This review contains spoilers
Cw: Discussions of real-life genocide
This “review” contains heavy spoilers up to and including EW Level 83 but nothing beyond that. It’s also not really a review as much as it is an in-depth analysis of a small part of the game. If you want to know my opinion on the game, read my other review.
I’m German. The nation-state that claims sovereignty over the territory I live in is a direct successor to the Greater German Reich, more commonly known as Nazi Germany, one of (if not the) most oppressive and genocidal nations to ever exist.
From a pretty young age, I’ve been taught about the history of the Nazis. Their crimes, how they came into power, how universal their hold on the German population was. But there is one thing you’re not really taught about in German schools: What happened after the Nazis?
Denazification was a set of policies by the Allied and Soviet forces that aimed to free Austria and Germany from all influences of national socialism. The most famous part of this were the Nuremberg trials, but the largest parts were getting rid of government officials with Nazi sympathies, a ban on Nazi writings and symbols, that sort of stuff. If you see a German street named after a person who lived in the 20th century, there’s a very high chance it was called the Hitler or Goebbels street until 1945.
Denazification was only a partial success. National socialism was everywhere for 12 years, it was deeply ingrained into every part of German society. Getting rid of it entirely would have been a lot of work. And also, the Germans didn’t really like this, and the cold war was more important now and everyone wanted Germany as an ally.
I mentioned earlier that I was taught about the history of the Nazis. My grandparents weren’t. They grew up in a period where people were too ashamed of what happened to talk to their children about it. I barely know what my great-grandparents did, but I don’t really need to be told either (except for one of my great-grandfathers, he was a young engineer in east Prussia when the Red Army came and recruited him to keep their Distillery repaired, and he learned a great recipe for Pelmeni there that my family still uses).
And I wasn’t really taught everything either. I was taught about the Holocaust against the Jewish people, but the genocide against Romani, disabled, and queer people barely got mentioned. Of course this is in part because the amount of people murdered in each of those groups doesn’t even come close to the amount of Jewish people murdered and I’m not trying to accuse any of my teachers of anything, but it’s also worth mentioning that those three groups still face legal discrimination today (not saying there’s no discrimination against Jewish people of course).
Every now and then there are stories about nation socialist police group chats or soldiers, and nobody is really all that surprised. Last month, a group of Reichsbürger, members of an ideology that refuses to acknowledge that the German Reich is no longer legitimate, were raided for planning a coup. Among them were members of the 4th strongest political party in Germany right now. This barely changed anything about their poll results.
What happened after the Nazis? They're still everywhere.
Garlemald is not a 1 to 1 analogy of any real empire, and I appreciate that a lot, it makes the worldbuilding a lot more interesting. It does, however, have obvious influences. The Roman empire is the obvious main one, but so is fascism. While it doesn’t always politically fit the definition of fascism, the aesthetic inspiration should be obvious to everyone.
I think the writers didn’t really know what to do with Garlemald after the end of the Stormblood Main Scenario. You had already won 2 pretty spectacular victories over the empire, but it’s a massive empire and it doesn’t just disappear from that. But in patch 4.2 we are introduced to the Popularis, a faction of pacifists that want to stop the empire’s conquest. While it turns out that the leader of the group you met was a fraud and a traitor, the Popularis themselves are shown to be genuine. Their leader, Maxima, even defects from the Empire to help you.
But the Popularis never achieve anything. There’s lines here and there about Empire leadership trying to get rid of them but for the most part they’re irrelevant for the story from now on.
Then we find out that the Empire is just a tool. It wasn’t created by the Garlean Solus Galvus to bring peace and security to his people (which, to be clear, would obviously still not justify an empire) but by the Ascian Emet-Selch, as a tool to hasten the return of his god Zodiark. The Empire’s goal of bringing peace and stability is the opposite of why it exists. It exists to destabilize the world so that more calamities can happen. That’s why “Solus” hadn’t chosen an heir. The ensuing civil war was a feature, not a bug.
