#Did I talk about how Scions take too much story time while the city leaders are barely present in their introductory expansion? Yeah.

[radigalde]

Was re-reading some of the MSQ quests, and it's almost astonishing how every single element in Dawntrail is repetitive.

One that is rarely discussed: do you remember all those "let's split and look for clues/talk with people" quests in DT MSQ? In all of them you go through several clicks, then the party gathers together, and... you get to read the same points again, as other characters repeat word for word what you just discovered a minute earlier. To the point that WoL doesn't have anything to add to the conversation and just nods to the final decision. And when there was some unique piece of info (like two Mamool Ja sidekicks during the cooking challenge), it's never brought up again - not in the conversation, nor further in the plot.

And don't get me wrong, I'm happy that Scions for once do something useful during group activities. But what was the point of making the player to go through several "find a person/spot" if it has no effect on the quest objective in the damn plot?

[linelpisffxiv]

About A’lin

Figure I should make a proper about page. Gonna make it here for the moment. Still very much a WIP

Name: A’lin Graeme

Age: 26 at the start of ARR, 29 as of patch 5.18, 30 as of 5.3

HIstory: Normal-ish childhood and early adulthood for a seeker. She grew up in Outer Vylbrand near Bronze Lake. As a child, she was often called Lin of the Frost by her mother, father, and other adults in the clan, after a late Hailstorm came about on the day of her birth. She later grew into it, with growing sharp skills in archery. When she shot her bow, it was as if a chill brushes past with the released arrow.

At 21, as Dalamud began to grow in the sky, Lin realized she wanted to see the world, or at least Eorzea, but always found some excuse to never stray farther than Limsa. A few weeks before that great calamity, she took off, and drowned herself in hedonism. First in Limsa, then in Ul’dah. However, there was one place she wanted to go for certain. Just as she was called Lin of the Frost, the nickname had her family claim she had Halone’s favor. While she doubted she could talk her way into Ishgard, she wanted to see the city, and perhaps find that holy spot she heard some adventurers prayed to for some reason.

It took everything to try and convince anyone to take her. Too close to the battle of Carteneau, the Garleans. No place for civilians like them. Still, A’lin found one fool willing to take her word that she could protect them. Unfortunately, the timing of her pass through Northern Thanalan towards Mor Dhona coincided with that exact day. While none of Dalumud’s fragments fell on them, the sudden burst of heat from Bahamut lifted the carriage yalms in the air, and tossed it nearly half a malm from where it started.

The driver and their chocobos died instantly. A’lin, however survived. Or so she believed for the longest time.

She doesn’t know exactly what happened, but she woke up some time later in a house owned by a woman who called herself Heidi. Heidi was a skilled alchemist, and found her near death and brought her back to heal. Lin was stuck with bedrest for the next few months, and with a lack of anything better to do, started to read various books Heidi had. Lin found herself engrossed with everything. While she could read before, there was never something that captured her attention before. She thought perhaps she hadn’t been given the incentive, as a more active child in the past, but even some stories she bored of before seemed amazing with this new lease on life.

Even after the bedrest, Heidi insisted she stay for some time and build up her strength again. A’lin started off with some easy errands in the safest of paths to help her benefactor, and later began to return to hunting. She never remembered to write to her family to let them know she was alive. She knew she may have been on a list, or at least assumed dead.

It took five years from the day she woke up, but Lin finally knew she had to leave Heidi. The woman suggested she make her way to Gridania, instead of the closer Ul’dah or Lin’s home on Vylbrand, to further train her skills with the bow.

When Lin returned to Mor Dhona during her quest to save the captured Scions, she never could find that house she lived in for years, despite her moving between it and Revenant’s Toll many times in the past.

To do: List the minor changes in the story (Relationship with Haurchefant, timing of certain job quests [DRG and DRK])

After learning about the unrest in Garlemald from Estinien, A’lin went to share the news with her friends, and work through her own feelings, in Norvrandt, however, after three days there, she learned that time had contracted to a comparative standstill on the Source, and when faced with a dilemma of living an unknown time on Norvrandt, and leaving, hoping nothing falls without her help, she chose the former option.

During this time, she continued to help Thancred, Urianger, and Ryne with Eden, along with study some odd ruins in Kholusia. However, the most important happening was finding a truth about herself she will not share with most people. Due to the revelations, she started to learn magic, and found that the Red Magic Alisaie picked up agreed most with her aether, at least for the moment.

