Line #18 WMG/BreathOfFireIII


1	[[WMG: Myria's claims of protecting the world are total BS; she's actually destroying it.]]
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3	She claims that her power is the only thing saving the world from being overrun by the Desert of Death that covers the world across the ocean, and that she loves the mortals of "her world" very dearly, even those of the Brood.
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5	Bull. On top of all the irrefutable evidence the first two games gave that she was a ruthless, malicious deity, this troper sees a few problems with her claims. First off, it'd be much easier for her power to protect mortals if she were closer to the part of the world they live in. Secondly, her domain is smack-dab in the middle of thousands, possibly ''millions'' of acres of ''lifeless desert.'' She says that she's protecting the world from that, but it's pretty clear to me she's ''the cause'' of it: Siphoning the life and power out of the world for herself, feeding off the very life she espouses to protect. With the Brood slaughtered by the Guardians and, thus, no longer able to oppose her, she was able to do this on a much worse scale than when she had a bunch of dragons at her throat.
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7	Her spiel about being the world's protector and benefactor is merely a final bit of defense should the Brood ever return... One that, sadly, worked perfectly on Teepo.
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9	* I would not count events in the earlier games here; other than that mural that showed the second game's heroes fighting against her, there is no direct connection (it could be ArtisticLicense). Note that the Brood Elder didn't mention anything about Myria besides her deciding to kill the dragons out of fear of their power. Also, this game tries to at least partially subvert the black-and-white morality of the genre. We see this from the various tragic Boss fights you have to face in the game (which we get flashbacks of at the moment Ryu must decide if he'll surrender to her.) Also, when the Yggdrasil Tree speaks through Peco, it doesn't deny her claims, though it does claim that the world is stronger than she thinks and doesn't need her protection. Finally her sister is there to... Die with her? (we don't actually see them die, if Ryu and his friends survived so could they.) She gets scolded but not hated by her. All that doesn't mean that she's entirely noble, though. If she opposes weapons of mass destruction, why is she allowing technology to drift into inhabited areas? How did she create the stormy ocean, and how does it prevent the desert from spreading? Also note that her base was full of imprisoned monsters. You could assume she was just trying to keep the world safe from them, but then why are there so many still loose? She is, at the very least, deluded about her importance, and possibly indeed up to something sinister.
10	** "Even a monster's life is sacred to Myria." All those Samples were rare creatures/bosses the party killed... And a random Dodo, the poster child for extinct species. As for technology, Myria specifically says she does want people to have it to make their lives better. Except for the weapons of mass destruction part. People end up abusing what she sends them anyway, because humans are bastards.
11	*** Except that most humans don't abuse the technology at all. We have one mad scientist and then an entire community of people dedicated to making their lives better. There are always going to be criminals, of course, but they are clearly the minority in the game and most of them end up dead at the heroes' hands any ways.
12	*** Most don't, but even Palet alone was able to cause serious problems through his hubris, and Palet isn't anywhere near the power level of the Caer Xhan civilization. One of the themes of BOF III is about [[PowerCorrupts the use and misuse of power]], and Myria (as the most powerful force in the world before Ryu showed up) made the call that she wanted to keep the tech level in the "lands of life" down to prevent the possibility of more powerful machines ending up in the hands of someone like Mikba. Of course, given that Wyndia and the rest of the world are mostly functional societies despite the power of the Sin City cartel and the Plant shenanigans, it's likely that she made the ''wrong'' call, but it's not hard to see why she ''did'' make it.
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14	* Fandom's insistence that Myria is just willfully and intentionally evil falls completely apart when you consider that, in the end, when she is completely alone and crying out about how she's afraid her world will be destroyed again like what happened with Caer Xhan... Who is she lying to then, exactly? Unless you think she can break the fourth wall and see the audience, it doesn't fly:
15	** The game makes it pretty explicitly clear that Myria is not evil and the Brood weren't good (go read Jono's scene again). Everyone is just ultimately, tragically human -- when Myria cries out to God ("if there is a God") to ask what she should have done, there's no answer. There's nobody to make the world a nice neat black-and-white package for you. You have to do the best you can. And if you've watched a civilization exterminate itself and become obsessed with taking all the nukes away, except some of those nukes (the Brood) are alive... Well, it's not hard to see where she went off the deep end just a little bit.
16	** Why would it be easier for her power to protect mortals if she lived in a different part of the world, anyway? There's no basis for that. She's concerned with keeping the world intact, not micromanaging mortal affairs (beyond trying to keep them from getting nukes again).
17	** Fandom's claim that Teepo is just a brainwashed zombie with no responsibility for his own decisions is something else the game doesn't really support. Rei blames Myria, but Rei is also a self-confessed immature punk with anger problems. Just sayin'. The game lets Ryu make either choice -- is it so impossible that maybe Teepo just plain disagrees with you?
18	** Siccing your best friend on you is still kind of a dick move, though. However, it's more like how civil wars tear families apart and pit them against each other. Speaking of battles, though, there are clearly some fights that just shouldn't have been fought. All of these due to some error in judgement or caused by denial (the Nue being one of the first cases of this).
19	** Anything thing to consider us how the humans survived to the artificial intelligence level of society. They were clearly close to the Cyborg singularity. Clearly, they had survived generations with the access to nukes (if their level of technology advanced like ours), so what caused the GodzillaThreshold that made nukes a viable option? Myria's paranoia is then completely justified if humans could make such a grievous mistake, but why is she keeping them in a Medieval status in some communities and giving other communities the access to machines and then letting another society have access to Robots and Black Ships? The machine society could easily conquer the Medieval societies and the robot/Black Ship society could easy wipe out the machine society's access to the sea which would leave them starving. It's a miracle there wasn't a World War going on with that unequal balance of power... If she's trying to protect people from getting nukes, then why isn't she also not making sure that no one has a tactical and technological advantage over others?
20	*** Huh? The robots aren't "a society." The Black Ship is operating under Myria's control and, outside of Caer Xhan (again, Myria-controlled) and Kombinat (effectively Myria-controlled; they don't know why they're loading the Black Ship), robots appear to be mostly wandering monsters. As for the "lands of life," Myria isn't keeping one part in stasis and favoring another part. Technology washes up in Rhapala and Steel Beach because they're on the ocean coast, and the guilds in those areas trade with the rest of the world. Also, while the Eastern Lands have more machinery available, there doesn't seem to be a preference for guns there and there's no indication that the guns that wash up are any more effective, broadly speaking, than swords. (And nobody gets widespread access to combat robots.) So there isn't any "imbalance of power" to speak of, except when people like Palet and Mikba become too powerful for civilized law and order to control.

Context WMG / BreathOfFireIII