morgan-aleghieri

[morgan-aleghieri]

reblog if you would give cheeses to these meeces

[morgan-aleghieri]

The real reason why you need to be social is the best chinese place within 10 miles is an unknown hole in the wall with a yearly marketing budget of $15 dollars and you will never, ever find it unless someone tells you about it.

[morgan-aleghieri]

｡.✦｡Rest assured I never shirk my training. I will be ready for whatever awaits｡✦.｡

[morgan-aleghieri]

the thing about the mountain goats is that, on paper, it's the whiniest-sounding catholic in america playing Just An E Chord saying shit like "i smoked a pack of spirits in florida / i thought about the book of galatians / why were you so mean to me last october" but then you listen to it and you're like what the fuck...... why WERE you so mean to me last october. and then you need like 3-5 business days to recover

[morgan-aleghieri]

:3c

[morgan-aleghieri]

Why do people call Sebastian a virgin when the reason why he was sent to the Chantry was for all the debauchery and drinking he was doing. And the prospect that all his debauchery and drinking would have made a bastard child. Which was probably even more concerning for the Vaels than the actual debauchery and drinking

[morgan-aleghieri]

what "no sugar added" should mean: the natural sugars of the other ingredients like fruit are the only source of sweetness in this product

what is actually means: we added a fuckton of artificial sweeteners

[morgan-aleghieri]

actually artoirel is one of the funniest and most tragic characters in heavensward like. man. imagine being the first trueborn son of one of the highest noble houses in a country where primogeniture is the word of law, having spent your entire life doing your damndest to fulfill your ordained role in life & gaining you father's approval, only to be the second-favorite son because your father likes his illegitimate son better than you—and you can't even truly blame him because yeah, your half-brother is just that lovable; having almost none of the privileges that your birth allowed you, he's still proud and happy and takes everything in stride; he's pretty much the embodiment of the chivalric ideal you both are meant to uphold; his men love and respect him because he's both a capable leader and a really good person; he is the ultimate faithful and virtuous knight and he's so good that he doesnt even begrudge you the place and privileges that he should be allowed, which makes you definitely ashamed of being jealous of him: he plainly likes and respects YOU!; he shows up one day begging your father for a huge favor (which he usually never does, as he doesn't like to use his connections for his own ends, thus lending a special weight to the request) i.e housing and protecting his "friend" of whom he speaks like they're the embodiment of hope and a new avatar of the Fury herself and YOUR FATHER ACTUALLY CONSENTS, much to your dismay, and THEN when said ""friend"" shows up (with their own retinue)—a complete stranger, a so-called "hero", more like a fraud in your opinion, but it's not like you were allowed to give your opinion in this matter anyway—you're half-secretly praying that they're just overrated and will fail but they actually are just that cool—dishonor upon dishonor: your father assigns them your own mission (the shame!!) and THEN you send them to what is most likely their own death in the field (cowardly and despicable move that should definitely strip you of your honor in the eyes of men and the gods both) but, against all odds, they actually survive AND succeed (and don't even blame you?? therefore proving their own moral superiority—JUST like your brother), so you have no choice but to actually agree with your brother here, and oh no you watch your father start actually loving them, and THEN your brother literally dies the single most heroic and righteous death a knight could ever wish for, and YOU, INSTEAD OF MECHANICALLY BECOMING THE NEW FAVORITE, even as you are named the new Count as your father steps down from the role—you realize with growing horror that you will never, ever be the first in his heart because now your dead brother has become a literal cult object, a genuine holy martyr, no less, and he tells the new similarly-virtuous-embodiment-of-chivalric-virtues illegitimate-born knight-leader that he sees your glorified dead brother in him in front of you and witnesses, including the stranger your brother died to protect, and it's only ever going to be that way. forever. and you always did what you were asked. and all you did was seeking to gain your father's approval by playing by the rules. ah well. luckily your younger brother is such a fuckup you can vent your frustrations on him and scorn him like the rest of the world does, at the very least,

[morgan-aleghieri]

Discworld is so delightful because you get lines like "When banks fail, it is seldom bankers who starve" except it's spoken by a 7 foot tall sentient clay statue named Pump 19 and directed to a man whose name is Moist von Lipwig

[morgan-aleghieri]

#9 for spots to kiss with malex please? 🥺 mals ears are so cute it seems necessary

it IS necessary you are so right!!!! 👀👂🏻 why are ears so big if not for being kissed?! ✪ ω ✪

[morgan-aleghieri]

Watched Ernst Lubistch's I Don't Want to Be a Man yesterday for a class. 1910s transmasc yaoi goes fucking crazy.

[morgan-aleghieri]

Because I have no chill, I drew a bunch of outfits for Alex :3 some are either inspired by his vanilla outfits or the ones in the seasonal outfits mod, and others are just my own creations based on what I think his style would be!

[morgan-aleghieri]

portrait of saint cethleann

(actually a study of vigée le brun's portrait of countess anna ivanovna tolstaya, but featuring flayn)

i rendered most of this with dilated pupils and now i'm dying. anyway, happy birthday flayn!

