OKAY this is gonna be fast and loose! I finished the story of Diablo 4 this past weekend, and was honestly shocked at how poorly the story handles Lilith??? And then I played through most of it again with my friend Ari, and SHE couldn't believe it either! And I can't find any essays on the actual story, so I'm just gonna riff a little on the conversations we had, and be frustrated!

These are just opinions! I don't expect better from a massive corporate multimedia collage surrounding the modern equivalent of a slot machine... but I was still surprised at how floppy the landing is, and how it builds up Lilith just to cast her aside in favor of her father??!!!

Basically this story portrays Lilith as a demon who is probably ultimately lusting after power, but almost everything she says about the state of the world *is factually true." For that, she gets killed. Meanwhile Inarius is absolutely full of shit and part of the centuries-long manipulation of humanity via the Cathedral of Light... and he gets worshipped even though he brings nothing but suffering. The game shows that he's more self interested than anything, but still paints him heroically even as he falls.

And Mephisto, her father, is a KNOWN ULTIMATE EVIL. He is revealed to have pulled the strings all along. And ultimately he gets what he wants, even if it's not quiiiiiite the way he expected. So Lilith is discarded by the end, in favor of re-focusing on the historic villains of the series. This is a huge mistake, in my opinion, both in terms of what "makes sense" in this world, AND what would be interesting to me, as a player!

Basically it feels like somebody up the chain of command said, "It's fine to make this woman the villain throughout, but we're going to end by focusing back on the Prime Evils," which just serves to reinforce the status quo of the game's world as well as our own. Somehow it comes to the conclusion that Lilith consuming her father and taking his power would definitely be worse than just keeping The Literal Embodiment Of Hatred around.

This is so fucked!!!!

(and I acknowledge that none of this matters in the big picture, but my brain is locking on to it so I'm gonna share my thoughts anyway! I'm focusing on this in terms of "does this work as a narrative?" as well as "does this support negative power structures?" but I'm NOT just looking for "plot holes" or whatever. I think there are errors of craft here, but that it's almost definitely a failure of / a deliberate choice by leadership to make this nihilistic story about Good Versus Evil somehow ultimately reify the status quo of Evil???)

(I'm also not interested in "but maybe the expansion will fix it" because that's exactly what they want us to say, so we spend between forty and eighty united states dollars to be let down again.)

QUICK PERSONAL HISTORY OF DIABLO

I was 10 when the first Diablo came out. My dad was into PCs, so he kept our hardware upgraded and would often acquire games for us one way or another. I missed Doom by being a little too young, but played most of the big releases as they came out, despite my family not having much money.

It's now been long enough (LITERALLY 27 YEARS FUCK) that it's hard for me to remember much beyond vibes. I don't usually think of myself as "liking Diablo," but the first two games were huge for me. I played a whole bunch of both; without cheats for as long as I could, and then ultimately turning on invincibility so I could see the ends. I remember being fascinated with every aspect of the first game. Tonally unlike anything else I'd seen at the time; arguably the only horror-adjacent media I enjoyed until my 30s. Played a ton of D2 with friends online.

Then I crossed into adulthood, with all of the disaster surrounding that, and cut myself off from games for a few years. By the time Diablo 3 came out, I had decided Blizzard's game weren't worth even trying because it was apparent how manipulative they had become. The unified Blizzard pipeline (where Warcraft and Diablo were made by 2 totally different teams at first, Diablo accidentally invented the ARPG and the foundations of free-to-play psychological manipulation, and then WoW is basically a mutation of Diablo with Warcraft 3's aesthetic, etc) became pretty gross to me. So I avoided D3 for most of a decade.

I tried D4 when it came out last year, because some friends wanted to play it. I liked the aesthetics, tone, and storytelling in the first few hours. But I remained resistant to its formula, and once I reached The Reverend Mother Prava, I was really put off by the insistence on Not Quite Catholic language.

But this is how they get you! Disliking Diablo 4 made me curious about the D2 Remaster. So I played the first couple areas of that. And then I wanted to know about D3, and over the last year I've played up to Act 5, in my darkest introvert moments. I think I get Diablo 3, as a kaleidoscopic compulsion engine. Its art, in the Warcraft 3 + WoW vein, is really unappealing to me. The story is utterly forgettable. I'm trying to hook in somewhere, and I just can't. Tyrael's quest to regain his life COULD be interesting... but it's really not!