While she managed to master the skill during her time there, six months after she chose to stay, time returned to a pace equivalent enough she felt safe returning to the Source, and did so.

From there, Lin’s story is quite similar to canon in 5.2 and 5.3. The one big difference is that when Gaius asked Lin to help with a fight, she called on her friends to help him instead with Ruby Weapon. However, when it came time for Sapphire, her friends turned the tables on her.

She spent a month or two after reviving G’raha and his induction into the scions  travelling with him and training. First a trip to Hingashi, Doma, and the Azim Steppe, then a trip to Azys Lla. In an untouched wing of the Fractal Continuum, G’raha proposed to her with a carnelian and turquoise necklace. However, for the moment, only a handful of people know about the engagement, given that on the Source, their courtship has been short.

Personality: A’lin is a mix of contradictions as the Warrior of Light. Sometimes she is reluctant to fight, other times she’ll jump in to test her strength. She is proud of her seeker identity, but often seems to forget the smallest things about her home clan after her time away.

The consistent parts of her, however, is her ability to care. While at first, she often resented the way the Scions treated her, and how she tended to identify closer with the Free Company many of her friends belonged to, over time and trials, each of them have earned her trust (First Alphinaud and Tataru as they faced the Heavensward, then Alisaie and Lyse during the rebellions. Finally Y’shtola, Urianger, and Thancred through her trip through Norvrandt and the First). This same trust is applied only to the leaders of two of the nations she has helped, Aymeric and House Fortemps of Ishgard and the Exarch of the Crystarium. She does not hold any pretenses about her choice to favor those Nations over the original Eorzean Alliance.

In her free time, she finds herself seeking out new songs, or when particularly inspired, compose herself. She can fashion her aether in the shape of a glowing turquoise harp, perfectly tuned, and will do so whenever she learns or makes new songs to her repertoire.

Lin loves collecting various small trinkets, such as low currency coins, jewelry, or figurines.

Jobs: A’lin is first and foremost an Archer and Bard (Level 80) in her fighting before she was trapped in Norvrandt for six months. She learned the skills of the Dragoon to a certain degree (Level 60), and on rare moments, she can form a zweihander and heavy armor, though she is loathe to talk about how she became so proficient to any except the Exarch, and he keeps her secrets (Level 80). However, when she returned during a period of severe contraction of time in Norvrandt, Lin sported a rapier much like Alisaie’s, and shows particular skill with the weapon and spells in ways others have not seen (Level 80, but hasn’t met X’rhun or Arya yet. Will probably when I can find a later break that fits)

While she is not an Astrologian, one of her friends taught her some skills, which she mixes into her style of fighting in her other jobs.

Style of Dress: While her choice in gloves and chestpieces can vary depending on day, in her daily life, she will almost always be seen with a hat cocked to one side, long boots, and short slops. However, when it comes time to fight, if she has the time, she will change to items that guard her legs, arms, and torso appropriately for the role she needs to fill, though under it all, she will usually still have the boots which make her feel most comfortable.

Trivia: The Lin of the Seventh Umbral Calamity and Later is not the A’lin of the Sixth Astral Era. Well, she is, but she isn’t. Instead, A’lin did die in the calamity, but given the precise timing and the fact that as WoL she has the soul of the Forteenth, the part of her soul in the Seventh merged their own with her, creating a mix of the two personalities, and keeping Lin’s body alive long enough for Hydaelyn to save her. While Lin did actually go to Revenant’s Toll, she was more an oddity, because no one could figure out where she came from. Those who followed saw her disappear after about 200 yalms from the settlement.

[natsunoomoi]

Still thinking about that ending

It’s been weeks and I am shocked by how much it weighs on my mind. I’ve literally rewatched scenes several times, played things over, Googled other people’s interpretations, read Through His Eyes twice, done image searches, and a bunch of things. I just keep thinking about his story and also relating it to other villains in the franchise and even apocalyptic doomsday plot lines in other series.

I’ve just found Emet-Selch/Hades to be extremely compelling. I still don’t agree with his perspective in thinking shard people are lesser, but I can understand how he got to that conclusion. I don’t agree with his solution, but I can understand how he came to choose it and how he can continue to stick to it. I can empathize greatly with his outburst against Alphinaud questioning how he can view their two positions as equal as its also flat out a normal response to grief and loss.

