chocobotism

[chocobotism]

gotta be honest when lakshmi showed up for real and she was white i was like. man ok

[chocobotism]

On Krile, Thancred, and Minfilia

Reviewing post-Heavensward dialogue for fic purposes, I came across this utterly bizarre conversation between Thancred and Krile:

Krile: Why must you be so disappointingly brusque? You're not at all as Minfilia described, you know. I don't think you've favored me with so much as a single compliment since we set out. Krile: Tell me, did your time in the wilderness sap you of all your charm, or are you holding it in reserve for your beloved? Thancred: This is neither the time nor the place. Krile: Well, call me old-fashioned, but when I'm risking life and limb infiltrating an imperial castrum, I like to be sure of my comrades' motivations. Thancred: I see now where Alphinaud gets it from. Thancred: Minfilia is dear to me, it is true─but not in the way you think. Thancred: Fifteen years past, when she was still but a child, there was an incident at a parade. A goobbue broke free of its fetters and ran amok through the streets of Ul'dah. Had I been more attentive, I could have prevented it...but I was distracted, and her father was killed. Thancred: I feared she would never recover, but in the years that followed, she showed herself to be more resilient than I had ever imagined. And when she learned of her gift, she did not flinch from the responsibility, but sought to guide others on the path. Thancred: She touched the hearts of all around her. Mine, Louisoix's, every Scion's. In those dark days following the Calamity, she was our guiding light─our hope for a brighter future. Thancred: She had so many dreams...and I would give anything to make them come true. Krile: My apologies. I can see she means the world to you. I did not mean to pick at old scars. Thancred: No harm done, I assure you. But fair is fair, my lady─what is Minfilia to you? Krile: You mean you don't know? Only my dearest friend. Krile: When I finally emerged from my torpor, I learned that nary a day had passed without her asking after me. She never gave up hope. Krile: And neither will I.

So, this takes place in 3.2, when Minfilia is still missing and Krile and Thancred are on the trail. Krile has clearly heard Minfilia talk about Thancred--she meets him with a certain expectation about his manner, which Thancred isn't presently living up to because he's too worried about Minfilia to be flirting. However, Krile also seems to have no idea what Minfilia's relationship to Thancred actually is. In fact, she misinterprets Thancred's concern for her as romantic, in the same breath as she's expressing surprise that he hasn't attempted to charm her. She's so curious about this that she interrupts a covert operation to demand he explain his motives.

Thancred, meanwhile, seems to have never even heard Minfilia mention Krile... who describes Minfilia as "my dearest friend." Despite the fact that Minfilia was asking after her every day while she lay unconscious, she apparently never spoke to Thancred about her worries. She even mentions Krile several times while we're in the room, calls her "my dear friend" and rejoices when she's found alive, but Thancred seems not to have been aware of any of it.

So these two characters, ostensibly the two people closest to Minfilia apart from her adoptive mother, know shockingly little about one another.

That's weird, right?

I would also like to note that Shadowbringers pretty much completely forgets about Krile being Minfilia's bestie, because when we finally get to see her again, Minfilia calls the Warrior of Light "Dearest friend" and has absolutely nothing to say about Krile. Thancred also doesn't mention her in his dialogue about the people who care for Minfilia and want to see her again, only himself and F'lhaminn. And Krile herself has little presence in Shadowbringers beyond the caretaker of the Scions' bodies, and I don't think she gets any reaction to Minfilia's death in the First, which, given how much time and attention is given to Thancred's feelings about it, is... certainly a choice. Even F'lhaminn gets a little follow-up sidequest, but Krile gets nothing.

What do we make of this?

I think from a Doylist perspective it's impossible for me not to see this in light of the issues I have with Minfilia's writing, and the lack of interest the writers seem to have generally in exploring the depths of female characters' inner lives the way they do the male characters. Minfilia is a major character and yet she is allowed so little interiority, and I've complained about that before so I won't get into the weeds here, but it's just so frustrating. If I had to watch Thancred spend all of Shadowbringers making her sacrifice about himself, I would at least have liked to have had it shown, and not merely told, that he was so close to her. That he knew her in some way that everyone else didn't. But we're not shown that! I've asked this question before, but if Thancred and Minfilia were in a room alone together, what would that talk about that isn't Scion business? Who knows! Did they talk at all? He didn't even know about her best friend!