So then they got me FURTHER with the successfully-strange branding of D4's new season. "Loot Reborn." What a joke, I thought. Embarrassing!

... But what did they mean?

LOOT GO LEAN

Basically they overhauled the D4 gear system, very similarly to the way they reformatted gear a year or two into D3. Fewer drops, higher levels, and rearrange the effects so they buff the player instead of diminish enemies. This is a brief gloss based on some reading I did.

I wondered briefly if this could be intentional: start with a Fine but subpar version of the loot systems, and then get attention before the expansion by switching to the Better version. I am guilty of conspiratorial thinking sometimes because the world doesn't make sense, and I want there to be some plan or scheme. I want people and organizations to be smarter than they are. Anyway I mentioned this to Ari, and she said there's no way a game company has that kind of cohesion. Much easier to attribute this to lessons being learned and then lost through the company losing the people who knew better. Because our corporations cannot value their people, and must repeat the same mistakes.

SO ANYWAY they made the game more "fun" to play, as long as I'm utterly depressed and burnt out and in a place where I can zone out to it. As I have been the last couple weeks!

I had started as a Sorcerer at launch, and realized the game felt really floaty and... not-tactile. Tactless? Untactilitous. lol. So, realizing I'm increasingly-sensitive to the sensation of contact in action games, I created a Barbarian. I think of myself as a wizard, but turns out I just want to smash into crowds of enemies. I enjoy the Aspects system, where abilities get modified by gear! It's neat when the Charge forward turns into a big wall of damage that makes enemies explode. Hell yeah. Sure! Whatever.

And I decided I wanted to see The Story.

THE TEXTURE OF CHANGE

I read Film Crit Hulk's essay on the Marvel movies some years ago. My big takeaway was the phrase "the texture of change." Distinct from actual change, those movies work and compelled people to come back again and again by feeling like they were always on the verge of a narrative transformation, using all of the signifiers of character and plot, but then ultimately either maintaining the status quo or moving deliberately toward a foregone conclusion.

Anyway, that's Diablo. Mechanically and, of course, narratively. The loot grinding treadmill is literally the texture of change. Increased challenge, better loot, overcome challenge, repeat. Most charitably, you could say the game generates lots of smaller arcs of challenge-to-reward. And it's also fine to Enjoy this, even if you know that it's just here to be exactly what it is! I remove the judgment from this assessment.

The Eternal Conflict is the setting AND the substance of Diablo. That's okay! If that's what it's for, that's fine I guess! The mega-corporate motivations behind Making Another Diablo are obvious, and I can imagine so many conversations about continuing the formula, making it interesting, but not breaking it.

But just because you want people to play the game forever doesn't mean you CAN'T do something more interesting with the story. So I'm not going to buy the argument that the story can't have meaningful events. And in fact, for as drawn-out and flaccid as the story ultimately is, there are arguably consequences to the world of Diablo. But the specifics and ultimate return to the status quo are what irritate me the most.

LILITH IS NOT THE VILLAIN, LOGICALLY OR TEXTUALLY

One of the problems is built into the now-traditional format of Game launch followed by Expansion that extends/concludes the current story. So let's acknowledge that there's no commercial way for us to be "fully satisfied" by the end of this game. Stipulated! That's not what I'm looking for.

It's also important to take our personal cosmology out of it. These are explicitly not our alleged version of Heaven, Hell, etc. So any time I mention any of that, it's purely in the context of this story and its avowed truths!

I'm also going to try and assess motivations SO FAR AS WE KNOW given everything said in the text. Basically it's a foregone conclusion for our heroes that Lilith Must Be Stopped No Matter What. And it's my contention that this is not true given the text of the game! They might be right, but there's a lot to suggest they aren't.

