#you telling me every drg isn’t intimately aware that dravanians (who’s bones they’re wielding in their lances)

[tovaicas]

I was talking abt this in dms w/ a friend but I’ll post it here bc it make me bewildered angry

there’s this chain of sidequests in the convictory you have to do for a tt card, and while I don’t remember the details 100% it basically revolves around a guy who has realized there’s a pattern to drawing larger dragons (to slay for glory, the dude doing it lost his house and is trying to get his honour back); you start with small ones, and eventually draw bigger and bigger ones as you go.

and over the whole course of this quest chain this surprisingly self-aware npc slowly realizes that this is happening bc the dravanians are collecting their dead to mourn and grieve them just as they do. And he slowly realizes that the dragons he’s killing feel genuine human pain and grief and emotion just as he would, and he really starts struggling with the idea bc it directly contradicts everything the halonic faith has taught him abt dravanians.

It’s a surprisingly well-written and emotional chain of sidequests and it made me really really excited, bc there’s the direct implication that what the halonic faith teaches to keep the war going directly contradicts the actual lived experience of every single one of ishgard’s career soldiers (which is most of the populace, but especially the dragoons who literally wield dragonbone in their lances) and the idea that every single one of them will eventually realize what they’re fighting is human in at least some manner, but you’re not allowed to talk abt it bc that’s heresy. how many of ishgard's heretics are soldiers who abandoned the war bc they realized what they were fighting wasn't a mindless beast? how many of them are people who have been taught to fight from the day they were born with the expectation that they would be fighting mindless beasts but were slammed with the reality they're killing people just like themselves? how many of ishgard's soldiers have deluded themselves into not facing reality bc that's Just Easier than having your whole worldview upended and facing the fact that what you were taught was a complete and utter lie that you can't talk about with anyone else on fear of death or worse? how many ishgardians talk abt this only in whispers behind closed doors?

and then they crashed all that development into a wall bc the npc does absolutely nothing else with his development and goes straight back to killing dragons for the glory and further refuses to wrestle with the moral implications he's been forced to learn like. you literally had everything set up and just train crashed it into a wall like????