Genuinely over how hard FFXIV is trying to push the idea that Sphene wasn’t a monstrously horrible person who rightfully deserved to get put down like a rabid animal.
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Admittedly, "was Sphene a good person" is a really hard question to answer because all the Alexandrians we now have to deal with absolutely thought Sphene was a good person, and have never seen and now cannot remember any evidence to the contrary.
(My personal opinion is that Sphene was so blisteringly irrational that whether she was "good" or "bad", is kind of beside the point, but insofar as she had moral agency at all, she willingly threw all of herself into accomplishing her stupid, destructive goals.)
Her entire story was “I want to kill everyone in your civilization so I can use their life energy to power cloud backups of all of our dead people” and they really wanted our takeaway to be that she was a fundamentally good person just trying her best
the whole "fundamentally good person just trying her best" thing the game pushes is so funny because that wasn't even a person we killed, it was a cold and unfeeling robot carrying out its directives while wearing Sphene's face and saying sweet words in her voice
Imo the way the handed the Garlean Emperor dying and all the people across the country unilaterally spiralling into such despondent mourning at the fall of their king and country it took the place of prayer in reanimating him as a horrific primal was such a better story beat
It successfully communicated the pride and patriotism of the Garleans and their utter despair at losing the war after having the upper hand for so long, but without trying to redeem Varis into anything less than a horrible monster
They should've leaned into the inherent mechanical/existential horror of a "well-meaning" (for her own people) character literally unable to stop doing planetary genocide because of her hardcoded programming and it's bonkers they didn't.
From reading it seems a bit of context does get translated out by accident, where it’s more “Sphene wants to do good but is being puppeted by the computer side of her”
In FFXIV it is pretty clear that a soul makes you you and anything else is sort of a pale imitator. Also Sphene is a genocidal maniac so no. I don’t think she’s worthy to live
Part of the problem is the narrative doesn’t seem to know if it wants to settle on “the people you found Black Mirrored into the computer were fantasy souls and functionally real people eternally preserved” and “they were actually all fake chatGPT robot versions of dead people”
I think that ambiguity is supposed to spark debate about what makes a person “real” but mostly I feel it contradicts earlier lore about what souls are in FFXIV which is sort of established haha (what with transporting souls to/from the First)
Yeah, like, it’s very difficult to do the “is this a real person or a fake one” thing when we’re in a fantasy world with established rules about souls being quantifiable things that contain all your memories and personality, and can be contained, transported, and placed in other vessels.
And I don’t mean can’t settle on in a “keeping us guessing” way, just in a “completely flip the switch from one to the other depending on the emotional beat they’re trying to make” way
Like, the characters will all talk about pretty anime princess Sphene hanging out with us in the Apple Store like she was a real person we’re supposed to respect and mourn the loss of, but then ascribe all the war crimes and genocide to fake chatGPT Sphene as though that’s a separate entity.
Sphene is literally just The Final Days in a different form, she's using souls as fuel, those souls aren't getting reincarnated.
Eventually, they will run out of souls to use as fuel.
The fact that we didn't confiscate and destroy every regulator as soon as Sphene was down is insane to me.
Even if we had to lie like "Hey, these things are poison and mind control etc etc etc"
Or I dunno, Galool Ja using the Everkeep authority to shut down the entire system so they dont do anything anymore.
I generally like Sphene as both a villain and a concept in a character study that can't quite be reduced to any one particular box, but yeah the way the narrative seems to be wanting to redeem her is a little weird to me. I love cyberpunk dystopia settings and we're getting that though at least, so
that'll pacify most of my harsher criticisms of the plotline. I want to see them go all in on making her an irredeemable monster but I doubt that's what we're getting.
Everything else, though? The Preservation shadow government? The mindfucking and brainwashing? That's up my alley at least.
I get the feeling that there's two people on the development team (we know one of them is the werlyt guy and well... I skipped that for a reason) that are at odds with each other on how they want the whole Sphene thing to go.
I've felt nothing for Sphene even harder than I felt nothing for Zero I want more of Koana and Wuk Lamat and they were doing so good with thought-provoking regarding death and souls until THAT MOMENT And for a moment I was hopeful we'd begetting more Ascian Stuff but....😱
Playing devil's advocate, in the context of their world, i can at least sympathize with why they just think it's ok. If you've only lived knowing one thing to be right, it's hard to unlearn it overnight especially if it means erasing thousands that they still see as "alive".
Doesn't make anything right, just there was at least a reason behind it and not just "evil for the sake of it". They just really could have done a better job at fleshing it out.
