(08-05-2015, 11:52 AM)FreelanceWizard Wrote: Personally, I think one of the issues is that XIV, like several other Final Fantasy games, juxtaposes great beauty and magic with some very dark themes. Yes, there's the beautiful vistas of the Churning Mists and Mor Dhona, but there's also scheming villains and egregious abuses of people. As is often the case in FF, the world would be an amazing, beautiful place if not for the wickedness of Man. There's a lot of evil, but there's also a lot of good.
The tension between the brightest light and the deepest darkness in XIV is one of the characteristics I find most interesting about the setting, but the downside is that it's not always easy to reconcile all the sources of information we have. On one hand, we have races living together and Fernehalwes saying that Eorzeans are a fairly accepting bunch (a comment in the "CG Midlander" thread from long ago), and on the other hand we have examples of racism and nationalism in game and Fernehalwes also saying that there's a lot of racial tension. It's up to us, as RPers, to figure out how to put both of those together into an internally consistent world view. There's not one right or wrong way to do this, IMO.
An excellent point - and that's something that made FFIX into one of my favourite titles in the franchise. The game has no shortage of lighthearted moments and the game world is very beautiful - and yet the bulk of the story involves some pretty horrific themes such as genocide and the complete annihilation of entire cities.
There's plenty of room in FFXIV for both tolerance and discrimination. Too much of one thing, however, leads to stagnation. My character concept would suddenly become irrelevant if there was no need for diplomacy between the playable races/nations.
