#EW role quest

[toadeyes-miqote]

Full Party Rumble

One does wonder if this is the side of effect of Alphi being gifted his Nouliths

Of course this mean there will be charges for protection.

Full party!!! Lets rumble!

You call this unarmed?! This is what Alphi works with. You know that I would be telling your kids that you're sufficiently badass enough to fight alongside me and the very badass alliance leaders yeah? We're only short of Varshahn and Lyse.

-----------------

My boss~~~~ <3

My bro.

Major!!!! Admiral!!

Two badasses and Aymeric going from one cold place to another. at least he gets to check in with Lucia. Don't mind me. I'm just standing here gawking at the rest of you like a fangirl. Trying not to get Grand melee Tizona PTSD flashback.

This thing looks familiar

Hey Alphi! Your dad be badass enough to keep up with Estinien and Arenvald

---------------- Nero is probably WAR or something. I took it as Raubahn and Ayemric being tanks, Kan-E Senna and Foruchenault were healers and the rest are physical and ranged DPS.

Of course Hylnyan went in as default BRD. I need to check targetting control, It tend to autoselect NPCs first and I have click through to enemies. Hazard of playing on gamepad? Dungeons are fine but instanced battle be like that.

Yeah essentially these folks are technically vetrens. The WoL herself, Hylnyan's been on the scene for like what three years?

[autumnslance]

Time to replay the EW Tank Role Quests, which solidify my theory that all of Gridania is in a conspiracy to not tell the WoL what the Keeper of Entwined Serpents's name is. WoL wasn't paying attention the day they were introduced, or they forgot, and it's been a game of name chicken since. It's a hard and fast Eorzean rule, Lyse has made sure the rest of the Alliance is in on it, how long until WoL cracks and asks?!

--

Seriously, SE, we have known this man for years, he features in Kan-E's ARR leader story, is at her side in Ala Mhigo, the Role Quests, and several holiday stories where his crush on the Seedseer is super apparent, what is his name?

[johnnylandslide]

it's unfair how pretty this man is

[deus-and-the-machina]

ffxiv garlemald discourse is so funny because people will go "ugh people just cant stand it when things aren't black and white" and then you look at how the empire are portrayed in stormblood and shadowbringers and its like hm. that seems like a pretty intense and accurate display of violent imperialism to me! Wow I wonder why people in this day and age may find it hard to feel sympathy for them or even hate them on principal. god its such a mystery.

the games like 50/50 to me on how it tackles these themes because I actually like the garlemald arc in EW, I think it has a lot of horrific and powerful scenes depicting how self destructive fascist propaganda and beliefs are, but I also think it doesn't go far enough on some fronts. the garleans' xenophobia is most notably and obstacle to getting them to accept the contingent's help, which is what they're there to do,

but there's never an admission of harm from any garleans on the uuuuuuuuh massive amount of war crimes the nations around them are still suffering from they're just kind of like "we misjudged you...but you actually wanted to help us all along" like yeah thats great now can we get you all some deprogramming because you keep talking about returning to your prime and glory days and I think we need to unpack some stuff you really SHOULDNT return to. im not even really talking about EW proper but the patches where things are a bit more chilled out and people are recovering.

It feels like they wanted to have their critique of imperialism and also have things end with the beauty of human connection and reaching out and these things just don't mesh well because hey a lot of your modern day audience is not gonna like having to treat people yelling xenophobic things at the cast and your character with kid gloves after you showed them hours and hours of the awful things these people's beliefs have done. especially in the present day hoo boy.

[yloiseconeillants]

👀 please say more about the company of heroes crossing paths with yloise!

oh god ok so it's nothing like. CONCRETE but the first major departure from the msq for yloise is that she does not participate in the fight against Ifrit (that belongs to other warriors of light in the soap opera) so her first Primal Fight is against Titan. So it feels a little pointed for all the Company of Heroes quests to be testing her because she doesn't even have a primal under her belt at this point! She's some fucking newly minted healer recruited to the Scions on the strength of Y'sthola mentioning she has the Echo!! So I think they take her completing these tasks a little more seriously than they would for her fellow WOLs in the soap opera.

And she *really* throws herself into them. No complaining, no dragging her feet - she wants to prove herself, even as Y'sthola is seething at what she perceives as a waste of time. That goobbue minion she gets for finding the Bacchus vine (hehehe *points at dionysos azem*) is a canon minion she takes with her to Coerthas (the Bacchus vine is *also* growing on it per my headcanon).

