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fic about hrothgar wol meditating on what it means to serve a queen as her knight, reflecting on their histories and dynamics with minfilia and lyse and wuk lamat and sphene. consider otis as a textually and in-universe acknowledged foil. throw the failure to protect nanamo in there for good measure, why not

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them: he's probably thinking about final fantasy

me: erenville and cahciua called each other "mentor" and "pupil." erenville and cahciua called each other "mENTOR" AND "PUPI--

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at one point i wanted to change my discord av and i thought long and hard about what it should be and i finally took the time to sit down and hastily edit my vision into reality and i updated my discord profile and then all my friends reacted like the horrified sobbing little kids in videos where a guy is like "i'm going to shave off the beard i've had for 15 years and my children will see my face without it for the first time." so the avatar slept in the files of my computer because i had nowhere good to share it and then i realized you can literally just post whatever you want so i give you

tonberry with a gun:

bonus: some earlier drafts as i finally worked my way around to the truth that using literally just a picture of a gun was funnier than any other option

bonus bonus:

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By the way I remain firm in my belief that the only reason Alisaie comes across as less of a Rich Kid is that she lets Alphinaud say the Stupid Rich Kid Shit first (this is not hard because he talks VERY much) and then just. Acts like she knew that was Rich Kid Shit all along. I think it took Alisaie a Long While to not be mourning the loss of her huge gorgeous perfect bed but someone made fun of Alphinaud for mentioning the "insufficent conditions for reat" early on so now she can never say a thing about it.

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explaining ffxiv to a magic player: okay, so imagine someone managed to recur shahrazad on the stack fourteen times, and somehow forced all those games to happen simultaneously

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they made my sweet boy tritoch a card and he's gonna be soooo funny in spells matter izzet

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now including the award-winning expansion heavensward

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and yeah that's all the blockers i have to declare so that's probably game for me. priority passes back to active player.

pass

pass

A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES (borne upon a wind, zenos, targeting blue's stiltzkin with the etb)

wh--

pass ig

that's once around the horn, zenos enters and resolves, priority back to active player.

pass

pass

MINE FOR THE TAKING! (doom blade stiltzkin, pass)

uh unless you have something here zenos is gonna transform immediately.

nothing for it, sorry, pass

right. doom blade resolves. stiltzkin dies, shinryu transforms.

THIS IS THE END! (targeting blue with shinryu)

priority back to green. if the transform on the stack and your attack both go through, mr. reflexes wins.

uh, okay. i cast fog during my own combat phase so i don't lose by killing blue i guess. this is stupid. pass

pass

It fills you even now, doesn’t it? The hunger. To bite down on my jugular, to feel the warmth fill your mouth and run over even as you drink deep. Good, good! This is the beast I have longed to face! (pass)

jesus christ

pass. do you really have to yell the lines every time, dude.

(yes)

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it's insane the chokehold this ugly WoW-ass apparel has on me. somehow it just speaks to me. red blue and white in the scarf (which to me have to be in the design because they are scion colors). completely gratuitous Normal Guns. Belts. Pouches. insane pauldrons. this is the main character look i will probably be carrying forward into the patches what is wrong with me.

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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.

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hello!!! not a request ask but a friendly "thank you!" ask for all your essays about ff14 and you deciding not to shut up! i love reading your analyses (i have for a while now ever since finding you via dt, i think) and i can't wait for the next one! 🙏🙏

this is very kind, thank you. I have a couple sideblogs of this nature where I write about various other games (which I will not be linking) and I find myself returning to this one frequently not only because ff14 provides an unusually rich and consistent text to draw on, by gaming standards (though imo it does), but also because it's a very rewarding fandom to write long silly analyses in, lol. i put my long-disused and half-remembered political science education to use on the moblins and people were actually like "ah this is neat thanks" in the tags! that's crazy! so nice to be interacting with a community where every other comment isn't "lol yapping" or something like that.

God, I sound old.

anyways even though this wasn't a request ask i'm using this as a springboard to broadly address two other asks I've had in my inbox for a while because I feel rude responding with nonspecific agreement and support:

to me pretty much every gender and sexuality (used broadly here, not as a synonym for "sexual orientation") interpretation in FFXIV works because 1) it is a story where gender and sexuality rarely matter directly in the text, leaving every reading equally unanswered (forget "is [x character] trans", i think you'd be hard-pressed to find explicit textual evidence that any given character is cis or straight!), and 2) it is nonetheless attentive to gender and sexuality broadly as part of its approach to fantasy (most evident in stormblood, a story which is very much About Misogyny in many places), so almost any reading can be interesting in how it shifts the text. as a result of both these factors, i think pretty much any "is [x character] trans" reading is equally valid and fruitful.

