole.
Sadly it's been a trend with square and many companies not to kill off characters or bring them back. Happens a lot with western comics. In some cases death has no meaning when this stuff happens.
Why are you booing me? I'm right. In all seriousness, thank you to MCP12 and BrodeurBear for showing up to the premiere and being cool! It was my first time experimenting with premieres and I probably won't do them for EVERY video, but I'll definitely be doing more in the future! And thank you for anyone who watches this video and supports my channel!
If I'm being honest, I disagree on the grounds that I really liked Ultima Thul and the anxiety it gave me even though I thought it was predictable. But I still agree in that I think it could have been done better in some ways, and I appreciate the depth of your analysis and criticism.
I definitely see what they were going for and I'm glad you were able to enjoy it! I definitely get the story's going to hit people differently, and that some people probably really liked it. I'm glad you appreciated my analysis anyway, and I appreciate that you didn't just write it off just because you disagreed, which can happen all too often both in the FFXIV community, and in general!
@@jasonthomas7909 At this point "Y'shtola almost dies" is gonna become the free space on the FFXIV expansion story bingo card. You don't gotta toy with my girl like that SE.
I really think you looked at the scene in totally wrong perspective from their original intention. If they tried to simulate scions die, nobody would buy it anyway because they invested a lot to make your dungeon NPC party, so why would they invest so much time and money into that just to remove it? From my point of view in the entire expansion was pointing out more and more how important the mission of the Warrior of Light it is. In every region characters needed to put all their trust in the warrior of light to the point where they left behind the only evacuation plan, to give the warrior a chance to save the planet. The scene was just building extra weight on the importance of this quest, adding all the friends of the warrior of light, resting on their shoulders. The only thing that annoyed me in the scene was the dungeon at the end. This dungeon ruined the entire scene for me because they needed to bring back the scions just to give you the party for it. I really think the best conclusion would be if they didn't had this one and the scions were coming back in the middle of the battle with Endsinger to save you by surprise.
BTW, you probably missed that, but even at the start when they were explaining about Thancred, they said he is not dead, but keeping the Ultima Thule's energy away to keep them alive and if he dies, they will die too. So the stage was set with the condition he is not actually dead. So my theory comes from there, because why would they set the stage by stating he is still alive if they want you to think the scions die in the scene. However, I kind of agree they were able to make stronger scenes for most characters, but I don't agree for Y'shtola and Alisaie. Y'shtola is all about science and knowedge from quite a lot of time, so her scene kind of made logic to her. Alisaie express worries about them not being able to help the Warrior of Light enough from really long time too, it is her motivation to push hard to become better warrior herself, so her scene was pretty logical too.
@@Grebeny I address this very thing in the video. They come out from the start mentioning that the Scions aren't dead when they disappear. The problem is, if they remove the stakes of losing the Scions by acknowledging you won't lose them, then what is the purpose of these scenes. As I mentioned in the video, they aren't convincing emotional death scenes, they aren't good character moments for each of the Scions (more on that later), and your idea that it's to put more weight on the WoL doesn't really land with me. At no point is the WoL challenged by anything that happens in Ultima Thule, between Thancred disappearing and bringing all the Scions back. If they did bring the Scions back in the middle of Endsinger, or after some big confrontation, that would entirely recontextualize these scenes and actually give them meaning, but my whole argument is that, as they are in the game now, they lack emotional weight. They also don't give the WoL any scenes or dialogue options that really shows any emotional struggle outside of the very end when we're all alone and get a single debuff that makes us walk slow. Where was the emotion we had when we were crying over Haurchefant's body, or when we were watching G'raha "die" as the Exarch, or any of the othe countless scenes where the Warrior of light does more than make a sad face. That's my point with the scene with Alisaie and Alphinaud. I don't think anyone's particularly off-character, but I just wish they had actually allowed the twins and the WoL to express themselves more, and contextualize it around their own grief, not just the burdens the WoL is facing, especially since throughout the whole conversation, the only one who gets emotional is Alisaie. Even if they wanted her to say what she did about not wanting to put that weight all on the WoL, she could've at least acknowledged her own feelings towards it. Also as one last point. I absolutely agree that Y'shtola's passionate about research and knowledge and discovery, but she's never been so overtly heavy handed about it before, and it really felt like her whole speech was a petty response to the aliens saying she's prefer to live in ignorance. That isn't exactly out of character for a conversation for Y'shtola, but we're talking about a scene where her passions, views, and convictions are supposed to forge the way forwards in the face of despair and she's going to lose her physical body afterwards. Look at every other scene where Y'shtola risks her life. In ARR she brings down the tunnel to help her friends escape the betrayal of the Crystal Braves. In Stormblood, she puts herself in harm's way to save Lyse from Zenos, and is severely wounded. In Shadowbringers, she jumps off a cliff to save an antidote that was the only hope of saving the Night's Blessed, who she had been leading and helping for 3 years at the time. Y'sthola's all about science and knowledge, but she's also a very passionate person when the chips are down, and framing her sacrifice around her just being nerdy magic researcher girl rather than someone willing to risk it all for the sake of the world and everyone she cares about was entirely out of character for anything we've seen from her thus-far.
