#extremely rare efksiv opinion post on main from me make sure to savour it

[tainbocuailnge]

garlemald was inevitably going to be hard to write about in endwalker bc it started out being the cartoonishly evil empire but i think the writers also made it even harder for themselves during stormblood bc the tone was more serious but the empire still evil so the list of crimes got more detailed and heinous. and ala mhigo liberation arc isn’t really the right time to start humanizing the oppressor but the longer they put that off the harder it got to pull off and now i have people in the notes of my art saying wol is completely justified in massacring garleans actually. helping garlemald is the right thing to do because the people dying out on the streets are not the ones who signed off on the imperialist policies but the more nuanced takes on garlean imperialism and propaganda came so late in the game that all the garleans who don’t immediately denounce the empire's evils look like fucking idiots for taking pride in cartoonish evil, even though given the premises set up in universe their stance is understandable if unsustainable.

it would've gone a long way if there were some garlean deserters in the ala mhigan resistance or something bc until maxima and his populares in stb postgame the only garlean we meet who's not a raging imperialist is like. cid. nero is a deserter but not really for moral reasons he just wants to bother cid and gaius in stb postgame still believes in imperialism just not the ascian kind. all the others we see desert were forced conscripts to begin with. typical scrambling to recover from stormblood botching its execution situation tbh. i also think ew postgame is resolving diplomatic tensions with garlemald way too easily but that's more personal preference for complicated and difficult situations than an actual failure to write the story they're trying to write here.