i think pretty much every "is this character a shard of that character" reading works but i don't have much to say about it. ardbert as your shard works because 1) it is an elaborate in-fiction justification for why only you can see this ghost and also why he can give you a sweet power-up in the finale (not for nothing, the same finale where emet-selch literally designs a video game dungeon explaining his sad backstory complete with three bosses for your final test, and g'raha gives the duty finder a diegetic explanation for once; making meta elements like narrative foils into genrefied text is sort of its whole jam) and 2) the warrior of light is in some ways such a non-character that they can best be characterized through other people, so ardbert getting a big neon "this is your narrative parallel" sign on him is actually informative and meaningful because depending on how you have previously played and imagined your wol, that might not be immediately clear. in pretty much every other case where people speculate on shard parallels, it's because they've already identified those two characters as narratively parallel in some way. but that in itself is enough! like, "x character and y character are in narratively parallel positions" is already sufficient grounds for an interesting follow-up. i'm already invested and listening. "x and y are shards" is just sort of a hat on a hat in that situation.

plus there's very limited space for it to ramify in the fiction; ardbert is a super special case because he's literally just pure aether wandering around (i would guess word-minfilia also did something to keep him from dissipating, but idt there's a specific textual cite to support that). any other two shards meeting is probably just two flesh-and-blood people who can't do much more than shake hands. it could be fun in a "what if we were in the sundered world and we were both shards and we kissed" kind of way ig. tbh i could only see it really mattering for justifying a sweet ancient oc that's the unsundered version of the two characters, and you can just do that anyways if you want (you should, now that i'm saying it out loud, it rocks). so far the game has used shard reflections to cue "these characters are extending a previously-existing running joke" (geralt and rowena, the trolley guys), and i think that's unironically the most narratively useful role it can serve at that point.

[tritoch]

long rambly post-endwalker wolund analysis post (so kind of a reflection on what they're going for the WoL from 6.1 onward, but with lots of oc nonsense so i'm not tagging it that way) (edit: i lied he's basically not in this it's just my notes on MSQ reread) structured around the dialogue options offered (all praise as always to xiv.quest)

right off the bat we've got a weird one with tataru asking you your future plans, and your options are more adventure, idk, or just not answering (with tataru's response implying it's because you're still emotionally processing the events of endwalker). interesting stuff that you're not allowed to explicitly say: that you want a break, that you're thinking of settling down, that you're done with adventuring or violence or war. they easily could have written in a consistent option for the WoL to be like "guess there's never a break, huh?" but the sentiment only comes up occasionally.

hits a lot of the same points as above but this is also The Moment we turn into The Adventurer and is worth flagging on that level. fun fact: the last time anyone called you the warrior of light in-game was hoary boulder, back in the post-Endwalker scion dialogue wrap-up.

No one has used the title since 6.1 began. it does show up in the abyssal fracture trial description i suppose

i think it's decently likely that in the next arc we won't be the WoL anymore but we might be The Bearer Of The Crystal. there's precedent!

anyways i find this moment very interesting because this is the one time in the patch series the warrior of light Makes A Decision. tataru suggests new possible places to adventure, and her reference to the Bounty sparks your memory of Emet-Selch and sets you going.

what i really like about this from a wol characterization perspective is that the warrior of light immediately transforms the call to new adventure into a duty. like literally by the text tataru is like "why not be a simple adventurer traveling in search of wonder?" and you think of THE BEST FRIEND OF YOUR PRIOR INCARNATION GIVING YOU A MAJOR POST-MORTEM DUTY TO HONOR BOTH HIM AND YOUR PAST INCARNATION, maybe the weightiest and lore-heaviest thing you could do. those two lines from emet are not near each other in the actual dialogue, they're from opposite ends of his speech! real "warrior of light, could you lighten up?" energy on immediately turning to that one, but it dovetails very nicely with my read that dawntrail is partly about the warrior of light trying and miserably failing to escape the demands and strictures of protagonism. you should stop feeling bound by duty. instead you should adventure, because it's your duty. GOD.

note to self: go back later and check if estinien ever calls alisaie by name. might need to check dungeon dialogue too.

pushing back lightly on the duty narrative above, the game DOES textually assert that the only reason everyone's in alzadaal's legacy in the first place is because you wanted "to see if the legends were true," or using estinien's phrasing were "chasing tales of underseas ruins." you don't get to displace the blame on this one!

here's one of those instances of the wol getting to be like "wow thought i was gonna get to chill" but i feel obliged to point out it's in a moment where everyone knows your involvement is a fait accompli. the wol never really gets to be like "I Would Like To Stop," but they LOVE giving you a wry "well, if i MUST save the world, i suppose i can" option (see: shadowbringers finale: "if you had the strength to take another step, could you do it? could you save our worlds? "what, all by myself?")