I also think this is probably in part the writers trying to play a bit of catch-up with all the stuff they left only vaguely implied in ARR because they were afraid to rehash anything returning players already knew. Like they got to 3.1 and by now the new game is a success and the first expac is a success and now they're realizing they need to catch new players up to speed a bit on things that were assumed to be Known when they wrote 2.0. This isn't a particular graceful execution of that but you can see how it would serve that function. No, Thancred isn't into Minfilia like That; here's what their history is.

Whatever the reasons, they wrote what they wrote. And I'm also interested in it from a Watsonian perspective, and what it says about Minfilia as a character.

She's this person whom so many people knew and loved... and at the same time, maybe no one really knew. The one scene we do get that sheds any light on what kind of connection she and Thancred share in the present is after Ifrit, when Thancred is berating himself for not being good enough... and shuts up the minute he realizes someone else is in the room. He does show a vulnerability to Minfilia that he doesn't show to anyone else. He shows vulnerability; she really doesn't. Minfilia has vulnerable moments in the story, but they're pretty much always a matter of circumstances putting her in a vulnerable position rather than her specifically opening up to another character because she trusts them. She is always kind, and generous, and caring, and willingly hands herself over as a sacrifice for the greater good multiple times. When she speaks of her worries, it's usually for the safety and wellbeing of others.

How much you want to bet that Minfilia was the kind of person who was always listening to others and supporting them and making space for them in her life, and checking in on them to see how they were doing, and always had an encouraging word, asked about their day, offered help if they needed it...

...all while never talking about herself?

ARR loves to make Minfilia a damsel in need of rescuing, but how often does she ever ask for emotional support from anyone? She makes mention of Thancred watching over her, but often it seems to have been from afar. Thancred himself talks about how resilient she was, how many lives she touched. Krile talks about how Minfilia asked after her every day.

I wouldn't be surprised if Krile isn't the only person who considers Minfilia to be her best friend. I've known people like this in real life. Their friends are often surprised to find out they're "like that" with everyone, and they weren't actually unique. The care was genuine, but they weren't the only one receiving it.

I think it's consistent with her character, but it also breaks my heart

[chocobotism]

why doesn't venat tell the convocation?

one thing you'll see come up from time to time: why does venat, the largest ancient, not simply eat the other sorry wrong notes. Why does Venat, who has access to time-loop knowledge, not simply tell the Convocation what she knows and try to fight the Final Days in her time?

it's an understandable question: why wouldn't you want to change the future, if you know what comes to pass? Answering this question does a lot to flesh out our understanding of the Ancients, as well as Venat herself, in fun ways. It also highlights the heightened tonal register FFXIV operates in where the Ancients are involved. Most crucially, it confirms that your ultimate victory in Endwalker is not due to time loop predestination, but because of the collective efforts of everyone along the way.

all quotes, as ever, sourced from xiv.quest (except for some stuff from the very end of myths of the realm which i pulled from gamerescape). spoilers through endwalker follow.

(post-completion edit: this got insanely out of hand and way too long and it's honestly not even very insightful. you were warned.)

The way I see it, there are two broad versions of this question: First, why doesn't Venat warn the Ancients about the Final Days? And second, why doesn't she reach out to the Convocation and try to nip it in the bud?

To start with, let's get the answer straight from the source:

Venat cannot tell the Ancients generally because she cannot trust that they will not panic. No judgment should be taken as unquestionable, obviously, but Venat is a nigh-immortal scholar and researcher who also did a long stint as traveling counselor and savior and friendly neighborhood video game protagonist, who repeatedly and fervently declaims her love of the people of the world and her belief in their ability to surmount any obstacle if they simply find the strength within themselves. She has also, in-fiction, seen the wider world unsundered. Our exposure to the Ancients, on the other hand, is: her; the ruling council of their people, turned evil dimension-hopping wizards; a slice of particularly detached academics in a mad science lab (comedy version); a slice of particularly detached academics in a mad science lab (horror version). That's it! And of course, the revelation of the Final Days ultimately does result in panic and a series of increasingly drastic measures. While we only have her reasoning to go off of on this one, I don't know that there's any evidence that goes firmly against her reading of the situation.

