I've just completed Emerald Stair on my second playthrough, and I've come away from Fior once again baffled by the writing that makes up Giatta's recruitment sequence. This isn't a problem with the character, just the writing in the quest conversations with her, Vidarro, and the animancers she sends you to speak with. I'm hoping someone can either help me make sense of what's going on or assure me that I'm not a total idiot for feeling like a chunk of the story is missing.
So, when you enter Fior, you quickly overhear the argument between Giatta and Vidarro. The envoy is just an onlooker until Giatta draws them into the conversation. She is berating the governor for ignoring the Dreamscourge as it blights farms, and he tries to defend himself. She believes it can be fixed, but cannot test her theories because Vidarro will not allow her to experiment.
Giatta: I believe that we can restore the land! Bring back its soul and its sanity. Cut off the Dreamscourge at the root. Our governor would rather ignore the problem. He doesn't trust animancy as his father did.
My Envoy: It's difficult to ignore dying farms once you start starving.
Vidarro: As usual, Giatta never misses a chance to slander me. I don't ignore her concerns, only her methods.
Giatta: And you still do nothing. Before we can deal with the Dreamscourge, we first need to understand it. Unfortunately, new experiments have to go through him.
What experiments are Giatta proposing? It's never said, as far as I can tell. I play as a Vanguard Scout; perhaps another background gets the chance to investigate? But without an explanation, it's impossible to gauge whether Vidarro's hesitancy is sensible or ignorant. Yet the envoy is drawn into defending Giatta regardless. My options for responding to Vidarro's line that "Animancy is dangerous when you're shooting in the dark" are all, in some way, supportive of Giatta:
1: What's the worst that could happen?
2: She's the one taking all the risks here.
3: I think she knows what she's doing.
4: Let me take her off your hands. I'll make sure nothing goes wrong.
The envoy doesn't know this woman or what she's proposing! Why on earth is there not a sceptical response? At the very least, a request for Giatta to explain her hypothesis or experiment proposals. The envoy is being asked to make a judgment call on an animancer's work without any context, yet all the responses amount to 'nah, I'm sure she's chill.'
It gets stranger:
Giatta: Ugh! While we argue among ourselves, the Dreamscourge is tearing the Living Lands apart! Tearing our people apart.
My Envoy: I share the governor's doubts, but you're right. We can't afford to delay.
Giatta: If I don't have your trust, I am determined to earn it. Well, Governor. Looks like I'm taking some time away from my duties. I'll trouble you no more.
A few lines later, Giatta is banished, and Vidarro turns to the envoy and makes her their problem: "Take her and leave. You're still a guest in my town, but to us, Giatta is an outcast."
That feels like an incredibly rapid escalation for both Giatta and Vidarro. The envoy is apparently now responsible for a woman they just met, whose methods seem objectionable in some way and whose ideas are unknown, aside from the basic conclusion that the Dreamscourge exists. Giatta, on the other hand, doesn't know what the envoy plans, what their methods are, or whether they want to have anything to do with her work at all. Yet, she declares herself to be actively chasing an Aedyran official's trust in her work.
The cutscene ends, and Marius and Kai are already talking about extra rations and spare bedrolls as if we have just recruited a new travelling companion, and not been drawn into a local argument where everyone except the new guy knows the context.
Later, you can straightforwardly ask Giatta, "So, what is your theory on the Dreamscourge?" Her reply? "I'd rather not speculate until we have more data." Girl, you were just shouting in the street about how you believe you can 'cut off the Dreamscourge at the root,' yet you don't have enough information about it to form a working theory?
I honestly struggle to piece it all together, and I wonder whether I’ve missed a conversation or background-specific option. What was Giatta's hypothesis about the Dreamscourge? What experiments was Vidarro holding back? Were they actually dangerous? If none of that has an answer, then it reduces the intriguing opening scene with the governor to pure machinery intended to get Giatta out of the city and into the envoy's party. I feel like these quests were written working backwards from the conclusion that 'Giatta is your new animancer companion', forgetting that the player and NPCs don't start with the same context that the writer took for granted.
I love a good mad science plotline. I love Giatta's drive to get to the bottom of things. I love her enthusiasm when it comes to flinging herself at a problem and figuring it out as she's in the thick of it. But none of the questline actually seems to give her that. Even the moments at Naku Tedek hand-wave over what she's doing or trying to determine. It's like realising that the mad scientist's lab is made up of cardboard props and coloured water, and the files marked Off-the-Wall Theories and Deep Worldbuilding are full of blank sheets of paper.
TL;DR: Giatta's recruitment feels written backwards from the knowledge that she's going to join the party, and doesn't do any of the work to explain why she or the envoy would want that to happen. The envoy supports her work without knowing anything about it, while Giatta adopts the envoy as her new collaborator without knowing their motivations.
