OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
The impression I have is that Tural is meant to be something like Eorzea, only a generation or two onwards. It's pretty clear there are deep tensions and divisions under the surface, and Tural is not as harmonious as it presents itself as. It's only tenuously unified out of a combination of love for and fear of Gulool Ja Ja, who is the Warrior of Light of his society. Much like Eorzea, it seems like Tural was a group of quarrelling tribes and city-states, and it was brought together out of crisis by a superlatively-capable warrior-adventurer. That sounds like, well, what you the player character did for Eorzea. But now it's fifty years later, Gulool isn't going to last forever, and what he accomplished may well fall apart.
Possibly I'll be disappointed later on, but right now I don't get the feeling that Tural is necessarily all that utopian. Before this FFXIV has generally been good at finding the balance with societies, I think. Even the sympathetic city-states (all six Eorzean states, Doma, Hingashi, Bozja, etc.) have skeletons in their closet and some unsympathetic traits, and likewise even the villainous nations (mostly Garlemald) have been shown to possess virtues, and be home to many likeable characters. I think the closest we get to purely utopian/dystopian societies is in Shadowbringers, with the Crystarium and Eulmore, and even then Eulmore's corruption is mostly due to Vauthry, and once he's removed you can appeal to the people and they start to make rapid improvements. That mostly leaves the Crystarium as the most one-note society in the game, and I'd happily say that the Crystarium is the blandest, least interesting civilisation in the game. I suppose there's the Ancients as well, but I think the Ancient society is pretty clearly depicted as horribly, dangerously flawed, and even perhaps dystopian in its own way, simultaneously naive and immensely, recklessly powerful. (I have run into people reading the world of the Ancients as uncomplicatedly utopian and good, but I question those people's reading comprehension.)
This is actually one of the reasons why I think FFXIV's overall portrayal of the world is pretty conservative-friendly, or even surprisingly anti-progressive - there are no utopias, and social improvement is only possible through slow, incremental work, which seems to always require renouncing simple binaries of good and bad, or oppressor and oppressed. This often requires tools that would be unsatisfying to a progressive mindset - I remember enjoying the way that both Ala Mhigan/Ul'dahn and Garlean/Thavnairian relations, for repairing those states, explicitly had to be built on capitalism and mutual advantage. Watching Nanamo gradually figure out how to make the Syndicate work for the common good, to wield the power of coin, of market and profit, for the good was very satisfying. Plus I think it's relevant that multiple sympathetic states (Gridania, Ishgard, Hingashi) are relatively anti-immigrant and isolationist, and this is not presented as something we need to change or fix. Gridania has every right to limit its borders to what it believes that its natives and the forest can support. The Hingans have a perfect right to not allow foreigners deeper into their country. This isn't a blandly progressive worldview.
If nothing else, the Ancients' major sin is hubris - they act like gods, fail to reckon with their own moral flaws or capacity for evil, and assume that they have an unlimited right to remake the world to suit their needs. The one good Ancient, Venat, is also the one who's a monotheist - the one who, in her key character moment, confesses to you that she perceives the presence of some kind of divinity beyond her. That seems a lot like a Judeo-Christian Fall narrative, up to the point where the Ancients' Babel collapses, and many nations - or parallel worlds - are spread out from the ruins. Venat's appearance as a kind of guardian angel with a flaming sword, guarding the way back to the Tree of Life, only fits that further. And it seems relevant that Endwalker's finale, the conclusion to the grand story they'd been building for years, echoes the conclusion to 1.0, in that the universe is saved by the power of prayer.
Certainly there are lots of fan readings out there that disagree with me, but I think there's a lot of room for reading FFXIV's story, at least from ARR through to Endwalker, as being quite conservative.
Much of that tracks with how I feel so far. I don't mind it being a lower-stakes expansion, and indeed I think that's a good thing. For comparison, the last few Elder Scrolls Online expansion stories - Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom - went from a demon lord seeking to destroy the world to a fun vacation and peace conference on a resort island to a demon lord who might accidentally destroy the world, and the most fun expansion was the low-stakes one at the resort. FFXIV in particular seems badly in need of lowering the stakes somewhat and just exploring an interesting corner of Hydaelyn.