Here's what happens before Diablo 4

Lilith, the demon daughter of Mephisto, co-created the land of Sanctuary with the angel Inarius.
These aren't our world's angels and demons; and Sanctuary isn't Earth. This is a universe entirely constructed around the conflict between Heaven and Hell, and it's interesting that Lilith & Inarius created Sanctuary as "another place" to avoid the conflict.
They gave birth to nephalem, which eventually became humans. So it is Cosmologically True that Lilith and Inarius are the Creators of everything relevant to humanity.
When humans die, they DO NOT go to heaven or hell. They go to the spirit realm and maybe eventually get recycled. That means any religion proclaiming otherwise is lying / deceived.
Angels and Demons apparently can't be destroyed either; they can be "killed" but will eventually re-form. So if you want to remove one from the board, you have to trap them. Inarius is trapped in Hell for a while; Lilith was banished to "The Void" or something for a while.
The games ARE ALWAYS about "Soulstones" which can trap even a big ol demon like Mephisto. When Lorath has a big idea that just might work, lol, it's a soulstone.
The Horadrim are scholars who SORT OF know what to do about Hell, but are always on the brink of extinction and without resources (except somehow always a soulstone).
The Eternal Conflict is the battle between Heaven and Hell for control of... basically anything that isn't Heaven or Hell. Humans are caught in the middle.

Then in the game itself, with commentary about whether people's actions make sense given these facts

You are a mysterious wanderer who is, for an unnamed reason, Very Important. A wolf looks after you in the snowy cave; turns out that's (the avatar of?) Mephisto, Lord of Hatred. He says you're capable of greatness. Presumably you're a Nephalem, but after D3 yelled incoherently about NEPHALEM the whole time, in D4 I don't think I've even heard that word?
So even though they don't tell us that's Mephisto, FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THIS GAME, Mephisto is pulling the strings.
We learn about Lilith, get fed some of her blood, so we can see "echoes" of what she did before we got there. In other words, there's an excuse for how we can see what Lilith is up to without ever being physically present with her until the end.
There's this guy named Elias, who was a "good guy" Horadrim, who realizes we're never getting out of the Eternal Conflict using existing methods. He decides that he needs to summon Lilith, the "Mother of Sanctuary," because she's the only one with power and interest in removing this land from the Conflict. Even though he's a creeper, HE APPEARS TO BE RIGHT ABOUT THIS, even if it is risky.
So he does!
He summons Lilith, and yeah she's reconstituted from sacrified human blood. Aren't we all?
Elias takes her to church. She's got the Mannerisms of Confident Evil, but the only way you can push back against what she says is to assume every single word is a lie. Maybe it is! Maybe she's manipulating us, and everyone in the narrative. If so, if a Demon is doomed by birth to only ever do wrong, then okay, forget all this. EXCEPT that there is a long period of apparent peace that she and Inarius created for other discarded beings.
There's a priest yelling at his small congregation about how they never do anything right according to the Light. That the Light is a lie is Cosmological Fact in Diablo's world. There is no reward for humans after death; they don't go to Heaven or become Angels. So he is a tool of manipulation.
Lilith shows up, and basically says everything a queer person would say against the church. They just want to control you, the way you were born is beautiful, what they call "sin" is just our true nature. She's using the language of liberation! And IF the game's assertion is that this type of language is a lie, then that sucks.
Now admittedly this causes the people to immediately kill their priest. But again, here, we've got this abusive priest, part of a system of false control, berating the people for like, drinking and partying. It is my personal opinion that our world would be better if we removed everyone who perpetuates this ideology of harm and guilt. So at least in my book, so far, Lilith is Correct!
I don't think at this point we know what Lilith's big plan is? She talks about saving Sanctuary and Humanity. Ultimately she obtains a key to Hell and goes in to destroy her father, who I must reiterate, IS THE LORD OF HATRED. She is Correct to do this.
We meet a Horadrim, who says Lilith must be stopped.
We meet a bunnnnnnch of church people, who say Lilith must be stopped. They also say Inarius is prophesied to defeat there. This is False.
We meet Inarius, who is stuck on Sanctuary and just wants to go back to Heaven. He encourages people to worship him, but does literally nothing to improve the lives of humans. A lot like some OTHER gods I know.
We meet Neyrelle, who is a budding young scholar of the dark arts. She and her mom track down Lilith, I can't remember why. After talking with Lilith, Neyrelle's mom decides to help; that Lilith's cause seems just. Yeah she gets a little Religious Fervor but again, YOU JUST MET THE ACTUAL CREATOR OF YOUR WORLD???
I'm inclined to give Lilith more credit than Inarius, but maybe that's personal bias. Inarius is shown only to be the kind of distant father who does nothing but harm to his children. Textually, he's a deadbeat. He's HERE on Sanctuary, doing fuck-all. Lilith was banished to the Void, and here she comes saying, "I'm sorry my children, I'm going to fix this." Maybe she's lying! That's a given at this point. Let's work with what she says.
Neyrelle's mom decides she'd rather follow Lilith than take care of her daughter, even going so far as to cut Neyrelle in order to continue her blood ritual. That sucks! I said, "Damn it must suck to have your mom align with a demon against you. Has she been watching Fox News?" lmao, but also fuck.

