Knights are a masculine character archetype, as much as cowboys or noir-style detectives; and what I love about the knights in Dragon Quest XI is how they subvert so much of what we've been trained to expect.
In DQXI, knights aren't the heaviest hitters. They're not cops or moral/legal enforcers. They aren't even particularly great tactical leaders. They're support staff, first and foremost. In battle, their job is to rally their companions and be the shield others can stand behind (meaning, in concrete terms, they levy status effects/boosts and absorb damage on behalf of others). Others hit; they just help.
And that's not typically a role we think of as masculine, is it? In particular, women are usually the ones who levy the status boosts in these sorts of games; they occupy the back row while some beefcake with a big sword in the front row goes to town on the Bad Guys.
I love that. I love that DQXI's take on this timeless masculine archetype is to make it about helping other people; that a knight is defined by his ability to help others achieve their greatest potential.
Consider the Knight's Oath:
A knight's word is his bond. His kingdom, his master. He serves the weak, untiringly; challenges the strong, unflinchingly, and never retreats in the face of adversity.
Nowhere in there does it say anything about a knight winning or defeating the bad guys or being the strongest or the wisest or the smartest or whatever. It's about three things: 1) keeping one's promises; 2) putting others' needs above your own; and 3) standing your ground.
But there's also something else in the creed, something that's easily missed: A knight must subvert the status quo without fear—i.e., "challenge the strong, unflinchingly". That's a concept that Hendrik, I think, particularly struggles with throughout Act 2, because, as he comes to realize after the world ends, for years he hasn't challenged a goddamn thing; he just did what he was told. Essentially, he followed the letter of the knight's oath and not the spirit of it.
Compare that to Sylvando, who has always followed the spirit of the Oath moreso than the letter of it. In fact, he internalized the oath's message so completely that, as a teenager, he ran away from his own father to become a circus performer. Even as a kid, he was upending the status quo; even as a kid, he challenged the strong, unflinchingly.
Yet Sylvando loves his father, deeply, even idolizes him. Sylvando's mom died when he was very young, so for a long time, it was just him and Rodrigo, a boy and his father mired in their grief, trying to make their way in the world, together. That forges a special kind of bond between parent and child, one that Sylvando assumes that he has broken. He assumes that because he knows that his decision to leave hurt Rodrigo terribly; as I interpret it, Sylvando isn't so much afraid of his father, per se, as he is afraid of his own guilt over hurting his father, and the possibility that his father might no longer love him.
But Rodrigo, of course, has not stopped loving Sylvando; Sylvando's decision to leave hurt him, yes, but it was the years of separation from his only son that hurt more.
And so we get this scene, where Rodrigo doesn't say the words, "I love you", but he says something more important that basically gets the same message across: I never stopped believing in you.
Rodrigo is an old, hurt man. But when his son waltzes back into his life at the end of the world, an entire parade of orphans and lost boys in his wake, he does something truly noble, truly knight-like: He opens his arms to them. He welcomes them in. He grumbles, because he's an old man set in his ways and he's apparently always been kinda cantankerous, but: He does what a knight does. He serves the weak, untiringly.
And for me, the best part is what comes later, in the post-credits scene where Rodrigo learns how to dance—which he learns, specifically, to surprise his son. Rodrigo gets gussied up in his own Mardi Garb and takes to the training yard with the Soldiers of Smile (he serves the weak, untiringly). He shakes his tail feathers, so to speak. He practices hard to make his son proud (never backs down in the face of adversity). And in so doing, Rodrigo upends his own status quo, his own concept of what it is to be a knight: He challenges the strong, unflinchingly—even when "the strong" is himself—and he does it all for love of his son. *sob*