My negative feeling on Dawntrail at the moment is mainly just that it's, well, boring. Tural and Tuliyollal are noticeably bland and uninspiring places compared to the last places we've been, the villains are tight-lipped and boring, and the heroic characters we meet are likewise very paint-by-numbers. I don't hate Wuk Lamat, but I'd tend to agree that she is badly over-exposed, particularly because there's just not a lot there, in terms of personality? She'd be fine as a supporting character, I think, but she's being asked to hold up the entire plot, and that's too much for her.
Part of me wonders if it's just that I've played too much FFXIV and I'm tired of it. After all, Norvrandt was also pretty uninspiring for most of the setting (Eulmore excepted; it was delightfully macabre). We're coming off several expansions with Zenos playing a major role, and Zenos was awful. However, I can't help but think that something is wrong, because I am really struggling to find the motivation to play Dawntrail. I just don't care about this place or about any of these people. Where I cared about Ishgard's fate, or about Ala Mhigo's struggle for freedom, here I just do not care who becomes Dawnservant.
Anyway, I asked because I wondered if there was a 'culture war' angle? If Dawntrail is just a mediocre and boring expansion, then that's fine - I've played a lot of MMORPGs and they all spin their wheels sometimes. But is there anything else inflaming fan feeling? You mention a 'Trans Superstar' perception, for instance. I vaguely heard something negative about Wuk Lamat's voice actor, but I can't immediately find any evidence of anything controversial connected to Sena Bryer (edit, googled, apparently Bryer is trans, but... meh, you can't tell that from anything in-game), and the acting itself, in-game, is... fine? Not amazing, but fine. (Plus, well, remember ARR? FFXIV has had some very bad voice acting in the past, and Wuk Lamat's nowhere near ARR-Minfilia.) I also ran into criticisms of Dawntrail's story for being a very generic "yay for multiculturalism!" story, but then, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker all had major subplots or even central story arcs about uniting disparate communities or convincing old enemies to understand each other and make peace or some variant on it, so again I feel like the issue there isn't the premise, but rather the execution. It's not that understanding and seeking harmony between diverse local factions is bad, because we've been doing that in-game for a decade - it seems, at least to me, just that Tural is boring.
I admit I find the culture war angle with FFXIV a bit odd, because otherwise I would have thought that FFXIV is the most, for lack of a better term, 'conservative' of the major MMOs currently on the market.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Out of morbid curiosity, I've been playing FFXIV for years, but have only been making my way through Dawntrail slowly - its setting and story thus far haven't been bad, but I'd say they've been aggressively mid, in a way that makes me feel more bored than anything else.
I've generally avoided any fandom discussion of it. Dare I ask what the perceived issues are?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Do successes through the courts not count? I believe that if you look at the last fifty years or so, there's been a steady march of increasing gun rights in the US. My understanding is that prior to the 1960s, it was actually quite unusual to read the Second Amendment as preserving an individual right to own firearms, and state-level laws on it could be quite restrictive. Since then, however, both judicial and legislative pressure, owing partly to advocacy by gun rights organisations like the NRA, have established and expanded individual rights to gun ownership. This is particularly obvious if you look at, for instance, the spread of right-to-carry laws.
Honestly, this surprises me because I would have said that gun rights is pretty much the only social issue on which the right has been consistently winning. They're losing or at best holding steady on everything else, but guns are the one place where they are successfully advancing.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Er, but you can, can't you? It depends on the trousers, certainly, but someone wearing sweatpants and no underwear may well show it visibly.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Er, are you implying they shouldn't be?
Going out without underwear as a man is, at best, slobbish. I'm in favour of some mild level of social pressure to get men to wear underwear.
I don't think it would very hard, because underwear is comfortable (if yours isn't, perhaps you've got the wrong size?), and indeed I'd feel much more uncomfortable going out without it, but still - yes, men should wear underwear.
No comment on bras. I don't wear them and don't have a good sense of their utility.
I think what strikes me most about the article is, well, how much it's about nothing? Just genuinely nothing. A friend of Marcotte's wrote something on Twitter that Marcotte found vaguely intriguing as an issue, which sets Marcotte off on a wave of wild speculations (there are a lot of maybes and perhapses in the middle!), and which she actually backs down from repeatedly:
Educating the public about their secret ballot rights is good, but don't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome. [...] Truthfully, I doubt many women want to vote for Harris and hide it from their husbands. Voting behavior, marriage, and identity don't work like that. People tend to be married to people they agree with politically.