As to the Convocation, she's right: the first time Hermes got the full picture of the Final Days, he immediately turned against you and tried to wipe your memories to prevent you from using your knowledge to stop them before they start. And that's really bad, because Hermes isn't just pretty important to stopping the Final Days: without the benefit of time-loop knowledge, he's the guy who draws the conclusion that connects the Final Days to the celestial currents of aether!

"Having shed light upon the phenomenon, he dedicated to himself to devising a countermeasure. Were it not for [Hermes's] knowledge of the celestial, we would never have made the connection—and thence forestalled the Final Days." Elidibus strongly implies here that Hermes is the guy who conceived of the Zodiark plan in the first place, or at least came up with the the mechanism by which Zodiark could actually use aether to protect Etheirys.

Hermes is a guy you absolutely have to have on your team if you're going to respond to the Final Days, because he is not just the guy who knows about dynamis. He is also, as far as we know, the only Ancient with a meaningful knowledge of outer space and celestial currents. Meteion herself is pretty explicitly parallel to a prototype space probe, a first-of-her-kind interstellar traveler. Given that the Ancients use magical concepts for seemingly nearly all their technology (there sure is a lot of stuff going on with crystals, I'll grant...but crystals are just aether, sometimes with concepts inscribed in them!), he is the closest thing they have to an aerospace engineer.

Space in FFXIV is obviously weird (no one's wearing a helmet on the moon, Midgardsormr flies through it, etc.), but nonetheless we know that space travel is difficult, and Hermes highlights in his explanation that Etheirys is unusually rich in aether while aether is much rarer in space generally. And we can surmise no one before him devised a way for the extremely aether-dense Ancients to travel and survive in space, or presumably that would have informed his own designs and he wouldn't have had to turn to under-researched dynamis. And we know no one worked with him on Meteion or understands anything about all the dynamis and, celestial currents stuff; Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch tell us as much.

Hermes might not be the literal only Ancient with knowledge of these things, but he is certainly the most knowledgeable, seemingly by a long shot. There is plenty of reason to believe the Ancients, while they have godlike power on Etheirys, don't have a huge body of working physics information. For example, the discovery and use of magnetism in creations was the signature achievement of Hermes' immediate predecessor as Fandaniel, per a Ktisis readable.

So you need Hermes, and cannot afford the possibility of losing him. Even with the benefit of the Warrior of Light's future knowledge, not having Hermes would fatally undermine any efforts by the Ancients to combat the Final Days—not only in terms of identifying which areas were likely to be affected, but also in terms of creating and implementing Zodiark, and with respect to any hypothetical "Ancients go to the edge of the universe to fight Meteion" plan.

That kind of full-spectrum involvement makes him only more dangerous. Sure, maybe you can approach the Convocation and convince them (and I'm not so sure of that: one of their members is there when you explain all this, after all, and he vehemently rejects the possibility right up until the moment the time-loop starts!), but how can you ever be safe with Hermes on board? Worse, what if this time he doesn't announce his betrayal? What's to stop him from building a flaw into Zodiark, or any one of the other plans along the way?

Well, but set the problem of Hermes aside for a second: why not approach other Convocation members? Aside from the information security concerns with Hermes, there's the fact that she already has some advance intel on that options. First, Emet-Selch already heard and experienced all these revelations, and he vehemently denied and rejected them. The only reason he ended up cooperative through the events of Ktisis is because "get to Hermes and stop Meteion" fulfills both your goals. You're literally out the door on your way to start the time loop post-Kairos and he's like "I still don't believe your future visions by the way! But if it's true then don't fuck it up!"

