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venus-is-in-bloom · 1 year

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"All for the Empire of Eorzea!"

On Final Fantasy XIV and the liberal doctrine of imperialism

Over the past few months, following the release of Final Fantasy XIV's latest paid expansion, Endwalker, public interest in the game has skyrocketed. Plenty of fairly big-name YouTubers and Twitch streamers have picked up the game, praising its gameplay loop and especially its extremely long story and in-depth worldbuilding. Among all this discussion it has become increasingly remarkable that many commentators, even those who espouse at least moderately progressive politics and who are happy to point out harmful ideas in openly propagandist media such as the Call of Duty franchise or Axis Powers Hetalia, have not yet brought the same critical lens to bear on the strongly political messages of FFXIV's extremely politically-focused writing.

We (myself, @everyone-needs-a-hoopoe, and @glamoplasm), three players each with hundreds of hours of playtime and full experience with the main story up to Endwalker, have committed ourselves, partly out of our passion for analysis and partly for our peace of mind, to presenting our own brief examination of one of the game's core themes—a theme so central that the other elements of the story can be seen to revolve around it.

This particular theme is that of the supposed rightness of imperial domination, supported by a series of sub-doctrines:

that it is in the nature of people to rebel against civilisation and seek its destruction;

that their subordination or willing loyalty to a good governing authority is necessary to turn their base natures to good purposes; and therefore

that any act rebelling against a governing authority, unless it is in service to another governing authority, is categorically harmful and must be stopped.

Some criticisms require only a sentence or at most a paragraph to give voice to. This one, however, requires investigation of large sections of the text. To best ensure that this analysis is understandable, rather than establishing our points exactly, we'll be following a more organic path—starting from the surface of the narrative, and focusing on those details that people notice first, before peering deeper and deeper into its basic structure.

For those who would rather not read an essay on Tumblr, it is also available as a Google Doc at this link.

1. "Suffering turns you evil."

Let's begin with one of the most egregious examples of poor writing in the early part of the game's core story, A Realm Reborn (or ARR). Specifically, we want to summarise the story surrounding the third dungeon, the Copperbell Mines.

The introduction to the Copperbell Mines is simple. You are an adventurer, and Amajina & Sons Mining Concern has contracted you to kill a group of giants (called hecatoncheires after the figures from Greek myth) that are occupying a mine they want to use.

That could have been it. That could have been the whole story. If so, it would have been a simple, low-effort excuse for players to enter a dungeon and fight monsters, extremely typical of the fantasy genre and totally unremarkable in its lazy allusions to some group of evil half-human monster people. Unfortunately, unprompted by anything, the story begins to give you further details on the root of this conflict.

The hecatoncheires are victims of slavery—specifically, during a previous dynasty, the people of Ul'dah used enchanted helmets to turn them into mindless mine workers, and theirs were the first hands to excavate the Copperbell Mines and strip it of its minerals. At a certain point, the enchantments broke, and the hecatoncheires organised a revolt against their masters. In retaliation, the king of Ul'dah ordered that the whole mine be collapsed on their heads, supposedly killing them all.

However, in your time, Amajina & Sons sought to unearth the mines again, hoping to glean new wealth from them. In doing so, they uncovered the resting place of the hecatoncheires, who had miraculously survived the mine's collapse. The hecatoncheires, we are told, were furious when uncovered. Amajina & Sons immediately set up a perimeter to keep them trapped inside and turned to brave adventurers to seek a solution to the problem of their existence.

This is where you come in. Please slaughter all these revolting slaves! They're getting in the way of our work!

After you fight your way through the Copperbell Mines, killing Gyges the Great, who is presumably their leader, you make a triumphant cheer and return to the surface to receive your thanks. Not long after, Y'shtola, a major supporting character throughout the story, praises you for your quickness to action and your unwavering morals. The game makes no mistake about the fact that, although it was sad they all had to die, you've done the right thing by killing them, and apart from this, the hecatoncheires are never mentioned again.

Except for the hard version of the dungeon. And except for the fact that years down the line, in patch 6.25 for the recent Endwalker expansion, a new dungeon in Ul'dah was added, the Sil'dihn Subterrane, in which the first boss you encounter is another, still-enslaved hecatoncheire. This is one of multiple callbacks showing that the game is not only fully aware of its early roots but making no attempt to distance itself from them.

But let's ignore that. Let's suppose that this really was just some isolated, unpleasant experience, and the rest of ARR is a fairly wholesome story about national pride and resistance against an invading foe, and move on—as many people surely did, relieved to be away from all of that. It's just one bad spot, after all, and one bad spot on an otherwise clean sheet can be overlooked.

Depending on your starting class, FFXIV will begin new characters in the heart of one of the three major city-states in ARR: Gridania, Ul'dah, or Limsa Lominsa. The beginning questline you experience will then follow one of the unique conflicts that each city-state is embroiled in at first before broadening its scope towards the middle of the story. Those conflicts are further elaborated on within class and job quests, as well as the many sidequests and optional content paths the game offers, each replete with story details.

Gridania.

Gridania, in the Twelveswood (or Black Shroud), is at war with the bird-like Ixal. The Ixal collect lumber in the Twelveswood, a fact much resented by Gridania's mystical elementals. Supposedly, this is because they collect too much lumber, or collect it too greedily or carelessly—acts that demand their total expulsion rather than any attempt at compromise. If you dig a bit deeper into the lore, you find out that the Ixal were once local to the Twelveswood, having settled there centuries ago after fleeing Azys Lla, and that the place they've been forced into by Gridania's actions, Xelphatol, is fundamentally unliveable for them as forest dwellers. Their walkways, airships, and shelters are all built from wood—they need it to survive. (Incidentally, the public and private dwellings, tools, and weapons of Gridania itself are also clearly built from wood, something that is apparently acceptable to the forces that govern the Twelveswood—it seems only one state has the elementals' blessing.) In your time in Gridania, you will slaughter countless Ixal in the name of protecting the wood from their intrusions, as well as some for your hunting log, as they are considered de facto enemies whose death requires no justification. This sort of thing becomes a clear pattern as you play through the game.

Gridania is also involved in two other conflicts with more human-like peoples that different quests explore: one with the Keepers of the Moon, and one with the Duskwight Elezen, both of whom suffer brutal and unrelenting discrimination even when nominally accepted within the city's walls. The Keepers of the Moon hunt for survival, and are therefore labelled as poachers; the Duskwights are displaced refugees from their fallen home of Gelmorra, not permitted to partake in Gridania's bounty, who as a people are exclusively represented as bandits and thieves. Certain questlines explore the depths of these conflicts, in each case explaining that although these people are deprived of what they need to survive, they are still wrong for feeling animosity towards the lawkeepers who do the depriving, and the response to their resistance is to put them down by force.

Indeed, Gridania shows very little friendliness towards outsiders. Much of this is justified by the extremely selective and capricious will of the elementals, with whom only the Gridanian head of state can converse. According to this communicated will, Gridania not only turns away refugees but forces them to starve. It expels anyone deemed unfit to dwell in the city or its surrounding villages and destroys through military force anyone that challenges its rule. It's sad that they resist, but necessary that they be killed, for it is the elementals' will.

Ul'dah.

Ul'dah has a different mandate—that of wealth. Coded according to the same orientalist traditions as classic western media like Aladdin, with many short, dark-skinned, scheming men abusing pale, delicate women in need of rescue, it is portrayed as a place where a few powerful merchants rule at the top of society, while the poor wallow in abject misery at the bottom. Ul'dah is where the aforementioned slaughter of the hecatoncheires happens, but its chief conflicts are with the Amalj'aa, which we will cover later, and with a so-called "refugee crisis" that bears eerie similarities—like much of the game—to certain similar occurrences in our world. Final Fantasy XIV wants it both ways: it shows realistically the struggle and poverty of refugees, their vulnerability to exploitation, their helplessness at the hands of a cruel law that would rather see them dead than give them food, shelter, or medicine; yet at the same time it tells you, in no uncertain terms, that Ul'dah is sadly justified in denying them those things—whether out of concern for preserving its own wealth by not letting poor people in, or because most refugees unavoidably become criminals. Multiple questlines have you hunt down wrongdoers among the refugee populace, turning them in to the authorities. None involve those authorities providing refugees with the urgent aid that they require.

Despite the troubling and racially-charged implications that tie into Ul'dah's supposed critique of capitalism, it is still worth addressing. At a certain point in the story, one learns that the Sultana of Ul'dah, Nanamo Ul Namo, was almost certainly placed on the throne as a child after the assassination of her parents in order that the Monetarists, a powerful group of wealthy merchants, might use her as a puppet ruler. After she attempts to step down from her position as Sultana and reform the state into a more egalitarian one, one of the Monetarists, Teledji Adeledji, stages an attempt on her own life as well, and almost succeeds. The culprit is discovered and punished, and after her recovery the Sultana decides not to reform Ul'dah after all, realising that the Monetarists do not want her to do that and deciding they must have a good reason for doing so. She goes on to form a strong partnership with the remaining Monetarists—supposedly a good ending for the state of Ul'dah, where the poor and the displaced suffer eternally, but the city grows ever wealthier. We'll come back to this topic after examining the game's other attempted critique of capitalism, later on.

Limsa Lominsa.

Limsa Lominsa has an interesting history. It is a comparatively young nation, originally founded as an alliance of pirates, who raided the native people—primarily the rodent-like kobolds—of the island where they had settled. As such, its mandate as a state is conditional, and certain powerful pirate crews that predate its formation enjoy not only great freedom but political privilege under its rule—though having Garlemald as an enemy has given the ruling Admiral an opportunity to tighten the yoke on them, forcing them to focus their efforts on the ships of the invaders. Limsa Lominsa initially faces two major conflicts: one with the furred kobolds, and one with the fish-like Sahagin.

The Sahagin conflict is short and simple in scope, so we will cover that first. The Sahagin live primarily under the sea, but much like salmon, in order to reproduce, they have to come to the surface and swim inland to suitable spawning grounds. Historically, the Sahagin had their own established spawning grounds, but the recent Calamity that shook the world rendered these unusable, forcing them to turn to other parts of the coastline—which are controlled by Limsa Lominsa. Limsa Lominsa does not want to give up the use of its land for the sake of someone else's survival, and so guards its shoreline with uncompromising force of arms.

Now it will probably be pointed out that the Sahagin attack Lominsan ships, pillage and slaughter indiscriminately, and engage in comically stereotypical displays of hatred and contempt for their enemies. In the past, they even destroyed an entire village to establish the only spawning grounds they currently have access to. We do not want to deny this—we want to bring it to attention, in fact. You will be noticing that in this case—and in the case of the Ixal—and indeed in the majority of the other cases covered here, the party of the conflict that is desperate and in need is portrayed as being the aggressor, threatening and attacking people indiscriminately and engaging in all sorts of horrible practices such as kidnapping and mutilation. Indeed, the ones who are suffering are always the most depraved and violent, while the ones causing the suffering are always civil, regretful, and repentant. In this framing, surely the civil ones, whose acts of bloodshed happen offscreen, behind closed doors, or amid screeds about ending the "cycle of violence", are in the right?

To put it more clearly, it is not our aim to say that the story does not portray your enemies—the tribes of animal people, the refugees, the poor, and other victims of cruelty at the hands of your allies—as evil. We are in fact claiming the opposite: they are always portrayed as evil. Their representatives and actors are always the most cruel, vile, callous, and hateful people you could imagine: two-bit fantasy enemies to be forgotten after they die. Anyone who is a victim of systemic oppression and who rebels against it is a villain in the eyes of Final Fantasy XIV's narrative, and it spares no measure in painting them as such.

Let us now return to the subject of Limsa Lominsa and the kobolds. The kobolds are noted as the original inhabitants of the island of Vylbrand, where Limsa Lominsa is now located. They occupy a vast subterranean network stretched out through the island's underground, but still need to harvest food and other necessities from the surface. After a period of conflict and invasion, the kobolds and the early Lominsans came to a treaty agreement which would grant the kobolds control over the land they held but give the Lominsans full control over the sea and coast. This treaty the Lominsans were quick to violate afterwards, pushing the kobolds out of the surface entirely and threatening their survival. Nowadays, starving kobolds frequently attempt to steal food, as shown in multiple randomly-occuring FATEs around La Noscea; these are swiftly punished by Limsa Lominsa's army and the faithful mercenaries of the Adventurer's Guild. At a much later point in the story, Limsa Lominsa will eventually enter talks with the kobolds to better their relations, with unclear outcomes if any.

This, too, bears eerie similarities to the conditions of real life. If you live in, say, the occupied land of Aotearoa or any other nation built on stolen land, you may be at least passingly familiar with the idea of legitimising treaties, signed often under duress with unclear wording, specious tactics, and generous reinterpretation by the invading party, that supposedly hand over governance or land ownership.

The primals.

Out of all the conflicts thus far discussed, the ones that govern the flow of the grander story are those between the city-states and the "beast tribes". These animal-like peoples, particularly the ones we have discussed, have much in common in their portrayals. They speak with improper grammar and distinct verbal tics vaguely implying a lack of fluency and some imaginary different native language. They are all described as "tribal". Their societies enforce rigid and unusual power structures and they distrust anyone from outside their group. They do not share technology or overlap culture with human peoples and are therefore shown to be more "primitive" and less knowledgeable. They are ethnically homogenous.

I point all these things out to make them explicit: they are all extremely common in racialised depictions of indigenous people worldwide. From Disney's Peter Pan to Neopets to the Spyro series to Genshin Impact, the funny-talking, ignorant, scantily-clad tribesman who menaces you with a spear is a staple of media and storytelling in the west—and whether by unknowing osmosis or deliberate reflection, much of the rest of the world has begun to absorb it.

In Final Fantasy XIV specifically, one more common thread can be found between the so-called "beast tribes": each of them, in the next stage of the story, summons a primal, a representation of their gods formed out of magic and purposed for war. In the case of the Ixal, the Sahagin, and the Kobolds, there's a very clear motivation for this: they are at risk of extermination, and need to resist it by any means necessary. Perhaps, then, this act of magical summoning, which is mystical and religious in nature, is something to be respected or honoured? No, not at all—in fact, this section of the story is given to establishing that primals are the ultimate evil and must be destroyed at any cost. Why? Primals—yes, the game's only representation of the pseudo-indigenous people's actual gods—force people to serve them through mind control. This is the first and perhaps most influential example of the game's use of "evil mind control" as an ad-hoc justification for why people fighting for a fair cause must nonetheless die.