But at this point, what remains of the thesis? Marcotte still finds 'the picture of a wife thumbing her nose at her MAGA husband by voting for Harris... arresting'? Okay? But that's... not news, or even a respectable thesis of any kind. That's just Marcotte imagining a thing that she thinks is neat.
...okay?
Good for her?
What's the actual content here? Marcotte really doesn't like the GOP, big shock there, and she has concocted a wholly imaginary fantasy scenario that she herself admits probably isn't going to exist, and written an essay about it?
I know pumping out an essay every week like clockwork must be hard, but still, this is really weak.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Would something like the Bruderhof count for you? They're not fully Amish, but they do form little Christian communities or villages in the middle of a larger society.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
It's not something I've experienced personally, though I've heard enough similar stories about urban decay in the United States that it's not an unfamiliar genre to me. The stories I have heard, though, suggest to me that the region is relevant, insofar as it lets us draw some conclusions around different states, governments, and policies.
So I guess I think it is relevant, if only because I can't think of much to say about the idea that an unknown city in an unknown country with an unknown government and unknown social fabric has a problem with drug addicts. That's not even a data point, surely?
The top level poster is under no obligation to tell me, of course - though then I'm free to find the initial complaint rather pointless.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Nothing in the top-level post indicates he's in the United States - I don't even know which country he's talking about.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Well, sure, but I would have thought that the name of a city by itself wouldn't be enough to make him identifiable, and since the content of the post is a complaint about his local neighbourhood, I feel that knowing where that neighbourhood is, at least in very broad terms, is relevant to understanding the complaint.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I was thinking of a particular city or region.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Where's 'here', out of curiosity?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
It's not clear to me how being a wonk or looking weird are bad, or discredit him in any way.
I'm not defending him, to be clear. I'm only saying that those specifically are not reasonable criticisms of him.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Oh, certainly. To the extent that Homeric heroes model the values of Mycenaean elite society, they do so aspirationally. I think the overall thesis survives that, though.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I'm not sure they do all believe the same things about cancellation.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
None of those people seem very much like each other.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
You have no idea whether or not this is a woman, or whether they're born female, so just admit it. And before you try to say the onus is somehow on the other side, bear in mind you just made the argument for why they don't have access to that evidence either.
Doesn't that prove too much?
By this standard, no one on the Motte should ever be allowed to claim anybody's biological sex.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
It is the briar patch story. The tar baby is how Brer Rabbit was captured - "please don't throw me in the briar patch!" was the trick he used to escape.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Isn't Song of the South a Brer Rabbit retelling?
I'm not sure how you tell Brer Rabbit without the story with the tar baby. It's the most famous Brer Rabbit story by a wide margin, isn't it? When I read Brer Rabbit when I was a small child, I genuinely didn't realise it had any connection to African-Americans at all. It wasn't until I was in my 20s, in an unrelated context, that I discovered the stories that had delighted young-Olive came out of an African-American folk tradition. At the time, then, I took the story about the tar baby entirely at face value - it was an effigy made of tar and dressed up that Brer Rabbit genuinely mistook for a child, hit, got stuck on the tar, and thereby was trapped for Brer Fox.
Wiki tells me that the story predates any use of 'tar baby' as a slur, so... I don't know, it seems silly, to me. It is actually a story about a baby made of tar, and nothing in the story has anything to do with race.
Maybe I'm naive here, but... there is just genuinely nothing in the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby that involves race. It's a pretty classic trickster archetype story - the fox traps the rabbit, and the rabbit cleverly tricks his way out of it.
'Bear Necessities', incidentally, is from The Jungle Book. Nothing to do with Song of the South. I thought the famous ear worm from Song of the South was 'Zip-a-dee-doo-da'?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I think you might be putting too much weight on Germanic descent or identity? As I noted, we have Western European warrior-aristocrats (partially Germanic) behaving substantially similarly to Mycenaean warrior-aristocrats (not Germanic), and if you want I'm perfectly happy to extend the comparison to Chinese or Japanese or Nahua peoples, or really anything else you like. I think there's probably a successful warrior-aristocrat package, so to speak, which recurs even across very different ethnic contexts, and it doesn't descend linearly from a single ur-warrior group so much as it's convergent evolution or natural selection. Samurai have much of the same package despite no connection to any other groups we're considering.