Second, if what you told her is true, Venat already has reason to believe Azem might not be willing to side with her. After all, one of the only pieces of knowledge you were able to pull directly from the records of the past is that even with 75% of the Ancient population sacrificed and preparations for the third sacrifice underway, Azem would not reply to the Anamnesis Anyder faction.

So she has good reason to believe her successor might not be willing to side with her, and she knows that successor's bestie will definitely counsel against trusting these future visions.

But what if she just shows them her memories and past events via the Echo? After all, reconstructing past events is a key part of your adventures in Elpis in the first place!

Venat can probably share her memories via Echo vision, but there's no reason to think that would work: after all, Emet-Selch was already there for most of these events and was still skeptical the whole way through. Plus, at that point you're really still just relying on Venat's testimony. Additional memory evidence certainly has some corroborating effect, it's not unimpeachable, particularly given the problem of Kairos. Hermes, Emet-Selch, and Hythlodaeus will all have memories that contradict Venat's because Kairos doesn't just erase memories, it straight up alters them.

But why not do the CSI crime scene reconstruction thing? Well, as Venat notes, those memories are prone to fading, and are etched on the aether of the world the same way memories are on the soul. So assuming, you were perfectly lucky and none of the aether got too altered by other events, you could reconstruct what happened from the moment Meteion connects to the hive mind . . . right up until everyone enters Ktisis Hyperboreia. Kairos functions by overwriting the memories etched into aether with yet more aether, and given that it targeted not just the group in the final room but the entirety of Ktisis Hyperboreia, it has presumably substantially altered whatever aetherial ripples remained of the day's events. Consider that if it's blotting out multiple days worth of memory over a large area (Ktisis Hyperboreia is a full-on spatial anomaly, after all), our only comparable event in lore is the Seventh Umbral Calamity. That's a lot of aether! Kairos moots any attempt to employ memory reconstruction as evidence.

So you can't tell everyone because they'll panic; you can't tell the Convocation because Hermes is untrustworthy; you can't tell the Convocation without Hermes because there's no point in recruiting the Convocation without Hermes because his expertise is what you actually need; even if you did want the Convocation without Hermes, there's reasons to believe that would go poorly; and you can't use the Echo to help you win them over because the well on memory-as-evidence is already poisoned thanks to Hermes inventing Kairos.

A brief interlude on the possibility of the Ancients getting to and fighting Meteion. Links to sources only because this post is already stupid long. Okay, pretend we perfectly secure Hermes on-side and rally all the Ancients. After making Zodiark early thanks to Venat's warning, the remaining 50% of the population sets to work on the problem of space travel to Ultima Thule. It'll be a lengthy process, since devising the propulsion systems of the moon took the Loporrits six thousand years, but sure, it's not like lifespan is a big issue for the Ancients. Then there's the matter of having enough energy to get there; Hydaelyn accumulates the aether of the Mothercrystal for over twelve thousand years to make that happen. But maybe we shortcut that with human sacrifice again. Okay, we've flown a spaceship full of Ancients to Ultima Thule. They can't do anything here because the dynamis is too thick for aether to do anything. Your allies can only reshape the reality of Ultima Thule to allow aether-based life to exist via dynamis in the first place. The Ancients themselves seem largely unable to interact with dynamis. Any familiars or entelechies they could try to use against Meteion would probably be overwhelmed by the transformative power of her own critical mass of dynamis. Probably your best bet is to send in wave after wave of Ancients to die in a delaying action while Hermes in the way way back with a megaphone tries to persuade Meteion to chill out? Part of the whole Endwalker thing is that the Warrior of Light's victory is an incredible piece of luck enabled by a whole host of actions both intentional and accidental. The thing about miraculous victories is they're miraculous because they were otherwise exceedingly unlikely!

"Well," one might ask, "shouldn't there still be something she can do? Couldn't she reach out to trusted friends to share this information and work to stop the Final Days and persuade the Convocation without accidentally reconnecting Hermes to the knowledge that caused this problem in the first place?" And the answer is: Yes, that's what she does! It just doesn't go great and results in the creation of Hydaelyn!