There’s a difference between the people of Alexandria and Solution 9 having a hard time with it and Wuk Lamat’s weird “it’s actually totally understandable that Sphene slaughtered my people en masse to feed into her Disneyland machine, I respect her devotion to her people very much” thing
Like, every time they ask you to comment on your feelings about Sphene the options are always like “>such a shame she was so nice and good
>she was just misguided by her compassion
>I’m very sad about what we had to do”
But never anything like “Sphene sucked and I’m not sad about this”
Wuk Lamat launched into some whole “oh no don’t burden yourself by feeling responsible for what happened to sphene, we all played a hand in that, don’t feel bad” rant when you say you’ll go to the funeral like My Girl I’m not sure why you think I’m sad about Sphene.
The whole "feel compassion for your fallen enemy" thing that's so prevalent in FF just irks me. This bitch deserves no sympathy, why do we literally have a funeral for them?! Oh and about that psycho guy from the last expansion they tried to play off as your "rival"....
To be fair, i think its a shift in the way they wrote the wol. Since SHB ended the wol’s dialog has been a lot less angry… i agree with wuk lamat tho. I get that she’s the more human side of being a ruler but girl at least agree she did a genocide… you can mourn AND admit she wasn’t right.
I think the main problem is that while the wol is meant to be the player agent, the way they wrote the wol’s dialog options in DT specifically was not in line with how we felt as players. Really would be better if the wol was their own character at this point like how GW2 did the commander.
True. Knowing how they usually designed characters and the fact they were blatantly mirroring FF9’s story for most of the second half didnt do them any favors either. We all shouted “yassified emet-selch” when she popped up
I wish I could have said "I don't feel bad about it, but its REALLY not appropriate for me to be there as her killer, period. It would look like a conqueror gloating over their fallen foe". Honestly im surprised us killing her wasnt brought up by the alexandrians at all
My headcanon is that the wol is just so used to being invited to everything now that they just crash every major event in the vicinity now for the free food and souvenirs.
I felt like a lot of that section of the expansion wanted me to feel conflicted when in reality I was like this is monstrous, you’re monstrous. Shut this down.
I can understand sympathy for the original Sphene, or a theoretical version of her simply lived forever unchanged, but the one we encountered was very much a monster.
I have never regretted my WoL taking down any of the big bads. She will punch God with a smile on her face because someone fucked around and she is the very avatar of Finding Out.
I keep calling her Colonizer dot EXE for a reason. Like base game was pretty clear about what she was doing and how she didn’t have remorse due to “programming”. Internally trying not to act like the average Irish football fan during that part of the game.
I actually thought the Garlean stuff was handled reasonably well if only because they clearly used so much of the fallout of WWII Japan for inspiration, so it had the realism of “now we have to cooperate and nation build” rather than “now we punish them all forever for being evil”
Like, I know some people were over it because they felt like it was apologizing over the Garleans, but I didn’t get that vibe, it felt like a story about crushing a violent prideful nation and figuring out what to do with all the people left over to avoid repeating the cycle
I was more talking about the ascians - the garlean stuff is frustrating because they kept centering the garlean military members who knowinglu committed war crimes(jullus that piece of shit) over the much more interesting groups like the populares and propagandized citizenry
Pretty much pointed out another problem I had with the Garlemald part of EW: We focused on their military doing heinous war crimes for so long that it became hard to care about the rest of them. I wish they actually put a spotlight on the rest of their people before they became irrelevant.
I zoned out so hard when Wuk Lamat started to console the Alexandrians 😐 Nobody acknowledges the horror of the situation and we're forced to watch. I'm here like
A big problem is that they keep equating the legit Queen Sphene that died with ChatGPT!Sphene, the one that extrapolated happiness for Alexandria's citizens at any cost from the data set that was original Sphene. (I just started the 7.1 MSQ so my mindset is "We're mourning the killer chatbot?)
I think they really wanted to set her up as "a fungible copy of queen sphene tragically burdened with a paperclip maximizer subroutine
i'm personally not over "what do you mean a town and several people commuting there got stuck in a 30 year bubble for two hours" can we please address that
I mean, that is addressed in the sense that time passes differently between the shards, it’s the same reason that when you finally got yoinked to the First in Shadowbringers you find out the Scions have all been stuck there for like 2-5 years after passing out the day before in the Source
I think the idea was basically that we had a bubble of another dimension trapped in our world, continuing to operate with that dimension’s quantum physics until we breached it and let all of our universe’s quantum physics in
Oh sorry I don't mean in a lore sense I mean in a "we moved on from the ramifications *really* fast, people were commuting to work and suddenly got trapped living out the next 30 years of their lives completely isolated from everything they knew, in two hours people grew old and died"
It’d be nice to have another villain that’s a deranged lunatic. One that dies with absolutely no sob story to make you empathize with them. And it’s not like they’re incapable of writing one.