Anyway a BUNCH OF STUFF happens, and also kind of nothing happens for a long time. We follow 3 steps behind Lilith, beat the shit out of allegedly immortal demons, and slowly piece together what Lilith's been up to. I'm not gonna track down every little tidbit because then I'll never be done. I'm just doing this from memory!

She goes to find her firstborn, Rathma, but Inarius found and killed him first. She mourns her child and swears vengeance.
She summons other demons along the way, and their violence toward us is a point against her. But also, we're trying to stop her.
Either Lilith works on Vampire Rules, or she won't/can't do things that people don't want to do. We see her offer Donan a chance to be a great hero again, which he rejects. She makes similar offers to his old adventuring party, and they take the deals. Everybody we meet explains why they're siding with Lilith, and they basically all make sense. Then we kill them.
We deal with Elias for a while; he's trying to summon more of the big demons, for reasons unclear to me.
There's a lady named Taissa who is going to be a vector for Andariel the demon, but she's also a powerful witch, and also she DOES become a demonic gateway, but then everything's fine because of course it is.
Lilith makes her way to Hell, as it becomes explicit that she's going to destroy Mephisto, who is currently a big weak egg for some reason. Everybody says this would be terrible, including: Lorath, Church people, and Mephisto himself.
We get demon ex machina'd a few times by the Mephisto Wolf, who keeps offering to help, we turn down the help with words... AND THEN WE DO EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED.
This is jumping around but at a certain point Lilith asks why would we side with Mephisto over her? THERE IS NO TEXTUAL REASON FOR THIS. Our character, jarringly, asserts that she won't follow either Lilith or Mephisto. But then, in the way of all "apolitical" figures, she winds up doing Mephisto's bidding and reinforcing the status quo.
Inarius raises a human army to chase Lilith into Hell. Basically Inarius thinks, BASED ON NOTHING, that if he kills his son and his ex, and maybe even destroys the world they created, that he'll be welcomed back into Hell.
So he leaves the humans to die, confronts Lilith, and stabs her, thinking she's dead. But nothing happens. So Lilith asks whether Heaven is proud of him. "Did they rejoice?" No, because, "Silence is their judgment." Lilith, among everybody in this story, seems to be the only one who understands abusive familial dynamics. There's no pleasing Heaven; there's no pleasing Hell. Inarius being a guilty little baby leads him to make catastrophic decisions.
Anyway she stabs him, rips his wings off, and then traps him in the very cool slowly-flowing tormented stone spirits.
Lilith reaches the shores of Hatred, where some other demon scoffs at her for "returning home" but lets her through because I don't know.

MEANWHILE we've made it to Hell, the story continually prioritizes Lorath and Donan's lame-ass relationship and histories over Neyrelle's repeated suffering (dead mom, faith is a lie, loses her arm for no good reason, etc) while they tell her "just hang in there, and you'll be one of us." It sucks.

Mephisto repeatedly helps us, and we do what he wants even though he says he doesn't want anything, and we say we won't do whatever it is. This is a place where he's very obviously lying to manipulate us.
Mephisto says that if Lilith consumes him, that will mean the end of Sanctuary. There is literally no other evidence for this in the text that I've seen.
Lilith invades our mind through the Sightless Eye, where her voice tries to convince us that if we join her, we will be Sanctuary's greatest champion. There's something special about us, and Lilith wants our help. Again maybe she's lying and manipulating, but what she SAYS is all pretty much bang on. It would make so much sense for our heroes to go, "You know what? Let's help her destroy Mephisto and then deal with the consequences." BUT WE DONT
Mephisto helps us again, warping us to the palace before Lilith arrives.
Here's where the story completely derails. Neyrelle, who has good instincts but really isn't an expert, decides to use the Soulstone to trap Mephisto. Why? There's no good reason given. Mephisto says doing that would be a mistake because OF COURSE HE WOULD, but Neyrelle does it anyway.
Then, somehow, the Mephisto wolf shows up again with another portal to take her away. Why? Mephisto was JUST TRAPPED. This makes no sense. But she leaves and is unreasonably sentimental toward our character even though there has been basically no emotional development between us.
Lilith reaches the palace, and she's pissed. Basically by trapping Mephisto, we've already ensured her failure. She could catch Neyrelle and eat the stone, but maybe not. She decides to kill us because we rejected her, but we defeat her.
Her final words are about how she gave us free will, and we've squandered it on a crusade we don't understand, following the Church and therefore Inarius even though there's plenty of evidence that they're full of shit. She appears genuinely sad in the end that she wasn't able to break the cycle of Eternal Conflict. Everything she says here is Cosmic Fact.
She turns to stone and then crumbles. I assume she'll re-form eventually. But we've thwarted this plan.
We leave Hell, close the gate, Neyrelle vanishes with the stone, and then we see her walking alone through the wilderness talking nebulously about some plan to take the Mephistone somewhere. But it's all bullshit cliffhanger nonsense, and even though the forthcoming expansion has been announced with a video showing Neyrelle's slow corruption by Mephisto, nothing that comes after will change what has occurred. Also they ALWAYS get out of the stones.
The world is "changed" because Inarius and Lilith are both "dead," all the faiths have proven to be trash, and so humanity is truly alone in the universe. OOPS!