As you are departing, Venat confirms to you that she will try to find a different way to resist the Final Days. She also tells you that she will not take for granted that the future you have told her will come to pass, and will simply do her best to try to fight the Final Days.

We have a good sense of the results of her efforts because her closest and most trusted allies are left behind as the Twelve and the Watcher. Rhalgr and Oschon were literally just fellow travelers she met during his journeys. Nald'thal was a merchant. Nophica was a landscape architect. Probably the most outwardly accomplished members of their number were Halone (candidate for the seat of Pashtarot), Thaliak (brilliant university president), and Menphina (brilliant university student). They were, sometimes literally, just some guys she found by the side of the road.

The truth is that Venat's message and efforts were simply not that popular in the unsundered world. We see her efforts to reach the people, conveyed allegorically, in the Thou Must Live, Die, and Know cutscene: her appeal to the better natures of her countrymen fails. They cannot be deterred from their path of sacrificing the lives of others for their own comfort.

The result of Venat's best work to rally the world against the Final Days, outside the auspices of the Convocation, is the Anyder faction. And the Anyder faction, though it makes its case to the Convocation and to others, ultimately cannot win enough people over to shake the Convocation from its intentions.

The Ancient world in FFXIV often operates in a heightened register. From the name references that invoke Greek mythology and Utopia to aesthetic elements like their theatrical masks and genre-breaking art deco architecture, the game takes pains to emphasize how otherworldly the Ancients are. This helps make their stories work emotionally. Emet-Selch and Elidibus and Lahabrea are personally responsible for six worldwide genocides, plus countless other associated sins. Even in the already heightened fantasy world of FFXIV, trying to take their stories semi-seriously would break them down. Instead, the game uses a number of cues (Emet-Selch's dramatic nature and taste for literary allusion help considerably here, as does the English localization consciously adopting slightly archaic language) to indicate to the player that the Ancients' story is being told in an epic register, that they are a fairy tale, that their story is a creation myth.

Being a fairy tale or myth means that things can be narratively true about the Ancients which would otherwise not work in FFXIV, a story which tends to shoot for some degree of psychological verisimilitude. A person can survive untold millennia as the only remaining sane member of their people, retain their sanity, and never waver in their mission or crack under the pressure. Three-quarters of the world rising up to spontaneously sacrifice themselves out of love and kindness and a belief in the value of the natural world. In Hermes' case, we are literally directly shown and told, by both magical empathic bird-girl and magical mood ring flower, that he is literally not just the Saddest Man in Elpis, but the Only Sad Man in Elpis. People often poke at this point reflexively ("Why doesn't Hermes go to therapy?"), but his despair is not just all-encompassing and overwhelming. It is literally inexplicable and unfamiliar to the Ancients around him.

Similarly, Venat, actual wandering superhero and benevolent demiurge possessed of an inexhaustible love for humanity and surpassing skill in every field, scours the earth and comes up with just thirteen people (or like, them plus a few) who are willing to stand against the Convocation. Venat does use her time-loop knowledge to spur on a parallel effort to fight off the Final Days. It doesn't work because the Convocation's plans not only have the weight of formal authority behind them, but because the Ancients overwhelmingly did not want to accept their losses, form a plan of action, and fight back. They wanted to undo their pain and suffering now, as fast as possible, and damn the consequences or whatever other lives it cost. If this feels unrealistically emotionally extreme, that's par for the course for the tone of the narrative around the Ancients.

The truth is Venat was just doing the best she could with the knowledge she had and the understanding she had of the arena she was in. She doesn't end up forming the Twelve and sundering the world because she heard about it from the Warrior of Light—the Warrior of Light comes from a world in which she formed the Twelve and sundered the world because that is what she always already would have done in this situation.

