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hmm for me the woke was mostly in how fake the world felt. A land that's full of diverse peoples that have been at war until just recently but they're all holding hands and singing kumbaya and if there happens to be a disagreement here or there it's fixed in an instant by something like tasty food, or resources. They've all had their cultures diminished to nothingness in just a few years of Galool ja ja's rule or something. Usually it's interesting to see how Japanese interpret foreign cultures via anime and other media since they are so insular they don't seem to bothered when the opinions are incorrect or offend. This felt like they were working with outside consulting groups until they got the usual soulless western media style fictional cultures that have all their rough edges sanded off.
Eh... there's still a lot of weird cultures going on. The entire point of the Lay of Repast joke is specifically about how two Mamool Ja are willing to overlook the Mamook side of that tradition. The Lay of Gold is the only one that doesn't rely on historical stuff, instead the modern (Dawnservant-inspired) Pelu focus on trade. It's less obvious in Tural the city, and the big focus on Big Fat Tacos kinda does do the cultures-as-foods-and-funny-hats bit, but if you look around there's still different parts of the city more focused on Mamook, X'braal, Pelu, and Hhetsarro architectures.
Even where the monoculture answer 'works', like Koana's solution to the Lay of Reeds, it's noteworthy that it doesn't work better: it heals fewer plots of reeds than the ritual magic, and likely has little beneficial effect on the wildlife. In Shaaloani zone, the monoculture sheriff is reasonable but completely fleeced; the local Old Ways of dueling saves the day. And groups like the Yok Huy are both fractured in tolerating Turalyi dominance at all, and even those that 'tolerate' it barely interact with others.
There's definitely a problem, but the game struggling with treating each zone as real cultures and simultaneously bottle episodes that can be solved in at most a dungeon or trial has been a thing since ARR -- the only people you can't persuade that way are literally brainwashed by primals, beast tribe or Ishgardian alike -- and lampshaded as early as Stormblood. The cultures here are a little less interestingly weird than those of the Au Ra tribes, but the Au Ra were far outliers: contrast the Doma, Ishgard, Bozja, so on.
The harder part is that it's openly judgemental about traditions: both the 'sacred brothers' tradition and Koana's abandonment are explicitly written as bad, in contrast to Yok Huy remembrances or the Hhetsarro tribe's interactions with their beasts of burden. That's not completely unprecedented (ie, Ala Mhigan militarism and kings, Limosan piracy).
But I don't know that they're woke in that sense. The sacred brothers deal in particular is not especially woke-flavored ('interracial marriages are bad for the kids?')
Yea I could see it just being bad writing did mention that in my original post that this is probably the worst story we've gotten since ARR. Spending so little time on each culture would also force them to appear shallow rather than it being woke consulting.
It was weird that they seemed to feel so rushed to tour all the local cultures and not leave them open to exploration later considering this is supposed to be the 1st book in their new arc. ARR introduced a bunch of different people that we had smaller interactions with or whose story didn't really come to the forefront until later. You interact with Ishgard early on, but don't go there and really get a deeper understanding until Heavensward. A lot of the Thanallan / ala mhigo and lala plots don't get wrapped up til Stormblood even. This gave the player some mystery or stuff to think about and look forward to in later patches. For w/e reason we didn't get that with Tural. Every culture needs to be tied up with a neat bow by the time we leave.
With the lay of reeds quest this still felt woke to me. It wasn't written like, "tradition works," the point of it was that our lib arts degree majors know better than unfeeling STEM. Wuk isn't a traditionalist, bizarrely she seems to know nothing about her home country despite having lived there her whole life, she is more a "listen to people's lived experiences" type.
For me it was hard not to pattern match it to woke though with the shallow feel good cultures, girl boss mc, beloved characters being sidelined for the sake of propping up new mc etc. Even had a disney esque themesong. There has been a lot more western pressure on Japanese brands and the ff14 community is probably one of the more degenerate and weird ones out of all the mmo's. They've pressured yoshi p to make perv changes like allowing female gear on male chars and stuff.
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