There’s just a number of things....But like, he isn’t wrong about the frailty and weaknesses of people. We see that everyday in how our species can be so involved in greed and vice and hedonism for the sake of selfishness. That stuff is true and not wrong, and sometimes those things make me wonder whether or not the death of us all due to not being able to stop climate change is deserving. But at the same time, thinking only of those things also ignores all of the beautiful things our species is able to create. Our fragility and ephemeral natures are what make our life special and urge us to create beautiful art and appreciate life. We also have an incredible capacity to care for others and to surpass expectations with sheer will if we want to, but as they say in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility and it is unfortunate that some people wield what power they have irresponsibly to the point that the rest of us can’t have nice things.

And like that point he makes is also expressed in X/1999 as well through the Dragons of Earth. That’s another influential work on me and I actually totally root for the Dragons of Heaven, but I also like a number of the members of the Dragons of Earth and I don’t find them to be wrong either. The earth in that story will either way be reborn, but the point of contention is whether or not humans will be included in it. The Dragons of Earth fight for a rebirth without humans entirely while the Dragons of Heaven fight so that humans can be given a second chance to take better care of their home. The ironic thing is that the Dragons of Earth also include essentially a lab experiment created through genetic and bio-engineering science that was once a little girl that was terminally ill, and the other a technopath that can talk with machines. Both things represent the innovations of mankind, but also mankinds step into taboo territory of science where they do science for science’s sake with moral ambiguity and don’t stop to think if they should do something. They are examples of humans playing god and the lines between what is a life and what isn’t becoming blurry. To that end, Satsuki the technopath, asks one question of Yuzuriha about the position of the Dragons of Heaven about why humans are deserving to be included in the rebirth. It’s so poignant because the Dragons of Earth are themselves humans and her powers as well as Nataku’s exist because of human innovation. Yuzuriha isn’t able to answer at all though and so Satsuki kills her guardian dog. But Satsuki isn’t really being evil, she just wanted Yuzuriha to think and answer and there’s all kinds of answers and she really just wanted to know why it’s okay to prioritize human life above all others. It’s a fair question giving what they are fighting for but not one she really cared for an answer to. She just wanted Yuzuriha to actually think about her position rather than just take for granted that her side is saving people. But I think it’s true too because why is it okay to kill animals, but not people? I’m not a vegetarian, but even outside the food industry often our businesses and way of life displace animals in favor of space for us. I admit I do so too in terms of how I kill spiders and bugs that enter my home, but they are just doing them. Plus when a lot of Westerners think of solar panels they only think of “empty space” as in no humans live there, but actually there’s no space on the planet that is truly actually unoccupied as there may be a local ecosystem there that you just don’t see. But if people make that comment, they obviously are only considering people and not the animals. And oil companies go to places for oil because human life requires the use of oil and it is in demand because of how we live, but oil rigs even in the ocean cause a risk to marine life not just from spills but from the mere presence of a foreign object sitting in the middle of the damn ocean. On the daily we prioritize human convenience and life over the lives of the plants and animals around us. I realize this at the same time knowing I am guilty of it too just as everyone else living in a city. I wouldn’t give up doing it either because I find this way of living in an apartment with electricity comfortable, but if I have to think overall for the good of the planet if I deserve to live this way more than the plants and animals that had to sacrifice to give me this space, I have doubts. While I do this to not live like a total hermit recluse and my comforts and entertainment and way of life are fundamentally unnatural, I know somewhere along the line there is a cost. I am unable to compel myself to give it up completely and I suspect most humans would too, so I wonder sincerely if it would be better if humans didn’t exist.

And to be fair, the Dragons of Earth would also question whether or not the Ascians even deserved to exist either. If we’re applying their logic to XIV as well. It’s not like they would take Emet-Selch’s side. I would like to be optimistic about Amaurotine life and think they are better than us without malice, but I can’t be sure. He’s also tempered so you can’t really tell how much truth he told. But I really think the Dragons would wonder if any humans even godlike humans like them even deserved to have so much creation power if it could go haywire in a moment of anxiety, and if they viewed themselves with a superiority complex. The idea for the Dragons is that humans are incapable of coexisting just as the Ascians seem to be incapable of coexisting with the shard planets.