We can surmise as much from how the time loop works across the rest of the game: even though there is always at least one person in the timeline who knows about the time loop, events always play out in a way that requires other people to exercise their free will, and those choices end up aligning with the time loop even absent the knowledge of the future. Either the Warrior of Light or Venat (also Fandaniel, now that I think about it, but I don't know of any meaningful insights to glean from that) is aware of the possibility of the time loop at all times: she knows about it from Elpis onward, then shows up in the boat at the start of Endwalker to say "hey fyi you're entering the Time Loop Zone," then you end up in the past with future knowledge of stuff up until you hit the time loop reset point and the whole thing starts again. But in the game through Endwalker, that knowledge never controls events; you and Hydaelyn are only ever individuals on a board with many players, and much of making the time loop work ultimately relies on the Ascians, a group we can definitely say both lacks time loop knowledge (except, again, Fandaniel) and is actively working to frustrate Hydaelyn's ends. On a broader thematic note, consider Zenos: he's ultimately crucial to your victory, and he's a complete wild card whose most important actions you could not possibly have told Venat about because they only happen after your return from Elpis. You don't win because you are predestined to win. You win because many people collectively take small actions which happen to, luckily, line up with ultimate victory.

The Elpis time loop only functions because of countless and almost entirely unknowing large and small actions by more or less every character in the game, and results from and is defined by those actions, rather than structuring and defining those actions. It's not that Venat, armed with knowledge of the future, chooses the time loop instead of averting the Final Days. It's that the time loop results from and incorporates a future-influenced Venat doing everything she can to avert the Final Days.

[chocobotism]

I never play roblox when i was young i played with invisible beings and shadows

[chocobotism]

pvp fun

[chocobotism]

FF14 Battle Portrait Tutorial

For the past few weeks I was trying to find a way to recreate the battle portrait from FF14 as there was a few characters that I want to see in that style but don't officially have one yet. I think I got it down more or less (see image below) so I thought it's a good time to share what I did.

First of all, I made a few files that would help make life a little easier. They can be grabbed here .

Note: I did use Reshade to do a bit of work at the screenshot stage to help speed up the process but the same effect can be recreated in Photoshop with a vanilla screenshot. There are a lot of tutorials on how to do comic/cartoon effect in photoshop and those would make good bases to work off of.

Step 1: Take the screenshot with the PortraitBase Shader on. I usually take two screenshots. One with "Comic" on and one with it turned off. This is so that I have more to work with if needed.

Step 2: Drag all the screenshots into photoshop and remove the background. In photoshop, arrange the layer so that the screenshot with the Comic lines visible is on top of the one with the effect off.

Step 3: Duplicate the the layer with the "comic" effect and apply Blur->Gaussian blur (radius 0.5)

Step 4: Take a look at the hair. In Eric's case, It still doesn't look blur enough to me so I used the blur tool and blurred it a bit more

Step 5: Create a new layer above the layer in the previous step and use the brush tool to start outlining the edges. Where to outline is up to you but the idea is to make edges defined so that it looks more like a drawing.

Step 6: Duplicate the outline layer and then hide that layer. Step 7: Merge everything under the outline layer. Step 8: Drag and drop the "Texture.png" into the project and Clip it to your character layer. Set the blending of the texture to "soft light". Step 9: Drag and drop the "stroke Texture.png" into the project and Clip it to your character layer. Adjust the size till you are happy then set the blending to "overlay". Step 10: Adjust the opacity settings of both texture layers until it looks good to you.

Step 11: Click on your character layer and go to image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation (note: you will see I dragged in the official Hades portrait as a point of reference to work off of). Adjust the saturation till you are happy.

Step 12: Go to image->Adjustments->Color Balance and adjust the color till you are happy. In this example, since Eric is also wearing the Sophist robe, I tried to match that color to Hades' Sophist robe color.

Step 13: Once you are happy, drag the "Template.png" into the project and scale that to the size you want. Make sure it is completely covering the character. If it's not, you can just use paint more of it with the brush tool to extend it till it covers everything.

Step 14: Hide the "template.png" layer and select your character layer. Use the magic wand tool to select the outside of the character.

Step 15: With the selection still selected, click on the "Template.png" layer and press delete on your keyboard. You should now be left with a blank in the shape of your character.

Step 16: Drag the"Template.png" layer to be below your character layer. Then click on your character layer and clip it.

