So all the Neuvillette voice lines are now opened up with 4.2 and I can gripe about how bad they are. But I also hated what they did with Furina and how the whole prophecy "fate can't be changed / but it's gonna change" thing was handled.
I offer asolution that solves most of these problems in this article explaining how everything worked. Well the explanation for Neuvillette is offered in a comment since it's a bit separate from the AQ. So you can work out a theory to explain away what appear to be errors, but I don't know if it was intentional or not.
Neuvillette. His new lines about how he's going to run all over the planet judging Archons and picking fights with everyone, up to and including the Primordial One, seem completely at odds with the personality that he had before v4.2 This is the guy who said he didn't actually like trials? This is the guy who said (rather pathetically) if Mr Lyney wants to be my friend, I'd like that. Nerd. This is the guy who acts as a father figure to the Melusines and has deep ties to his own nation - why would he care about other nations? Now he wants to abandon the Melusines to run around the planet "judging" people.
The Prophecy. So they basically lied repeatedly saying the prophecy would be fulfilled 100%, and in some cases had already been fulfilled and then ... it just never happens. We were promised everyone dissolving and all we got was Melus and Silver and half a dozen nobodies. How exactly is fate "deceived" by anything Furina does? Never explained. It feels like Neuvillette gets a power up and then says "Prophecy? Forget about it. I stopped it."
Random Whale. It feels a bit cheap that the Whale is so deliberately random. They go out of their way to say it's a pet. And the Whale doesn't either know or care about the prophecy, Fontaine, Celestia or any Sin. It's just fat and eating stuff. The Whale feels bad as an explanation of the flooding because it's random. Disconnected. At one point someone says the Whale causes the flooding because it's getting fat. Seriously???
Furina. So is she the same person as "Focalors" or is she not? Make up your mind, story. It keeps going back and forth. In the end it feels like Furina is a separate person but we're told she isn't. The "show" and the "tell" are pointing in opposite directions. For an example of a powerful "show" we have Focalors saying she'll have to apologize to Furina for torturing her for 500 years. She never does btw. She doesn't even explain why it was important.
We spend about 50 minutes on the Focalors-Neuvillette chat and the Traveler inside Furina's subconscious scenes combined. Those two are all the sources of all information we ever get about the relationship between the two (Furina and her alter ego).
The overall plot is simple enough.
- originally Furina is an Oceanid familiar created by Egeria
- along with many others she becomes a human hybrid / Fontanian
- later, Egeria dies and Furina is the chosen successor to become Archon
- Furina is very smart, and figures out how to work around the prophecy
- Furina splits herself into two parts Furina-human and Furina-god
- Furina-human must be ignorant of the plot, therefore Furina-god has to instruct her
- Furina-human is told to act as the Archon
So is Furina-human the Archon (or half of it) or is she not? It's left ambiguous and it really shouldn't be. Because it completely changes the narrative feel if she's one or the other. So we end up pulled in opposite directions at once which messes up the emotional feel of it all. I mean it's sad of course, either way, but is Furina the self-sacrificial hero, or just Focalors' victim?
If Furina is NOT Focalors, or Focalors is the senior "half" then Focalors basically creates an average teenage girl so she can spend 500 years being tortured until her mind almost snaps. She guilt trips this teenager with massive emotional blackmail telling her that if she fails the entire nation will die horribly, and she can't ever tell anyone or make friends with anyone or pursue her own happiness in any way. That's what the curse does btw. That's a horrible horrible story. Makes Focalor completely evil. And Focalors doesn't even seem to care. And it also makes Furina into a victim with no agency. There's nothing she can do about anything.
If Furina is Focalors and she's the senior partner in the relationship it changes everything for the better.
- She becomes the hero, not the victim
- She is the decider, the plotter, the clever one - not a passive doll thrown about by others
- Her pain is owned. It's still real pain but it's her sacrifice.
- She wins in the end since what she always really wanted was to be human - not a god, not an Oceanid
- When she wins it's her victory - not someone else's.
- Happy ending - even if nobody else but Traveler knows what she did.
- She's a winner, not a loser who thinks she messed up, or doesn't even know what happened or why.
Note that the story can still have Furina kept ignorant (for plot "reasons") for the 500 years so long as the audience is shown that it's HER idea and HER decision to suffer for the cause and she ends up regaining her memories of that decision. Specifically don't show us that it's FOCLAORS decision.
I'd replace the first (and only) scene between Furina and Focalors where it appears that Focalors is the boss, with one showing the exact opposite. Have Furina be the one explaining the plot to "Focalors" but just add at the end "and now, because I'm only a human, I need you to seal my memories for me, until after the prophecy is completed".
Remove or reverse these lines of Focalors, to make her seem less arrogant, less of the "boss" half.
- I am Focalors. You know? The god?
- I always dreamed of becoming human... and I still do even now.
- the human counterpart I left behind, I named "Furina"
- Anyway -- so then I cursed her
- she is, in a sense, "me" in human form
- I most definitely owe her an apology for it
- Hmmm. "Mirror-you," huh? You know what? That's not bad. Let's go with that.
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In the end I'll try to write up a theory that tries to explain most of these apparent plot holes away as necessary to the plot. But not the Furina thing. She has to be the hero of her own story. There's no getting around that. The lines that make out Focalors to be the creator of Furina, the namer of Furina (as if she didn't have a name before they split) and the boss of Furina -- they are just terrible and cannot be saved.