@@SaltExarch but you pointed out "later", it was not later, but the very first thing in this part of the game. Just after they jumped out of the ship Meteon explained them Thancred is not dead. This is the reason I say it was more about losing the helping hands, no seeing them die. I will not lie, for me at least especially the last scene with the twins and the walk to the top was really amazing and emotional. I understand the technical reasons why scions came back before the battle (they promised to not add cinematics in the middle fo dungeons/trials after ARR), but I feel like, this single battle needed to be exception to the rule or even split it on two trails, like it is the grand finale, don't waste it just because someone may skip and get annoyed, IDK.
@@Grebeny I meant later as in, later after you explore Ultima Thule a bit. There's a bit at the beginning where you're investigating and searching for Thancred before Meteion shows up and tells you. Also my point was that if it was about losing the helping hands, then it still doesn't really work because the WoL doesn't do anything after losing the Scions. You walk up to Meteion, and then almost immediately summon Emet and Hythodaeus, and they change Ultima Thule so you can summon your friends back. You don't experience any hardships or challenges with them gone. I agree that if they had changed the ending fight to bring the Scions back after the dungeon or in the middle of the Endsinger fight, that would change, but as the story is, I don't think the scenes serve that purpose well. That being said, I do totally get being emotional with these scenes, and I do think they're going to hit differently for different people, I just personally think they could've done about a dozen other things that would've been more emotionally and/or narratively impactful, or at least that explored depths to these characters in a way that felt less awkward and strung together in my opinion.
I felt differently about Ultima Thule because I never read it as fake out death scenes. I didn't see Meteion as some big bad that needed to be stabbed to death, but a confused child that needed to be properly raised cause her father sent her out into the universe having done a garbo job of raising her. So I saw the loss of Scions as Dynamis Debates. And what I and thus my WoL would have been thinking at that moment is not only did Hydaelyn torture us for 12k years so we'd get good at taking it. She made sure the people on the ship were tortured in the exact right way as to be able to endure the pain Meteion came across on her journey. And it was just too well aligned to be coincidence, so I was mostly thinking about how much influence has she had over the course of our lives to shape us for this moment. Our first obstacle is survival and we have Thancred. Our second obstacle is dragons and we have Estinien. Come on!
Plus I knew since we do trials alone they needed to be taken out the picture somehow and I figured this was how they were gonna do it and once I defeated Meteion I'd summon them back. And incase I hadn't figured out I had the ability to do this by myself, which I did, Y'shtola flat out tells me which makes me think the writers didn't want anyone to believe they were actually dying to make pathways. Not to mention G'raha makes me promise to bring him back and the twins are more concerned with me having to carry on alone than their "deaths" which makes me think they never seriously meant for the player to read these as deaths but instead character moments which highlighted how each Scion's journey had made them fit to defeat one of Meteion's types of despair.
So when I was able to summon them all back before the final battle, I was surprised and wondered if they had made yet another trial that could be fought with NPCs. I guess I was never bored because I was instead paying attention to see how each Scion fit as the solution to each problem rather than thinking I was watching a bunch of death scenes. My WoL would have been more chill about the whole thing than the game character was, it's not like the Scions haven't been disembodied souls before. That's an average Tuesday for them at this point. And I'm holding a rock that gives form to the formless. Come on, we good. Teach that little girl how to endure trauma so we can get outta here.
While I think that explanation of Ultima Thule would be the best reading I've seen so far, I can't really agree that this was the writer's intentions, mostly because, if they had meant the Ultima Thule to represent that, they wouldn't have utterly botched the execution. Thancred's half-speech to Meteion before he was unmade was entirely generic given what we knew at that point. He basically just says "even if times are tough, giving into despair is bad" which is the absolute bare minimum take you get from his story and his character arc. Then you have Estinien to the old dragons, which, as mentioned in the video, is probably the best and most succinct. Honestly I don't have any faults in his speech and I feel his aligns the closest to your interpretation.