The reason we did not include the Amalj'aa in the passage on the individual city-states' conflicts is that the possibility of their having a narrative or a motive at all is entirely erased by the mind control plot point. Supposedly, at some point, the Amalj'aa summoned their god, it enthralled them with its magic, and now they are all fanatical servants out to kidnap or kill anyone they meet (except for the one non-brainwashed faction that is sympathetic to Ul'dah instead). This puts on clear display the utter erasure of complex narratives that such a plot point enables—and the same principle extends to the portrayal of the other tribes, who should have been more sympathetic. With superb convenience, it always turns out that the majority of "beastmen" are fanatically loyal to their god, hostile to humans, and must die, whereas a small faction of them despise their god, ally with their oppressors against their god's followers, and are therefore the "good ones"—even if the people they are allied against are fighting for survival. People who are mind-controlled are beyond reason, so there's no reasoning with them. People who are mind-controlled are as good as dead, so there's nothing but passing sadness that you had to do the deed. It is the perfect excuse. At no point is any credence given to the idea that the "bad" tribes' actions might in fact be justified—even though the story has already provided full justification for their actions—because how could you support mind control?

This masterstroke enables the utter demonisation of the oppressed in the "beast tribe" narrative. As we learn, not only do the tribes summon primals to their own detriment, they are being manipulated into summoning them by the game's great evil. They are merely puppets, and once you've killed them, you can move on to the next, grander task in your rise to heroism, with only a few sad words. The focus is no longer on the systemically enforced evil, which reaches the point of genocide, that is the source of the tribes' suffering and desperation. Instead, it is on the idea that primals are the ultimate evil, and that anyone who summons a primal is your enemy, regardless of their reasons for doing so.

ARR as representative of the story.

Before we move on, let's have a quick retrospective on the story so far. You are the once-humble, now-proud instrument of the three city-states of Eorzea, who wage a constant war to drive out and take everything from those who are not either citizens or servants. This war is justified and its casualties are necessary. Your greatest enemies are the "beast tribes", who summon primals, which are evil, and that makes them evil, and means they must be stopped. You are always in the right for doing so. You are a hero.

This is a fairly clear message so far. However, as we get into the leadup to the first expansion story, Heavensward, maybe things will be different. Many people regard the ARR experience as a sort of black sheep, a drudgery that new players must sit through before getting to "the good stuff". The story, they say, gets better. Why judge the game based on its first twenty to forty hours?

It seems prudent to point out that Final Fantasy XIV is not something that exists in a static form, like the old issues of a comic that can no longer be changed and must be built upon. Over its years of live service, the game has undergone many dramatic overhauls, especially ARR. There is no longer a TP gauge, which was a staple mechanic of melee combat up until Stormblood. Entire dungeons and trials have been overhauled, their mechanics and layout being streamlined to fit with newer design philosophies and help new players acclimate to the concepts that are common in later expansions, and new "duty support" features being added with new character dialogue suitable to the story at that point. Great consideration has to be given to these changes, and the amount of improvement the game experience has seen over the years is worthy of applause.

If it is possible to not only tweak but completely overhaul the structure of major gameplay elements, then one would expect that if there was a perceived need to perform small or even moderate alterations to the story, many of which only require the editing of textual game dialogue and its corresponding localisations, then at least some such changes would have been carried out. Yet it stands out that ARR's story has gone completely untouched. The story experience that every single new player has to go through has not had any further edit passes. No words have been altered. Does this speak to pride in the early story, or maybe just indifference? In our discussion of the Copperbell Mines dungeon, we pointed out that parts of later content actually allude to some of the content in ARR. In fact, the game seems willing to eventually acknowledge some criticisms. One example of this is the milquetoast attempt at rehabilitating Limsa Lominsa during the Shadowbringers patch quests, in which much is said, little is promised, and nothing thus far is done. Another example is the renaming of the "beast tribe quests" to simply "tribal quests" at a certain point in the game's lifespan—a half-hearted acknowledgement that it's bad to equate indigenous people to animals, which does nothing about the fact that all quest text and dialogue still uses the terms "beast tribe" and "beastmen", let alone the incredibly one-sided and unfavourable portrayal of the Ixal, Sahagin, Amalj'aa, and kobolds, the implications of which are far worse if one considers that the connection to portrayals of real-life indigenous peoples is one made with full knowledge and awareness.

All this is to say that if Square Enix wanted to change the story in the early part of the game to remove harmful political implications, they have the ability to do so. This is not just a small part of the game. A Realm Reborn consists of enough mandatory content to occupy the first several days of an average player's time in Final Fantasy XIV. For a good proportion of players, it may be all they ever see of the game at all—especially if they don't like it. The complete lack of alterations to the story of A Realm Reborn, as well as continued allusions to its story elements throughout the following expansions, indicate that the company as a whole is happy with where it is and wants it to be a part of the player experience. Therefore, it should be judged as a component of the final product.

In addition, as we will see, there is no particular break between the themes of ARR and those of the following expansions. The game is nothing if not consistent. Even the specific way that the "beast tribes" get treated, with one good faction to be helped and one bad faction to be destroyed or subdued, is reprised in Stormblood with the Vira and Qalyana, in Shadowbringers with the Ondo and Benthos, and in Endwalker with the history of the Arkasodora and the Gajasura.

Ishgard and Dravania.

The first thing you learn about Ishgard is that it is at war with dragons. The dragons in question are a mindless, ravening horde, bent on killing every human being. Mysteriously, given this fact, the dragons are aided by seditious human agents, called heretics for their disloyalty to Ishgard, which is a theocracy with many, many similarities both aesthetic and otherwise to the Catholic Church. Inquisitors (yes, inquisitors) hunt diligently for these heretics among their ranks, and one of your first missions involves uncovering that an inquisitor is secretly a heretic accusing innocents to advance his cause. Real-life inquisitors, as we know, never accused innocent people of anything.

With not only a heretic-hunting Inquisition but also an Order of Temple Knights at its disposal, the Holy See of Ishgard is more than an image of the Catholic Church. Specifically, it is an image of the Church in the period of the so-called Reconquista, the infamous genocidal war that attempted to purge all Muslim and Jewish people from Europe without a single trace. Unlike in the real world, however, the Holy See of Ishgard is entirely virtuous, and its purposes without fault. It is embroiled in an endless war through no fault of its own, or so we are led to believe. What then does it imply to put evil dragons and scheming "heretics" in the place of Muslim people?

Not to worry, though—Heavensward is the first expansion to dare introduce moral ambiguity into the story, though also the last. Before the expansion proper even starts, you meet the infamous Ysayle Dangoulain, a heretic leader, who challenges you, telling you that you are fighting for the wrong side—that in fact Ishgard must fall for there to be peace.

Over the course of Heavensward, both this claim and Ysayle herself are systematically dismantled until they are dust, and then the remains are insulted.

First, Ysayle, who believes in the ultimate aim of peace between humans and dragons through exposing and redressing past wrongs, is pitted against Estinien, who believes that the only peace that can exist is the total subjugation of dragonkind through military force. The game treats these views as equally valid and worthy of consideration for a short while, before ultimately favouring Estinien's. You cut your way through the realm of dragons, slaughtering children and adults alike on your quest to reach Nidhogg, the dragons' general, in a sequence of dungeons that the game absurdly claims is a peace mission because, after killing Nidhogg's consort, you then approach him and ask if he wants to parley. As Ysayle falls into impotent despair at the failure of her ambitions for peace, Estinien gets his wish—he kills Nidhogg. After this point, Ysayle essentially leaves the story, changing into an ineffectual figure whose only deed is to regret her past actions as wrong.

Around this time, you have discovered that the war is built on false pretenses. Long ago, humans and dragons lived together in Dravania. Ishgard claims the dragons began the war for no apparent reason, but in fact, the first king of Ishgard led a ring of assassins to kill the dragon Ratatoskr, sister of Nidhogg, and eat her eyes to gain her magical power—power with which they hoped to gain supremacy over all of Dravania, and dominion over dragonkind. However, their betrayal was discovered by Nidhogg, who attacked them and killed the king, but had his own eyes ripped out in the attempt. The remaining assassins plotted to spread a lie by which they could rouse the humans to a great war of extermination on their own behalf—thus establishing Ishgard's identity as the dragons' enemy. The flashback in which this is revealed is bizarre. It reveals that among the masterminds of the lie is the king's son, Haldrath, who after the failed assassination of Nidhogg dedicates his life to killing as many dragons as possible, using the power stolen from Nidhogg's eyes to fuel his rage. He is the first so-called "Azure Dragoon", and the first of the dragoons in general—a class of soldiers specialised for dragon-killing. Interestingly, Haldrath claims that he means his crusade as a "penance"—but how can murdering dragons be a penance for murdering dragons?

We'll revisit the "penance" line in the next section.

(Incidentally, this is not the only time we will be told a story about how it is understandable, or even admirable, to lie about and conceal the true nature of a conflict in order to demonise the enemies of a state. In the Sil'dihn Subterrane variant dungeon, Nanamo ul Namo discovers that a similar lie was involved in the founding of Ul'dah. Ul'dah concealed both its culpability in unleashing a horrific "zombie plague" on its rival city-state, Sil'dih, as well as the fact that the Amalj'aa were its staunch allies in containing said plague. Upon learning this, Nanamo not only draws a direct connection between Ul'dah and Ishgard, but explains that the noble intentions of her forbears were to conceal the information until "the time was ripe for reconciliation". Ripe for whom? Who would benefit from delaying to lay bare this evil deception?)

While the lie of Ishgard is being concocted, Nidhogg flees to his brother Hraesvelgr, who grants him one of his own eyes, saving his life. Nidhogg vows to use his power to protect dragonkind from the misguided wrath of the misled humans—except not quite. Because this is a story where being oppressed turns you evil, Nidhogg vows revenge upon all humankind, and mobilises his fellow dragons to war via mind control.

This cleans up the question raised at the beginning of the expansion, as to whether you might be fighting for the wrong side. Sure, Ishgard might be built on lies and founded on the desire for supremacy at any price—but the dragons are mind-controlled, so they're really in the wrong.

Despite this, the story has one last hurrah for its dying spark of centrism. After killing Nidhogg, you journey back to Ishgard to deliver the good news, hoping to use his death to barter for a lessening of hostilities. However, complications arise, because the archbishop of the church knew the truth about the war all along, and doesn't want that truth to get out or the war to end. You chase him down, kill him, and then help to instate a new government that will pursue a path of peace. This seems like a significant positive step compared to the story in ARR. Your allies were shown to be in the wrong, you have taken corrective action, and now things will change—won't they?

A telling fact is that Ysayle is dead by this point. Having bet everything on the hope that the death of Nidhogg and the Archbishop would bring reason to Ishgard, she has ordered the heretics underneath her to disarm and surrender, and subsequently given her life to save yours. In the wake of the story, she will receive a cold eulogy in which Alphinaud condemns her as a heretic before reluctantly admitting that her late actions in alliance with you redeemed her somewhat.

Now, you may be wondering why this essay is titled "the liberal doctrine of imperialism". Liberalism has been the name of several related ideologies throughout international history. The sense we have in mind, however, is the one primarily used in discussions of the electoral system of the United States and its two-party system. This is a party in a representational democracy that stands somewhat to the "left" of a more conservative party, yet not so far as to lose mainstream support. It aims to offer a modest challenge to the status quo, appearing to be more progressive. By doing so, it seeks to capture the interest of radical elements in society that would otherwise find themselves totally unrepresented. Seeing that a party represents their interests, they remain satisfied with the electoral system and do not engage in actions that would produce social unrest. In reality, the liberal party remains extremely close in policy to the conservative party, never pushing harder against it than it absolutely must to avoid utterly losing its grip on the radicals. Even when in power, it strategically permits the conservative party many victories, and lets its own more left-leaning policy proposals fall by the wayside. As such, it produces the illusion of political representation without the actuality, and uses this illusion to enervate dissent—a function vital to a government that wishes to have a plausible claim to democracy, while maintaining strict control over its laws and systems.

So much for definitions. The first thing you find out under the post-coup system is that very little changes, despite the fact that the military is in charge instead of the church. Heretics are still criminals, condemned by the government, and the Inquisition operates at full force. Dragons and humans remain firmly apart, with none being permitted to freely move in the lands of the other. (The one example you see of dragons trying to enter Ishgard, in the Firmament quests, results in them being held at spearpoint under an Inquisitor's orders.) Much later on, the Endwalker role quests confirm that the clergy retain their privilege and authority and have the backing of the new government in doing so. The war has entered a ceasefire, but as we will see, not for long.

A conference is held to broker peace with a faction of dragons from Anyx Trine that is sympathetic to Ishgard and hostile towards Nidhogg's army. (Does that sound familiar?) During the events surrounding the conference, two very interesting things happen. Firstly, we learn that many of the most miserable and battered Ishgardian citizens are against the ending of the war. This is very interesting. Why would a people who had suffered in an endless war for a thousand years in the greatest hardship not seek the end of that suffering by any means necessary? The story so far has strived to portray the Ishgardians as the ultimate victims, while giving little sympathy to the dragons for their time at war. Yet here the Ishgardians do not act in their own interest. Several Ishgardian citizens attempt to sabotage the peace talk out of a desire for vengeance against the dragons.

Once again, they have suffered, and the actions they take in response to that suffering are entirely senseless, emotionally driven, and destructive. Suffering turns you evil. The refusal of those citizens to cooperate with the new government requires them to be either brought to heel or killed.

Fortunately, Vidofnir, the dragon representative from Anyx Trine, shows no such tendency, and is totally cooperative. The second interesting thing that happens during the peace conference is that she is attacked and seriously wounded by the resurrected Nidhogg, who rails against the prospect of peace. Remember, Nidhogg was initially motivated to war by the assassination of his sister and the revelation of King Thordan's plot to conquer and rule over dragonkind. His struggle against King Thordan and his knights almost led to his death, and if not for an unlikely miracle he would be dead twice over. Yet now he opposes a peace treaty, which would protect his people and himself from further harm from the humans who so fervently want to kill them. Why? Suffering turns you evil.

We have strayed a little from the account of events given by the narrative. Let us explore this for a little bit. The story of Heavensward is ruled by the theme of the supposed "cycle of vengeance". According to the stated account of events, those who are wronged begin to heedlessly seek vengeance against those who have wronged them, even to their own detriment. After they accomplish their vengeance, those who they hurt in turn heedlessly seek vengeance against them, and so on and so forth. This, the narrative asserts, is the cause of the Dragonsong War. The dragons hate the humans, and the humans hate the dragons, with no ultimate rational basis except some irrelevant occurrence from a thousand years ago.

While this is at best a somewhat inaccurate model, it is absurd to apply it to something as serious as war, as the narrative attempts to do. As noted above, it leads to the baffling conclusion that the only reason people engage in the war—on either side—is because of hurt feelings, and the only way people will ever want to end the war is if those hurt feelings are mended. There are no practical reasons, no material conditions, no serious fears real or conjured that give rise to conflict or bring it to an end. Everything is laid at the feet of the idea that suffering turns you evil.