I also just can’t imagine his burden. Like the Scions we play us chose to take up the mantle and fight for the betterment of their lives and other people. They self-started themselves into their situation. Emet-Selch was elected. He was chosen by his people to be a leader and to save them. He was bestowed the responsibility as a representative of them. While I don’t agree with his methods and I can’t imagine that if he did resurrect his people and home that all of them would be all that happy about what he did to do it, I can imagine that is an immense pressure to have to bear and the feeling of failure of being unable to do it or even if he was the one who designed the plan and it failed spectacularly or didn’t go how he expected on top of any possible manipulation he may be experiencing from Zodiark itself. I think perhaps at the time panicked citizens gathered outside the meeting place of the Convocation and clamored for salvation and express their faith in them to please save them. He was respected as one of the most brilliant of them and it seemed their faith in him was quite strong for them to elect him. Imagining the perspective of someone in the position of leader while all hell is breaking loose, I can imagine how that scene can compel a person to fulfill a promise at all costs even if it starts to become murder-y and crazy. Like he probably has imprinted on his mind all of the people down to the smallest child looking up at him and depending on him to help them to continue to live. And it’s just, I don’t know how you forget that even if they all die. It probably haunts you in your sleep, and forces you to re-promise every night to save them. And bear in mind, I still think he’s wrong because the dead are dead. The gone and sacrificed are just gone, but those memories must be there and could be just enough to keep him sticking to his plan. Plus in his grief he recreated his home. He had a point in doing it too, but he did it in such incredible detail. It’s likely there’s bias in it, and I find it amazing that there is an operable store that will actually sell you goods (from a game development perspective it totally makes sense to have something there for the player to get supplies, but seriously from a narrative perspective having an operable store in a town of shades where no one will actually buy anything is depressing af), it’s depressing to know his level of grief to know that he chose to hang out there.

There’s just so many layers too it, I just sit in awe thinking about it.

And then of course, there’s just that he tried. He built up two fascist empires in Allag and Garlemalde for sure, but along the way he had moments where he tried. The Through His Eyes story is just heartbreaking at the end where he talks about his son and where he had hope that maybe the shard people would be okay, but then had all of his hopes dashed when his son died prematurely. Like I can imagine everything going fine with him and he’s going through the motions and doing his plan, but he actually gets emotionally struck by this little baby and watched him grow into a young man. But despite all of his advantages and privilege he dies to an illness reminding him that shard people aren’t all that hearty. He must have experienced similar time and time again as he chose to live among the people. Like the story even talks about how he had concerns of political enemies and even allies that eventually stabbed him in the back as he rose to power as Solus, and I can understand how that can make someone a bit jaded in general, and I mean anyone can get jaded if the people around them that helped to give them their support are all douchebags waiting for their time. Part of it is who you surround yourself with, but I mean, in a political arena where you rise to power to run a country like that, you have a lot of people vying for the same thing so you run into a lot of characters like that. Often, the nice people who don’t pull that shit don’t even bother to take positions like that. Power corrupts absolutely, and let’s even say that outside of him trying to do the Rejoining thing so that he can have his home back he also tried and dabbled in being a decent person as he rose up. Possible considering he funded a theatre troupe and sponsored the arts. He could have tried to be a decent ruler at the same time as trying to bring the end of the world, and maybe in those times where he was trying to be decent he thought about maybe not following through only to have a trusted aid or someone stab him in the back with some kind of political intrigue. It’s possible there was some actual goal-post shifting in his desire to search for hope among the people, but also it’s hard to not be horribly disappointed by people when they do that to you. Like I’m melodramatic sometimes and when something goes wrong, I just say “Ugh, I hate everyone,” but if he experienced that for real, there’s a reasonable amount of expectation that he might feel like shard humans are a waste of space.