She also gets injured in the fight against Titan and ends up recuperating at Warmwine Sanitorium instead of heading straight back to the Waking Sands so there's a bit of a disconnect there as she meets back up with Riol before catching back up with the MSQ.

That the Company of Heroes keeps popping up in the quests that I decided were ~canon for her (Sch and Postmoogle) also feels significant. It's just. Meeting them was an important part of her life and she keeps in touch with them whenever possible. They occupy a larger part of her life than other ARR questchain npcs would and I am always so happy to see them.

(also also i have been thinking about the post-ew wineport artoirel nonsense and shamani is definitely involved *somehow*)

[heirbane]

FIMBULVETR: TERNCLIFF'S TERMINUS.

aka: give us a wrap up for werlyt, squex.

Terncliff had been on the cusp of desperation several times before Endwalker. First, when they believed Gaius van Baelsar came to colonize and eradicate the culture and heritage that the cliffside port had cultivated; second, when his towering form disappeared from the area all together, leaving tints of Garlean occupation without the promise of industry and technology. The magitek units had come, providing the men and women with goods and services beyond any they would have been able to harness on their remote stretch of Ilsabard, and then simply disappeared, leaving infrastructure half-built and their people without the skills to finish it on their own.

When Valens van Varro began to encroach upon Werlytan territory, they had well and truly believed it to be the final chapter for their people. Valens pushed forth magitek reapers, shattering windows and crumbling brickwork with ease. He had been the Imperial officer they truly had expected when Gaius came to their shores over a dozen summers prior.

Valens was the shadow they had feared, and the depths of his depravity saw no end, as violent and unpredictable as the waves against its jagged, rocky cliff side. He had come simply to beckon the wolf out of hiding, the greying hound's children puppeteered by their loyalty.

The strings that bound them to the Empire would gather around their throats, a noose made of good intentions and false hope, and one by one the Imperial Legatus strung them up and let them rot.

Gaius had nothing to bury but broken machinery and the echoes of children at war. When the Warrior of Light finally helped him seek solace for all that Valens had done, he felt as if there was just as little left of himself, too.

It came as a surprise, then, when the sky began to fall, that neither Gaius nor his remaining child turned into their own fear and uncertainty. As the remaining villagers began to transform, skin and bone into decay and death, he and his daughter remained.

What was the end of the world to those who had lost all but each other?

The blasphemy that haunts the forestry around Terncliff screams one night, a sound half torturous and half inhumane, a vicious, guttural laughter that those who encountered Valens van Varro could never forget.

It is dubbed Fimbulvetr. It is a beast not to be ignored, a beast borne of a boy who had his orphanage ravaged by Valens' mechanical soldiers. He had lived through certain death once, and when the sky began to turn red, his peers collapsing into frothing, soot-bleeding things, he believed the worst days of his life were returning. He had fled into the woods, running for his life, until - under the full red moon - he came across the skeletal remains of the Diamond Weapon.

Fimbulvetr towers past the trees. They are part machine and part person, as if it had simply began gathering up the scrapheap remains of a Garlean occupation. When not cowering among the foliage by daylight, they are calling out for whoever can hear them, mimicked laughter and scared sobbing on an endless loop.

With little and less experience in combat and the inability to put down a child the settlement had once known and cared for, panic and unrest becomes palpable. Even if those in Terncliff got aid from others in Werlyt, they were farmers and fishmongers - few had ever involved themselves in conflict by choice.

And so it fell to the man who had seen his own children laid to rest. The man that had slaughtered nine throne usurpers. The man who had extended an olive branch on the Empire's behalf over a decade before and now resided, desolate and alone, at the outskirts of town, still trying to pull the gristly remains of his existence from the broken corpse the Empire had left behind.

He had led before. He would do it again - just once more.

In the ensuing conflict between Fimbulvetr and their cobbled together militia, Gaius cuts down yet another malady of nature. Their wounds weep blood-tinged ceruleum: flesh carves away to steel innards. They laugh. They laugh. They laugh, sick and familiar.

Until they don't, and it is just a boy begging as he had less than a handful of summers before: Don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Please.

When Gaius awakes, the sky is blue and the moon is silver and full, shadowed by the sun. In the moment he had hesitated, a father looking at a son begging to be put out of his misery, the beast had lunged.