We also need to spend some time on the shape this evil takes. Some of the most bewildering claims made during Heavensward include the idea that Nidhogg is deliberately not winning the Dragonsong War, even though he could, in order to "punish" the humans of Ishgard. Disregarding for now the implicit idea that a conquered people is happier than a people still fighting, this would imply that prior to the events of the Steps of Faith, Nidhogg has never, at any point, with all the leverage in the world, made any attempt to recover his stolen eyes, the theft of which is supposed to be a chief impetus for his war against Ishgard in the first place. What logic is this? There is none—but that is consistent, as the story believes that Nidhogg, like all other people turned evil because of suffering, is beyond all reason.

Back to the story. Now the lines of conflict are drawn once again. Peace, as it turns out, was short-lived, and Ysayle died for nothing. The true source of conflict is Nidhogg, representative of all dragonkind's unreasoning, illogical hatred. Estinien was right: killing dragons is the answer. Peace comes when all the bad dragons are dead.

Fortunately, because of the mind control plot, there's only one bad dragon. How convenient!

At the last stroke, Nidhogg's death seals the peace deal for Ishgard. It's difficult to judge the details of this, as the subject of Dravania's dragons is given no attention at all after Heavensward ends. In fact, you see no further sign of any interaction between the humans of Ishgard and the dragons of Dravania for the rest of the entire main story. In addition, while Ishgard and its knights appear several times throughout the main scenario, only one job quest and one piece of side content include dragons at all—the latter of which shows what was stated above, that the Inquisition is alive and well and that it continues to hunt heretics and dragons that dare stray towards the city. With the same conditions that began the first Dragonsong War still about, and no guarantees visibly made against it, it seems like the only thing we can be sure of is that when conflict is sparked anew, the newly formed Ishgardian House of Commons will get one half of the vote on who gets sent to the front.

So this is the story so far: Suffering turns you evil. Once you are evil, you need to die. Your death brings peace. Don't look at what causes the suffering in the first place. The slaves are rebelling! Kill them!

2. "The state is the reins of the people."

As we move further into the story, full analysis necessitates a deeper dive into the themes that the game constructs. Our first section aimed to lay bare the game's strange fixation on people who suffer becoming villains. However, we have yet to even begin to explain the framework of belief that might produce such a perspective.

Ala Mhigo.

Some of the setup for the story of Stormblood, the next expansion, is done all the way back at the beginning of Heavensward. There, during the plot to assassinate the Sultana, one of the chief actors is Ilberd. Once a loyal friend of the Sultana's right-hand man, Raubahn, Ilberd has betrayed him in the most gruesome way possible to side with the would-be coup leader, Teledji Adeledji. What is his motivation? Once again, it's because he has suffered.

In brief, both Ilberd and Raubahn are survivors of the conquest of Ala Mhigo, a city not too far from the Black Shroud, by Garlean invasion. Like many other survivors, they fled from Ala Mhigo to Ul'dah. (As noted previously, the people of Gridania in the Black Shroud turn away refugees, leaving them to starve if they remain there—the distance to Thanalan is much greater, yet it seems many make the journey.) Raubahn won fortune and a place at the Sultana's side through his great luck as a gladiator, while Ilberd later on signed as a soldier under his command. Ilberd has long hoped that Ul'dah, a powerful and wealthy nation, would be moved to liberate the people of Ala Mhigo from Garlean rule, but they have steadfastly refused to do so. Teledji Adeledji promised Ilberd that, once he was in power, he would send the aid that Ilberd desired. Based on this promise, Ilberd chose to betray Raubahn, who had been unsympathetic to his requests despite his ability to bend the Sultana's ear.

That all happened in the leadup to Heavensward. Now, in Stormblood, Ilberd seeks another path. With the three city-states of Eorzea uniting their militaries, Ilberd believes more strongly than ever that they have the ability to fight off the Garlean Empire, but they still refuse to move. By staging a false military operation that provokes the Garlean Empire into believing Eorzea is on the attack, Ilberd wants to force the coalition's hand, at the cost of his own life and those of many others—for the sake of his home being free.

Now, Ilberd's plan works. He summons the primal Shinryu, provokes the Empire, and gets Eorzea to respond, leading to the liberation of Ala Mhigo at the cost of his life. Indeed, the fight to take back Ala Mhigo is one half of the focus of the expansion. Despite this, Ilberd is portrayed as a despicable villain, with the familiar trappings of evil laughter and human sacrifice. The game makes sure that nothing implies that his deeply sympathetic cause might have any popular support—every person who follows him does so under deceitful pretences, and he treats them like tools. Why was the choice made to portray him thus, before and now, when his aim was something that the game afterwards portrays as unilaterally good, and his actions are shown to be utterly necessary?

We have the beginnings of an answer based on our previous analysis—Ilberd's life was characterised by oppression, which makes him evil. Indeed, Ilberd even uses Nidhogg's eyes for his summoning ritual, calling back to the last great villain who was the source of all evil. But that covers only Ilberd himself. The broader question is: why is Ilberd evil for sparking a revolution, but Eorzea good for carrying it out?

To answer this, let us take a step back and consider Eorzea's reasons for not pursuing the liberation of Ala Mhigo, even after forming a coalition for the very purpose of combating the Garlean Empire. As it turns out, only one reason is given—the Eorzean Alliance does not feel ready, and they worry about weakening their strategic position for the overall fight. Ilberd's interference has noble aims, but it interferes with the Eorzean war plan. This detail is easy to overlook, as it essentially comes to nothing in the following story: you lead the Alliance to an overwhelming victory against the Empire on two fronts.

Let us also take a step forward and consider the specific aftermath of the liberation of Ala Mhigo. There are two aspects I would consider worthy of note: the Sultana's extractive "financial aid" plan, and the denial of the people of Ala Mhigo's right to carry out their own justice against war criminals.

The first case is at least moderately infamous among fans. Ala Mhigo is devastated by the lasting impact of Garlean occupation and wealth extraction. Sultana Nanamo Ul Namo of Ul'dah therefore understands that the nation requires monetary aid. However, the wealthy owner of the Gold Saucer, Godbert Manderville, as well as other powerful merchants, advise her that providing people with aid is harmful, as it will make them lazy; and that if Nanamo gives monetary relief to the refugees of Ala Mhigo, the poor of Ul'dah will want some too. Nanamo takes this advice to heart. She decides that the people of Ala Mhigo will not get money for food, shelter, transport, medicine, infrastructure, or any other amenities that would actually improve the condition of a country ruined by military occupation. Instead, Ul'dah will spend on only two things: first the extradition of Ala Mhigan refugees from Ul'dah, solving the long-standing "refugee crisis", and second, subsidies for the East Aldenard Trading Company (yes, it is actually called that), which will establish a salt panning operation in Ala Mhigo, employing Ala Mhigans to export this precious resource out of the nation. In exchange for this generous scheme, which subordinates the only new industry of devastated Ala Mhigo to an Ul'dahn company, and which does nothing for anyone who is unable or unwilling to work for the East Aldenard Trading Company, Ul'dah shall also demand a proportion of all the profits of salt exports in perpetuity—not just those their investments contribute towards, but all of them. This is a form of "aid" praised by the narrative for ensuring that Ul'dah does not lose money—since far from actually aiding the people of Ala Mhigo, it is entirely based on getting the people of Ala Mhigo to enrich Ul'dah with their labour.

Now, if you have studied the history of British colonialism at all, you will know what the East Aldenard Trading Company is almost certainly named after—the East India Trading Company, or simply East India Company, one of the first megacorporations, which was the privileged agent of British wealth extraction, military suppression, and ultimately colonial administration in the Indian subcontinent. To mimic such a name in association with a fictional company would already be politically loaded, but the story goes well beyond surface similarities. In its role in Ala Mhigo, the East Aldenard Trading Company is not only privileged by a government charter and generous subsidies, but also operates for the purpose of extracting wealth from one nation to another at the first nation's expense.

The specific case of one nation being forced to pay a portion of its wealth to another also has basis in reality. The Françafrique refers to the lasting state of control and exploitation created between France and its African colonies after the former nation supposedly granted independence to the latter ones. With full control over exchange rates, great political and personal influence at all levels of government, and even ownership of half the treasuries of its "former" colonies, France continues to enrich itself immensely at their expense, and in this supposedly post-colonial age still wields a frightening amount of economic power over them. All this is couched in the language of coopération, which not only grants France the mandate to exert such control based on its supposed generosity in "uplifting" them through colonial oppression, but also affords France the right to conduct military interventions at its leisure, supporting or suppressing whatever government it chooses. When one nation claims it has the right to extract wealth from another because of its generosity in allowing them to seek limited and conditional self-determination, the result is a relationship of economic exploitation and political control—nothing less than neo-colonialism.

This is one piece of the puzzle. Let us move on to the second case. Following the liberation of Ala Mhigo, among the citizenry's many concerns is that imperial collaborators, who betrayed their people for personal gain and were some of the primary orchestrators of the atrocities committed during Garlean rule, be brought to justice. Much like real empires throughout history, the Garlean conquerors encouraged such collaboration, and rewarded class traitors with greater human rights than their fellows. The chief example of this is a woman called Fordola rem Lupis, granted a Garlean name to honour her contributions in leading the Crania Lupi. These were a regiment of Ala Mhigan conscripts who served as colonial police, enforcing Garlean imperial law in Ala Mhigo with legendary cruelty, killing, stealing, and abducting for the sake of their chosen masters. Fordola herself is perhaps the bloodiest Garlean agent remaining in Ala Mhigo—apart from her accomplishments in leadership, she has killed countless innocents herself, a fact she laments on several occasions.

With the Garleans driven out, the Ala Mhigans wish to see punishment for these crimes. However, strangely, Lyse Hext of the Scions, Raubahn Aldynn of Ul'dah, and you the protagonist put all your force into denying their will, instead electing to take Fordola into your custody for her protection, and later inducting her as a soldier of the Eorzean Alliance. Not only that: in the same scene, Lyse and Raubahn roundly condemn all punitive action taken by the people of Ala Mhigo against collaborators like Fordola as horrible and unjustified. They go so far as to call the people an angry mob that "isn't ready" for an age of peace, and compare them to the Garleans who brutalised them. Now, the stated aim of the Eorzean Alliance was to liberate Ala Mhigo, a phrase that presumably involves granting the people the freedom to determine their own governance and live as they please. At what point did granting people freedom become denying them the right to punish those who have committed horrific evils against them, thereby guaranteeing their own safety? Where is your allegiance in this conflict—to the people of Ala Mhigo, or to something else? What is the purpose of this rhetoric painting them as unfit to rule themselves without some hand holding them back?

After her rescue by the Eorzean Alliance, Fordola goes through a long recovery period in which she eventually resolves to atone for her past actions. As such, the narrative portrays the decision to protect her life as the correct one. In addition, the masses of people calling for her death are portrayed in a strongly negative light: a reasonless horde of hateful faces who are at risk of potentially upsetting public order with their demands. The story makes it clear that your ability to take control of the situation from them is a relief.

The latest expansion, Endwalker, goes into yet further detail on this subject. In the healer role quests, the baffling assertion is made that the former collaborators under Garlean rule represent Ala Mhigo's most unfortunate citizens, and that their suffering goes far beyond that of their fellows. This runs in stark contrast to the facts presented earlier. Imperial collaborators are specifically rewarded for their actions by improvements to their material conditions. Furthermore, collaborators like Fordola were directly responsible for much of the cruelty suffered by their fellow Ala Mhigans, and were spared that cruelty themselves in addition to the many benefits they enjoyed in terms of comfort, respect, and power. Typically, the advantages enjoyed by imperial collaborators mean that even after a colonial regime ends, they go on to occupy positions of power in the new, free state. This is how collaboration works. No one would betray their home or become a murderer of innocents without some promise of gain, so the occupying force provides that promise. Even after independence, the colonisers then have the collaborators as powerful allies in the supposedly free nation.

The Endwalker story backs up its claims by asserting that the collaborators are blameless: "in their place, anyone would do the same." This is in spite of the fact that the whole reason they are being singled out by their fellow Ala Mhigans is that other people did not do the same—people who suffered under the Garlean yoke and the collaborators' whips were under not only largely the same conditions as the collaborators themselves, but significantly worse ones. The collaborators betrayed their people, severed the bonds they shared, and became the enemies of everyone around them. Now, with the dividends of betrayal dwindling, they are starting to feel the lack of the thing they gave up—their own trustworthiness and the goodwill of their fellow citizens. Yet the narrative assures us that the collaborators are now all helpless victims with no advantages and no wealth, and that it is wrong that they should face mistrust, and not only wrong, but the greatest possible wrong that is going on in Ala Mhigo.

What is the meaning of all this? Eorzea supposes that the liberation of Ala Mhigo, while possible, is not worth weakening its own position for. Once forced to take action, Eorzea swoops in as the hero, but when the dust settles, it sets up a system of wealth extraction while denying the people they supposedly liberated the right to administer justice on their own terms. The story takes great pains to justify this as the right thing to do.

Ala Mhigo is not free. Ala Mhigo has gone from being a direct colony of Garlemald to being a neo-colony of the Eorzean Alliance.

With this view in mind, certain things can be explained—in particular, the villainisation of Ilberd. Ilberd acted for the sake of Ala Mhigo, but he did not act in the interests of the Eorzean Alliance. If the narrative is focused on praising actions that benefit the Alliance, and on condemning those that threaten it, then this makes perfect sense. After the disaster of being forced into a war against Garlemald on someone else's behalf, the Eorzean Alliance manages to turn its fortunes around and end up in a far more powerful position than it enjoyed previously, subordinating Ala Mhigo as a source of valuable exports for its burgeoning empire. It has little interest in empowering its colony to do anything that would not benefit itself. In fact, people having a will of their own is something of an inconvenience to a government that might be at cross purposes to them. It must neutralise such a thing by any means necessary.

Eorzea's other colonies.

Let us go back to the earlier examples of colonialism in the story—those in which the victims were portrayed as animal people or as blue-skinned bandits. This time we are not only considering the status of the oppressed who serve as enemies of the state, but also the status of their foils—those who cooperate with the state at the expense of their fellow people: the Fordolas of Gridania, Ul'dah, and Limsa Lominsa.