And well, his grief. Like he gets really upset when Alphinaud tries to point out that their goals are essentially the same where they are trying to save their respective people and treat the situations like they are equal and he gets upset and says that they are not. He doubles down on the shard people being lesser because they are fragments, which I think is wrong, but I think also Alphinaud is wrong for thinking he can completely understand how Emet-Selch feels. This here is a lesson in grief in general. When you lose something, particularly people you care about, there’s bereavement. You feel like there’s a hole inside you. I felt this when my Dad died. It hurts so much and it’s completely unforgettable. It gets easier to live with because after awhile you just get tired of crying and wallowing in depression and it gets easier to cope with, but the mistake a lot of people make when something bad happens to others is they can say the words, “I know how you feel” when they are trying to give sympathy. I understand it’s the thought that counts and they are trying to say that they understand that you are sad, but sometimes people get angry when they hear that because actually there is no possible way for any other human being on the planet to actually *know* how you feel. Other people may have been able to experience loss and understand loss because they have loss too or have people they also want to protect as is in the case in this game, but every person’s experience is also different. Like I loved and still love my Dad, but part of the horror after his death was finding out from all of his friends and our extended family that he was a different person to everyone. It makes sense that he is because we all had different interactions with him, but when he died I felt like I didn’t know who he was because I learned so many things about him after he died from different people that I just felt lost and felt like I didn’t really know him even though I was his daughter. I had so many questions left and a part of myself and my dreams died with him. As an aside, this is probably especially moving for me at this time of year as the last Christmas he was alive I opted to stay in LA because I had to work and it would be difficult for me to go home for the holidays because I couldn’t get enough time off. Then between Christmas and New Year’s he had a heart attack and was in the hospital for a month and eventually died at the start of February the next year. And like, other people have experienced their father dying, but no one else had to experience the regret of choosing not to go home for what would turn out to be his last Christmas. That was my choice and my experience of his death. No one else made that choice. No one else had to experience coming as soon as I could for New Year’s to visit him in the hospital and just think he was going to be okay only for him to not be able to recover and then die after a surgery. My other family members were there and watched it happen for sure, but they experienced it in their own ways that was separate from mine as I had to go back to work. My sister was even still in school and didn’t talk to the doctors directly while I did, so I fundamentally have different memories and experiences of that time, and even feel slightly different about the whole thing because of that and because of my specific relationship with my Dad. So my grief is incomparable to literally anyone else in the world. I try not to be a dick to people who mean well and try to sympathize or even empathize with me with their own experience, but I totally understand the position of people who do when it happens to them because there is literally no possible way any other person in the world could possibly get it and understand how you feel. I am crushed and heartbroken over that still even though I’ve since healthily moved on with my life, but it still makes me sad and it’s nothing in comparison to losing way more people who may be more or less precious than that, your entire home, and having the weight of the responsibility of being the one person that was in charge of that. I wasn’t really in charge of my Dad’s affairs. My Uncle took the lead on that so I fortunately didn’t have to worry about a lot or do any daily check-ins with the doctors, but my sister and I both had the privilege to decide when we wanted to take him off life support. So I dunno, I can kind of imagine the weight of responsibility, but also completely understand that my situation is nothing in comparison to the weight this character must have felt. It’s not only not quite comparable on the in-game kind of racist basis of shard people vs full Amaurotines, but not comparable in terms of the actual grief or responsibility.

For me especially, knowing all that, there’s so much compelling about the character and so much I want to say to him that the game won’t let me. Even to kind of scold Alphinaud a little too for being a bit to presumptuous.

Grief though is....a terrible partner. It can linger with you for some time, and there’s so many clues to it in Emet-Selch’s behavior. A lot of people point to his slouching, and I noticed the peculiar shape of his eyebrows. No matter what his visage or expression his eyebrows are in perma-grief/sorrow position. That furrowed look a person has when they are sad. But even more than that, in re-watching his scenes I noticed how much he likes talking about sleeping and taking naps and how fond he is of passing the time that way. It didn’t hit me until I re-watched them and a lot of the fandom writes it off as laziness, but no, that is grief. That is depression and mourning. That was how I spent a good chunk of the first year. Sure I went to work and went through the motions of life, but I enjoyed sleep so much. It passed the time and meant less time and opportunity for my brain to think about how my Dad was gone. In my dreams and sleep too I would dream of him. Like I’d dream of being in the passenger seat of his car and we’re just driving somewhere. In real life sometimes it was nowhere in particular. Like a couple of times he’d just take us cruising and go somewhere and like his 2nd or 3rd car he had that I remember before he totaled it, there was a turbo in the car and he’d make us laugh by using it on off-ramp turns when we’re getting off the freeway. And when I sat in the front seat, I’d have my hand to my side and at the lights and times when he didn’t need his hand on the stick, he’d hold my hand and rub the back. When he died I escaped my reality by dwelling a lot of my free time in sleep and naps so I wouldn’t have to face the reality that he was actually gone. There’s no time limit though on grief and bereavement, and I had it so bad for one person that I was particularly close to for quite a long time. I can’t imagine how I would be myself to lose everything. The first year for me was the worst, but I think I was severely affected for at least 3-5 years. I slept so much. I never erased his number from my phone’s SIM card either. I was scared to. His number was surely given away to another person, but I had to get my phone stolen before I finally lost it. After the funeral, I didn’t even unpack my bag from the trip. My duffel just sat there in the middle of the room for at least a month because I didn’t want to open it and have to face that I went to a funeral.

