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Xenoblade chronicles 3 spoilers
Honestly with how prevalent the Aionios queens were in the advertising material for Xenoblade 3 I feel almost clickbaited by the reveal of them just being robots. The game really builds Melia up throughout the first, like, 2/3rds of the story and by the time you finally encounter her the tension is palpable and the amount of questions you have is insane.
I don't like being majorly negative here but having all of that build up just to reveal that "oh that's not actually Melia, it's just a robot that looks, sounds and fights exactly like her" feels like a major copout.
It's like they wanted a major hook of the game to be that you'd be fighting against 2 nations lead by previous party members but also didn't actually want to make them antagonists. A classic case of having your cake and eating it too.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want Melia and Nia to be evil rulers knowingly waging an eternal, sadistic war. But if you're going to have most of your game building them up and creating tension, don't have the payoff be "they were identical robots the entire time!"
I've already made a semi-joke post about this idea but now that we know that Shulk and Rex's kids are going to be a part of the Future Redeemed party and that they've been reborn into the Origin system as child soldiers I'm really curious as to how the two are going to react to what Moebius has done.
Despite Shulk's track record of violently flying off the handle when the people he cares about are hurt, I can imagine his reaction to seeing (who could be) his child in Aionios being that he’s just happy to see them and to know that they’re safe, even if they’ve been turned into a child soldier that doesn’t recognise him.
After all, his reaction to Fiora being turned into a Mechon in XC1 was to almost instantly let go of his hatred for the Mechon, try to save her and try to understand what was actually going on. He wasn’t angry that they turned her, he was happy that she was alive.
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Rex however, despite being outwardly optimistic and kind throughout his game I think would fly off the fucking rails the second he realises what Moebius had done to his daughter.
Pyra and Mythra both have a lot of trauma about their past as living weapons, which they probably carry in some way even to this day. And I think the fact that Moebius would dare subject his daughter to the same pain his partners have been through, being dehumanised and forced to fight to survive as nothing more than living weapons would be enough to tip him over the edge.
I also imagine that N is going to be in some deep fucking water if Rex ever figures out what’s happened to Mio as well.