And finally, as Ari pointed out, NONE OF THIS MATTERS TO US. None of it. The Lilith boss fight comes after the resolution of the main conflict at which point your motivation to kill her is, "because she's going to kill me coz I fucked up her plan to free Sanctuary from the Eternal Conflict." It's such a floppy, deflating end to Lilith's narrative arc.

If Lilith was summoned, killed Mephisto, and took over as Lord of Hatred... literally nothing would change for humanity. We'd be none the wiser. We didn't have to get involved. NOBODY provides anything more than fear and supposition that she would go on to greater harm.

Great harm than THE SOURCE OF ALL HATRED FOR ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY? Fuck, this is stupid!!!!!

WHAT IS IT FOR

Listen all I can really say is: Lilith speaks truth the whole time. She SHOULD kill her dad. We SHOULD kill the priests. Inarius is a little do-nothing so-and-so. Yeah maybe she's powered by Hatred and awakens the Hatred in humans, and maybe if she eats the Lord of Hatred she'll be an even worse Hatred. But so far as I can tell, the game never show us that she's lying about wanting to save humanity and Sanctuary!

Basically she's a confident woman with a liberation politic, and she is thwarted by her powerful father to maintain the status quo. Her crimes are:

Creating a peaceful place way from cosmic war
Creating new species of people who live there for a long time in apparent peace
Angel-Demon War comes to conquer Sanctuary and she's cast out of existence
Coming back from The Void and telling everybody the truth about how the church sucks, Sanctuary wasn't supposed to be a place of suffering, and that she's going to fix it
Wanting to destroy LITERALLY ONE OF THE MOST PERSISTENT EVILS IN THE COSMOS who is also her BAD DAD
Arguably manipulating people into doing what she wants, maybe in the worst reading by mind-controlling them, but again there's no textual
If anything there's evidence that she can't control people. When Donan says no, she leaves. We're infused with her blood, and even we are able to go, "nope not gonna do it." Maybe the other people are more vulnerable or weaker, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Oh yeah, at some point we kill Elias like 10 times before undoing his immortality. His dying words are to call Lorath a coward who would never be able to accomplish his goals, which as far as I can tell is also a Cosmic Fact.

So, a threat to the obviously-evil status quo is disregarded despite being calm and reasonable, somehow perceived as an enormous threat while everything she says indicates otherwise. She is a threat, to Heaven and Hell. In other words, a threat to Power.

And in Diablo's world, as in ours, Heaven and Hell deserve to be destroyed.

WHAT DOES IT SAY

There's no way for Power to be used for good. The Angels don't do it, and the Demons don't do it. What do I mean by "good?" Well, peace is good. Love is good. Caretaking is good. Truth is good.

Unless she is lying about absolutely everything the entire time, these are the things Lilith does. She births a world. A people. A peace. Which is only thwarted because her peaceful domain becomes an appealingly-juicy object of desire for the conquering hordes of Angels and Demons.

We don't have to just take her word. We have the advantage of a Lore-Obsessed series of games, which have documented the history of the cosmos in great detail. I haven't read all that shit because it is mostly so boring to inhabit this faux-Christian perspective, but I went and read a bunch of backstory to explore all this. And we come back again the Cosmic Facts. We KNOW she did all these things. We KNOW she said true things as she moved through this game's events. We KNOW that every other power structure is manipulation and control.