But the new emperor is different! Varis isn’t an Ascian and he fully believes in the empire’s stated goal of bringing peace to the world (which, to reiterate, absolutely still makes him a villain). Or so one might be tempted to think. There is a cutscene in I think 4.5 where Varis talks to the various alliance readers and basically tells them “Yes, I also hate the Ascians, but the way to defeat them is to do exactly what they want”. I didn’t mention this in my Stormblood review because it didn’t feel relevant at the time but looking back it really shows that the empire’s role as a plot device supersedes any development that could be happening there.
Throughout 5.0 the Empire exists mainly to threaten the release of Black Rose and then at the end, Zenos (who came back for SOME FUCKING REASON) kills his father, the Emperor. There would be no winners in the coming civil war, in part thanks to Fandaniel’s meddling, but in part also because Empires can not last forever. By the time Endwalker starts, the nation of Garlemald is no more.
After figuring out a way to deal with the tower of the Telophoroi that have been popping up all over the world, the Ilsabard Contingent gets sent out to what used to be the capital of the Garlean Empire. They have two goals there: Deal with the Tower of Babil, which seems to be a central piece in the Telophoroi’s plans, and
Help the people of Garlemald.
As I hopefully made very clear in the opening of this text, dealing with the survivors of a nation with violent, racist, authoritarian, and imperialist ideals is incredibly difficult. I personally do not know how to do it. And I don’t think a Final Fantasy game is the right medium to explore a question like this.
I mentioned that after 12 years, national socialism had ingrained itself into every part of German society. The Garlean Empire existed for over 60 years. When you arrive there to help the starving and freezing Garleans, they despise you.
At first, you try to help a small group of civilians. They make it very clear that they do not trust you and that they do not want the help of a savage like you. At some point, one of them attacks Alphinaud, one of your closest friends, and yet the game never asks, “do these people deserve our help?”. It instead asks, “Are we like invaders for doing this”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of radical hope and redemption, but at the same time, I’m a queer person. If a person that has declared their hatred for me and suddenly they need help, I’m not going to put myself in a vulnerable position to help them on the off chance that me helping them changes their mind and they suddenly don’t want to kill me anymore. And yet the game forced me to do exactly that. And don’t try to justify this by saying that FFXIV has always been about helping or seeing the good in everyone or something like that, we’ve been killing Garlean soldiers since ARR.
The story of “helping” these people ends with one of them hating you so much that she runs away from you and dies. Good riddance. The game frames this as a sad thing, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I shed no tears for the people who tried to kill my friends.
After that, you run into a Garlean soldier who tried to steal food from you. He tells you that his legion is still around so you get sent with him to negotiate getting them some help, because apparently we’re so much into helping now, we’ll even help armies that are at war with us. It goes about as well as you might have predicted. Alphinaud and Alisaie get taken hostage and their Legatus talks to you about how your dream of peace through harmony and multiculturalism can never be achieved and how everyone needs to be united under Garlemald to achieve peace. Even with the capital in ruins and his soldiers freezing around him, he still believes in the lies of the Empire.
Eventually there is a fight that breaks out between this legion and your allies, a fight that ends as soon as the legion learns that they are literally the very last remaining people fighting for Garlemald. Now it has finally sunk in that they’re not going to win. Their leader kills himself (which the game frames as tragic LMAO) and the others get your help. Not because they ask for it, or acknowledge their weakness or anything like that, but because they’re too weak to resist anymore. In the end, you despite everything, you don’t win because you were more kind. You won because you were more powerful.
I haven’t done any patch content yet so apologies if this gets brought up there, but nothing that happened in the MSQ addressed how the Garleans will move on past the empire. All it did was show just how deeply ingrained the empire’s ideology is everywhere. And then it just expects you to move on from that, go and save the world.
What will Garlemald look like in 80 years? Will the people there wonder what their grandparents were doing during the days of the Empire? Will there be people arguing over whether the Garleans have done “enough apologizing” and need to get back to being proud of their heritage? Will there even be any apologizing? There certainly wasn’t from Japan.
This part of the MSQ opens a massive can of worms, then refuses to deal with that and tells you to move on. Nobody would have complained if the can of worms just hadn’t been brought up at all. I haven’t even gotten into the awful and frankly pointless body swap thing that happens immediately after this because it doesn’t really belong to this (that’s how pointless and out of place it is) but combining it with this awful and surface-level exploration of what to do with the survivors of an authoritarian state makes this my least favourite stretch of all of Final Fantasy XIV.
