Frankly, I'm still stuck on Kicha somehow not taking the golden opportunity to explain what the fuck the Tribute Cycle is meant to accomplish and why they continue supporting it on a purely democratic consensus even when the Gysians' continued existence is a Sorrow in itself and directly proves that it is fundamentally not the only way.
Sure, perhaps we didn't ask the exact questions that would get those answers. But given that Kicha has waited hundreds of thousands of years (at least) waiting, hoping for a chance like this, the idea that she wouldn't jump at the chance to explain it entirely of her own volition suggests that she just plain doesn't get it. She doesn't empathize with non-Shiplords, not because she doesn't want to, but because she lacks the ability to do so--or at least do so at a level even approaching any of other species we've encountered thus far. She hates the Tribute Cycle, yes, but it seems like she hates it more in the sense that she hates what the Shiplords have become rather than, y'know, because of the incomprehensible loss and suffering that the victims of the Cycle experience. She wants peace because she wants the Shiplords to stop being so awful; she doesn't seem to want peace because she wants the non-Shiplord races to not be xenocided, at least not beyond an intellectual level.
And even with all that she knows is at stake, at how miraculous this opportunity before her is, she still insists on sticking to an old tradition/oath and refusing to answer the questions that the humans she is literally begging to solve the Shiplords' problems for them NEED ANSWERED for them to have the best possible chance of achieving peace.
...or that was what we thought before, but now it's even worse. The Sorrows that she claimed would answer our questions did not, in fact, provide any answers to our questions at all. They may have explained why the Shiplords covertly penetrate the societies of all other races, but that is probably the least objectionable part of the Tribute Cycle if taken in isolation. They did not even begin to explain why the Shiplords start, continue with, and end all of their relations with other races with xenocide, tyranny, and terror. In fact, they did the opposite: they stopped short of xenocide for the worst case scenario of Secrets abuse and the encompassing Sorrow showed how that worked perfectly fine and has caused zero problems. And yet the Shiplords still sped down the slippery slope of mass megadeath forever on the basis of "this is the only way" despite having literally a religious pilgrimage to a Sorrow that showed an objectively better way being something that Shiplords do regularly.
Getting a better perspective on Shiplord society and what the hell they think they're doing would help us figure out how to convince them to stop, yes, and that's important to pursue. But I genuinely can't imagine how that is supposed to make them even remotely sympathetic, at least beyond a "well, it is kinda tragic that you've accidentally mentally lobotomized yourselves in a way that you can't recognize and consciously decide to forcefully murder or drive-to-suicide everyone else who might ever be able to solve the problem, but that does not mean that you're even remotely deserving of forgiveness, trust, or respect" level.
I'm reminded of Paarthunax, from Skyrim: "Which is better? To be born good, or to overcome one's evil nature through great effort?" Paarthunax overcame his evil nature, and convinced others of his kind to do the same. Likewise, it is entirely possible for people incapable of properly empathizing with others to still choose to learn of ethics/morals on an intellectual level and commit to following them as best as they are able, because they recognize that their disability doesn't prevent them from choosing to overcome it. The Shiplords fail at both--they are fully capable of recognizing their hypocrisy and inability on intellect and historical record alone, but do not even try to overcome their flaw through determined effort.
We've seen too much of the Shiplords' history, of their actions and methodology, of their culture, of their governance, and even spoken openly to several of their best possible representatives who had the chance to at least try explaining themselves. And they've either refused for rather unsatisfying reasons, or just not placed much importance on the issue to begin with. Indeed, when Kicha was asked and given the chance to explain, she placed more value over her oath of tradition--over herself and the Hearthguard--than over the extremely deserved answers the latest victims of the Shiplords' inexcusable atrocities were begging for. Which, it seems, is quintessential Shiplord behavior: even when they try doing the right thing, it's for self-absorbed reasons. When they do the wrong thing, they act in selfish ways--a refusal to explain, a refusal to be honest ("This is the only way" and that's it, despite the Gysian Sorrow literally and physically showing undeniable proof that this is a lie), a refusal to try to be better, and a refusal to ever directly explain the supposed justification for their atrocities and let themselves be grilled for the bullshit afterwards. Even the one time the Shiplords ever allowed another people to know, it was indirect and impersonal--"You want the truth? Go there and look at that archive for yourselves. Good luck. Bye." Then jump-cut to "they spent a century looking at it, determined that they could not solve the problem themselves, and then collectively commit suicide because they could neither force the Shiplords to stop nor bear to just stay idly by and watch such atrocity unfold without doing anything to stop it, and knew that they couldn't convince the Shiplords to not be monsters".
And fundamentally, the reason we've always focused on Witness rather than Remember is because we fundamentally do not trust the Shiplords or believe that they have a good relationship with the truth, even among themselves. This journey has been one about finding out the truth first, and learning about how the Shiplords rationalize everything and distort the truth themselves second. And the most strikingly absent thing from the Sorrows that we've seen is the start, cause, justification, or reasoning behind the Tribute Cycle. If the Sorrows are the biggest milestones marking the Shiplords' fall from grace, the fact that the Shiplords themselves don't seem to consider "the point at which we just default to mass murder and destruction right from the start" as one of those milestones is as telling as it is horrifying.
And a small thing: you say that the only reason the Shiplords discovered the Gysians' development of vacuum implosion weapons in time was because of the total penetration of the Gysians' society. But if that was actually the case, how in the fuck did they react so late that the Gysians completed at least one such weapon and got into a position to deploy it before the Shiplords could even muster a response at all? And worse still, the obvious lesson from such a failure--be ready to respond to any red flags raised from such intel way faster and more decisively, and maybe warn a species ahead of time that pushing the Secrets too far without proper guidance could end up having catastrophic consequences for themselves and everyone else--seems to have been rejected in favor of "start with mass murder and destruction first, then return and terrify and brutalize them again the moment they've started to pick themselves back up, and keep doing that until they're strong enough that we can no longer do it so easily, and throw in a dire warning that we know is a total lie just so that it will make them much easier to xenocide if/when we decide to do that, because surely them finding out that the warning was a bunch of bullshit won't directly lead to them thinking that all of our other warnings were total bullshit too."
We should probably go back to Kicha and ask her straight up, "Okay, give us a good history lesson of how the fuck the Shiplords arrived upon the Tribute Cycle as a solution to anything and why the majority of your society supports it, and why the minority that doesn't support it doesn't seem to care enough to actually do anything about it. No, I do not even slightly care about any of your oaths or reservations or traditions. You're begging us to fix your mess, and us choosing to come out here for these answers instead of staying to protect our people from your people's attempt at completely unjustified xenocide resulted in several of our friends dying and one of them being abducted. We're out of patience for trying to find the best possible explanation by following your recommendations; we'll have to settle for the best you can offer here and now, because I really don't think you or any of the Hearthguard comprehend the suffering and outrage your atrocities inflict or just how much literally everyone else in the galaxy hates you all. We need the best answers you, personally, can give us, because a recurring theme we've noticed is that Shiplords seem utterly, violently opposed to explaining themselves directly."
