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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.
Yeah, that seems correct. I don't think you'll be disappointed with the rest of how Tural goes. There's definitely still warts-and-all for every one of the cultures you encounter; the Pelupelu, Moblins, and X'braal, just come across as a little minimized compared to others.
((And given how much Gridania's warts get minimized, even including the WHM class quests, that's saying something.))
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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