That said, even if you think it's distinctively PIE or Germanic, that doesn't undermine the specific observation, as you grant - that Nietzsche's historical analogies are extremely strained and implausible. Neither Christians nor Greek pagans resemble his caricatures.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
The issue is not migration, the issue is atheism, no-fault divorce, LBGT, obesity, lack of classical architecture, consumerism and hollywood. The issue isn't migration, it is a symptom.
Wouldn't many of those things also be symptoms?
Lack of classical architecture, really? Maybe a change in architecture is a symptom of cultural decline, sure, but it does not seem to function very well as an explanation. Likewise I suspect something like obesity is more of a symptom than a cause.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
If I may be permitted a tangent, I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history. If you're determined to push the Christian-slave aspect, you have to ignore not only what Christian martyrs or ascetics thought they were doing, but also the vast numbers of other committed, deeply pious Christians doing stereotypically 'master' things. If I try to think of a person who behaved like a stereotypical 'master', the best example to spring to mind is actually Cortes, and more generally conquistadors, and those are all the products of a Christian civilisation, frequently using explicitly Christian justifications for their actions. We may question Cortes' piety, but we can't do the same for every crusader or king or warlord who seems to fit the same bill - Charlemagne seems to have been sincerely pious, after all.
But more importantly than that, the master morality model fails to accurately describe or predict even pagan Greek aristocrats. If you read Homer somewhat more attentively, you'll notice that the Mycenaean warrior class was, far from being bold amoral power-seekers disregarding any law or constraint in favour of their own desires, intensely concerned with duty, obligation, and right. Their concepts of obligation weren't necessarily ones we would find sympathetic today, but they absolutely exist, and moreover are extremely communally oriented. That's the common theme in Odysseus' voyages - he is repeatedly offered bliss or the achievement of all the world's desires (the Lotus-eaters, Calypso, etc.), and he rejects these because he is nothing outside of the ordered community, the polis, which gives his life meaning. Without the community of which he is a member he is literally nobody, to the extent that he uses that as a pseudonym in the story (and it's also why he recklessly boasts of his name to Polyphemus afterwards; he must place himself within a community, identifying himself as a man with a history, reputation, family, and so on: "Say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, Laertes' son, a native of Ithaca, maimed you!"). Likewise when he returns to Ithaca, when he conceals his name, he appears a poor beggar, because that is all he can be without the name that locates him within the community.
So even the Bronze Age Greek warlord isn't this Nietzschean stereotype. He may be violent, glory-hungry, desperate for achievement, etc., but none of these amount to being unconstrained or amoral.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds. It doesn't even need to be violent (pagan emperors and Christian kings both patronised the building of monuments, in order to bring shine to their name), but in the case of literature it often is - Achilles is desperate to go to the Trojan War to win glory, and in the same way, Yvain picks fights and is desperate to go on the tournament circuit. For a noble warrior class, glory and reputation are the fundamental concerns.
Now it can be a bit more complicated than that, and both traditions but especially the Christian do problematise this desperation somewhat. The shade of Achilles appears in the Odyssey and confesses that he would rather be alive, even if a poor slave, than one of the glorious dead, in a way that seems to cast some doubt on his earlier values. Likewise for a character like Yvain, that glory-lust is presented as a character flaw, which leads to his downfall and he must redeem himself through anonymous service before finally reclaiming his name.
Anyway, this is not to say that there aren't any shifts or transformations in the way people thought about morality through the rise of Christianity, and it's true that Christianity prizes compassion and humility in a way that the ancient Greeks did not, or at least did not explicitly. But I think Nietzsche projects his master/slave distinction on to them in a way that does not accurately describe either world.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Rites of absolution and return to society are attested well before Christianity, aren't they? Think of, for instance, Jason needing to visit a seer and purify himself of the crime of murdering Absyrtus.
That sounds fair, then. Perhaps when I finish it I'll talk about it in the regular fun thread or something. Thank you for the interesting diversion!
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