He is told the Warrior of Light appeared. He is told the machina melted into boy and then into soot and ash, that - finally, finally - nothing remained of the Weapons in the cliff side.

When he awakens, it is the middle of the night. Allie is asleep at his side. Severa and Valdeaulin are snoring in chairs brought from his sitting room. There are flowers on his kitchen table and meals in his Garlean icebox.

He is glad to be alive.

Once he recovers and is able to walk again, he adds the boys name to their memorial, etched below the name of his own children.

[luc1d17y-ffxiv]

My life in FFXIV feels like a series of "but I can't do X unless I do Y first," so when I read that it was highly recommended to finish the Eden raids before doing the 6.5 MSQ... here we are 24 hours later.

[dragongirlbunny]

i need to NG+ shadowbringers at some point

[tsckcyomi-archived]

the urge of having my female muses stay antagonists battling with my urge to give them a chance to redeem themselves to some degree or at least be able to, y'know, LIVE in peace in a setting close to canon. and i don't mean 'redeem themselves' in a way where suddenly they're uber helpful and outright good or anything, or where they grovel for forgiveness. But maybe them acknowledging the pain they have caused without forgetting what's been done to them, because both yotsuyu and benedikta have 100% perfectly good reasons to be livid with the world at large, laid out in canon for everyone to see. and faith should live, too. as a treat.

[starrysnowdrop]

Though it’s not a canon job for Hali, I just had to share Hali’s current Red Mage glam! Even though I know it doesn’t match, she just had to use the Chicken Knife! ❤️

[toadeyes-miqote]

Free Aymeric again

aka - More reason to do EW Role quest if you want a date around Ishgard with Aymeric or hold him hostage at Camp Dragonhead. Mind the potential traumatic flashback yeah. Someone learnt to use Passage of Arms in the Vault

-----

Over half a year of hanging out at Camp Dragonhead, tis time to free him and let him go back to Ishgard to work.

(AITA - That my brain translate this as a small cat trying to bother her tall feeder for food and trying her darnest to keep up with her feeder's strides? I blame my cat for this) On a certain level I'm glad that Scholasticate incident happened and so did Halone. It gives the Ishgardians enough time do their thinking since then. And Halone ain't involve in anything.

I see we're back here again... Ah... How many times do we have to relive the trauma of storming this place.

o_O!!!!!

Yeah Halone and I talked about it and she doesn't hate my guts for that whole Halone Incarnate and raining arrows in a narrow enclosed pit thing. We're totally good.. Good enough for me.

[autumnslance]

Redoing the EW caster quests and I am struck suddenly, in choosing to run to places in Ishgard, how similar it is in some ways to Radz-at-Han.

Both built upon a mountain, so a sort of vertical architecture requiring a lot of stairs. People of strong faith. A hidden draconic heritage shaping every aspect of their society--and not just any dragons, but members of the First Brood.

Dunno if I have anywhere to go with this, I just was thinking it was an interesting parallel, and aside from the obvious ones of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood, not one I'm sure has really been done before, but strikes me as very intentional.

[myrfing]

i'm an sb liker yes but it does still make me laugh that a japanese company took a shot at writing a story about imperialism in the fantasy east and not only did they make china Japan 2 alongside with a preexisting Actual Japan 1 & nearly completely ignored SEA (going so far as to call fantasy Vietnam like, a "historically insignifcant nation" in ShB), they wrote their titular postpatch tragedy in part about how the locals in fantasychina did some evil sexual slavery shit and thus paid for it by being colonized and ruled by their vengeful victim who was given power by their imperial rulers. Like huh.....damn...Oh you want to write about fantasy south america with motifs of the start of the columbian era now

[impossible-rat-babies]

under the cut bc this is just. paragraphs of eyrie and lyse’s friendship stuff

the conflict between eyrie and lyse is just. kinda tragic? it’s the inevitable of two people changing, and the conflict of realizing that change and longing for when it wasn’t like that. how change isn’t always upwards and for the good. it’s the disillusionment of lyse in her admiration for eyrie—that they are a hero and yet they can still do terrible things, as humans are wont to do. they lied to her. committed acts of violence and murder. have been callous and rude. they are nothing if not terribly flawed.

it’s eyrie’s pain of realizing how they have changed, and not for the good. they cannot deny what is in the mirror when lyse is shoving it in their face, asking them why it is different than she remembers. Were they always this bad? what made them like this? the difference between being aware of your own flaws v. showing others those flaws. the vulnerability and exposure. how shameful it would be to admit the cruelty of their life to her, and how they are not a good person. (good as in worthy of her admiration, respect and friendship.)

stormblood changed lyse for the better despite the hardships. she suffered and learned and grew—she saved her homeland, and is a leader that will continue to grow over time as her nation rebuilds from the ravages of war. how they will, in time, pave a new path and hopefully make themselves into a nation many people can be proud to call their own. much of lyse parallels that. (also additionally how she will learn about the culture of her father as the nation discovers and redefines that culture for themselves in the wake of 25 years of garlean occupation.)