In the archer questline, Leih Aliapoh is a representative of the Moon Keepers who wishes to integrate into Gridania at the cost of losing her ties to her old family. She faces vicious and unrelenting discrimination for supposedly coming from a culture of 'poachers'—a kind of fantasy racism skewing, once again, too close to reality—but persists in her efforts believing that she will eventually earn some small measure of respect by displaying her dedication to Gridania's restrictive laws. She is contrasted against the villainous Pawah Mujuuk, who is shown to be entirely unsympathetic to her cause, and whose villainy is cemented when she asks Leih to kill you, the player, to "prove her commitment". Despite this being shown as something far too extreme and unreasonable to ask someone, Leih's eventual decision to lay her fortunes with Gridania is cemented by the supposedly heroic act of capturing Pawah Mujuuk, and placing her in Gridanian custody—at the hands of which her fate will assuredly be brief. Gridania does not even want the Keepers of the Moon to hunt for food: its aim is their extermination.

Ilberd, who we have discussed so much already, is himself a sort of foil to Raubahn, his once-friend. Both Ilberd and Raubahn are refugees from Ala Mhigo who came to Ul'dah. The difference between them is that Ilberd's chief aim remains, after a long time, the liberation of Ala Mhigo, while Raubahn dedicates himself to the systems of Ul'dah, through great luck wins a position at the side of the Sultana, and thereafter serves in absolute loyalty to her welfare and her wishes, forsaking all thought of his erstwhile home. He commits himself to the Sultana to the point where after Ala Mhigo's liberation, Raubahn refuses to return to it despite his desire to, because he believes he is too indebted to Nanamo for elevating him out of poverty to ever leave her side. He does not even dare ask about it. Only Nanamo's independent decision to allow him to leave, out of the kindness of her heart, grants him freedom. Raubahn afterwards remains Eorzea's loyal ally, and indeed only ever appears again in the main story to play a supporting role in your endeavours.

Coming to Limsa Lominsa, we have to step a little into the future—into Shadowbringers and Endwalker. As previously noted, the Shadowbringers patch story involves Admiral Merlwyb, the head of state in Limsa Lominsa, softening her position on the issue of kobolds having the right to exist—something that was previously impossible because, as you may recall, the kobolds were mind-controlled by primals, which made them evil. The issue of primal mind control is handily wiped away by the introduction of a medical treatment that neutralises the condition. Following this, Admiral Merlwyb speaks to Patriarch Za Da of the Second Order, the leader of the group of kobolds who summoned the primal Titan, demanding that he either shoot her with a pistol at that very moment or enter peace talks on Limsa Lominsa's terms. His agreement to the latter option, despite his profound mistrust of Limsa Lominsa's good intentions, is shown to be a win for peace and civility. A quick exercise for the reader: suppose the Patriarch had indeed taken the pistol and killed the Admiral of Limsa Lominsa during a diplomatic meeting, what would the subsequent reaction of her bodyguards, successors, and cabinet have been? What material protection would the Patriarch and his people have had against any reprisal? What, then, is the purpose of her presenting such a symbolic option to the Patriarch—in short, what were the actual choices made available to him by this ultimatum?

As a contrast to this, Endwalker's physical DPS role quests put on display the Sahagin's refusal to cooperate with Limsa Lominsa. Having failed to secure breeding grounds for themselves, the Sahagin are still at existential risk. The choices available to them are either an attempt to court diplomacy with Limsa Lominsa, or to maintain a hostile stance and try and take what they need by force—a very similar choice to the one faced by Patriarch Za Da. Though the Sahagin are divided on this topic, a prominent priest, Doww, and the reigning Indigo Matriarch—who, as the Sahagin are a eusocial species, fulfils the role of a reproducing queen—both distrust the possibility of cooperation. When the Indigo Matriarch spontaneously transforms into a huge monster, raging against the people of Limsa Lominsa, Doww sees this as divine intervention—a last chance at wresting back control for their people. But his dissent cannot be suffered. As the story shows, his reading of the situation is wrong. The intervention of the Eorzean Alliance brings about the fortuitous demise of both the priest and the Indigo Matriarch, and with the death of their reproducing queen right before the birth of a new clutch would have happened, the remaining Sahagin are left with no choice but to accept the rule of Limsa Lominsa. Fortunately, despite her past resolution to annihilate the Sahagin from existence, Admiral Merlwyb's change of heart is genuine. Obviously, the Sahagin should simply have cooperated with her from the start—look at the sticky ends met by those who dared resist her, in the past and now!

The morality, and by extension the perceived success and happiness, of each of these people is determined by their relation to the overmastering will of Eorzea. Those who oppose Eorzea meet bad ends, while those who support it find success and hope while leaving their old allegiances behind. Even—or perhaps especially—in the case where Eorzea is a hostile and oppressive force, the correct answer is always to submit to its will, not to resist.

Let us turn also to Ishgard for our last examples: Nidhogg, Estinien, and Ysayle, the key players in the moral question of Heavensward. As aforementioned, Estinien holds that peace comes only with the annihilation of the dragons; Ysayle holds that peace must be brokered through a deescalation of hostilities; and Nidhogg is a ravening beast with no coherent desire. Interestingly, the story makes several attempts to draw parallels between Estinien and Nidhogg, implying that since the death of a loved one was a central part of their backstory, they are fundamentally alike. However, Estinien's quest for vengeance is portrayed positively, and leads to the war's end, while Nidhogg's is portrayed negatively, and leads to the war's continuance. What could be the difference between them?

Ysayle is also contrasted negatively against Estinien. Her ideals are given a little space to breathe in the early leadup to the expansion, but quickly quashed in the events following their encounter with Hraesvelgr. In the following chapters, Ysayle undergoes a steady character assassination: she entered the story as the single voice calling out for peace and an end to the Dragonsong War, yet by the end her resolve is completely neutralised as she wallows in regret (while others with far more blood on their hands for far less reason maintain their resolve). As aforementioned, after her death, her eulogy only cares to decry her as an evil yet ultimately repentant heretic. Much like Ilberd, it would seem that her mission of peace aligns with the protagonists' desire for the same—yet no similarity or understanding between them is admitted at the close. Why? And why, in the end, do both Nidhogg and Ysayle die supposedly just and deserved deaths, while Estinien lives on?

These questions have a simple answer. Estinien was Ishgard's ally; Ysayle and Nidhogg were its foes. Ysayle's punishment is for betraying the allegiance she should have had—to the state of Ishgard, not to its people.

This allows us to answer the question raised when we discussed Haldrath in the previous section. When Haldrath spoke of his time as the Azure Dragoon being a penance, he did not mean penance for murdering Ratatoskr—no, rather he meant penance for the fact that murdering Ratatoskr put the newly-founded supremacist state of Ishgard at risk. In this light, his self-imposed punishment being to spend the rest of his life killing dragons makes perfect sense, as doing so reduces the threat that those dragons pose to an Ishgard that would see them subjugated or dead. This at last disambiguates him, explaining why the narrative puts him in the right and casts him as a benevolent spirit of peace in the Dragoon job quests, standing in opposition to the hateful and monstrous Nidhogg—who is himself a victim of Haldrath and his father's imperial ambitions!

On "right" and "wrong" capitalism.

So much for Eorzea itself: we have demonstrated that in its relations with its colonial subjects, the Eorzean Alliance is always in the right. But what about other oppressive state entities and relations? In the first section, we discussed the limited and ultimately toothless critique of class relations in Ul'dah. Despite the Monetarists being shown as greedy, conniving economic predators, the game explains that they are ultimately a necessary part of society, and that the stratification of class in Ul'dah is lamentable but inevitable. The correct path is to maintain the wealth of the wealthy in order to enhance the power and prosperity of the state "as a whole"—regardless of who actually gets that wealth and power, and at whose expense it comes. What is criticised is the Monetarists' attempt to overthrow their just and honest ruler, who they should instead have seen as their ally. Once the monarch agrees to legitimise their activities, and they bow to her authority, everything is fine.

A brief note: Out of the three original city-states, Ul'dah is a traditional monarchy, Gridania is an effective monarchy where rulership is exclusively passed between the descendants of a handful of noble families (all according to the elementals' will!), and Limsa Lominsa is a dictatorship in which the ruler selects their own successor. After ARR, the types of government encountered become somewhat more varied, and it's interesting to note the greater prevalence of representative democracy in the nations encountered later—yet in incidents like the one above, it is constantly reaffirmed that the standing monarchies or dictatorships are fine forms of government, and that it is right for a single ruler to have final say on all affairs. In Hingashi and Doma, dictatorships are again upheld as desirable governmental solutions. The samurai 61-70 job quests are dedicated to crushing a popular revolution against the bakufu in Kugane, while the revolution against the Garleans in Doma cannot even begin until the people are united and inspired by the return of their absent king.

Let's jump forward to Shadowbringers again. Widely hailed as one of the best expansions to date storywise, Shadowbringers de-emphasises the obvious political messages present in the earlier parts of the game. Nonetheless, there are a few points where those political topics come back to the forefront. We will for now focus on the case of Eulmore.

If ARR is the "black sheep" of Final Fantasy XIV for fans, then Eulmore is surely the "black sheep" of Shadowbringers specifically. The game, up until this point, has taken a very simple and specific approach to character design. The men are muscular, the women are petite, and the same handful of extremely similar body shapes are recycled between them—more or less the same ones available to players. Only certain minor enemies—exclusively humanoid monsters—are depicted as fat. One could easily believe it to be an engine limitation: only a few body shapes are coded to be able to move. However, when it comes to Eulmore—the game's second apparent critique of class, in which the wealthy Eulmorans feast, play, and torture their servants in shows of elaborate decadence, enjoying their hoarded wealth with complacence to the collapse of the world around them—suddenly the game shows it absolutely can model fat characters. These are exclusively used for a handful of the most wealthy and privileged members in Eulmoran society. The two notable ones are Lady Dulia-Chai, a cheerful, pleasant wealthy woman who is portrayed as childish to the point of infantilisation (and who is pleasant only so long as you ignore the bit where she and her husband had a servant thrown to his death); and Lord Vauthry, the tyrannical and self-absorbed ruler of Eulmore, who plots against the poor gathered outside Eulmore's walls.

Dulia-Chai's portrayal, though plagued with strange and off-putting stereotypes, is tenuously positive in its outcomes. She mostly exists in the plot to be loved by her more level-headed husband, and to through his adoration persuade him to treat others with the same compassion that she naturally expresses. In between these moments, jokes are made of her simple-mindedness and her supposed inelegance—jokes which come together in a number of scenes where, in attempting to embrace her husband, she heedlessly crushes the life out of him instead in a comedic display of clumsiness.

The same cautious praise cannot be given to the portrayal of Vauthry. A primary antagonist of the expansion, Vauthry is designed, in the manner of the most loathsome and hateful stereotypes of fat people, to be grotesque, greedy, gluttonous, and helpless all at once. A cutscene revealing the culmination of his evil plan treats you to a prolonged scene of him furiously eating bread, panning across him in great detail so that you will associate the monstrous transformation that he is undergoing with the amount of food he is consuming. Much like Dulia-Chai, he is also portrayed as childish, frequently throwing tantrums in which his shouts and the beating of his fists can be heard throughout the city.

Why is it relevant to point this out? As we have noted, Eulmore and Ul'dah can both be construed as a critical portrayal of deeply dysfunctional capitalist systems, characterised by massive class inequality wherein the wealthy and powerful at the top extract labour from the suffering poor at the bottom. However, the game does not claim that this is because the system of wealth extraction itself is evil. Instead, what ties the portrayals of Eulmore and Ul'dah together is the claim that in each case, great power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of the wrong people—people who are lacking in the correct virtue, or the correct birthright, to wield it for good. In Ul'dah, a land whose portrayal is shaped by orientalism, the wrong people are the greedy, spineless brown men who act without a fair-skinned monarch to set them straight; whereas in Eulmore, the wrong people are the decadent, childish fat people who have—by some mistake, surely—ended up at the top of society.

Much like Ul'dah, the solution to Eulmore's problems is no great change but a small alteration to the way things are run. After Vauthry's demise, the citizens and servants of Eulmore (not the poor people outside the city walls or down in the slums, or the peasants of the towns and villages Eulmore derives its produce and labour from, mind you) hold a vote in which Chai-Nuzz, Dulia-Chai's husband and a wealthy entrepreneur, is unanimously elected as the city's new leader. He immediately sets out re-recruiting members of Vauthry's old government to help him rule, strengthening the city's private army, and in other ways ensuring that the city which first appeared in the story as a symbol of absurd wealth and sick alienation remains the seat of Kholusia's government.

Capitalism is not bad. The wrong people being in charge of capitalism is bad. Poverty and misery are inevitable, but as long as the wealthy have good intentions, everything is copacetic.

The rightness of empires.

So far we have put forward the notion of Eorzea as the centre of morality in the narrative. We have also begun to discuss the ways that class relations not directly related to colonialism are portrayed. However, to really get at the meat of this analysis, we will have to depart from our primary subject and consider the portrayal of other colonial powers—other empires.

There are three of these discussed throughout the story: Garlemald, Allag, and Ronka. Garlemald is all very well. For the first three expansions, its portrayal is extremely straightforward: it is an antagonistic military force, having some ties to the sinister Ascians (but who hasn't?), the threat of which shapes the geopolitics of each expansion. Long before the subject of Garlemald gets complicated in any way, the other two empires, whose appearances are comparatively minor and indirect, give us some warning signs of things to come.

Ancient Allag and modern Garlemald clearly have much in common. Both are expansionist empires with a global reach, who view other peoples as lesser—the Garleans view other peoples as "savages", the Allagans as "livestock". The Garleans are noted to have taken much inspiration from Allagan technology and science, even using the same term—"eikons"—to refer to primals. Allag is long fallen, but many of its war technologies (and some civilian ones) have endured to have significant impacts on the present day—not least among them the infamous artificial moon Dalamud, cage of the primal Bahamut, the fall of which caused the Seventh Umbral Calamity. In fact, in addition to their partial responsibility for the Seventh Umbral Calamity, they also bear full blame for the Fourth.

The Allagan Empire's deeds are not limited to world-shattering disasters. In fact, much of what is known about them is that they were founded on conquest, and that they perished in the search for still greater conquest. Much like Eorzea in the present day, the Allagan Empire's genocidal ambitions pushed its victims to take desperate measures, causing many of them to summon primals to try and fend off its might. As such, the Allagan Empire developed and deployed a large array of tactics intended to destroy primals, or "eikons"—or even enslave them to its will. During the Heavensward optional trial sequence, our protagonists hurry to the floating laboratory-island of Azys Lla as eager students, hoping to learn at the feet of the Allagans how they stole even the last gasp of breath and the words of the final prayer out of the mouths of those they conquered. Indeed, despite knowing about the genocide, slavery, and militant conquest that characterised the Allagan Empire during its great rise and terrible fall, the game's characters have hardly a bad word to say about it.