Example: Valens Van Varro from the Werlyt storyline.
Felt nothing for her to be honest. I would have respected her more if she was just ruthless from the get go and was pretending to hide it versus the “uwu she loves her people” argument. She was a lifeforce colonizer like what 🥴
from what i’ve seen in story centered playthroughs of ff14 bc i have no patience to play it atm there is a HEAVY dose of japanese imperialist background thought processes going on in the writing some storylines often sound like “but the colonizers were good too actually”
I honestly thought it was kind of cool that with Garlemald they were like “they are a direct parallel for Imperial Japan and also explicitly and unflinchingly the villains of this story”
I know some people thought it was too humanizing and apologetic to show the efforts to rebuild Garlemald after the fall and open positive diplomatic relations with them, but like… it’s paralleling a real place that was rebuilt and fostered positive diplomacy with former enemies
That’s true! I should clarify, I’m not claiming the writers are imperialists, if anything i’d wager it’s unintentional theming on their part due to subconscious biases and the like but again, that’s just me reading too much into it i think lmao
She was just a memory overlay on a program that would override the memory's will if it meant keeping Living Memory running. A cruel puppet of people long dead.
Thankfully with Hermes/Fandaniel it was largely confined to EW, but it's annoying how insecure the writing has become, leaving no room to feel ambigious or, heavens forbid, negatively over a character. Sphene is Good because she's Tragic, a sad robot following orders, much like Meteion.
As someone who largely actually liked Dawntrail a lot I was 600% done with how hard they were trying to sell Zoraal Ja as a tragic figure when his entire goddamn motivation was "I want to be a big fascist bully because I'm genetically entitled to be" by the end
I think there was a ball dropped with Zoraal Ja's arc but I see him representing the past his father left behind when he became a leader for all people of Tural. His frustration is he had a destiny as a miracle king and warlord that never came to pass bc his father created such radical change.
Also how they never challenged his whole "I get by on my OWN strength and I EARN everything I get" rhetoric when in practice he's a cheating coward who was handed everything and it was never enough
I honestly appreciate that he was ultimately just a moron with no good reason for doing anything that he did, and that the narrative is willing to just let you arrive at that conclusion yourself without spelling it out for you, because that's rare.
Varis is another villain that I like because he's a fucking moron, and the game is willing to let him be a fucking moron who is wrong about everything and die like a chump offscreen and not need to always say "you know, I guess the Garlean Emperor wasn't as smart as we believed."
i offer a counterpoint: it does refute his rhetoric by having him lose every time he gets in any fight. he dies to gulool ja ja, his invasion is repelled as soon as it isnt a sneak attack, and then we kill him again.
Honestly? I feel kinda same but more because it bothers me we got same treatment with Emet but not with Zenos. With Zenos the story tried to paint him as the most horrible monster when in reality Emet and Sphene were worse. This is just my opinion on it though, others can obviously disagree 🥹❤️
I’ll go to bat defending Emet because he’s basically an Eldritch entity. Like, we are in the literal lore of the games lesser beings than him so it’s understandable that he has a hard time accepting our personhood.
Emet’s story is basically that he watched all of his friends die in a cataclysmic apocalypse, and was told he could bring them back if he mulched up a billion beetles. But then he spent so long with the beetles he started to get conflicted about their rights to live their beetle lives
Also worth mentioning the difference between Sphene and Emet is Sphene just wants to throw souls in the incinerator and destroy them, but Emet thinks that he’s ultimately doing everyone a favour by stitching their sundered souls back together
Emet did terrible things but was so horribly conflicted about them that he more-or-less stage-managed his own defeat at your hands. Sphene knows she's doing terrible things but is 100% committed to doing them anyway, even knowing they won't work.
There is such a lack of any real conflict or even characterization in this expansion that it's so hard to care about any of it. Oh no, robo-Sphene wants to kill everyone to keep copy-machine people alive! Oh, but they're okay if we say no. Baby lizard's parents are evil! But he's okay with that, too
The only interesting thing is Solution Nine's people being an exceptionally special sort of pathetic to immediately back down from any sort of growth or understanding of death, which should have been the focus of this patch story instead of the damn cliffhanger! It's the only thing they got here!