Step 17: Click on the "Template.png" layer and add a 2px stroke and shadow to it.

Step 18: Drag "Back_Deco.png" into the project and place it behind your character. Scale it till you are happy with it.

And that's it! Now you can recreate portraits for any NPCs that you want (in theory). A lot of it is also fine tuning to what you want but this should at least give you a decent base to work off of :)

[chocobotism]

Parallels between Matoya and Y'shtola, and Thancred and Ryne... is this anything

[chocobotism]

Cahciua is a classic mom that kinda sucks. Like it's that simple she just kinda sucks. Many of us have these.

[chocobotism]

Thank you for having a brain about Cahciua, genuinely. It's so disheartening to see the hateful her when imo she's actually one of the best moms we've seen in this game. it's refreshing to see a parent with actual flaws but she so clearly cares about Erenville and it's so obvious that she actually knows her son quite well from how they interact. That whole last section with her illustrates that best imo.

First I want to apologize for sitting on this ask, the past few days have been quite hectic for me. That said, thank you for this message I genuinely feel a little insane at times reading reactions to her. I'm going to spoiler this as it's very text heavy and there are images added in!

I agree completely about how nice it is seeing a parent with flaws when too often this game falls into the pitfall of either making mothers cartoonishly evil and selfish or otherwise just the embodiment of the Victorian ideal of mother's being the "guardian angel" of the home (i.e. perfect, maternal, ever giving saints.) To me Erenville and Cahciua were really the heart of Dawntrail and emotionally impacted me the most and the reason for that is just how real and complicated their relationship was. You are completely right as well about how much she cared for him, and I know not everyone takes the time to read npc dialogue between quests but multiple people mentioned just how much Cahciua talked about him, the entire reason she did everything she did was in the slim chance she would be able to see him again and she had the faith he could against all odds make it back to her. When you go back and speak to Geode he literally says this

Once again, your completely right that she knows her son best and it's all in how they interact. Even in the final scene when she says she has a brilliant idea, and even though he initially brushes her off, what ends up happening? You see him for once in that entire zone come out of his sulking, actually interact with us and finally break out of his up til then, self induced isolation to ask us to come along. He realizes he needs his friends to help support him to finally confront that which he and Cahciua had been putting off the entire time. She knew him well enough to know he needed to be distracted in order to pull himself out of his head. Even though she may not have said things perfectly, who could? It was a fucked situation that everyone was doing their best to navigate. Really put yourself into her position of having to explain to your child that you are long dead, for the website that jokes about not even being able to order in a restaurant, coming up with the perfect words here seems a tall order. Furthermore we have to remember this isn't the real Cahciua we're even talking to, this is an amalgamation of her memories. We have no idea how the real Cahciua would have acted or what she would have said. I also see the idea that "she abandoned him" thrown around a lot and I think you're losing the forest for the trees here. Just because Erenville felt she abandoned him doesn't mean she really did. Whenever we engage with Vieran societies in game we have to set aside our ideas of a nuclear family, they do not ascribe to them. They form close knit, matriarchal societies that live communally. Due to in game limitations they can't really show us this but I'm sure he had Aunts, Grandmas (probably multiple due to vieran aging), other family members and close friends (Iyaate being one) that helped look after him. At this point I'm also going to bring up that we all agree parents shouldn't have to completely rid themselves of wants/desires/dreams and we're seeing this in action, a mother holding onto her dreams and she is being treated so unfairly. It's really insane how quickly people will accidentally push very traditional gender essentialist lines of thinking without realizing it (her place is in the home where she should stay.) If she had been a father leaving her child in the care of family while taking trips (keep in mind we have no idea how many times she did this or how long she was gone btw) would you be as upset?

All that said, I will defend Cahciua till my dying breath (even though, I myself have mixed feelings on her due to my own complicated relationship with my mother) because the things this fandom and the world at large let characters perceived as masculine do while woobifying and come up with a million reasons why what they did was right and moral actually and they were justified vs feminine characters is crazy. It's wild the grandfather of Imperialism and a character who participated in untold amounts of genocide gets so much sympathy by and large versus a single mother (who was largely coded as a woman of color) who was doing her best in an extremely fucked situation that was out of her hands and then receives the most wild takes and uncharitable reads. It's just very disheartening to see her get little support and of what there is, most of it is over-sexualization.