Then there's Y'shtola, and I'm sorry, but her speech is out of left field. She gets pissed because the weird jellyfish aliens tell her she wouldn't understand their explanation for the heat-death of the universe or why they want to die. Does she say that she can't understand their simple desire to give up? Does she say that she would fight tooth and nail to figure out a solution? Does she condemn them for being narrow-minded, and not taking any chance, no matter how slight? No. She gets mad that they said she'd be better off not knowing and that they expected her to take their word for it. The thing I love about Y'shtola is that, despite often being considered, and also wanting to come across as, the composed, scholarly, refined one, she can get pretty reckless and emotional. She used Flow to save people close to her, not once, but TWICE, with only the slimmest hopes of making it out alive. If it was a matter of ideals and conviction, the supposed theme of Ulima Thule being "Hope vs. Despair" , she'd tell those alien bastards to shove it for giving up on a potential solution and just wanting to die, and then turn to the WoL and tell them that there was a slim chance they could all come back, not tell them not to try. That would've not only fit far better with her character, but aligned better with the supposed goal of being an antithesis to Meteion's view of the world.
G'raha's speech is, like I mentioned in the video, a rehashing of his speech in 5.3, when he had no idea whether his gamble to survive and be revived back in the Source would actually work, so using him asking the WoL for more adventures I don't think is much evidence he expected to survive, only that he thought there might be a way to. And the twins and the WoL's interactions after that were really just not well written at all. No matter your interpretations of Ultima Thule, whether they be fakeout death scenes or some bigger argument, can explain why they decided to make Alisaie literally speak for the WoL and not even reflect, a little bit, on what happened. Same goes for Alphinaud. He of all people should've had something more to say about the situation, whether it be pointing out that hope wasn't loss or lamenting the loss of his closest companions. Hell, if we were going for the former, he could've pointed out his failure with the Crystal Braves, and that while at the time he felt hope was lost, and he was responsible for the loss of everyone, that he continued to forge onwards in the face of his despair.
Under the most charitable of interpretations, I think that the writers might have wanted to incorporate some of those themes into Ultima Thule, but in the end, they were either pressured to or decided on their own to also try to ramp up the drama by making the player think the Scions might not make it to the end this time, and at best you have a segment of the story that's confused and is trying to bite off more than it can chew effectively, and at worse is counterproductive to the story of EW as a whole.
Sadly it's been a trend with square and many companies not to kill off characters or bring them back. Happens a lot with western comics. In some cases death has no meaning when this stuff happens.
Why are you booing me? I'm right.
In all seriousness, thank you to MCP12 and BrodeurBear for showing up to the premiere and being cool! It was my first time experimenting with premieres and I probably won't do them for EVERY video, but I'll definitely be doing more in the future! And thank you for anyone who watches this video and supports my channel!
If I'm being honest, I disagree on the grounds that I really liked Ultima Thul and the anxiety it gave me even though I thought it was predictable. But I still agree in that I think it could have been done better in some ways, and I appreciate the depth of your analysis and criticism.
I definitely see what they were going for and I'm glad you were able to enjoy it! I definitely get the story's going to hit people differently, and that some people probably really liked it. I'm glad you appreciated my analysis anyway, and I appreciate that you didn't just write it off just because you disagreed, which can happen all too often both in the FFXIV community, and in general!
@@SaltExarch But I mean I totally get what you mean. Like after seeing Y'shtola almost die AGAIN I was like "Alright come on now".
@@jasonthomas7909 At this point "Y'shtola almost dies" is gonna become the free space on the FFXIV expansion story bingo card. You don't gotta toy with my girl like that SE.
I really think you looked at the scene in totally wrong perspective from their original intention. If they tried to simulate scions die, nobody would buy it anyway because they invested a lot to make your dungeon NPC party, so why would they invest so much time and money into that just to remove it? From my point of view in the entire expansion was pointing out more and more how important the mission of the Warrior of Light it is. In every region characters needed to put all their trust in the warrior of light to the point where they left behind the only evacuation plan, to give the warrior a chance to save the planet. The scene was just building extra weight on the importance of this quest, adding all the friends of the warrior of light, resting on their shoulders.
The only thing that annoyed me in the scene was the dungeon at the end. This dungeon ruined the entire scene for me because they needed to bring back the scions just to give you the party for it. I really think the best conclusion would be if they didn't had this one and the scions were coming back in the middle of the battle with Endsinger to save you by surprise.