Last month I saw a reddit post pointing out that the soldiers at the Garlean consulate in Thavnair still call you a savage after beating Endwalker. People thought this was a funny example of them not updating NPC dialogue to reflect changes in the world, but I disagreed. Why wouldn’t they call you a savage anymore? It’s pretty obvious they still consider you to be one.
This “review” contains heavy spoilers up to and including EW Level 83 but nothing beyond that. It’s also not really a review as much as it is an in-depth analysis of a small part of the game. If you want to know my opinion on the game, read my other review.
I’m German. The nation-state that claims sovereignty over the territory I live in is a direct successor to the Greater German Reich, more commonly known as Nazi Germany, one of (if not the) most oppressive and genocidal nations to ever exist.
From a pretty young age, I’ve been taught about the history of the Nazis. Their crimes, how they came into power, how universal their hold on the German population was. But there is one thing you’re not really taught about in German schools: What happened after the Nazis?
Denazification was a set of policies by the Allied and Soviet forces that aimed to free Austria and Germany from all influences of national socialism. The most famous part of this were the Nuremberg trials, but the largest parts were getting rid of government officials with Nazi sympathies, a ban on Nazi writings and symbols, that sort of stuff. If you see a German street named after a person who lived in the 20th century, there’s a very high chance it was called the Hitler or Goebbels street until 1945.
Denazification was only a partial success. National socialism was everywhere for 12 years, it was deeply ingrained into every part of German society. Getting rid of it entirely would have been a lot of work. And also, the Germans didn’t really like this, and the cold war was more important now and everyone wanted Germany as an ally.
I mentioned earlier that I was taught about the history of the Nazis. My grandparents weren’t. They grew up in a period where people were too ashamed of what happened to talk to their children about it. I barely know what my great-grandparents did, but I don’t really need to be told either (except for one of my great-grandfathers, he was a young engineer in east Prussia when the Red Army came and recruited him to keep their Distillery repaired, and he learned a great recipe for Pelmeni there that my family still uses).
And I wasn’t really taught everything either. I was taught about the Holocaust against the Jewish people, but the genocide against Romani, disabled, and queer people barely got mentioned. Of course this is in part because the amount of people murdered in each of those groups doesn’t even come close to the amount of Jewish people murdered and I’m not trying to accuse any of my teachers of anything, but it’s also worth mentioning that those three groups still face legal discrimination today (not saying there’s no discrimination against Jewish people of course).
Every now and then there are stories about nation socialist police group chats or soldiers, and nobody is really all that surprised. Last month, a group of Reichsbürger, members of an ideology that refuses to acknowledge that the German Reich is no longer legitimate, were raided for planning a coup. Among them were members of the 4th strongest political party in Germany right now. This barely changed anything about their poll results.
What happened after the Nazis? They're still everywhere.
Garlemald is not a 1 to 1 analogy of any real empire, and I appreciate that a lot, it makes the worldbuilding a lot more interesting. It does, however, have obvious influences. The Roman empire is the obvious main one, but so is fascism. While it doesn’t always politically fit the definition of fascism, the aesthetic inspiration should be obvious to everyone.
I think the writers didn’t really know what to do with Garlemald after the end of the Stormblood Main Scenario. You had already won 2 pretty spectacular victories over the empire, but it’s a massive empire and it doesn’t just disappear from that. But in patch 4.2 we are introduced to the Popularis, a faction of pacifists that want to stop the empire’s conquest. While it turns out that the leader of the group you met was a fraud and a traitor, the Popularis themselves are shown to be genuine. Their leader, Maxima, even defects from the Empire to help you.
But the Popularis never achieve anything. There’s lines here and there about Empire leadership trying to get rid of them but for the most part they’re irrelevant for the story from now on.
