#and Gridania

[fjotla-vithir]

After talking with a lot of people who know Ether well, and we have all come to the conclusion that

Ether is Titania’s dominant

[morgana96]

FFXIV players who want their WoL to kill the Elementals: "My WoL would be applauded for freeing the Shroud of their evil and their death will fix Gridania's shortcomings, prejudices, and xenophobia."

The actual likely consequences of that scenario:

[southshrouded]

starter city snacks! where are you gonna do a snack run?

[45liza109]

New Gridania (12.4 , 12.1)

[nabaath-areng]

[on the floor, beaten up and bruised] Guydelot and Sanson together serve as metaphors for the respective twin adders that represent Gridania as a nation of hyur and elezen coming together, which means Gridania, symbolically, is yaoi— [beaten up even further off-screen]

[pilinonia]

kan-e senna doodle

[chibisatou]

Starting up a new alt and

[eriyu]

what baffles me about the Gridania situation isn't that the problems "still" haven't been dealt with; it's that the story seems less interested in exploring them than it did in ARR. there is so much ARR content that clearly acknowledges that the racism is a problem, that the xenophobia is a problem, that the elementals are a problem...

but later storylines are just more and more content to gloss over it all. as of 6.5 we just have Nophica telling us "teehee, listen to the elementals; all the shitty things they do are just because they love too much :)"

[kemakosassa]

upside down and inside out

[radiantlightxx]

"This one is strange...but a friend to the forest, nonetheless." 🌿

A young Xel'ia taking a nap with her sylph friends, because I just love her relationship with all things fey and wild 💖

[mythandral]

re: the tags on my last post literally the only 'evidence' we have that the elementals don't like Duskwight/Keepers is Gridanians telling us that. Who are somewhat biased.

yeah, their fear of the Greenwrath/elementals was valid, but discrimination based in fear is... still discrimination. And we don't have any proof that it's founded in anything. Duskwight and Keepers have clearly been living above ground just fine for centuries.

[itsmeishmi]

Little Sylph in East Shroud pixel practice!

[4threset]

Foods of Eorzea :)

[hollowtones]

that said the litmus test for "would you recommend this MMO? should I play this MMO?" is as follows: you find whatever free trial / demo / preview the game has and you download it and you play it. Play for like an hour or whatever. Are you not having fun?

STOP!

Uninstall it RIGHT NOW & go outside & Go have fun at the park instead. If you're enjoying yourself you can do whatever you want I guess. Foolproof system, never done me wrong.

[lookbluesoup]

So while I get that Gridanians live under these.... essentially toddler-gods who can afflict the entire territory with horrible plague, who will severely punish well-intentioned children that were manipulated by adults instead of the adult, and can't communicate their desires clearly, which leads the community to adopt a lot of hostility to change, paranoia, hate and even violence toward outsiders, etc...

Unless there's more explanation for this I haven't found? I know I'm not 100% up to speed on everything Gridania, especially pre-ARR....

Keepers of the Moon were living in the Black Shroud outside of Gridanian authority, for generations, presumably not being laserbeamed out of existence. There would have been a lot going on outside of the Seedseer's effective reach, and there aren't Moonkeeper Padjal to make up the gap there, only Hyur get to be Padjal.

Miqo'te are described as traditionally being far more in tune with nature and eschewing things like major city developments and whatnot. They're predators, yes, but predators have a place and function in the natural balance of the world.

"Beast Tribes" are a made up word from Ul'dah to protect trade monopolies in Thanalan, and Miqo'te could easily have ended up on the wrong side of that label if the rich elites had wanted them barred from the city. Historically, they're a lot more "feral" than a lot of the other spoken races.

I mention all this because it's unlikely the Elementals divide people into Beast Tribes and Human Races. Sylph's aren't being deleted by the Elementals, either, despite certainly having no inclination to live like the Gridanians do and being fairly mischievous.

My point being... I wonder if maybe the Gridanians kind of brought the Greenwrath on themselves. A lot of the time. The same way that some IRL religious institutions preach hate in the name of a deity and stir paranoia and fear of eternal condemnation. They create sins where there didn't need to be... Justifying division and destruction and isolation out of fear (and thus a need for control), and actually creating their own problems.

Elementals might not care about a lot of the stuff Gridania does, its clear a few times when something bad happens to someone, even just getting sick, panic strikes that the Elementals are behind it and people act irrationally out of fear, like the IRL Salem Witch Trials.

If you look at places like Haukke Manor... a country living in balance with nature does not need massive monuments to vanity like that. And there's apparently a whole quarter devoted to mansions for nobility in Gridania (which the npc says we're not allowed to visit.) Why do you have that. Why do you think that promotes peace with the natural world.

There's Wood Wailers who talk about wanting to kill Moonkeepers on sight, just in case they're "poachers." That's sort of like killing wolves because they're predators. Outside of some genuine bad apples, though, a lot of what seems to drive actual Moonkeeper poachers AND Duskwight Elezen to banditry is a straight up need to survive. Gridania's essential demand that they have dictatorial rights over management of the forest leads them to disrupt these group's lives, sometimes with exceptional cruelty.

I know that "central authority" is kind of... not super really a thing for Gridania, power is pretty divided up and a lot of it seems to run on an honor system. But that seems to have led to a lot of Process Loss and enabled a lot of prejudice and abuse to run rampant. Especially now that the Elementals are weaker than pre-Calamity.

I guess basically I wonder if the reason Sylphs and traditional Moonkeeper clans managed to survive out there was because, unlike Gridania, they don't have social systems built from the ground up on fear and condemnation. They're not constantly LOOKING for reasons to think the Elementals hate them and someone to blame for it.

They just live "natural" lives, that aren't inherently dangerous to the overall balance of the forest ecosystem, and they don't have an entire religious/government body dedicated to trying to interpret vague impressions from the Elementals (this is a HORRIBLE system of government and EXTREMELY susceptible to personal prejudices/bias), so these non-Gridanians run into conflict with the Elementals far less often.

i.e. Moonkeeper kills a rabbit, uses the meat, skin, and bones, is behaving like a hunter, Elementals don't care. VERSUS Gridanian kills a rabbit, uses it the same way, but then a villager gets sick and their friends panic and they turn into a mob and punish the Gridanian, Elementals didn't care but now they're a little pissy bc you're disrupting the forest with your insanity.

Basically... Gridania is the real affront to the Elementals, their very infrastructure and their culture of micromanaging the forest and constantly looking for scapegoats, kind of flies in the face of actually living in balance with nature. The Elementals aren't omnipotent or a unified group, and seem to struggle to understand human minds anyway, so they're trying to work with this city-state and have established some kind of partnership, but Gridania is really its own worst enemy.