[morgan-aleghieri]

Normally I'd agree many Final Fantasy games have rather young protagonists. It's because they're usually single-player JRPGs made with the assumption of younger players, and like most Young Adult media, create characters that cater to that, even if it ends up with teens running the world and fighting in wars. And for many players, the first time playing these games is in childhood/adolescence/very young adulthood. So it's YA anime.

Final Fantasy XIV does not fall into that same mold, despite the "Teen" rating for legal and distribution purposes.

The majority of the FF14 cast, including the bulk of the main characters, are between 20 and 40 years old (the Scion Archons, Ishgard Elf Husbands). Many other characters are between 40 and 80 (Ishgard's Counts are all late middle aged to elder dads/grandpas, Gaius is mid 50s, Jehantel and Ran'jit are elderly, all still active). The younger characters (especially with any authority or special position) like the Leveilleur twins, are actually outliers. And the youth of the characters between 16 and 20 years old tends to be plot relevant, where that inexperience and naivety causes problems and drives story (Nanamo's arc at the end of ARR into HW, Alphinaud and the Crystal Braves, Ryne's determination of self in ShB, etc).

Characters have a variety of appearances; some characters in the same age ranges look very different. Varis is only 4 years older than X'rhun but Varis's model shows the stress and disagreeableness of his life a lot more than the RDM trainer's. Cid's in his mid-30s but with the beard looks older--and without it he has a baby face (hair color doesn't matter, cuz they do keep the anime trope of "everyone's got white or silver hair"). Lalafell are designed to be anime-cute halflings so it's hard to tell their adult ages even if they've got facial hair like grandfatherly Papashan. The pad'jal of course look like kids, but the youngest main pad'jal is A-Ruhn in his late teens; all the others are adults stuck in adolescent bodies. E-Sumi is a few hundred years old. Kan-E uses various methods to look older so other leaders and people from outside Gridania will take her seriously as an adult. The padjal introduced in the StB WHM quests is a child, and that's the plot; she's not in charge of anything, or has any particularly advanced-for-her-age skills. She's just a kid having a really rough time.

This inability to determine age by looking and assuming isn't just due to limits of the game engine and character creation options; it reflects real life. I met my work team for the first time in person recently; one person looked older than I know them to be, thanks to months of stress and health issues. While all of them were shocked to remember I'm in my 40s as according to them, I "look much younger". Most people are actually pretty bad at guesstimating ages based on appearance, due to the variety of folks' lives.

Speaking of kid characters, many of the children we interact with, like the Doman Adventurers, are between 12 and 14 and act much younger. Khloe has this going on too, with her age "corrected" to 13 (when previously listed as 10), but she acts way younger to me. Most of the actual child characters are treated like children, and it's not until they get to 14-16 (Honoroit, Leveva) that we start to see them treated like maturing adolescents and having some rsponsibilities, but still young and prone to the kind of choices one expects of less experienced and more emotional youth.

As a MMO, FF14's primary audience is actually adults; teens do play the game, but also age up with it if they keep playing. If a 15 year old began playing with ARR's release, they're in their mid-20s now. Having a primarily adult cast, and treating child characters like children, and adolescents like young people figuring out how young adulthood works, makes sense for this game.

FF14's time bubble is also part of the issue; a developer tool to keep it so they don't have to worry too much about character ages, new models so often, or how long things take in game. Timelines are then intentionally left malleable for the players' benefits, to create our own stories and determine how long things take for our WoLs and their tales. Some folks have their stories pass in real time, some compress it to a year per expac, some expand it out even longer. So the ages the characters have listed in the lorebooks and rarely in game (which is then reflected in online resources), is a starting baseline. Personal headcanons as always should be applied (including changing around some character ages to fit one's own story if necessary).

Also, FF16, made by the same team, has a brief prologue/tutorial section where the main trio is between 10 and 15, guided/trained by adult characters, experience the inciting incident trauma--and then we spend the majority of the game with the main cast in their 20s and 30s. The game also has a mature rating, featuring some sexual situations, lots of violence, and stronger language than other FF games. It's made for adults, and its cast reflects that.

So it is a matter of audience expectations; for a MMO, you're going to have an older and aging player base, and the varied ages of the cast reflect that, as do their varied appearances and experiences as adults. The young characters are treated closer to how their youth should be; still with respect for those in positions like Nanamo, but also prone to errors due to inexperience that drive story. In other FF titles, which were made to be more YA-focused, a teen and young 20s cast were treated much differently. But even in the single-player FF titles, if they are made with adult players in mind, their cast and stories likewise reflect that.