I'm still not really sure what happens after they're 'incinerated', like... do they go back to the aetherial sea like elidibus did when he was sucked dry by the crystal tower?
That's also a good point imo and maybe what makes him more personal to us is the Azem connection. However, I still don't see Zenos as somehow more deserving of the hate. Like our charas miss Emet all the time like he had never committed any wrong which to me is a bit strange if that makes sense
And the real Sphene died well before the actual plot. The one we directly interact with is just a computer program needing more energy for the ['crypt'o farm] wearing her face.
I'm guessing Preservation is going to step more formally into the big bad role for violating her memory even more.
The real Sphene is basically a non-entity as far as the story is concerned. Like, the only character who’s ever met “real” Sphene is Otis and he’s not exactly a character I’d trust for an unbiased opinion. The “real Sphene” Wuk Lamat keeps insisting we mourn is still just fake crypto Sphene
In a sense yeah but if we talk about it in our POV he's just one more ascian talking about euthanazing everyone we know and love. Logically, it makes sense since we as a player get his POV but in storytelling it gets more complicated I think.
Honestly I took it as "people don't care how evil their leader is or how many others they kill so long as they're nice to them personally", with it being a criticism of Sphene and the alexandrians. not a "she's actually not a bad person! :D" deal
It’s one thing when her subjects don’t get it, it’s another thing entirely when we have multiple beats of Wuk Lamat reiterating how misunderstood she was
Like, it really is not necessary to have the leader of the group the war crimes were committed against defending the character that committed the war crimes against them. It’s like if Lyse dragged you to a Zenos memorial so everyone can talk about how his heart was in the right place
I play all the msq stuff as MNK with the Emperor’s New Fists glam on my weapons, so that fight was really funny to watch Gray just punch him to death with his bare hands
fair enough. Honestly Wuk Lamat really just needs to learn that people can be "nice" while also evil. That just because you can understand their motives, you don't have to agree with them or make excuse for their evil actions.
i will say that she was right that "Sphene would never choose to only save some of her people", especially since that "Sphene" was clearly a fake (ascian?) I am however worried as to whats going to happen to the "real" backup Sphene that woke up in Living Memory. Probably just more apologism tho :(
Weird that they want to go deeper with that, but didn't bother to give Zoraal Ja any motivation at all beyond just apparently being a piece of work, despite being the sibling who grew up with Wuk Lamat and Koana who they've (I assume??) known since childhood.
I won’t lie there’s a moment during her memorial when something touching was said about her and it cuts to my character who then squints her eyes and I laughed
I feel like XIV's tendency to make villains sympathetic bites it in the ass when it would be better to not dwell on it that much. Idk they treated her with such kid gloves when for other villains, even at their most sympathetic, we still were more clearly decided to put them down
I was really weird during the campaign, but I felt like they handled the balance right - Sphene was a monster in a pretty face, but also incredibly *hollow* when the mask comes off its satisfying but also very well forcasted.
I'm not fond of them backpedaling on any of those concepts - it's like asking if JFK is moral for setting the stage for Vietnam and is somehow not as culpable as Johnson
Jarring when I chose the 7.1 "I'm not convinced that Sphene was even alive" dialog option and Wuk Lamat just said "well we still have to feel bad for killing her"
As an FC friend is fond of putting it when antagonists' genocide plots are revealed to the audience: "Cool* motive, still murder"
I make a lot of jokes about Uther in WoW but this sounds a lot like that. It's really weird when writers fixate on a terrible character just because of the vibes. I don't know what to call that phenomenon but I'm a lot more aware of it the older I get.
No but seriously, we JUST shelved Emet Selch. Can we please have at least one (1) expansion that doesn't frame borderline genocide apologia as trying to protect their homes? Square Enix I promise you can have good villains without saying there are very fine people on both sides
I loved Emet, I think he works because he’s literally like, an eldritch ancient walking around in a man suit. It’s like expecting Cthulhu to see you as an equal and respect your personhood.
I guess the difference between him and Hermes or Meteion or Sphene or whoever is that from his perspective sacrificing everyone isn’t killing them, it’s putting everyone’s sundered souls back together so they can go back to their superior, fulfilling lives standing in line at the Imagination DMV
The beauty of his character is that as often as he says this, he doesn't really believe it. There are so many little clues that he's in denial about the sundered and has to lie to himself, because he couldn't live with the guilt otherwise. Contrast Elidibus, who just goes straight to fighting you
I think the big difference between Emet and Elidibus is Emet got emotionally involved and had a family he loved and then later a family that he didn’t care for but just in general humanized the little sundered souls for himself in a way that was counterproductive to his mission
What I'm hoping they're setting up is that the AI Sphene's personality and memories of being The Bestest Prettiest Fairytale-iest Princess are fake, implanted there by the council that made her in order to keep her fully committed to the mission.
