#and then you load into sohm al or ESPECIALLY the aery and you're killing dragons in their own homes and sacred spaces

[tovaicas]

I think the main reason the way the dravanians are handled (other than the kinda shitty implications of this game wanting to have its cake and eat it too re: the dragons, so that it doesn't have to engage with the honestly terrifying and extremely sad plight of the dravanian horde so that the player can still have mindless dragons to fight that you don't have to feel bad abt killing) annoys me so much is that heavensward had an honestly good curated experience of you learning gradually and then all at once just like an ishgardian would that the dravanians are real people with lives, families, customs, and dreams and not the mindlessly hyper-violent animals you've up until anyx trine you've been made to believe they are, something that is started in ARR with midgardsormr but really hammered home that all the dragons, even the ones you've killed, are sentient, intelligent beings with lives and many simply want quiet lives away from the war and don't want to lose their children to it. up until then you've been made to fear dragons and think of them as deserving of violence in turn simply for being what they are under the assumption they're mindless swarming beasts...just as the ishgardians do. heavensward does an honestly very good job of mirroring the ishgardian mindset and viewpoint of the war to you so that you can experience what ishgard feels when the truth is finally laid out for you.

but then as soon as we get anywhere close to actually engaging with that nuance, with what that says about the situation of the dravanian horde and ourselves, combined with the previous, initially offhand lore that the dragons literally cannot ignore the calls of their sires (which is the entire potential crisis that drags aymeric in for his first on-screen appearance, because midgardsormr can drag every dravanian currently alive into the war if he wants) and that maybe this is a far more complicated and tragic situation for all sides than we initially expected, and that maybe nidhogg's brood suffers in a way that's actually very similar to the ishgardians - we drop all of that. we drop it so that we can have an enemy in dungeons we don't have to feel bad about killing, so that we don't have to feel too uncomfortable with our actions or with running these two dungeons.