In the Crystal Tower raid sequence (now a mandatory story section), we meet G'raha Tia, a researcher who is descended from a lineage of Allagan slaves sourced from Meracydia (an as-yet-inaccessible continent that shares much in common with real-world Africa). Though the time of his ancestors' servitude is long past, G’raha is not free from its legacy. He bears the mark of Allagan genetic modification that turned his bloodline into both a living book, storing Allagan knowledge, and a living key, granting access to Allagan technology. G'raha spends almost as much time extolling the Allagan Empire's knowledge and accomplishments as he spends dedicating his life to ensuring that their great legacy, the Crystal Tower—the instrument of the Fourth Umbral Calamity—is kept secure until the rest of the world proves itself worthy of the technological wealth contained within, by attaining the same moral heights as the warmongering and slaving Allagan Empire once again. In the Heavensward optional trial sequence, your companions' praise is somewhat more lukewarm. Astounded by the heights of their technology, they nonetheless lament the Allagans' attempts to imprison the primals summoned by their desperate victims and convert them into a power source—not because they are shocked at the Allagans' cruelty, but because primals are so great an evil that the Allagans were foolish, if well-intentioned, to try and leverage them.

Ronka is in some ways the shadow of Allag, a similarly long-vanished empire in the First Reflection of the Source. Though the ruins they leave behind bear some vague resemblance to the traditional structures of the Mexica people, their story takes little inspiration from that history, being fairly sparse in the text. All we learn about the Ronkans is that they mysteriously disappeared hundreds of years ago, and that they were conquerors as well—surviving them are two peoples who were subordinated under their rule and used as servants, the Viis of Fanow and the Qitari. Both the Qitari and the Viis remain absolutely loyal to Ronka despite it having fallen long ago, have nothing but praise for this long-dead empire, and have no ambitions except for obeying their last known orders from the Ronkan Empire, and restoring what remnant of Ronka's knowledge and traditions might remain. Sadly, with the fall of Ronka, they seemingly have no historical traditions of their own, and have therefore forgotten almost everything about them.

All happy, stupid servants and noble, mighty conquerors—what does the material we have covered so far tell us about the game's overall attitude towards the subject of imperialism? Do they believe conquest is wrong? No. Do they believe slavery is wrong? No. What is the correct response to a conquering empire? Absolute obedience. What is the correct response to a rebellious colony? Uncompromising repression.

But wait! We have only lightly touched on the elephant in the room: the one empire whose shadow falls over the whole story, whose actions are absolutely villainous, and against whom rebellion is just. That great evil empire is Garlemald.

Garlemald.

Now, rebellion against Garlean rule is not unconditionally just. Do you remember our first discussion of Ilberd? It is now time to perform a final reexamination of the beginning events of Stormblood. With the knowledge that: (1) people resisting oppression act evilly and without reason; (2) Eorzea is the centre of morality in the narrative; and (3) empires are good; how do we explain that it is wrong for Ilberd to instigate a war against Garlemald for the sake of Ala Mhigo's liberation, yet right for Eorzea to fight to liberate Ala Mhigo, only to subordinate it shortly afterwards as a neo-colony? At last the picture is becoming truly clear. Ilberd was wrong because he acted alone, without the permission of a powerful and good empire like Eorzea. Eorzea's actions, meanwhile, are justified, purely because it is acting in its own interest, and manipulating events to its benefit.

Yet if Eorzea is a good empire, surely Garlemald, being an evil empire, is justly portrayed as the monster it is? Not at all. Let's jump ahead, and finally discuss the main story of Endwalker.

Garlemald falls quietly, without outside intervention, during the events of Shadowbringers. By the time Endwalker comes around, the empire is no longer the towering threat it once was—hijacked by a mysterious Ascian wielding the power of, yes, mind control. Building on the mind control plot point, what could perhaps have been a climactic final battle at the heart of imperial might, leading to the end of a great war, is instead a military-backed aid mission to a wrecked and deserted city. As we learned in Ishgard, the true cause of war is hurt feelings—surely a gesture of kindness, then, will serve to mend old wounds and ensure that no invasion ever happens again.

When you get to Garlemald, you discover that the citizenry believes in their own racial supremacy with such fervour that they refuse aid from foreigners, then attempt to take it by force. If that attempt fails, they choose death instead of the shame of the horrors they are sure the "savages" will wreak upon them. To say they are "brainwashed" or "ignorant" misconstrues what the story shows with full clarity—that it is a nationalist impulse that drives them, and that only when all illusions that they are racial masters have been shattered, when they see that they are utterly without power and no force of Garlean might is coming to rescue them, do they agree to accept aid from the people of Eorzea.

You also discover a party of former slaves, who were abducted, shipped to Garlemald, and put to work mining the ceruleum on which Garlean technology depends. Strangely enough, the story seems hesitant to condemn the circumstances that brought them here. A certain sidequest has you recruit a former slave driver to your cause, and explains that he had a good relationship with his slaves and that they feel amicable towards each other; while in the Reaper job quests you learn how ceruleum-based technology is the chief product of Garlean ingenuity and that their empire is founded on it is proof of its worthiness. The plight of the formerly enslaved people receives little attention: you do not give them aid of any kind, and they do not appear or get referenced in the story again.

So just as the slaving-practices of Allag and Ronka were praised, Garlemald's slavery is at worst a neutral affair. How about the Garlean military, then, which wrought such horrors across Doma, Ala Mhigo, Bozja, Thanalan, and other places the world over? Are their actions at last condemned as more than mere unfortunate circumstance? Not at all. The leader of the scattered and starving 1st legion, Legatus Quintus van Cinna, gives a grand speech explaining that the reason the Garlean Empire formed was to combat the oppression that Garleans faced as a people who could not use magic.

(Yes, that is correct. The Garleans are fantasy-racist because they were oppressed once.)

Quintus' speech includes several classic fascist lines, most notably the claims that the nations of the world are locked in a perpetual power struggle in which there emerge only victorious dominators and defeated subordinates; that some peoples are "strong" and meant for victory, while others are "weak" and meant for servitude or extinction; that the dominion of the powerful creates peace and prosperity; that the dominion of the weak ushers in social, spiritual, and physical corruption; and that all attempts to deny these claims are merely the machinations of the weak in order to gain an unfair advantage over the strong.

You may recall many of these talking points from another famous speech in Final Fantasy XIV—that given by Gaius van Baelsar in the unskippable cutscene prior to your boss battle with him in the Praetorium. He too advances the idea that might makes right, that Garleans are strong and just while Eorzeans are weak and deceitful, and that Garlean domination will be good for Eorzea. He and Quintus both present the challenge that, if Eorzea desires peace, they should give in to the Garlean yoke.

What is most interesting of all is that in both these cases, no rebuttal is given to these claims.

Final Fantasy XIV has complex worldbuilding, but it does not have a subtle or multifaceted story. It has a single moral through-line that is hammered home by exhaustive exposition on the part of every character around you. Every single meaningful action you take is quickly praised as the right thing to do, with plentiful explanation given as to why. At most, in the greatest dramatic moments—such as the period in Shadowbringers after you complete the Crown of the Immaculate trial—there is a brief lull where you are allowed to feel a period of doubt, before your trusted supporting characters swoop in to reconfirm the one truth; or at the narrative's more thoughtful points, a character, frequently Alphinaud, gives voice to the feeling that some mistake must surely have been made somewhere, and that they feel regret over it, before letting that concern fall by the wayside, never to be resolved.

Yet in this moment, after Quintus' speech, the story lets his words hang in the air while Alphinaud scrambles for an answer he cannot find—not as some absurd rant given by a fantasy version of a white supremacist utterly detached from reality, but as an uncomfortable truth that must be acknowledged. The claims set forth by Quintus are never openly opposed, never even questioned, for the rest of Endwalker.

This is disquieting. But it is possible to glean details from the way a narrative unfolds even if it will not speak them out directly. Does Final Fantasy XIV as a whole narrative agree with the statements put forth by Quintus and Gaius? Not quite. Eorzea does not capitulate to Garlemald, nor is that shown to be a harmful thing. Not long after he gives his speech, Quintus takes his own life, refusing to live in a Garlemald overrun by "savages". In a moment of visual irony, his blood spatters the Garlean flag, whose spotlessness he swore in his final moments to protect. Ages ago, Gaius, shortly after he made his own triumphant speech, was driven back by the heroic protagonist and forced to retreat.

So where, exactly, does the story disagree? And why does it refuse to put the terms of its disagreement into words? Perhaps it is a great disagreement, or perhaps it is a small one. Let's have a short review.

Does the story tell, or show, a continuous power struggle between the nations of the world, from which there is no exit except submission? As we have seen in the various interactions between Eorzea and the "beast tribes", this seems to be frequently the case in the story. (Consider Admiral Merlwyb's remark, following the battle with the Sahagin, that "the weak perish, but the strong prevail.") However, it is not always the case: Eorzea has amicable relations with Doma, for example. So this is a point of disagreement.

Does the story tell or show that some people are fit for rule while others are fit for submission or extermination? This is a more difficult question to answer. Consider all the examples we gave before, in which those who rebel against authority are painted as villainous and evil, while those who show steadfast loyalty to it are shown to be happy, right, and virtuous.

Something we have not touched on before is exactly which authorities are considered worthy of loyalty. The primals, who mind-control their subjects, are not worthy of loyalty. By extension, the people of the "beast tribes", who show fanatical loyalty to their leaders, are also villainised. Nidhogg, who once was a legitimate citizen of a united and harmonious Dravania, is villainised for his actions against Ishgard—that he might bear loyalty to that lost land is not even considered. Ilberd's loyalties lie with Ala Mhigo, for which he is shown to be a monster. Meanwhile, Gaius van Baelsar, a villain at first, is redeemed and made an ally in the story after he explains that his loyalty is to Garlemald above all.

There is a clear double-standard on display here. Clearly, some loyalties are more praiseworthy than others. However, unlike the implication within the Garleans' speech, there is not one good and rightful ruler. Instead, there are several, chosen by some criteria. The story agrees on the principle, but disagrees on the matter of who is fit to rule.

Does the story tell or show that the dominion of one nation over another creates peace and prosperity? Recall the many words in the Crystal Tower sequence extolling the Allagan reign as the solstice of technology and enlightenment, and lamenting that civilisation has fallen so far since then. Much later, in Endwalker, Fandaniel will repeat these claims, saying that Allag's military conquest of the entire known world brought in an age of technological advancement and great prosperity, which ultimately gave way to "decadence". The Qitari praise the Ronkan Empire for "uniting" their disparate peoples under a single banner. And of course, it is Quintus' assertion that Garlemald would have brought peace to Eorzea that silences Alphinaud. This is a point of agreement.

Does the story tell or show that the dominion of an inadequate or unqualified nation causes corruption? This is easy to determine by going back to the examples used for the second point. The "beast tribes" that oppose Eorzea undertake a variety of hideous deeds: the Amalj'aa supposedly bribe a man to kidnap would-be pilgrims, who they horribly mutilate and kill. The Sahagin, Ixal, and kobolds all likewise murder, threaten, and cheat to get their way. In addition, they are all being secretly manipulated by the Garleans and Ascians for their own ends—not only corrupting but vulnerable to corruption. Nidhogg uses mind control to get his way, and sows unrest and mistrust in Ishgard by inviting defectors to join him, becoming "heretics" that can transform into draconic monsters. Ilberd operates through deceit and betrayal, and those under him are portrayed as victims of his ruthless designs; afterwards, members of the supposedly more legitimate Ala Mhigan resistance lament that he weakened them by seducing soldiers to his cause. This is a point of agreement.

Finally, does the story tell or show that those who are undeserving to rule deny the claims of fascism and seek cooperation as a form of underhanded deceit? Once again we begin with tenuous agreement. On the one hand, in a later scene, Alphinaud admits to the supposed truth of Quintus' claims: according to him, because Garlemald is no longer an almighty national power, it will inevitably face exploitation from the heroic nations of the Eorzean Alliance. In other words, even "good" nations will inevitably seek dominion over others, no matter what they may say. (We will discuss the subject of what the narrative regards as inevitable or necessary in the third section.) On the other hand, it is not shown that this is a trait particularly limited to some nations of worse moral character. The various downtrodden enemies you come into conflict with throughout the stories do not seek cooperation at all: they either accept subjugation or fiercely resist it. In fact, this is one of the many qualities used to villainise them. Furthermore, the game does not suppose that cooperation always has bad ends. Sometimes it can even coexist with systems of exploitation. The handful of actual partnerships you do forge—for example, with the Confederate pirates in the Ruby Sea—are not only shown as unanimously positive, with no difficulties or shortfallings, but eternally reliable. This is a point of disagreement.

To summarise: the story does believe that some peoples should rule over others, or have the right to exterminate them. It also believes that should the wrong peoples attempt to take power for themselves, society is damaged and eroded. However, it does not believe that there is only one rightful ruling power: there are several. In addition, these several rightful states may cooperate with each other, even should one be in a position to exploit another at the same time, to the benefit of all.

The story backs up these conclusions shortly after the events we discussed above. First, Eorzea, one legitimate imperial state, extends the hand of succour to Garlemald, another legitimate imperial state, and indicates that they do not need to be enemies. In the Endwalker "capstone" role quests—the optional quest chain unlocked by completing all role quests in the expansion—this partnership is expanded, as the Eorzean Alliance and its allies offer to help rebuild the ruined city of Garlemald, galvanised by the plight of Garlean citizens driven out of its imperial colony in Corvos (or Locus Amoenus). In an emotional moment, one such refugee describes the idyllic state of occupied Corvos, waxing lyrical about how the 2nd Legion was quick to crush rebellions in the days prior to the apocalypse.

The refugees from the Corvos colony are given a privileged treatment not afforded to the poor, starving refugees from Ala Mhigo who came to Ul'dah only to be spat upon and treated as either disposable labour or worthless criminals. In addition to the plan to rebuild Garlemald, Lord Fourchenault Leveilleur, the representative of Sharlayan's council, immediately offers them unconditional citizenship should they wish to emigrate to Sharlayan rather than stay in Garlemald during the reconstruction. A portion of the refugees refuses even this, declaring that they would rather die than live under a non-Garlean government: in response, Lord Leveilleur offers them leading positions in the project to build an archive on the moon. There is no discussion of how difficult it would be to offer them aid, no hand-wringing from Sharlayan about how it must keep outsiders away to protect its virtue, and no concern about them becoming criminals if they emigrate. Even the prospect of taking back Corvos for the Garleans is considered with some seriousness, though in the end Lord Leveilleur decides it would not be the right thing in this case—a welcome break from the political position of the game's earlier parts.

One more sign can be noted that gives away Garlemald's moral position in the narrative. Earlier we compared a few examples of individuals who opposed Eorzea to examples of individuals who collaborated with Eorzea, showing that regardless of the reasons for their actions, the collaborators are portrayed as in the right, and the rebels are portrayed as in the wrong. Let us do this again with two more relevant examples. On the one hand, we will have Gaius van Baelsar, villain of ARR, and on the other, we will have Zenos yae Galvus, villain of Stormblood and Endwalker.

