#lao just doesnt offend me in the same way probably because him being suicidal went somewhere

[xenoblademisadventures]

read the tags on your post about ripping apart xc2 and i gotta say. same dude. i loved the game but that one cutscene on the cliffs of morytha where rex like hallucinated pyra is the worst cutscene ive ever seen. especially when it cuts to the vision of aion and pyra/mythras like "this is our power. as your sure this is what you want" and im just like yeah actually, its a cool fucking robot what reason have you given me not to want it. its not even what mythra used to accidently destroy torna in the prequel that was siren

Yeah. That cutscene actually singlehandedly soured my enjoyment of the game so much that I can't bring myself to play it anymore. This will be fun to elaborate on. Tw: suicide mention.

I truly despise this cutscene entirely due to it brushing off the suicide plot in favor of giving Rex an anime power up.

"The reason we wanted to go to Elysium was to beg our father to let us die."

"Listen, I swore to you, we're going to Elysium. Together."

Like, no. No. Fuck you. The writers above all else. This was the single most important part of Pyra's and Mythra's character arc to get right the they didn't even try. It's been thoroughly established that they want to die because they see themselves as a threat to the world and will inevitably irreparably harm everyone that they love. Mythra is coming from an abusive (or at least, extremely toxic) background where she was both treated as an unwanted burden everyone had to carry around and as a potential ticking time bomb who will kill everyone while being bullied for random shit in between. Pyra is coming from the background of being the face of Mythra's self hatred. Mythra literally already attempted to kill herself by creating Pyra. Rex's piffy nonsense should not have been enough to make her not suicidal.

Here's the problem from a character writing perspective "you have friends who love you" and "my existence is a burden and I will hurt everyone I love" aren't mutually exclusive ideals. And besides the promise to reach Elysium also being the suicide condition, sometimes making commitments isn't enough to stop people from killing themselves and leveraging those commitments over their heads is cold and unhelpful.

I hate how dismissively the writers treated Pyra and Mythra being suicidal when that plot point most mattered.

Alongside that, they chose to establish that Jin is suicidal in a really stupid way. You can't just look at someone in the eyes and ping them as suicidal. People who are suicidal don't flag it like that.

Besides that, Jin would be the second Xenoblade character where they're suicidal and Monolith decides to depict that as being a danger to the people around them. The first being Lao. Lao works better because, first there's an answer for why he doesn't just kill himself and why it had to be everyone else's problem, and second, Elma isn't concerned with Lao's wellbeing and that makes for some interesting scenes. But the larger issue for both of them is that they emphasize how suicide impacts the people who aren't suicidal. They're both depicted as uncontrollable, beautiful, and dangerous. That's not a good.

It's also bad that Pneuma, Lao, and Jin all end their arcs by heroically sacrificing themself (Lao accidentally fell into a vat tube but same difference, the character dies sort of).

Anyways the reason why this part of this scene ruins the entire game for me is that it perpetuates certain stereotypes about suicide that, at best, can make people who know someone who killed themself feel worse and, at worse, push someone further into a suicidal mindset.

Like, Rex just knew the right words to make Pyra and Mythra not suicidal? Imagine if a loved one killed themself and you believed that it was all because you didn't say the elusive magic right words to save them? Imagine if you feel suicidal and you want someone to say something that will drag you out of that mentality but that doesn't happen? Rex leverages his friendship with Pyra and Mythra and that works. Imagine a close friend killed themself. Was it because you just didn't love them hard enough? No. Imagine you are suicidal. Maybe you think you don't have those friends or never will. Maybe you think that you're only making things worse for your existing amazing friends. Both of those conclusions can make things worse.

Stories absolutely should not talk about suicide without having a giant ass content warning. Like, I don't think anyone's going to play Xenoblade 2 and immediately kill themselves for it, but it does reinforce common myths about it that absolutely can make things worse for people.

It doesn't help that this is when the story starts being like "humanity sucks we're philosophical."

There are a lot of other things wrong with that scene and the game as a whole. Despite what I said at the beginning, this scene alone didn't make me hate the game. But it was the final major blow to my ability to enjoy the game. I went from "the game's decent but nowhere near as good as it should be, I want to dissect it" to "fuck at least one of the writers" over time.