[morgan-aleghieri]

anybody else going through life feeling like a dog that wasn't socialized enough as a puppy

[morgan-aleghieri]

one thing i like to do when i'm feeling too unbothered and chill and normal is read venat discourse on twitter. makes me insane every single time it comes up. "she placed herself as a god above the ancients and judged that they had no right to live" "she was taking the only path available to her to stop meteion and defeat the final days because it needed to be a race that could handle dynamis" wrong wrong wrong! learn to read!

venat was stopping a planned mass sacrifice of non-ancient life by the only means available to her. that is the primary motivation for the sundering. shadowbringers says this to you, very very clearly. hythlodaeus in "a greater purpose," 5.0 (this is when you're chilling at the DMV together):

The Convocation of Fourteen─well, it was Thirteen at the time─endeavored to create a will for our star. They would repair the fundamental laws of order and halt the spread of destruction. But creation on such a scale required an immense source of power... Of those of us who still lived, nearly half offered up their lives in the name of salvation. And from their sacrifice, Zodiark was born. Just as we had hoped, He reached forth and halted the march of oblivion. ...Yet oh how the star had suffered. So many species lost. The land was blighted, the waters poisoned, and even the wind had ceased to blow. Once more did our people give of themselves to Zodiark. Another half of our race sacrificed to cleanse the world; to ensure that trees and grasses and myriad tiny lives would sprout and grow and flourish. The cycle of life had begun anew, and we reconsidered the means by which we might protect it. The Convocation decided thus: we would nurture our world until it was bursting with vitality. Then, when the time was right, we would offer some portion of its living energy to Zodiark... In return, He would restore to us those brethren whose souls had fed His strength, and together we would resume our role as stewards. There were, however, those who disagreed with this plan. They argued that enough had been sacrificed to Zodiark─that this new world should belong to the lives newly born. These dissidents surrendered their life energies in the creation of Hydaelyn, an incarnation of their opposing belief. And for the first time in history, our people stood divided... Know you, then, how this conflict ended?

Hythlodaeus is very clear: Following the first 50% sacrifice to Zodiark, the land was dying and there had been a mass die-off. A second 50% sacrifice (so 25% of the pre-Zodiark Ancient population) resolved that, cleansing the world and restoring nature and non-Ancient life. Afterwards, the Convocation planned a third sacrifice: they would "nurture [the] world until it was bursting with vitality," the "trees and grasses and myriad tiny lives" he describes earlier, and then sacrifice some considerable amount of that life to restore the Ancients comprising Zodiark.

People pretend that there's a lot more ambiguity on this point than there is, but it's quite clear that when he says "myriad tiny lives," he is saying something that encompasses the modern peoples of Eorzea or their very near ancestors (it's only been about 12,000 years since the Sundering. For comparison early modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago, and there's no suggestion I'm aware of that evolution even exists on Etheirys anyhow). There's a couple very strong pieces of evidence for this:

First, anything that exists on multiple shards must have existed pre-Sundering, since there's close to no multidimensional travel (barring Ascians and the Exarch). Thus, all the player races, which we know exist on each shard so far, as well as, say, the Amalj'aa, the Kobolds, the Sahagin, and the Qiqirn, all must have existed before the Sundering since we also see them on the First.

Second, the phrasing of "trees and grasses and myriad tiny lives" positions "lives" as a category that encompasses everything that isn't trees and grasses. We can surmise that when he describes the Hydaelyn faction standing for "lives newly born" he's again describing basically everything that isn't plants. this again includes the spoken races of the current game or their ancestors; they are a clear part of what was at stake in the sacrifice.

Third, if that doesn't persuade you that Hythlodaeus is talking about lives like yours, consider that you've just spent the last few quests exploring the city full of giant ancient magic people going "wow! you're so small and childlike! what a miniscule living being you are!" When Hythlodaeus gives this speech about "myriad tiny lives," he is a literal enormous giant sitting next to you, a very tiny living being from his perspective.

This sacrifice, which Hythlodaeus explains to you in the DMV, is the crux of the matter and the root of Venat's choice. The time loop, her knowledge of Meteion, the debate over the right solution to the final days—all of that is secondary. She explicitly is unsure up until you meet her in the Aitiascope whether the time loop is stable and real and applies to you.

The essential issue is the fact that the Ancients are supposed to be stewards of the star, and now they are going to engage in mass sacrifice of lives that Venat knows are people like her and her peers (mostly this is thanks to being a humanist who believes in the sanctity and dignity of life but she also has the confirmation of your post-sundering, totally humanlike existence). Just a quarter of the Ancients' original number remain, their society is in tatters, and what's left is in the process of actively betraying every ideal they ever claimed to hold by slaughtering the life they allegedly guide and care for (which they know to be ensouled!) to undo the great and noble sacrifice of their loved ones.

but venat's faction is weak. it's her and like 13 sorta-important people she knows plus maybe some unnamed others. they lack the numbers or the raw ability to make something that can defeat zodiark, and will need instead to lean on venat's abilities.

her morals do not allow her to stand by as the convocation plans a mass sacrifice of "lesser" life. her circumstances do not give her the time or ability to win them over through rhetoric or decisively defeat them with force. nor can she actually destroy zodiark, because then the final days would simply resume. nor, I assume, is she interested in straight up slaughtering what remains of the ancients until the convocation's plan becomes impractical, assuming she is even strong enough to do so with just the twelve and the watcher's ancient selves for backup. there is no longer an option on the table which does not involve great pain. left to choose between unacceptable options, she chooses the one route which seems able to protect the vitality of the world and uphold the ancients' mission of shepherding all life upon the star towards flourishing: the sundering.

[morgan-aleghieri]

I can keep him too, right? 🥺