She did well by the memory of paplymo.

she isn’t the same person who eyrie met in gridania. no longer is she the ditzy young woman stuck in the shadows of her sister and the scions. she gets to decide who she is going to be. And eyrie has been along with her for so much of that. As tentative as their friendship was in ARR, they still were friends. even if eyrie kept their heart and feelings close to their chest, she still saw how soft, warm and intelligent they were beneath all of that because that’s how they were with papalymo. she watched them grow from a simple adventurer to this grand hero. And a lot of that came with the expectations of being a hero and the static nature of that. A bit of their humanity left behind in favor of The Image of a Hero. how could they be different? they’ve always been this way—a soft, respectable, kind and selfless.

but stormblood was a lot. much of it for eyrie was spent in the volley between the numbness and rawness of grief for both haurchefant and ysayle—the horrors they had seen during the war. the loss of papalymo, most especially. they never stopped bleeding from that. the simmering rage and frustration at the injustice of death. thordan looking at them and asking not who they were, but what they are. zenos gets under their skin—pokes and prods at these monstrous feelings. how they are a hero, but how much that has separated them from being human. they are distinct—divorced from their humanity by the seemingly impossibility of the actions and fortitude. raised so high up as to become an impossible ideal. Trapped behind that reputation. they live in a gilded cage of a reputation.

twenty five years sees a baby grown into a man, but for eyrie who has lived the lifetime of a man already, it’s the not so distant past. they remember being there when Ala mhigo burned—the terrible things they did and saw when the garleans conquered it. they are not scars, but festering wounds to these people. they see this and none of them know their hand in that this is their reality. even as nothing but a common foot soldier, they still hold that shame and guilt close to their chest for their actions. they did these things and yet they would be asked to save this country. it’s ironic to a laughable degree—enough to make them scream.

they feel like a monster, and if zenos does understand that, maybe there is some justice to be found in indulging him. letting themself go to be the monster zenos craves so they can be the “right and good and just” person for killing him. a wolf in sheep’s clothing, devouring the other wolf. they get to be the right person, and hope to god the parts of them that are the same as him die with him.

but Zenos dies—by his own hand. Denied catharsis, they are left alone—the last monster standing. The last rat in the cage, blood soaked with corpses and all around. A monster by virtue of killing the rest—the horror above all the other horrors. the one left to suffer alone with the thoughts he put into their head. they should feel right—they did a good thing fighting zenos and his death, but they just feel Alone. this just builds and builds as they try to look for a way to take their mind away from it. put the choices in someone else’s hands—have someone else decide how and what they are going to do. it worked well enough in ARR to keep them safe. it should work now. If they can take all the power of deciding to be that hero away—put the choice in the public and the scions—then they’ll be safe. they aren’t responsible for their actions.

it’s that sort of line of thinking that has them kill the qalyana woman in the throne room before she can summon lakshmi. the scions combat the threat of primals, and they are the champion of the scions. they were doing their duty. it doesn’t matter that she was a person with her own hopes and dreams for the future—even tempered, it was still there.

It’s eyrie’s cold detachment towards killing the woman that truly bothers lyse. She is no stranger to the reality of what happens to the tempered, but it’s never not uncomfortable. but to her eyrie is just….stone faced. appearing as if there is no regret or remorse to their actions, or even a thought to it. because there was no thought. they didn’t think—they did as they had been taught and believed to be the right thing from all their previous experience. they just took out a step by killing her before the summoning could happen. it saved lives, didn’t it?

and their fight about it really boils down to all of that. This simmering change into something utterly unrecognizable and is no longer salvageable. they are too different now—far too changed and in opposing ways.

[soothingmind]

puts head into hands

[humblemooncat]

Think I might try running Dead Ends again tonight. I really want the Starbird, so it's been added to my goal list.