Gaius, initially presented as a fairly stock villain, reappears in the Stormblood patch story. Proposing to ally with the protagonists, he later explains that he does so out of loyalty to Garlemald and its Emperor, believing that Eorzea can help him root out corruption that threatens the Garlean Empire. From then on he is a staunch, virtuous ally, and the story forgives him all his past misdeeds. His virtues even earn him the loyalty of the Werlyt Revolutionaries, who fight to liberate the same land Gaius once tyrannised as the legatus of the 14th imperial legion.

Zenos first appears as the tyrant prince who oversees the Garlean occupation in Doma and Ala Mhigo. Violent and domineering, he is said to have orchestrated a number of manipulative schemes. He shows notable favour to imperial collaborators such as Yotsuyu and Fordola, who impress him with their cruelty. Zenos soon assumes the role of the player's treasured rival, unlike other villains who face some sort of comeuppance for their actions. Indeed, the relationship between him and the player is shown to deepen in Endwalker, where amid his kidnapping, torture, and promises to bathe your home and family in blood, you are given several opportunities to indulge his requests and even call him your friend. There is only one point in all his appearances post-Stormblood where Zenos is directly chastised: by Jullus, a Garlean military officer, for his betrayal of the people of Garlemald in the course of causing a global apocalypse. Following this, we hear that Zenos has been excommunicated from Garlean society—perhaps the only time he suffers negative consequences for his actions.

The comparison of these two cases implies to us that Garlemald is viewed in a similar moral light to the sovereign states of Eorzea. Those who are loyal to it are virtuous, and those who betray it are punished.

The arbiters of good.

We have finally grasped the spark of it. Previously we noted that within Final Fantasy XIV's narrative, certain authorities are considered good and worthy of dominion, while other authorities are considered base and worthy of subordination or extermination. Now we see that Garlemald and Eorzea, along with other empires such as Allag and Ronka, both dwell in the category of the "good". This category is shared with Eorzea's allies, such as the Confederacy and Doma, as well as certain neutral and ultimately beneficial parties, such as the shogunate in Hingashi (which the Samurai 60-70 job quests are entirely dedicated to defending), Thavnair, and Sharlayan. Garlemald itself is in fact Eorzea's enemy for much of the story, yet still receives this honourable treatment. What exactly is the common thread here? What rule includes all these and excludes all their victims?

It is impossible to answer this question without bringing up the subject of racial politics, which has so far hovered over our analysis as a sort of looming spectre, largely unaddressed yet increasingly difficult to ignore.

Previously, when discussing the so-called "beast tribes", we noted that they shared many features common to caricatures, especially fantasy-genre caricatures, of indigenous people—not least being called "tribes" and likened to animals. We also pointed out that the portrayal of Ishgard takes particular inspiration from Christian military and police constructions around the period known as the Reconquista, including the various Inquisitions and the Knights Templar (a Catholic military order), which puts the monstrous dragons against whom Ishgard wars in the extremely awkward position of being stand-ins for the Muslim population of al-Andalus (or 'Moors') who inhabited parts of Europe prior to being ethnically cleansed by Christian conquest. Following the establishment of Christian rule, anyone suspected of practising Islam or Judaism, especially converts or those supposed to be descended from Muslim or Jewish ancestors, were ruthlessly persecuted by church organisations such as the Spanish Inquisition.

The uneasy-at-best racialised portrayals of characters in Ul'dah or Ala Mhigo also deserve some attention here, as well as the game's strangely polarised portrayals of skin colour. This polarisation is to the point where a large number of antagonists, including many of the imperial Garleans and the mad emperor Xande, are portrayed with dark skin in their role as antagonists; whereas only a few such individuals are shown in a positive light. While discussing the contrast between Ilberd and Raubahn, one thing we noted was that the specific insurance of Raubahn's loyalty to the state of Eorzea comes from his loyalty to a fair-skinned, fair-haired woman whom he faithfully serves as a subordinate. Ilberd's lack of loyalty to the same figure and the city-state she rules is then utterly demonised.

So we see that a common thread runs through at least some of the most hated and reviled factions of the story. If we look at the "good" nations, meanwhile, we see that a majority of them have western European inspirations: Limsa Lominsa is based on the British Isles, with some Welsh and English natives; Gridania's ruling family is noted to have "normal" Hyur names, i.e. British, Germanic, or Normandic; Ishgard, in addition to being a literal Holy See, has a majority of French names as well; Garlemald uses ancient Roman names and organisational systems; Sharlayan's architecture is rooted in images of Ancient Greece or Rome. In Stormblood, we learn of Doma and Hingashi, both based on somewhat cynical interpretations of Japanese history. It is little surprise that a narrative which praises conquest should firmly put these in the right. However, especially if one includes Stormblood and later expansions, we see a more varied geographical character.

There is Ul'dah, a rigidly capitalist nation in which the greedy Monetarists are held in line by a noble, kind monarch who understands the necessity of their existence. The people of the Azim Steppe, heavily based on Mongolian culture, are one group of "tribal" people who, though deeply exotified, receive a positive portrayal due to their willingness to obey the protagonist and the alliance you serve. This is established through you, an outsider, using your friendship with the Mol clan to make a legitimate claim for the position of Khagan, ruler of all the Steppe tribes. Due to their unconditional support of your military endeavours and recognition of you as their ruler, the Steppe tribes otherwise seem to be granted a measure of independence, and the narrative largely leaves them alone. Another nation that is privileged as your ally is Thavnair, which appears in Endwalker after being talked about for many expansions as the source of such things as "exotic" dancers and rare spices. As we learn through the main story, Thavnair's religious history is based on the alliance of the Au Ra and Arkasodora (the good elephant people) to ethnically cleanse the warlike Gajasura (the evil elephant people) from their nation—a history extremely reminiscent of the stories in early ARR.

To put it in short at last: while some nations, primarily European (or, as of Stormblood, Japanese) in inspiration, are seen by default as having the right to sovereignty, other nations earn the same right—in the case of the Steppe tribes, by partial subordination and servitude, and in the case of Thavnair, by mirroring the dominant powers' history of "good conquest".

There we are. So far we have had to dive significantly further into the overarching themes of the story, but we have emerged with an understanding. In the first section we learned something about how the narrative views evil: that evil springs from individuals who suffer, especially at the hands of systemic or social forces, and who seek to rebel against those forces. Now we have learned something about how the narrative views good: that good springs from the mighty state, that rules over its subjects, conquers those who are not fit to rule themselves, and cooperates with other states fit to be its equal.

These elements are clearly consonant, but we have yet to find the magic solution to this two-variable equation, the thing that ties them up into a single narrative with a single main thrust. We know the slaves are rebelling because they are suffering, that rebelling slaves are evil and must die, and that the state that enslaved them in the past and that slaughters them now does so for good reason. But what is that reason? If these horrible cycles are the truth of the world, what ideal are we supposed to believe in that justifies our continuing to uphold them? Why should you, personally, be the agent of imperialism, and feel good about it?

3. "The greatest evil is despair."

In seeking the story's moral core, we at last come to discuss its ultimate conflict—the matter of the primals, the Ascians, the ancients, and the Final Days.

Endwalker's central plot is thrust into motion by the character of Fandaniel. This Ascian was once the legendary Allagan scientist Amon, who cloned the Emperor Xande in order to instigate a new age of military conquest and ultimately brought about the Fourth Umbral Calamity. As we know from the plot of Shadowbringers and earlier, the Ascians seek to bring about great calamities because they coincide with the "rejoining" of the many reflections of the world with the Source. However, Fandaniel cites another reason for his actions—a genuine fondness for the Allagan empire, and despondence at its condition in the time he was alive.

In a cutscene taking place in the Tower of Zot, in the early part of the expansion, Fandaniel repeats the earlier assertion that Allag's conquest of the world brought about an age of peace and enlightenment, in which "every need was fulfilled". He then takes a further bizarre leap of logic—claiming that this period of peace was the cause of Allag falling into a state of "decadence", in which the nobility performed cruel surgical "experiments" on people for the sake of entertainment. (We also know that, in the Allagan laboratories of Azys Lla, human beings were hunted for sport or 'exercise', but it is unclear whether this is related.) Amon believed this state was undesirable and resurrected Emperor Xande to begin a new age of Allagan conquest, which he believed would improve the nation's moral character.

Now, Fandaniel himself is not a reliable narrator, being one of the expansion's main villains. Perhaps his values and his version of events do not reflect the intent of the narrative. Let us turn quickly to the Unending Codex, the game's own record of lore, containing facts about the characters and the world. Speaking of Allag, the Unending Codex states that "generations of peace and prosperity gave rise to decadence", and that "[t]he people grew complacent, abandoning learning and drowning themselves in leisure" (a strange way for sure to moralise about torture or human experimentation). Again, it says that "a victim of its prosperity, the empire had grown stagnant; the people delighted in debauchery, and science was no more than a means to amuse the masses." To dispel all doubt that the Codex and Fandaniel are talking about the same thing in the same terms: "None lamented this deplorable state of affairs more than a technologist named Amon."

It seems that the story very much agrees with Fandaniel on this point. Peace itself was inimical to Allag's existence. Furthermore, the nebulously-defined "decadence" and "debauchery" are not at all condemnations of the nature of Allag as an empire built on military conquest, slavery, and exploitation. Otherwise, why would a new age of that same military conquest be construed as a solution? Neither are they condemnations of the ruling class in particular: the Codex entries above refer to "the people" and "the masses" as if all the people of Allag were united in their habits and interests.

Very similar sentiments may be noted elsewhere in the story of Final Fantasy XIV. For example, when discussing the war that led to the Sixth Umbral Calamity, Raya-o-Senna, one of the Padjal leaders of Gridania, claims that Mhach and Amdapor were at peace for a long period, but that "prosperity breeds contempt, and nations warred for power and riches". This is the exact and only cause given for the war. The resulting war between the two nations apparently caused such great environmental destruction (expressed through the fantasy-notion of "imbalances of aether") that the entire world was submerged in a great flood.

Why might such a strange notion—that moral decay, which creates social evils, arises in times of peace and prosperity—be put in the mouth of a villain in Endwalker? This is doubly interesting because Fandaniel is not only a major villain in Endwalker, but the original cause of the chief conflicts of Endwalker's story. After unveiling the identity of Hermes, the original Fandaniel and the root of the present Fandaniel's soul, there is a cutscene in the Aitiascope in which Fandaniel reveals that he fully remembers Hermes' plans, and that his worldview was an influence on Fandaniel's own. Later on, G'raha Tia speculates on supposed similarities between Amon and Hermes' actions, and presents the idea that their sharing a soul makes them in some sense the same person. The journal entry on the same events confirms this interpretation, going so far as to describe Fandaniel as "the man who was once Hermes, many times Fandaniel, but Amon at the last".

We point this out particularly to establish that the game draws thematic ties between Amon's actions, which led indirectly to the fall of Allag, and Hermes' actions, which brought about the downfall of the ancients. Therefore, other such links may also exist—for example, between Fandaniel's resolve to destroy the world by bringing about the Final Days, and Hermes' initial involvement in that same catastrophe.

Hermes.

On this note, we will quickly go over the subject of Hermes. Late in the Endwalker story, you travel back in time and visit Elpis, where you meet with the ancients as they once were: Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, Venat, and Hermes all make appearances here. We see that the ancients lived privileged lives, using their immense magic power to freely shape the features of their planet, which they called Etheirys. They created and destroyed life at will, tailoring the ecosystems of Etheirys to their convenience and aesthetic preferences, as well as what they otherwise believed was "the good of the star". The creatures they would freely create and destroy included not just animals, plants, or amalgams of aether, but sapient creatures, including "familiars" that they created in their own image. The ancients justify this (at least in part) with their belief that only they possess souls, and that without a soul, no other creature is truly alive.

When you travel back in time, you emerge at a point in history when Hermes is the head of Elpis, a floating island facility in which sample organisms were judged for their suitability for addition to the planet. Hermes is at first notable for harbouring doubts about the nature of his work. He believes that the question of a 'soul' is immaterial, that all beings deserve existence, that the greatest effort should be taken to preserve their right to life, and that their deaths, no matter how necessary, should be mourned. Hermes' feelings about the death of living creatures extends to fellow human beings in the civilisation of the ancients—in addition to taking the lives of others too lightly, he believes that they take their own lives too lightly as well. His views are, as far as we know, unique in his society—no one we meet shares them, or even entertains them as anything but unfortunate outbursts of emotion. In fact, while Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus challenge Hermes on the subject of his former mentor's imminent passing, accusing him of slighting his memory by denying that he should return to the Lifestream, no argument at all is had about the welfare of creatures regarded as lesser.

Hermes' concern for life leads him to question the morals of his society, and he seeks a new paradigm of meaning. He creates Meteion, a harpy-like being who behaves much like a child, and clones her several times to create a hive-mind. Meteion is a being with great control over, and sensitivity to, a substance called "dynamis" or "akasa", and using it as a medium, she is capable of long-distance telepathic communication with her clones, as well as space flight. Hermes sends most of the clones (or Meteia) out to explore the cosmos, seeking out alien civilisations in order to ask them "what gives life meaning", hoping to find through external observation some new paradigm that determines the worth of living beings.

We are now coming to the most absurd part of this whole story. Meteion and her sisters travel the universe, visiting a fair list of civilisations—the numbering in Ultima Thule implies at least eighteen, maybe more. She discovers that every single civilisation she has gone to visit is either dead or entirely populated by people who wish to die. Some are victims of conquest or oppression. Some have polluted their planet to a point where it can no longer support them. Some engaged in a war in which both sides were apparently happy to seek their own destruction. Some simply found out about the theoretical heat death of the universe and decided to unanimously give up the ghost because, in approximately 10 quattuortrigintillion years (a term it took no small effort to look up), the universe will reach a state of fairly high entropy, from which it will be difficult to derive energy to perform any kind of work—and obviously, nothing worth doing or experiencing could occur between now and then.

Of course, there is some parity between the ideas portrayed here and the world we presently live in, and that our ancestors lived in. In the present day, we face a multitude of international crises, many of them produced by the sick society that presently dominates most of the productive forces in the world. Many of these crises are reflected in the game, if in broad strokes. But there are two things to note here.

Firstly, crises that threaten our existence are not new. We know, through history, how human beings (and, indeed, other types of creatures) react to danger, even very great danger that destroys much of our populations. Deliberate genocides, ecological disasters that devastate communities or entire nations, and the fundamental deprivation of personhood are common themes, if anything, for the oppressed in our history and especially our recent history. If suffering could make every person in a community, without exception, give up the desire to live, we should have seen it do so; moreover, humanity in general should have been long consigned to the grave.