this is just a crazy y'shtola moment. "the dank cave i studied in was about as far from the bright, airy halls of academia as one could get. but it was a wondrous, magical childhood nonetheless." she's being so emotionally open with you because she trusts and cares about you i'm gonna *remembers you're not supposed to say it* cast superbolide

in keeping with the 6.X campaign to make y'shtola hashtag relateable, it's interesting that they have her read your silence as amused.

one of those fun moments where they just give you the same option dressed up in different language according to your roleplay desires. interesting to me because it elevates "the warrior of light is kind of just winging it" to the level of text, which makes sense! it's very rare that a fight in FFXIV takes place with full knowledge of what you're up against, and way more common that what wins the day is keeping alert and willing and able to change plans, as most clearly demonstrated in the ktisis finale with your improvised cooperation with emet, hyth, and venat around the issue of the aetheric convergence.

they really went the full gamut with these options (imo a strict reading of the third answer plainly implies that you DO consider zenos a friend, so imo all options are represented)

i love the early zero moments where nothing you do ever lands properly with her because she is an alien predatory intelligence in the shape of a person (who of course gradually reawakens to her full personhood)

there's the sliiiiightest defensive hint to both these options that i really love. yes, estinien, OBVIOUSLY i didn't know this. c'mon man JEEZ.

another entry for the "can't win with zero" pile, but also really interesting because this is such a fun example of the exposition and characterization blending. like, sure, the void does operate a lot on deals and agreements and contracts, befitting its nature as the place the mages of etheirys summon demons from to strike bargains with. but it works that way because everyone else DOES want something. most other voidsent have to want something, or the idea of a contract-based society wouldn't work, because a contract only works if each party has or can do something the other party wants. that's also why they're constantly fucking each other over (they want stuff really bad) and why they need a strong culture around honoring agreements (so people don't just break them, because they want stuff so bad). zero on the other hand claims to not want anything and is instead doing the insane depressed alien version of the saul goodman "put a dollar in my pocket so we have attorney-client privilege" thing, but for her revealing she's a memoriate.

skipping a lot of the alphinaud and alisaie dialogue bc it's either boring or fodder for my future "alisaie still deserves her own complete arc and here's why" post

i must've taken the second choice here bc i don't remember the first, which is cute. brb making a powerscaling tier list of scion research capabilities

the rest of the void stuff doesn't really actually have any interesting dialogue which more or less make sense because it's also not really your story

just remembered they made the leader of the radiant host a brocon for no reason. sometimes ffxiv really knocks it out of the park in terms of absolute left-field character choices

again, interesting that they don't let you NOT be interested in explicitly the golden city itself. you can be interested, skeptical of the rumors, or like "oh word?" but you can't be like ehhh.

a couple interesting things here. first, again, no option to be disinterested in adventure. you can be undecided, you can be like "idk i'd rather stay out of politics," but you can't be opposed to adventure or seeing new things, you can't at this juncture say you want to take a break (versus when you could with y'shtola in a situation where it didn't matter).

i'm also, in retrospect, very interested in the idea g'raha raises at this pretty critical and highlighted point in the plot. "what's important is to be true to yourself as you walk [the long road of life's journeys]." that's a kind of specific sentiment! like, some other easy generic sentiments the game could have slotted in: never lose hope, remember the beauty of the world, hear feel think, etc.

i would not describe FFXIV in the zodiark and hydaelyn saga as a game very concerned about being true to oneself as one walks life's long road. it's broadly in favor of it, but when you literally watch venat walk the long road of human existence, the wisdom she imparts is that life is a journey about finding yourself and your purpose, which is also about finding the strength to continue and also about finding joy even as darkness descends and also about finding light everlasting amidst deepest despair. then ultima thule's conclusions end up being about how suffering and adversity are part of life but cannot be either defeated or redeemed but must merely be accepted because they are simply part and parcel of all that life has to offer, which also includes free will and new experiences and human connection and the beauty of nature (which includes all things that are), which are good in themselves, and though joy is transient suffering is also transient. meteion basically spells it out at the end

there's not a lot of room in this particular paradigm for like, deviation from the self.