On top of that, I have anxiety from trauma and different childhood stuff and other kinds of insecurities, and more recently PTSD from the trauma of harassment, but I’m in a healthier place now. I’m a lot more balanced and happy and I’m okay. When I wasn’t though I wasn’t a good person. I still tried to be a good person, but there were a lot of times where I was selfish or crazy now that I look back on it, and it’s just when you are grieving or even in the middle of your mental health battles it is so hard to keep everything straight and to not be awful. It doesn’t excuse my behavior, and it doesn’t excuse Emet-Selch’s either, but I can also see he’s being a dick because he’s suffering and probably not entirely in his right mind from grief on top of being tempered to Zodiark. Grief makes you fucking crazy. I just can’t even begin to imagine the little neurotic things that he must have started doing to cope even though I know all the little stupid things I did to try to get through it. I cried every time I saw a reminder of my Dad too, but like he can also see souls and sees reminders all the time. You get numb to it after awhile, but I can just imagine that is some kind of hell.

So just all of that together, after all those end-game scenes I just came to love the character so much. I just can’t hate him.

And then I was like looking up character rankings and other people’s interpretations and love for him. He’s not included yet in any official rankings, but a number of people who have played several FFs have found him to be one of their favorites of the entire franchise. Man, I think he deserves it though.

A lot of people compare him to Ardyn though, and I understand Ardyn’s story too and I see him as sympathetic, but XV wasn’t really executed well so I wasn’t able to really experience sympathy for him as I should have. Like logically I understand, but I don’t really feel it and I found him so much more annoying during the time I did see him that I just can’t really feel for him. It’s more an execution level problem.

Then I was reading a bunch of people commenting on Kuja from IX and I understand Kuja too, but at the same time still don’t feel it. Like I can’t connect why having a shorter life or anything would still compel someone to be murder-y. Like I feel bad for him still, but I also think like he could have just as well rebelled by being a complete foil and saving everyone instead of doing his intended mission of destruction. Plus like IX wasn’t as good as I hoped.

And then like, to this day I still don’t really understand Kefka’s appeal. Like a lot of people like him because he’s crazy? So people like him because he’s like the Joker, but I find even the Joker to be more interesting than Kefka and Kefka gives me the creeps because I hate clowns. For some reason I’m okay with the Joker, but I hate all other clowns. I played through all of VI and I just don’t get why people think he’s good because he’s just evil for evil’s sake and weird.

Sephiroth I like, but also partly my sister is a Sephiroth worshipper, but I have sympathy for him too. Like a lot of criticism of him is that he want on a tantrum, and yeah that wasn’t the shining moment, but of all of the franchise’s villains Sephiroth is the only one who I would consider letting him win. The reason for that relates to the aforementioned Dragons of Earth philosophy because he was created through humans meddling with science they shouldn’t have been screwing with and human experimentation. I know not all humans committed the crime against him and did that to him, but I don’t really have an argument for why a species with asshole scientists shouldn’t die either. I understand regular people weren’t responsible for that and ShinRa is a garbage company that is slightly better now under Rufus and everyone working together against Sephiroth, but like from Sephiroth’s perspective he is actually different and not human. Humans lab created him and fucked him over and he didn’t ask to be created or their experiment, and I don’t know. I don’t really think I’d know how I’d react if I found out my entire existence was a lie and found out I was being used. There’s no way anyone else could imagine that because all of us have the safety of knowing our own reality and identity. He was definitely mistaken for thinking himself a Cetra and there is some question as to whether he is in control or if Jenova is in control of his mind, but I don’t have a defense-able excuse for what happened to him either. So I can kind of understand what he wants to do, and I’m okay with it same as how I’d be okay if all of us died from global warming because of what our species has collectively done to the planet. Like I can do my part and maybe I’m a good person and worthy of living and I might do my best with what limited power I can, but collectively as humans we are a trash species that is selfish. The same as how I can’t excuse the greedy CEOs and stuff that had an actual hand in leading us to possible doom even though I didn’t directly cause it as a normal person I think it’s okay if all of us humans didn’t survive, I am okay with Sephiroth killing all the people on his planet because of the stuff the jerk scientists did to him. It’s kind of like Good Place logic where it’s actually impossible to be a good person because there’s unknown side effects to industries where a company cuts corners somewhere and ends up exploiting some other person or destroying something else. It’s just impossible. 