However, according to the game's narrative, events like these universally compel every single person in a civilisation to give up hope—civilisations with purposeful parallels to humanity's struggles. There must be a reason why a notion so contrary to reality is given such credence. Even though the narrative does reach the conclusion that life is worth living, and therefore it does not agree with such sentiments as the ones given above, it nonetheless chooses to inflate their importance and overstate their persuasive power, making these sentiments—not the events that spawned them—into world-ending catastrophes. Why might it do such a thing? Why depict the arising of a particular feeling, a particular emotion born of existential thought, as not only a credible threat, but the ultimate threat to all life?

Secondly, thoroughly existential notions and abstract philosophical problems, like the case of the Ea described above, are depicted as equally valid causes of the complete destruction of civilisation as the more physical and inescapable causes. In another example, a civilisation supposedly "eliminates all causes of suffering" within itself and subsequently decides that life has "lost its savour" without the joy of struggle, so they should all perish. (The 68th Letter From The Producer Live video specifically confirms that this civilisation mirrors that of the ancients, and that they would have met a similar fate, should they have "perfected" their world—a sentiment foreshadowed by one of Hermes' lines, no less.) This specifically allows the narrative to account for nations that supposedly "succeed", that reach a certain pinnacle—that attain total mastery of society, of knowledge, of their environment, and of their enemies. Including these, Meteion does not encounter a single person on a single planet who is happy or even ambivalent about their life. Why does the narrative put such emphasis on the fact that all civilisations, whether they prosper or suffer, inevitably produce this same fatal sentiment, this emotional basilisk?

Let us return to our summary. Prior to Hermes hearing Meteion's report, you reveal to him and to the other ancients your suspicion that he has something to do with the Final Days. Once Meteion receives the data she will relay, she becomes distraught, concerned that Hermes will react poorly. Despite this, you and the other ancients corral her and force her to proceed with the report, where she outlines all the supposed truths that we have described above. Hermes, upon hearing this, realises that Meteion herself, through the very despair she feels, will bring about the Final Days—and decides that he will safeguard her and allow her to do so, because of the resolution he had made when sending her out on her journey—that "whatever answers we find, [he] will not dismiss them out of hand". This draws a direct line between his initial motivations and his present actions—they are meant to be related. He then ushers her on to escape and destroy the world with her song, while preventing anyone from pursuing her by erasing their memories of all the events recounted here.

If you recall the first section of this essay, our chief point there was the narrative's claim that anger and despair arising from suffering are the source of evil acts. Hermes' treatment throughout this story is remarkable in that light. He specifically says that no one else in all of Elpis, no one he has ever met, has negative feelings about the treatment of the creatures tested there—since those feelings are not reflected in the Elpis flowers, which serve as a reliable barometer of emotion. By contrast, he feels sympathy for the creatures of Elpis, who are used, abused, and discarded, and who feel terrible pain and fear. Meteion herself frequently refers to Hermes' own anger and pain, which hurt her—putting a strong focus on his feelings, rather than what he sees that gives rise to those feelings, or what he intends to do based on them. She again focuses on these feelings prior to giving her report. Indeed, the story seems to regard Hermes' intentions as unimportant compared to his emotions. Although he seems to initially have a clear principle guiding his actions—that all beings in Elpis deserve to be valued and respected—he abandons his old way of thinking as soon as Meteion's "verdict" comes in. His compassion for life, while an interesting trait, is thereon discarded in the story, and ceases to have significance.

Instead, Hermes becomes the source of all the great evils of the story that have ever occurred. The first and second Final Days, the sundering of the worlds, the transformation of the supposedly benevolent Council of Fourteen into the hated Ascians who caused the seven Umbral Calamities, and even the birth of the Amon-Fandaniel who would deliberately bring in the apocalypse all have a direct causal line to Hermes' actions and to his apparent nature. All this because Hermes sought answers from the stars and heeded what answers he received, and all this because, in the first place, Hermes questioned the mores of the nation in which he lived.

Of course he is driven by his emotions, rather than reason—all people who oppose the state are. And of course he was moved by the suffering of living creatures—suffering turns you evil. And of course he ultimately brought about the destruction of the world—evil is that which opposes the state, and its end is only hatred and destruction, nothing else. The story has not moved at all, not at all advanced from its roots, not at all changed in its stance. According to the morals of Final Fantasy XIV, the hecatoncheires who were enslaved in the Copperbell Mines, Ilberd the traitor, and Hermes the overseer of Elpis are all of the same mind.

Yet this is only a confirmation of what we have discussed in the previous two sections. We have not yet found the "kernel of hope" that resides in Endwalker; nor have we completely defined the nature of its great despair.

Opposing the Final Days.

Much like our protagonist, we too have completed our sojourn in Elpis, and must return with the answers we have found to the present day. Zodiark was a being created by the ancients at great cost to forestall Meteion's lethal song of despair, preventing it from reaching Etheirys. After Fandaniel, with our unwitting help, destroys Zodiark, the Final Days that Meteion had begun to bring about in the ancients' time resumes. People are drawn into despair, and when they are, they transform into horrible monsters that savage anyone around them. We are specifically told that these monsters cannot be saved or healed and must be ruthlessly destroyed to prevent their influence from spreading. The story has long informed us that those who respond to their suffering with anger become violent and beyond reason. Now it writes this into indisputable fact.

Truthfully, the blatantness of the theme of suffering giving rise to evil has reached a fever pitch. In Doma, a woman who lost her husband in the Garlean occupation transforms into a monster, and her mother out of grief in turn plots to deceive the village of Isari, turning them against the good king, Hien. In Ala Mhigo, those who suffered under the imperial boot shun those who served as the spikes on that boot's underside—the imperial collaborators, who subsequently turn into monsters. In Ishgard, similar resentment brews among the commonfolk against the church and the clergy, who for a thousand years maintained the lie that kept the war going at the people's expense—and who are now turning into monsters due to the contempt of their supposed lessers. In Limsa Lominsa, the Sahagin who oppose cooperation with Limsa Lominsa for its genocidal policies and history of broken treaties form a splinter faction around the monstrosity that was once their queen. In Gridania, a man who was first cast out from his childhood home by the great elementals, then deprived of his family by a plague, now embodies that plague to rage against those elementals. In Garlemald at last, we learn that the fallen empire still holds at least one colonial territory in Corvos, who have rebelled and driven out all Garleans, granting them no quarter, not even imprisonment—the unfairness of which has left the Garleans who returned to a ruined capital homeless and despairing, prone to transform into monsters. No matter what, the fault lies with the oppressed and their unreasonable hatred; and no matter what, the institutions they rage against must stand, for in institutions alone can hope be found.

Hope—for after all, there is a way to put an end to the song that Meteion sings. For this, you and your trusted companions, no one else, must journey to the place at the end of the universe where she resides, a region of space ruled over by the power of emotion, poetically called Ultima Thule.

How exactly do you do this? Only by quelling the unrest that created the above monstrosities—and by uniting the Empire of Eorzea, its counterparts, and its subsidiaries, who all come together to create an ark capable of travelling the stars. Sharlayan, the city so great that it treats all other nations and their citizens with contempt, is the privileged heart of this operation. To build the ship they have dreamed up, the shards of Allag's false moon, Dalamud, are pillaged for materials; sacred relics are taken from Doma and Hingashi; and the "beast tribes" themselves conjure up their gods, but in a good way this time, and for a good purpose—to hurl themselves into the ship's engines and be cannibalised for fuel.

This at last is the great resolution of the story of the evil primals and the ARR tribes. When the tribes summoned primals for their own purposes, to oppose the states that were trying to erase them from existence, they were thoroughly evil and hateful. In fact, they were considered the greatest evil of that story, greater than the Garleans, a scourge that had destroyed ecosystems, nations, and entire worlds every time they sprung up. During ARR, it was made clear that the very existence of a primal exerted such a terrible force on the ambient magic of the world that it destroyed everything around it. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn, your own illustrious paramilitary intelligence network, are themselves devoted to the task of hunting down and destroying primals, as well as prevent their summoning where possible—this is one of the primary reasons the organisation exists. Now, however, the tribes are allied with the colonial nations, and at the eleventh hour, at the last minute, we receive the little lore factoid that a good way to summon primals, without the mind control, has always existed. They are not fundamentally evil at all. Because of this, the newly pacified tribes under the thumb of Eorzea can selflessly put their gods into the great meat grinder of progress for the good of the entire world. A finer metaphor for an empire's treatment of its victim cultures has hardly ever existed. Everything can be made to serve. Everything that serves is good.

What is despair?

Backed then by the unanimous support of the entire world, you travel across time and space to Ultima Thule. There, Meteion opposes you, forcing your comrades to make valiant sacrifices that will shortly be reversed. Dwindling in number, you climb the vastness of the plane of despair, ascending towards the inverted summit of the dark planet looming overhead. Here we at last have a chance to deeply explore the subject of despair—although it takes a particular section of post-game side content to actually begin to contend with the ideas presented. Ultima Thule chiefly comprises the illusory images of three dead planets: those of the dragons, the Ea, and the Omicrons.

The dragon planet is the original residence from which Midgardsormr, the father of all dragons on Etheirys, fled long ago. They were beset by a vicious conquering force that pillaged their planet and poisoned it to such an extent that their young could not grow. The image of withered parents whose babies are born sick and dying is one ripe with real-world connection, especially if we consider in what geographical context this story was penned. The solution to the dragons' despair is to persuade them that their offspring do have a future—in Dravania, where you slew their leader to secure peace for a nation founded on the promise of their destruction. When this fails to convince them that their future is bright, you then also persuade them to make up with their conquerors, who have turned over a new leaf. So far, this is simply what we have already seen: despair comes from their suffering, and hope comes from the state-authorities that caused that suffering in the first place, whose rule you now bring to them as you brought it to the dragons of Ishgard.

The Ea long ago gave up their physical bodies for immortal shells, forsaking all physical sensations in order to more perfectly pursue knowledge. These are the ones who discovered the heat death of the universe and thereafter concluded that life was not worth living. They have since begun to try and reincarnate themselves in physical forms so that they can all die. The solution to the Ea's despair is to remind them of the pleasures of the flesh, such as food, childrearing, and electrocution (which they were perhaps once wired to enjoy).

This touches on the subject of the "universal despair problem" that we introduced earlier. It is not an unusual thought that knowledge of the universe's (by one definition) finitude might shake someone's worldview and make them feel worry or even dread. However, it is a paper-thin excuse for why an entire civilisation might halt all its operations and single-mindedly seek death. The cure for it, therefore, is also childishly simple—once the Ea remember to have fun and be themselves, they are no longer worried by the idea that one day all life will be extinct. The depth in this issue dwells not in its details but in the pattern it forms with other, similar issues.

During your journey in Elpis, Hermes passionately proclaims his concern that if all ancients become satisfied, they will all choose death and disappear, ending their civilisation. One of Meteion's reports covers a similar place, whose inhabitants eliminated all suffering and then chose to disappear because "life lost its savor". In addition, as we covered earlier, Amon described the "decadence" and "debauchery" of Allag, which came about because of excessive prosperity, and was cured by a new call to military conquest—which cured the issue of decadence by granting "new purpose" to the nation. This implies that the so-called decadence was brought about by a corresponding lack of purpose. Furthermore, when Xande deliberately brings about Allag's destruction through the Fourth Umbral Calamity, he confides to Amon that the reason for his actions is the knowledge that he will not live forever—and when he is dead, he will no longer have his empire. Fandaniel cites this as one of the primary reasons for his attempt to end the world. This sentiment resonates in a worrying way with the bizarre concerns of the Ea, who are not satisfied with living a mere 10106 years, but see no point in life at all if they can't personally experience an eternity.

Where does this bizarre notion spring from? The more we unveil the intricacies of Final Fantasy XIV's idea of despair, the more it strays from our natural understanding. Peace yields despair, and war cures peace! Those who can live as long and happily as they wish are the ones who value life the least! How does it cohere?

Let us consider again what we have already learned. A crucial subpoint of our very first discussion—that suffering turns you evil—is the matter of what, exactly, brings about suffering in the first place. Why were the hecatoncheires enslaved by the king of Ul'dah? Why does Ul'dah deny so many people access to food or shelter? Why is Limsa Lominsa's government partly beholden to pirates that hunt the innocent for wealth? Why do Gridania's elementals call for entire classes of people to be punished or expelled for performing the activities necessary for life? We may have some suspicions as to the answer to these questions, but the game itself does not. It does not need to. As far as its story is concerned, suffering is necessary. It is not only necessary circumstantially or temporarily. It is a fundamental necessity of the establishment and maintenance of a state authority, from which all good flows. That suffering is a necessity, that some people will always suffer, that some people will be made poor, will be abused, will be killed by an unjust society in the name of the overall good—the number of times this sentiment is repeated is too high to easily count. Most notably, Nanamo confirms it, speaking out of sympathy for the poor in Ul'dah; and G'raha Tia confirms it, praising Amon's choice as motivated by goodwill towards his people—and the Unending Codex also confirms the efficacy of Amon's actions.

In fact, only by accepting this fact can we reconcile the game's clear and continuous acknowledgement of the abject suffering endured by your enemies at your hands and at the hands of your allies with its conviction that nothing should be done about the cause of that suffering. Now at last we understand the root of its claims—that it is not a problem that people suffer. The only problem to be solved is the problem that stands before you, the one who madly resists the way of things, who denies the necessity of man-made suffering, man-made torment and cruelty.

Those who wish for an end to the system that perpetuates suffering will destroy everything. The stateless revolutionary and the enlightened death-seeker are one and the same. They must both be stopped.

This explains even why the supposedly great and peaceful nation of the ancients, which was headed for ultimate enlightenment, had to disappear; why those who, after the apocalypse, wanted to restore Etheirys to its idyllic state were monsters for doing so who demanded an unconscionable price; why Venat was right to split the world into fourteen parts and subject humanity to the chaos of mortality and struggle; why the Ascians, once proud and good-hearted Councillors, become cast as supercilious, emotionally-driven creatures of destruction in their opposition to you; why Mhach and Amdapor went to war; why Eulmore retains hegemonic power... in short, why every cycle and every system of violence that has been present in ancient times has endured through to the present day, and why it must continue to do so into the future.

(We would be remiss here not to, again, draw a connection to reality. On the one hand, it is a classic line of fascist parties that war should be the way to revitalise a dying nation, one supposedly crumpled and withered by the decrepitude of peace and the invasion of foreign entities. The great magnetic draw of fascism is the promise that a nation united by expulsion, conquest, and destruction of the other will cure all social ills. On the other hand, we have the position of the moderates of the world, which states there should be no new suffering, but that the wars that are ongoing, the conflicts, the inequality, the abuse, the occupation, the institutions of extortion and segregation—these should remain, and should be enshrined and praised. Much as we have previously observed, the story's political line hews much closer to the liberal view than the fascist one—yet it does not hesitate to extol the conditional virtues of the fascist regimes of the past.)