Then we find out that the Empire is just a tool. It wasn’t created by the Garlean Solus Galvus to bring peace and security to his people (which, to be clear, would obviously still not justify an empire) but by the Ascian Emet-Selch, as a tool to hasten the return of his god Zodiark. The Empire’s goal of bringing peace and stability is the opposite of why it exists. It exists to destabilize the world so that more calamities can happen. That’s why “Solus” hadn’t chosen an heir. The ensuing civil war was a feature, not a bug.
But the new emperor is different! Varis isn’t an Ascian and he fully believes in the empire’s stated goal of bringing peace to the world (which, to reiterate, absolutely still makes him a villain). Or so one might be tempted to think. There is a cutscene in I think 4.5 where Varis talks to the various alliance readers and basically tells them “Yes, I also hate the Ascians, but the way to defeat them is to do exactly what they want”. I didn’t mention this in my Stormblood review because it didn’t feel relevant at the time but looking back it really shows that the empire’s role as a plot device supersedes any development that could be happening there.
Throughout 5.0 the Empire exists mainly to threaten the release of Black Rose and then at the end, Zenos (who came back for SOME FUCKING REASON) kills his father, the Emperor. There would be no winners in the coming civil war, in part thanks to Fandaniel’s meddling, but in part also because Empires can not last forever. By the time Endwalker starts, the nation of Garlemald is no more.
After figuring out a way to deal with the tower of the Telophoroi that have been popping up all over the world, the Ilsabard Contingent gets sent out to what used to be the capital of the Garlean Empire. They have two goals there: Deal with the Tower of Babil, which seems to be a central piece in the Telophoroi’s plans, and
Help the people of Garlemald.
As I hopefully made very clear in the opening of this text, dealing with the survivors of a nation with violent, racist, authoritarian, and imperialist ideals is incredibly difficult. I personally do not know how to do it. And I don’t think a Final Fantasy game is the right medium to explore a question like this.
I mentioned that after 12 years, national socialism had ingrained itself into every part of German society. The Garlean Empire existed for over 60 years. When you arrive there to help the starving and freezing Garleans, they despise you.
At first, you try to help a small group of civilians. They make it very clear that they do not trust you and that they do not want the help of a savage like you. At some point, one of them attacks Alphinaud, one of your closest friends, and yet the game never asks, “do these people deserve our help?”. It instead asks, “Are we like invaders for doing this”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of radical hope and redemption, but at the same time, I’m a queer person. If a person that has declared their hatred for me and suddenly they need help, I’m not going to put myself in a vulnerable position to help them on the off chance that me helping them changes their mind and they suddenly don’t want to kill me anymore. And yet the game forced me to do exactly that. And don’t try to justify this by saying that FFXIV has always been about helping or seeing the good in everyone or something like that, we’ve been killing Garlean soldiers since ARR.
The story of “helping” these people ends with one of them hating you so much that she runs away from you and dies. Good riddance. The game frames this as a sad thing, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I shed no tears for the people who tried to kill my friends.
After that, you run into a Garlean soldier who tried to steal food from you. He tells you that his legion is still around so you get sent with him to negotiate getting them some help, because apparently we’re so much into helping now, we’ll even help armies that are at war with us. It goes about as well as you might have predicted. Alphinaud and Alisaie get taken hostage and their Legatus talks to you about how your dream of peace through harmony and multiculturalism can never be achieved and how everyone needs to be united under Garlemald to achieve peace. Even with the capital in ruins and his soldiers freezing around him, he still believes in the lies of the Empire.
Eventually there is a fight that breaks out between this legion and your allies, a fight that ends as soon as the legion learns that they are literally the very last remaining people fighting for Garlemald. Now it has finally sunk in that they’re not going to win. Their leader kills himself (which the game frames as tragic LMAO) and the others get your help. Not because they ask for it, or acknowledge their weakness or anything like that, but because they’re too weak to resist anymore. In the end, you despite everything, you don’t win because you were more kind. You won because you were more powerful.
I haven’t done any patch content yet so apologies if this gets brought up there, but nothing that happened in the MSQ addressed how the Garleans will move on past the empire. All it did was show just how deeply ingrained the empire’s ideology is everywhere. And then it just expects you to move on from that, go and save the world.