but you know who bursts in at the end of the expac to be like OKAY are we done talking HERO SHIT can you acknowledge there is MORE TO YOU THAN SAVING THE WORLD can i TALK ABOUT DESIRE AND PERSONAL PURPOSE NOW

and then of course, being true to the self ends up being a major throughline of dawntrail. it's wuk lamat's struggle (how best to be queen? in the end, by not letting herself be swayed by false desire or hidden resentment as the other claimants are, and instead to live honestly and thereby honestly connect with other people), it's also her big heroic moment (getting endless sphene to live and die as herself, thereby elevating their final battle past the realpolitik struggles of two states competing for limited aether and turning it into a space for two people from unfamiliar cultures to understand each other, recognize their similarities, and come to terms with reality). it's what koana has to do, it's what BKJJ has to do, gulool ja is doing his own little baby bildungsroman right now, new sphene is figuring out what it MEANS to be true to yourself if your purpose seems to have disappeared from beneath you...all this to say it's interesting to have g'raha set it up so explicitly here

something that really interestingly sets up dawntrail again here imo: not only are both your options here about adventure (and hey, fitting for cosmic exploration release time, that's another star trek ref up top), but neither is about the threat to eorzea. wuk lamat is very explicitly in eorzea for a political purpose: she needs you to back her claim to the throne to help her defeat zoraal ja and put an end to his policy goals before they can come to fruition, and she emphasizes that in her pitch to you. and you're like "yeah i'll come, seeing new stuff sounds awesome". you CAN'T say "i don't really want to, but i cannot abide the threat you described", which is a very common sentiment the game allows you to express in other situations! see, e.g., zenos. just a neat note here.

[tritoch]

circling back around to this because i realized "knight of alexandria" made it into the title list (you actually get it back in 7.0). watching these developments with the finely-tuned radar and deep misgivings of a fujoshi noting a new female character's arrival in a shonen with great concern

idle musings on eff eff one four that hover somewhere between holding my finger to the cultural wind and doomposting, and therefore get sequestered here with minimal keywording

spoilers for patch seven point two follow

delivering this as a series of thought impressions so as not to speak it into existence:

w*k l*mat backlash. broader cultural conservative back swing. the retrenchment of sexist cultural dynamics. h*yoverse "returning to its roots." sexism in gacha. the rise of master love. waifu-forward marketing. neutral observation that corporations producing popular media are particularly attuned to conservative backlash, and that such attunement need not be conscious or overt to affect the final product.

backlash to wol role in d*wntrail. pc importance in game. npc relationship to player. h*urchefant. em*t-s*lch. g'r*ha tia. shipping hints as narrative and role-play element. "husbando simulator." the gendered appeal, or rather lack thereof, of romance. sph*ne as girlha tia. moe as an aesthetic. the knight and princess dynamic. the recurring "calling upon your aid" scene. tragic antagonist romance. reincarnation romance. fish out of water. the wol as uniquely positioned to discuss endless sph*ne.

I'm not saying this is the direction they're necessarily taking, I'm not saying it would necessarily be bad if they did, I'm not saying that if things start moving this way it means CBU3 is selling us all out for that sweet waifu cash. I'm just saying I've played a video game or two before and when a mysterious princess appears who can only rely on you emotionally for specific plot reasons and you bond with her in a moment of peril, there's usually a limited number of ways things go. and since this isn't a western AAA studio, I don't think we're about to be her dad.

[tritoch]

psa re: ffxiv cosmic exploration

if you haven't logged on and seen cosmic exploration yet, you may have been exposed to people who are really worried that "all the content is already done."

none of the player reward content is done. you can still get all the mounts and minions and titles and everything. there's no timer on any of those.

what people are upset about is the visual build-up of the area from totally empty to somewhat built-up. the first three phases, which are finished on many servers already, include the basic start of a base and fast-travel system in the new zone.

this is indeed unfortunate, but there are two things that mitigate this.

first, in the in-game menu for cosmic exploration, you can literally go back and see each version of the base. select infrastructure index from the exotablet.

there, each phase gets a text write-up describing it and a short, silent video showing off any additions.

second, there are going to be more phases, so even if you miss all the interstitial phases you should still get a sense of visual progression. you might miss stages 1 and 2 and 4 and 5, but if you're playing during the patch you'll still get to see it jump from 3 to 6 (numbers all conjectural, i don't think we have a schedule yet).

obviously this isn't perfect; it would be nice if there were a better middle ground for the pace of these intermediate phases, and personally i think the pre-fast-travel phase of the zone could have lasted longer. but there's a lot of incomplete information about it percolating right now so i hope this can be helpful to people who are anxious about missing a "saint of the firmament"-style title (there aren't any of those in this).

[tritoch]

the margrat custom deliveries questline boiling down to "local researcher uses accidental friendship with celebrity to prank colleagues; gets yelled at about deadlines in return" is so extremely real and powerful

[tritoch]

i have mostly a pretty whatever opinion of hsr's writing but i do think thancred and feixiao should get to meet. one of them is the other's oc i'm just not sure which is which.

like did thancred make himself a hot fox lady with a gunblade with a tortured heart and angsty backstory and a complicated relationship with a male healer. or did feixiao make herself a hot dude with a gunblade with a tortured heart and angsty backstory and a complicated relationship with a male healer.

[tritoch]

i call a lot of things the funniest thing and i want you to know: i mean it every time. i'm simply mercurial and inconstant.