So the most charitable possible read for the end of this story is that, with mommy and daddy dead, humanity can start anew. But they can't. Because Mephisto is still the Lord of Hatred. Hell is still waging constant war on Sanctuary. Heaven is noticeably absent from this entire game's narrative. I know you go to Heaven at the end of D3, but I didn't finish it so I'm not sure what happens. Did Heaven get blown up? Is it even there for Inarius to appeal to? I assume it must be, and I'm not looking it up now because I don't care anymore.

This is a story about a woman speaking truth to Power, and everybody losing their shit and killing her to ultimately maintain Power where it already is. This is a cowardly narrative, neoliberal in its framing of power, convinced that as bad as things may be, there's no way a transfer of power to someone cool-headed and intelligent could be any better. If anything, it would have to be worse.

We also start with Neyrelle as a main character, but she gets shouldered out of the spotlight almost immediately. Lorath is the narrator, because there must be a gravel-voiced man in control of the story. He and Donan, who I cannot stress enough are pathetic little babies who I cannot identify with in the least!!! I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING THESE PATHETIC OLD MEN DO. Neyrelle is along for the ride, and she's the one who makes a lot of things happen... but it's from the narrative backseat.

If the expansion reconfigures any of this, great. But I have no reason to believe that it will.

BECAUSE YOU SPENT ALL THIS EFFORT BUILDING UP LILITH

JUST TO THROW HER AWAY

AND MAKE THE NEXT CHAPTER ABOUT HER DAD

WHY IS IT LIKE THIS

Tradition, conservative leadership, etc. Ari thinks the ending is decided early on, so cinematics can go into production long before the game is near complete. Maybe the writers accidentally created a compelling character in Lilith, but leadership said she has to die so we can focus again on the Primes. Maybe knowing that she had to die, the writers chose to make her sympathetic.

Either way, huge games like this are a collage. I'm not indicting any given writer or artist involved in this game. There's some fantastic writing (and some absolute time-filling nonsense), incredible art, tight gameplay (for what is is), etc. I have learned that the likeliest source of Big Problems is, of course, Management.

Games and movies, especially mass-market fantasy shit like Star Wars, Marvel, and the big games, have had a tendency to be about vindicating or excusing Bad Dads. Trying to tell stories about kids and making it about forgiving the parents. All of the Russo Marvels are about Bad Dads. We talk about the Daddification of Games with Last of Us, et al. Aging developers wrestling with their own demons for having given too much of their lives to labor.

This is the daddification of Diablo. They presented a story about two Daughters, and made it a story about All The Dads. It's worse than unsatisfying; it's honestly gross. It's a foregone conclusion, no matter what Lilith says, that she is Wrong. Despite her words. Despite the evidence. Despite avowed cosmic history.

Because the powerful refuse to change.

SHOULD YOU PLAY THIS STORY

No. There's an option to skip the campaign; take it. It truly made both me and Ari like the game A LOT less.

SHOULD YOU PLAY DIABLO 4

🤷‍♀️

WHAT WOULD I PREFER

Lilith should have eaten her dad. Let her ascend to power. Let us see what she would do with it. If the final expanded Act was about "ope, Lilith lied and she's just gonna destroy EVERYTHING now," then so be it. Let her ascend and then fall. Let a new villain rise rather than returning to the Prime Evil well.

More interestingly, what if she was true to her word? Let her eat Mephisto, and then let us ally with her as she destroys the other Prime Evils, and then all the Lords of Heaven. Tear down the cosmos. Kill god. It would be an opportunity for new stories to be told, other axes of ideology to be ground. Keep Sanctuary; show life improving for its citizens as we fight off remnants of the Eternal Conflict. Set Lilith up as Right, as the victor, as the one being willing to tear down institutions for the possibility of a better life.

Then the next Diablo, for there must be another, could reframe the conflict. Sanctuary is a place of peace where Lilith is worshipped, or even where she refuses to be worshipped. Tear down the Eternal Conflict. Stop letting the powerful live when all they do is oppress. Stop letting false visions of forever take over our present reality.

Then find something else to fight about.

DIABLO 4: LILITH'S CRIME IS TRUTH, OR, DAUGHTER OF HATRIARCHY