How deep is the despair of one who knows such a truth! How profoundly must they weep, those who believe they have grasped this answer, the answer that all injustices are eternal and that to even try to escape the cycle is utter self-destruction! What misery to think in such a way!

Yet we must not give in to despair. For despair, as we know, is the enemy. Those who despair become monsters, traitors, and family-killers. Those who despair destroy their civilisations, leaving no trace behind. So we must not think that this state of affairs is bad at all. No! Since it is inevitable, we must find joy in it, and we must think it good.

Where is hope?

Let us loop back and take up the subject of the last of the three dead stars in Ultima Thule. The Omicrons are a people who were once flesh, but who, in their fear of conquest, pursued ultimate military might. They shed their flesh and became robots, believing they would thus have fewer weaknesses. As soon as they could take to the stars, they began conquering and destroying every alien people they found for fear that if they did not, one of those alien peoples might one day become stronger than them and conquer them instead. Eventually, they could find no more aliens. As robots, their single directive was to become stronger than all other civilisations in terms of military might, so they simply stopped doing anything once they had achieved this goal. The cure to this is to seek the head artificial intelligence of the Omicrons, who is the only one who can provide them with a new directive. Once you secure the cooperation of this being, it issues a new guiding principle to the robotic hive-mind: to "live". Following this, in the Omicron Tribal Quests, you help the Omicrons to establish a "café" in the centre of Ultima Thule, from which they peddle hope and good thoughts to the various denizens of the various dead stars. Again we see that the supreme, military conquering force becomes the catalyst for positive change—the Omicrons were the only people to even begin to ask the question of new purpose—but that is hardly the most relevant point. With the Omicrons themselves revitalised by obedience to this command, you set about tending to the other, fundamentally illusory denizens of Ultima Thule, with the aim of transforming this place of despair into a vision of hope.

This transformation takes a telling form. We have already covered the subject of the dragons—inspired by the story of Ishgard and told to make up with their conquerors. A similar solution occurs with the Karellians. These are the people utterly destroyed by a global war between an oppressive state and a revolutionary rebel force. This portrayal of civil struggle as purely destructive is by now unsurprising. The Omicron café entertains two Karellians, one from each side of this war, who are shown to be equally narrow-minded in their loathing for each other. The solution to their problems comes easily when they both agree to be "less violent" and to cooperate with each other in bettering their environment. Following this, the two factions' negative opinions of each other remain, but are treated as a sort of humorous sideshow. Clearly, wherever hope is, it does not consist in struggling against one's oppressors.

The Grebuloffs are another group that the Omicron café handles. We are told that the Grebuloffs were an ocean species by origin, and that they afterwards took to land, but remained at least partially aquatic. The pollution of their oceans therefore took a fatal toll on their species, and drove them finally to extinction. Since this almost directly recalls the heavy toll that pollution and global warming are already beginning to have on the oceans of our world, it seems surprising that the Grebuloffs at large blame themselves generically for their failure to stop polluting. No particular party, that might have been insulated from the impacts of environmental destruction and might have wielded unusual amounts of political and economic power, is held to be at fault. It is simply taken for granted that the Grebuloffs each knowingly and willingly poisoned themselves and their entire world to the point of no return, without any sort of twisted system as an impetus. This runs quite counter to the known sociopolitical currents in our world. The Grebuloffs have their hope restored by being reminded of the pleasant sights and smells that their planet once held, and decide to go on with their second chance at life. So wherever hope resides, it is not in analysis of the cause of past failures.

We have already discussed the matter of the Ea, who are made to remember their physical roots and the pleasures of the flesh. Although it is hinted that the Ea have forgotten much of their treasured knowledge following their great turn towards nihilism, this was not the original cause of their despair. Nonetheless, the restoration of those memories is taken as a solution, because it distracts the Ea from the questions that so daunted them. Wherever hope dwells, it does not require you to confront and resolve uncomfortable ideas.

Now for the Omicrons themselves. They are trapped not by any outward condition, but by a similar loss of faculties: their inability to seek new purpose after having bent their society to the pursuit of violence. They have "perfected" themselves by subordinating themselves to a set of artificial personalities of ultimate intellect, the Stigmas. Despite the fact that the many Omicron units show clear signs of emotion, desire, and self-direction, they ultimately deny having any will beyond the will of these central intelligences. Without such a will to instruct them, they do not otherwise act. The ultimate solution to the Omicrons' despair comes with the realisation that they are not bound to their past directive and can instead choose to focus on the new one—to "live"—to their own benefit, since they are still living beings. All this takes place within their collective will, not contrary to it—it is not the breaking of any sort of restraints placed upon them that gives them freedom, but rather an acknowledgement that they were previously wrong. It is a change of attitude, not a change of state.

In a similar fashion, the Nibirun are the people that "perfected" their society, notably by preventing war and death, and concluded thereafter that life without struggle was worthless, so they may as well die. The solution to their despair is that they are confounded by the newfound hopeful feelings they encounter throughout Ultima Thule as a result of your work with the Omicrons. Some of them then decide to visit the café as well. In their case, too, the change is a change of attitude.

Indeed, every single key to "hope" in these stories is simply the act of convincing someone that their present state is not that bad; and of course, the one to do the convincing in each case is you, the outside visitor to Ultima Thule. This is remarkable in the context of the larger story we have already uncovered. In many of these cases, the great despair that falls upon people was supposedly triggered by overwhelming external circumstances. However, as soon as their attitude changes, Ultima Thule suddenly blesses them with a better world—in other words, the key to their improved condition is an improved attitude. Conversely, throughout the Omicron Tribal Quests, it is on many occasions noted that even one person remaining in a state of despair could damage Ultima Thule's condition, bringing everyone's newfound happiness to naught. That's right—one person's negative attitude is the greatest threat to everyone else's happiness and success.

It is not universally a harmful approach to imply that a change of perspective can improve someone’s emotional state. However, we recall that these stories began with discussion of things like environmental destruction, war, oppression, and other conditions that supposedly brought not one person, not a percentage of people, but every person in a civilisation, without exception, to the agreement that they should die. In fact, our suspicion is that the root of despair, as far as the story is concerned, is what the narrative considers to be a very real fact—that civilisation begets torment and cruelty, that it must do so in order to continue existing, and that life cannot exist without such a civilisation. It is observation of this fact that drives people to despair, and yet it is not a counterargument but simply a resolution to be hopeful that fixes the problem.

Does this supposition hold up? Let us move on to our final case study: that of Meteion herself, who you meet after climbing through and surveying all of Ultima Thule. It is the curing of Meteion's own personal despair that transforms Ultima Thule into a place where hope can exist at all. Meteion has convinced herself, through seeing the absolute and inescapable demise of every single civilisation in the universe regardless of its conditions, that no life should continue to exist. What is the answer to this?

In response to Meteion, you use the gift of Hydaelyn to summon the spirits of Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus to your side, who then remind Meteion of the promise that Hermes once made to her—that when she returns to Elpis, Hermes will gift her with a flower. Meteion then concludes that what is important isn't what she found, but what Hermes wanted her to find—a message of hope, which could not have been discovered out in the universe, but instead had to be created. This is afterwards reinforced by you, when you wordlessly gift her your own positive emotions about life.

Meteion's newfound hope then alters the entire universe, as her despair once did, creating—as she tells us—the possibility for life to bloom again, which she had extinguished with her song of despair.

It is exactly as we have seen all throughout this analysis. The problem which is directly stated and presented is utterly ignored when it comes to seeking solutions. The true source of pain, suffering, and harm is not the problem but the way people feel about it. Negative feelings about the present state of affairs lead naturally to a state of "despair" in which one not only wishes for, but actively works to bring about the destruction of all life. The antidote to this is positive feelings, or "hope", which, as long as you stick to them with all your might, spontaneously generate better conditions.

Remember how Hermes was moved to destroy the world by his concern about the abuse of living creatures! His negative feelings, his pain, his sadness, created Meteion, and in concert with her, Hermes chose to usher in the end of the ancients' civilisation. Now, far into the future, Meteion's echo of Hermes' pain is silenced by the idea that you should feel happy, no matter how bad things are, not by any attempt to address the bad state of any part of the world. Every single avoidable harm that exists, every single bad thing that could be changed, is folded into the idea that, as Hydaelyn tells you, "to live is to suffer". Hope is not fighting to better the world, it is not changing one's ways, and it is not improvement to one's circumstances. In fact, dissatisfaction with one's life is the source of despair, which is evil. Satisfaction with one's life, on the other hand, is the source of hope, which is good.

We want to emphasise again that this is a message being given in the context of systemic oppression, of material circumstances created by some that bring about suffering and pain for others. Despair is when slaves rebel. Despair is when a man gets worried about animal welfare. Despair is when a people fights back against its own genocide. And despair is when a child weeps for the world.

Hope is when the slaves are suppressed. Hope is when the man deletes his memories of questioning his society. Hope is when the leader of the embattled people is killed. And hope is when the child expresses her willingness to go on to the grave, crying tears of happiness.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the true name of Endwalker's "hope" is submission, and the true name of Endwalker's "despair" is rebellion.

The liberal doctrine.

The ultimate source of hope in Endwalker is everything you have built up over the course of the story: all your allies, and all the ideals that come with them. Because of this, and because of all we have outlined above, the narrative of hope against despair, despite its grand, emotional presentation, cannot be extricated from its connection to the story's previous themes. In fact, it reinforces them. War, subjugation, and inequality—all the trappings of capitalist imperialism as we know it—are not only inescapable but good and necessary for a just life, and any good state will enforce them. However, people's base natures lead them to respond to suffering with a desire to question or change their material conditions. This is why people who are not controlled are dangerous. Such questioning invites destruction, and should be silenced, replaced with love and praise for the status quo. People who are correctly guided are perfectly obedient to a state authority, serve it with all their being, and even if they suffer, do not question that their suffering is for the overall good. This is the eternal state of the world and of all life. There is nothing artificial about it, and nothing that could ever be changed—except for the worse.

From start to finish, from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker, this is the whole intentional message of the story of Final Fantasy XIV. There. We have found it.

4. Conclusion.

We stated in our introduction that part of our reason for presenting this analysis is our passion for interpreting not only the possible messages of a piece of media, but the intentions and ideas that might have created it. This is true, but we also believe that doing such work has a measure of objective importance.

The question of "are video games art?" has surrounded the medium since not long after its inception. A similar question arose when film first became publicly accessible, when novels started to be written in large numbers, and with the invention of photography and digital art. In short, such a question arises around every new medium as it strives for legitimacy within its culture.

If we judge by the barometer of certain propagandist institutions—for example, the US military—we can see that the answer is a resounding "yes". Ever since the inception of Hollywood, which today is pretty much synonymous with the globally-reaching US film industry, that nation's military has had a direct hand in every film script it sets its eye on. In fact, if a movie wants to portray the military at all, it will typically need to use suitable props—tanks, guns, military advisors and so on—and the US military is the sole supplier of these, and only hands them out to films whose scripts pass its approval. This is in addition to the allocation of funds to subsidise specific propaganda films.

More recently, that same military has set its eye on the video game industry as a vehicle by which it can manipulate its portrayal. Not only have they directly developed game franchises such as America's Army since as early as 2002, they also host esports tournaments and run competitive esports teams across a number of franchises—not only those that directly portray the US military, such as Call of Duty or Counterstrike, but also broadly popular games such as Fortnite, League of Legends, and Overwatch. They partner with companies such as Activision Blizzard to stage publicity events in which they attempt to recruit attendees and people who sign up for giveaways.

Now, the United States media machine has a massively global reach. As an English speaker who plays video games, you are likely to have heard most if not all of the above names. US-based propaganda is the greatest propaganda machine in the world—but it is far from the only one. If it is turning its eye to the realm of video games, we too must put our guard up in that arena, for the rest of the world is surely doing the same.

As consumers in this era of global capitalism, we are constantly inundated with propaganda. The media, whether news or fiction, that gets advertised to us—the media that reaches great peaks of popularity, that everyone ends up reading and talking about—is the media that is at least accepted, if not directly pushed, by wealthy businesses or powerful governments. The more it is supported through advertising, through funding, through systems such as localisation and publishing, the greater its reach becomes. This creates a sort of "positive censorship" in which our media intake is controlled not necessarily by undesirable messages being suppressed, but rather by desirable messages being elevated far above others, and made so loud that they drown out any chance of the rest being heard. It is an echo chamber.

As residents of this echo chamber, even our commentary on these things, even our reflexive fan-writing and analysis, is deeply influenced by the limits of what we are able to hear. We reflect what we know, and we reflect what we are made to believe. It is impossible to shun all propagandist media and escape into a pure world of only truth. Merely experiencing a couple of flashes of insight about society, or riding the coattails of one or two countercultural movements before they fade into obscurity, does not constitute such an escape. If we believe that it is, and immerse ourselves in a shallow side-chamber where some criticisms of the mainstream are voiced, it will not cure our condition—to the contrary, if we allow a little knowledge to give us the impression that we are totally enlightened, we will only become more fooled.

We must therefore, in order to attempt to build a truthful picture of the world and not become mirrors of propaganda, devote ourselves not only to seeking out sources of truth but also to the practice of critical reading and analysis, and to the joy that dwells in it. It is one thing to see that something has an odious political quality and recoil from it. That much is a natural response. But the power of criticism comes from peeling that thing apart, taking it down to its roots, exposing what lies it is telling, and discerning the purpose for which it might be telling those lies. Putrid though the thing itself might be, by examining it critically, we increase our understanding of the world.

Final Fantasy XIV is a particularly notable case study because, compared to other works in its genre—especially other MMORPGs—it does not shy from details or attempt to euphemise anything away. It is not a lazily written story that happens to contain some unexamined elements which coincide with pro-imperialist viewpoints. Its focus on the details of political events, on moralising about those events, and on establishing the political history of its world makes its position absolutely crystal-clear. Out of all MMORPGs, it is also the one that receives the most attention, and the most praise of its story, in the present social media atmosphere. Its comparable colleagues, such as Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft, are in many ways aligned with its messages, but their stories are far less coherent and receive far less positive attention. This exceptional status makes Final Fantasy XIV a ripe subject for analysis, but it far from precludes analysis of any other media. If anything, it is our intent to encourage people to turn a somewhat more informed and more critical eye on everything they consume, fiction or non-fiction.

We will leave the subject here. We thank you for coming this far with us, if you have. The rest, as always, is an exercise for the reader.

#ffxiv #final fantasy xiv #things venus wrote

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