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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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