BTW, you probably missed that, but even at the start when they were explaining about Thancred, they said he is not dead, but keeping the Ultima Thule's energy away to keep them alive and if he dies, they will die too. So the stage was set with the condition he is not actually dead. So my theory comes from there, because why would they set the stage by stating he is still alive if they want you to think the scions die in the scene. However, I kind of agree they were able to make stronger scenes for most characters, but I don't agree for Y'shtola and Alisaie. Y'shtola is all about science and knowedge from quite a lot of time, so her scene kind of made logic to her. Alisaie express worries about them not being able to help the Warrior of Light enough from really long time too, it is her motivation to push hard to become better warrior herself, so her scene was pretty logical too.
@@Grebeny I address this very thing in the video. They come out from the start mentioning that the Scions aren't dead when they disappear. The problem is, if they remove the stakes of losing the Scions by acknowledging you won't lose them, then what is the purpose of these scenes. As I mentioned in the video, they aren't convincing emotional death scenes, they aren't good character moments for each of the Scions (more on that later), and your idea that it's to put more weight on the WoL doesn't really land with me. At no point is the WoL challenged by anything that happens in Ultima Thule, between Thancred disappearing and bringing all the Scions back. If they did bring the Scions back in the middle of Endsinger, or after some big confrontation, that would entirely recontextualize these scenes and actually give them meaning, but my whole argument is that, as they are in the game now, they lack emotional weight. They also don't give the WoL any scenes or dialogue options that really shows any emotional struggle outside of the very end when we're all alone and get a single debuff that makes us walk slow. Where was the emotion we had when we were crying over Haurchefant's body, or when we were watching G'raha "die" as the Exarch, or any of the othe countless scenes where the Warrior of light does more than make a sad face.
That's my point with the scene with Alisaie and Alphinaud. I don't think anyone's particularly off-character, but I just wish they had actually allowed the twins and the WoL to express themselves more, and contextualize it around their own grief, not just the burdens the WoL is facing, especially since throughout the whole conversation, the only one who gets emotional is Alisaie. Even if they wanted her to say what she did about not wanting to put that weight all on the WoL, she could've at least acknowledged her own feelings towards it.
Also as one last point. I absolutely agree that Y'shtola's passionate about research and knowledge and discovery, but she's never been so overtly heavy handed about it before, and it really felt like her whole speech was a petty response to the aliens saying she's prefer to live in ignorance. That isn't exactly out of character for a conversation for Y'shtola, but we're talking about a scene where her passions, views, and convictions are supposed to forge the way forwards in the face of despair and she's going to lose her physical body afterwards. Look at every other scene where Y'shtola risks her life. In ARR she brings down the tunnel to help her friends escape the betrayal of the Crystal Braves. In Stormblood, she puts herself in harm's way to save Lyse from Zenos, and is severely wounded. In Shadowbringers, she jumps off a cliff to save an antidote that was the only hope of saving the Night's Blessed, who she had been leading and helping for 3 years at the time. Y'sthola's all about science and knowledge, but she's also a very passionate person when the chips are down, and framing her sacrifice around her just being nerdy magic researcher girl rather than someone willing to risk it all for the sake of the world and everyone she cares about was entirely out of character for anything we've seen from her thus-far.
@@SaltExarch but you pointed out "later", it was not later, but the very first thing in this part of the game. Just after they jumped out of the ship Meteon explained them Thancred is not dead. This is the reason I say it was more about losing the helping hands, no seeing them die. I will not lie, for me at least especially the last scene with the twins and the walk to the top was really amazing and emotional. I understand the technical reasons why scions came back before the battle (they promised to not add cinematics in the middle fo dungeons/trials after ARR), but I feel like, this single battle needed to be exception to the rule or even split it on two trails, like it is the grand finale, don't waste it just because someone may skip and get annoyed, IDK.
@@Grebeny I meant later as in, later after you explore Ultima Thule a bit. There's a bit at the beginning where you're investigating and searching for Thancred before Meteion shows up and tells you. Also my point was that if it was about losing the helping hands, then it still doesn't really work because the WoL doesn't do anything after losing the Scions. You walk up to Meteion, and then almost immediately summon Emet and Hythodaeus, and they change Ultima Thule so you can summon your friends back. You don't experience any hardships or challenges with them gone. I agree that if they had changed the ending fight to bring the Scions back after the dungeon or in the middle of the Endsinger fight, that would change, but as the story is, I don't think the scenes serve that purpose well.
That being said, I do totally get being emotional with these scenes, and I do think they're going to hit differently for different people, I just personally think they could've done about a dozen other things that would've been more emotionally and/or narratively impactful, or at least that explored depths to these characters in a way that felt less awkward and strung together in my opinion.
completely disagree with this video, but its always worth hearing different opinions nonetheless.