I still think real life humans should be responsible with nature as much as they can, but there’s something about our species’ innate laziness where we stick to the latest fad solution without thinking about how actually energy solutions are complicated and won’t work for every situation but there’s some meme on Facebook talking about how this one latest thing is the best thing since sliced bread and we should all switch to it immediately. Like, no. There isn’t one magical solution. The annoying thing for me isn’t that people are trying. It’s good that they are trying to be better and to find alternate solutions, but it really pisses me off when I see the latest meme conservation or eco-friendly thing that suggests a 100% switch to this thing or that is the answer to all of our woes. It’s not. Like one thing I saw was a thing that suggested we switch to all hemp fabric because of the cost of water that raising cotton. Like fair, cotton uses a lot of water, but like if you think that everyone is going to be able to switch to hemp you are a fucking idiot. Cotton is popular for a reason because it is soft and comfortable whereas hemp is a more harsh material and is more prone to causing skin irritation and allergies in people which is why it’s less popular. Should some brands consider switching to hemp if it is not a huge deal for them to be that soft? Absolutely. Should we find ways for us to reduce our reliance and usage of cotton? Of course. But all switch to hemp instead of cotton completely? No. That’s ridiculous, stupid, and completely illogical. Plus it only causes new kinds of industries and opportunities for exploitation because remember these plants can’t just grow anywhere. Plants all have optimal locations for them to survive. Then like energy solutions like solar panels, geothermal plants, and windmills. Yeah, they are more eco-friendly and have less dangerous output to the environment, but you are also stupid to think that they don’t have a cost. Windmills and solar panels in particular have a spacial cost, and a lot of people think we have a lot of empty space except no space is empty because *animals* live there. There are habitats there even if humans aren’t there, asshole. And windmills are tall so they can interrupt bird flight paths and stuff too. What happens if you build a windmill in the habitat of an endangered bird? And geo-thermal plants aren’t suited for all locations. There has to be an optimal place that has access to a compatible spot and you have to drill to make the passageways for the energy to pass through and like, that’s drilling near places that have geo-thermal activity so presumably they are also active and maybe have earthquakes and volcanoes. Kind of like how fracking can cause earthquakes, imagine a badly positioned geo-thermal plant. Or like what if a place just doesn’t have the proper rock bed that can support a geo-thermal plant. Like Florida has a lot of sink holes. Does that sound safe to have a powerplant built over a place that could randomly develop a sinkhole? It’s like, I appreciate people are trying to find solutions, but it makes me fucking angry that people are so short-sighted that they tout every random thing as the next miracle solution when it isn’t. It’s just an alternative for the right location. I like people knowing about it, but it isn’t a thing that’s appropriate for every fucking place on the planet. Energy is complex and you have to survey the local area and find out what works for that location. This is a complex issue, and there’s so many people that are just averse to thinking complexly or wanting to do any actual thought into making a workable solution that I just can’t bring myself to really care that much about whether or not our species lives. Like if you’re going to put all of 20 seconds of thought into a complex energy solution that could severely fuck up nature, your neighbors, and all the animals then why even bother? Like the solution is even worse than the actual problems because no one actually wants to think about them. It’s still humans thinking selfishly and only of themselves. So even though I will do my best to do my part, I don’t really care at all if climate change kills us all because most humans out there only want to do half-assed measures or something that makes them look good in front of their friends.

And like, back to the actual topic of genocidal FF villains, seriously if their reasoning is relatively okay, I can’t really bring myself to dislike them if they want to kill everyone because humans are trash. Like, I understand.