And then I'd like them to turn that "fairy tales are bullshit and adults need to move on from them" theme on Tuliyolal and say that maybe picking the absolute monarch of a continents-straddling empire via a carefully constructed game show is a stupid idea.
Tbf didn’t Papa Two Headed Lizard basically say as much, and that the contest was more to pacify everyone with tradition while he observed the prospective rulers and if he didn’t think any of them were a good fit for leadership he’d just keep ruling?
Seemed like the writers were taking a lot of inspiration from the Golden Age of Rome, where the Emperor didn’t pass leadership to their biological children but rather individuals that they saw leadership potential in and adopted
That's true. Maybe I'm reading too much into the writers' preference for more democracy over less. I was just trying to mine something out of the parallels between AI Sphene and Wuk Lamat and settling on "if Archeo-Alexandria is mostly fake, what is fake in Tuliyolal?"
I don't play FFXIV but whenever a villain starts giving a sob story i generally wish there was a Asura's Wrath style "Punch them in the face" interrupt button.
It’s not even a sob story, it’s like… she wants to wipe out an indigenous civilization and use their souls to power her Disneyland theme park and the moral they keep pushing on it is “but she did it with the love of her people in her heart so really she was a good person”
I guess this is where the satire rests for me- I read it like ‘Haha isn’t she great?’ *vacant ten thousand yard stare*. I also think it’s hitting in step with the current American political climate so it makes my skin crawl
It's wild because we used to have villains that were openly motivated by self-interest. Now we're on the third expac in a row where the big bad is like "but did you consider... what if i have a good reason for doing genocide" and the game acts like we're supposed to give them serious consideration
Haven't started the patch/haven't resubbed yet but this has been a reoccurring thorn in my side wrt this game's villains. Gaius was another one they failed miserably at trying to redeem, they *could* still do better with Sphene if they stop handwringing
like if they lean hard into the "bowlderized, amoral shade of the real Sphene" thing, but the thing is, idk if they will. They seem to want to have this one be "the real one" but also not, like make up your mind!
I think all of the time about the line Zenos has where he says "Would you be 'happier' if I had a good reason? If my motives met with your approval, would you no longer resent the outcome?"
And then about how despite the tone of that scene, and how great the line, FF XIV ruthlessly says "Yes".
For some strange reason, this big bad villains can be responsible for committing atrocities, and I am routinely supposed to be willing to forgive them because they had a "good reason" to.
I'm not against rehabilitation. I love how Bakool Ja Ja is genuinely making an honest attempt to reform himself after the events of the base Dawntrail MSQ.
But for a lot of these other people, it would be nice for them to show some attempt to atone before we started full-throated defending them.
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...i kinda miss her...
I felt no guilt at all
Eventually, they will run out of souls to use as fuel.
The fact that we didn't confiscate and destroy every regulator as soon as Sphene was down is insane to me.
Or I dunno, Galool Ja using the Everkeep authority to shut down the entire system so they dont do anything anymore.
Everything else, though? The Preservation shadow government? The mindfucking and brainwashing? That's up my alley at least.
>she was just misguided by her compassion
>I’m very sad about what we had to do”
But never anything like “Sphene sucked and I’m not sad about this”
At the end of all things, she's gonna punch that Garlean twink out one more time.
i'm personally not over "what do you mean a town and several people commuting there got stuck in a 30 year bubble for two hours" can we please address that
Example: Valens Van Varro from the Werlyt storyline.
and as much as i love heavensward it had that in it too
it just doesnt refute it verbally.
I'm guessing Preservation is going to step more formally into the big bad role for violating her memory even more.
at the end of my sword.
>.>
(caveat: haven't played 7.1 MSQ yet)
But we never met her.
If the queen we knew was worth a damn, we’d still have Otis.
As an FC friend is fond of putting it when antagonists' genocide plots are revealed to the audience: "Cool* motive, still murder"
And then about how despite the tone of that scene, and how great the line, FF XIV ruthlessly says "Yes".
But for a lot of these other people, it would be nice for them to show some attempt to atone before we started full-throated defending them.