What will Garlemald look like in 80 years? Will the people there wonder what their grandparents were doing during the days of the Empire? Will there be people arguing over whether the Garleans have done “enough apologizing” and need to get back to being proud of their heritage? Will there even be any apologizing? There certainly wasn’t from Japan.
This part of the MSQ opens a massive can of worms, then refuses to deal with that and tells you to move on. Nobody would have complained if the can of worms just hadn’t been brought up at all. I haven’t even gotten into the awful and frankly pointless body swap thing that happens immediately after this because it doesn’t really belong to this (that’s how pointless and out of place it is) but combining it with this awful and surface-level exploration of what to do with the survivors of an authoritarian state makes this my least favourite stretch of all of Final Fantasy XIV.
Last month I saw a reddit post pointing out that the soldiers at the Garlean consulate in Thavnair still call you a savage after beating Endwalker. People thought this was a funny example of them not updating NPC dialogue to reflect changes in the world, but I disagreed. Why wouldn’t they call you a savage anymore? It’s pretty obvious they still consider you to be one.
Reviewed on Jan 10, 2023
3 Comments
@LunaEndlessWitch I don't believe that anyone is beyond help or unworthy of help. The survivors of a fascist state deserve help. I don't even think them being hostile to you as you're helping them was a bad narrative choice.
But the fact that the game just mostly ignored this made me deeply uncomfortable. My issues could have been largely resolved with a single conversation adressing all of this. Not even offering a solution (because honestly I don't think there even is a right solution to a situation like this, only less bad ones), just acknowledging that it's an issue
But the fact that the game just mostly ignored this made me deeply uncomfortable. My issues could have been largely resolved with a single conversation adressing all of this. Not even offering a solution (because honestly I don't think there even is a right solution to a situation like this, only less bad ones), just acknowledging that it's an issue
For what is worth, those issues are partially answered in the mini-narrative arc of the Garlemald side quests, the role quests and in patch 6.3 (in the ShB Trials and Bozja storyline as well, to some extent). I believe that it is not as satisfactory as I could have been, but they are not completely hiding the topic under the carpet.
In all fairness, I have the same issues with the Ancient behaviour and how much the game is romanticising Emet-Selch and discarding all the genocides. And even though I love Venat fondly, her dilemma with the Sundering is not explored enough. Those narrative threads are unfortunately closed, but I hope that Garlemald will receive additional attention, especially when we'll get back to the Bozjan and Dalmascan resistance efforts, and explore the rest of Ilsabard.
In all fairness, I have the same issues with the Ancient behaviour and how much the game is romanticising Emet-Selch and discarding all the genocides. And even though I love Venat fondly, her dilemma with the Sundering is not explored enough. Those narrative threads are unfortunately closed, but I hope that Garlemald will receive additional attention, especially when we'll get back to the Bozjan and Dalmascan resistance efforts, and explore the rest of Ilsabard.
LunaEndlessWitch
1 year ago
My SO is russian descent, her parents are russian, one day her grandfather came over for a couple weeks, and we both had to help out with taking care of him. He was pretty nice, I couldn't understand what he was saying but he had a lot of heart. He, however, spent every single day there watching Russian channel 1. Like full on fascist propaganda in the wake of everything. I imagine if he knew me personally he would hate me, probably. I'm Jewish and queer, after all.
But at some point you really, really have to ask yourself why. Would you condemn the entire populace burnt under the propaganda machine in an information war that christens them into willing devout followers, most of them not having the choice or agency to even really strike out individually for something of belief, because for most of them it's all they've known and are increasingly forced to be made known. Would the millions of them be nothing, hated for the crime of their Society that individually their life is worthless and not worth giving sympathy towards.
Fascism should not be given sympathy, but the idea of Germany here to me is a smokescreen, Garlemald is no 1-to-1 as you say but it is REMARKABLY Russian. It is clearly poignant to that, it's topical intentional or not. It's not about being just sad for them, it's a whole point on that intense propaganda fascist machines leave the people underneath bereft of choice, only zealously hanging on to the one thing left before they too corrode and fall into the ruin. We don't have to give quarter to their beliefs, but to leave them out in the cold when they never had a real prescient choice to begin with is ignorance, imho.