I'll end all this by inserting some of my favorite comments from this reddit thread that really helped me understand her and their relationship better.

[chocobotism]

I never play roblox when i was young i played with invisible beings and shadows

[chocobotism]

forever consumed by the idea of ysayle's obsession with being hraesvelgr's love in the form of shiva reborn being the world's most intense form of comphet experienced by a trans woman trying to discover her own identity

[chocobotism]

[chocobotism]

Last reblog it's genuinely no fucking wonder ancients were like yeeep time to kill myself once they've decided they've done all they can in this life. This society was fucked down to the core I can't imagine how they could possibly turn it around even if they didn't get blown up to smithereens.

[chocobotism]

thinking about pandaemonium again. the quiet horror of erichtonios "choosing" to remain there and study under his abusive father, even admitting that he has not changed at all and he merely "learned" to deal with him because "deep down" he loves him (even if that were true it wouldn't matter). even after all this time he's still trying to prove himself to lahabrea. 0 long-term significant change. they didnt even fire hegemone or anything and she's now (?) at least (???) erichtonios' ally (?? out of guilt? pity? genuine compassion?). ohhh my god

i'll be honest i think the doylist explanation here is lack of commitment and a writing quality that is not bad, per se, but got scared about the difficult themes it had been, so far, bravely and lucidly tackling, hastily wrapping it up in a kind of "it's alright now :)" "good ending" that just leaves a bitter aftertaste

but the watsonian explanations are plentiful. after all it is highly coherent with what we know of ancient society & its rules—duty to the star and your betters as an unyielding principle, with human feelings and emotional hurt being at best ignored and repressed. the loop..... you cannot escape the cycle.... jane eyre coded fr

[chocobotism]

How to Collect all the Framer Kits

There are a LOT of framer kits out there now for our adventure plates and dungeon portraits. But where to find them all?

You don't need to go hunting it up on websites; the game will tell you!

Open up your Portrait menu. I'll use a currently unused plate of Aeryn's.

Select "Edit" above the center portrait. On that page, where it lets you select the Presets, Background, Frame, and Accent, there are the usual arrows, but also a page icon, the Background paper button boxed in yellow below to contrast with my dark mode UI.

At the top of that submenu are options to show obtained or unobtained, and also how/where you get the various backgrounds.

Filtering out the ones I own, I see I can get A "Heaven's Orthodoxy" (among others) and at the bottom of the list, it tells me where I can get it (from Khloe Aliapoh in Idyllshire; never free of that kitten...)

There are plenty out there! Every Allied Society has a framer kit now, talking to old Jonathas in Gridania about your achievements will nab a few, turning in bicolor gems to various vendors will add a few more, PvP for Job frames...the list goes on! The second dropdown in the submenu will give you ideas of all the ways to find kits.

And yes, it works exactly the same way for previewing Adventure Plate options!

Go forth, and make your WoL's ID cards pretty!

[chocobotism]

"All is excruciating pain. I breathe fire and torment. I birth a world of suffering to mire and plague. In one fleeting moment, lives come and go. Ever moving towards the unknown. And in that fleeting moment, they cry for the answer to the question: Why, given life, are they meant to suffer? To die? As fragmented, imperfect beings, yours is a never-ending quest. A quest to find your purpose, knowing your end is assured. To find the strength to continue, when all strength has left you. To find joy, even as darkness descends. And amidst deepest despair, light everlasting."

[chocobotism]

I understand why people see venats “no more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. henceforth, he shall walk.” as a #hardship breeds character #ease is bad statement but to me in the context of endwalker and in the context of Hermes’ whole deal it was more to me a “you are so fixated on heaven you think earth is a misery. I’m overturning the fast lane you are trying to pave to heaven. Everyone is taking the scenic route”