ruva-fjura

[ruva-fjura]

An Important cohost Post, Recreated on Tumblr

(Original Publication Date: August 16th, 2024)

I got pretty distant from my dad once my parents split up. He wasn't really all that great to me, but he was trying his best, and he had anger problems like me. All the same, I sort of understood, and thought maybe after the decade apart, I could forge a new relationship with him.

This is a story about how getting invested in stories causes them to find new ways to suckerpunch you. About how character creation does deeply impact how you experience a game. And about how grief is like having twisted an ankle when you were twelve: You think everything's fine and then you do something weird and it hurts all over again.

This is a story, about Ruva Fjura, Warrior of Light.

Content Warning: Final Fantasy XIV Spoilers, Heavensward Spoilers, depictions and discussions of death, discussions of trans identity and grieving.

I've been getting into Final Fantasy XIV recently thanks to the introduction of Hot Cat Women (I am predictable.) A few years before this, I had made an attempt to play FFXIV when I was really itching to play WoW with my friends. Legolas Lordofthering did not inspire a connection to the story. This time, now that I could play as a species that I could feel connected to, not a smoothskinned human-alike, but a real anthro Lady… Since, when I bought the game, I was given a free month of sub, a month before Dawntrail's actual release, I decided to fold that into my WoL's backstory. Ruva Fjura is a trans hrothgar, seeking to adventure to earn the gil to afford the expensive body-changing medicine Fantasia.

I even made sure to take a screenshot of her very first dress.

Ruva would, over the course of A Realm Reborn:

clean up a little,

and polish her look as she set forth to defend Eorzea. (Don't tell anyone, but relatively early on I start using plugins, so everyone appropriately addresses Ruva with the correct pronouns. Shoutout to PrefPro!)

Originally I'd intended to use the Magic HRT that is the Fantasia potion right at the border between A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, because I'd tried to play the game a few years ago and knew the story beat there makes a good point for an identity update… but having accidentally blitzed the story of ARR in 2 weeks, and having more time still to play before Dawntrail drops, a few friends suggested another story point I was likely to get to by the time Dawntrail dropped:

Right after the Vault. (For those of you who already know what happens in the story, you can see where this is going.)

Now, I don't always remember to screenshot things, and my screenshots aren't particularly well-organized, so I don't have a lot of visual material for my man Haurchefant. You first meet him during a segment of A Realm Reborn when you're attempting to locate Cid's airship, and dealing with the Ishgardians. While they're mostly religious isolationists at this point, Haurchefant welcomes you rather more warmly and openly, to the best his ability and rank can afford him to. You assist him a few times, and he is consistently the most helpful hand and face in the whole of their region.

It's under his guidance you're able to escape from the major regions after being framed for assassination, to House Fortemps, the house he calls home as a knight and bastard son. (Ishgard has some of that Noble Houses stuff going on.) He's super chill. He's a bro. You interact with him a lot during Heavensward.

Ruva ventures forth in the surrounding region of Coerthas, assisting Ishgard with trying to end a war that has lasted a millenium, makes enough money to purchase an apartment, decorates it for her friends, and, one night, stops and gets to think:

"Soon, I won't be trapped in this body any longer."

It's the night before the servers drop for The Maintenance That Installs The New Expansion, and I finally come to the Vault. You're trying to save a different person, Ser Aymeric, who's been INSTRUMENTAL in keeping you safe and helping sort things out in Ishgard from being captured and possibly killed trying to confront his father. I ask my friends to assist, since this is the last thing I'll be doing narratively before Ruva Fjura finally gets her magic HRT shipped in. (Mechanically I've had the consumable since before the end of A Realm Reborn, but narratively.)

ou join him to run off after your friend, but suddenly, an enemy knight who had been standing on the tower walls of the building behind you launches a spear of light your way. Haurchefant tries to do his best to intercept it, defend you, block it with his shield, but…

It's too powerful.

The wound is too deep. Your companions' best healing cannot hope to stop his injuries enough to heal him. You're here in his final moments.

He looks up at you, and delivers the line that nobody in my friend group, myself included, could have predicted would utterly decimate me.

"Oh, do not look at me so."

This is one of the most famous lines from Heavensward, involving to my experience on of the biggest character deaths in the series. It's touching, but on its own it probably would not have hit me as hard as what happens next. Because he says this, and the camera immediately cuts back, to Ruva.

Pre-HRT.

... ... About two years before I started playing Final Fantasy XIV, my father died suddenly. The details aren't important, but given that I had never had a great relationship with him growing up, I didn't feel that loss as much as my sister, and the rest of my family, did. Atop this, it takes a lot to make me cry, just because of the kind of person I am. I can feel strongly, but I usually just feel tense, and achey, and anxious, far before any tears flow.

A year ago, I had started really started feeling out how I expressed and embraced my gender in real life. Slowly, but more than I'd done in the previous three decades. I'd started wearing dresses, changed hairstyles, dyed my hair, asked my family to call me Astra rather than my birth name. I didn't get to show my father this side of me. I started this journey after his death. He never got to see me be who I really want to be, who I really am. And- And I just-

And that potion is in-transit, it's coming tomorrow, and this man, this close companion, an elezen who has never treated me as anything less than the woman I have always been, who sees The Warrior of Light and thinks 'friend', is dying. He is dying right in front of me, and his final words are commenting on a face that doesn't feel truly mine! He never got to see me be who I really want to be, who I really am-

I sat there. In the voice call with the friends who had assisted me in that dungeon run, who I'd been sharing my experiences in the game with, who had told me to make these cutscenes the last thing Ruva did before Dawntrail's release.

And I sobbed.

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

A few days pass. Dawntrail drops. I log in, use the Fantasia, and log out so I can enter the options. I fiddle with the character creator to get that final polish. I make the Ruva Fjura I bought this fuckin' game to play as. I log back in.

Before I do anything else, I travel to the highest point I can get to in Coerthas. Nothing else matters. I have taken the fantastical gender potion, Ruva has finally achieved that which she first started adventuring to achieve. And she has to get as close to the heavens as she can.

I have to make sure he can see.

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

I have fallen into becoming a tank main. I'm a Dark Knight main, though I play most every tank. (It's a little near-impossible, playing a properly effective healer on controller.) I have helped end a war that has lasted a millenium. The head of House Fortemps has gifted me a shield bearing the crest of his household. It is the same sort of shield that my closest friend once used trying to protect me.

In the background is a browser window with information on informed consent clinics within my area, as well as the price of various estrogen medications. The shield I have obtained completes a set I have since worked to put together. I will not lose anyone else without them having seen me for who I want to be. For who I really am.

I will never forget him. I will always honor how he has touched my life.

... now if only Paladin wasn't the most awkward of the tank rotations-