[thisdaynews]

Beto’s Long History of Failing Upward

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/betos-long-history-of-failing-upward/

Beto’s Long History of Failing Upward

AMES, Iowa—The presidential run of Beto O’Rourke is a profoundly personality-driven exercise, his charisma and Kennedy-esque demeanor the topic of one profile after another, so it’s surprising to listen to his speeches on the stump in which he doesn’t talk a whole lot about himself. In Iowa recently, over several days in a rainy, foggy, uncertain stretch of spring, O’Rourke delivered a series of speeches and held question-and-answer sessions in which he spoke at length about unity, civility and inclusivity, and only rarely touched on his personal story. There was one notable exception: When he did offer up bits of his biography, he leaned most heavily on his run last year against Ted Cruz for a spot in the United States Senate.

He recounted for the crowds tales of the places he went and the people he met during his barnstorming, freewheeling, attention-getting campaign, coming back to two numbers: 254, the number of counties in gargantuan Texas, all of which he visited … and the percentage-point margin by which he was defeated.

Story Continued Below

“We lost by 2.6 percent,” he said in a basement music venue here at Iowa State University.

“We lost that Senate race in Texas by 2.6 percent,” he said in a downtown greasy spoon in Storm Lake.

“We came within 2.6 percentage points of defeating Ted Cruz,” he said in a community college cafeteria in Fort Dodge.

“So close,” the local party leader said in introducing O’Rourke one morning at a brewpub in Carroll. “So close.”

The part of his past that he talked about the most, by far, was a race that he lost.

O’Rourke, 46, campaigns with the wanderlust of the wannabe punk rocker he once was and the vigor of the regular runner, hiker and cyclist he still is. His hair is somehow simultaneously boyish and salt-and-pepper-streaked. He drives himself around in rented Dodge minivans, dressed almost always in plain brown shoes, Banana Republic chinos and blue oxford shirts with no tie and the sleeves rolled up just so. He often dons locally appropriate dad hats, from a maroon Iowa State cap at Iowa State to an orange Clemson cap at Clemson and so on. He holds microphones with his right hand kind of like a singer, and he extends his left arm into the air kind of like a preacher, and he punctuates his points with grins that flash perfectly imperfect teeth.

After Iowa, I dropped in on O’Rourke on the trail in South Carolina and Virginia, listening to him rat-a-tat-tat through his airy, often alliterative talking points about “common cause” and “common ground” and “common good” and “conscientious capitalism” and “our aspirations” and “our ambitions” instead of the “pettiness” and the “partisanship” of politics today, along with planks of a nascent platform like a new voting rights act, citizenship for Dreamers, “world-class public education” and “guaranteed, high-quality, universal health care.” And almost always, when he did talk about himself, it would be back to the time he fell just short. “We lost by 2.6 percent,” he said to a small, low-key gathering in rural Denmark, South Carolina.

Celebrating defeat is unusual for a politician, and doing so makes O’Rourke notably different from the rest of the unwieldy field of Democrats running for president. In contrast to the 20 or so other 2020 candidates—all of them in various ways overachievers who tout the litanies of their successes—O’Rourke instead presents his loss to Cruz as a prominent selling point. More than his ownership of a small business. More than his six years on the city council in his native El Paso. More than his next six years as a back-bench House member in Congress. His near-miss against a prominent Republican in a red state was such a high-quality failure, so epically heroic, he seems to suggest, that it should be considered something of a victory.And he’s not wrong to do it. His failed Senate bid, after all, is singularly what made him famous, what got him an interview with Oprah, what put him on the cover ofVanity Fair—and what’s put him in the top handful of aspirants angling for a shot to topple President Donald Trump.

But while it might be his most spotlit miss, it’s not an aberration.

There’s a reason his biography doesn’t feature much in the campaign. For O’Rourke, the phenomenon on display in that race—failure without negative effects, and with perhaps even some kind of personal boost—is a feature of his life and career. That biography is marked as much by meandering, missteps and moments of melancholic searching as by résumé-boosting victories and honors. A graduate of an eastern prep school and an Ivy League rower and English major, the only son of a gregarious attorney and glad-handing pol and the proprietor of an upscale furniture store, the beneficiary of his family’s expansive social, business and political contacts, O’Rourke has ambled past a pair of arrests, designed websites for El Paso’s who’s who, launched short-lived publishing projects, self-term-limited his largely unremarkable tenure on Capitol Hill, shunned the advice of pollsters and consultants and penned overwrought, solipsistic Medium missives, enjoying the latitude afforded by the cushion of an upper-middle-class upbringing that is only amplified by his marriage to the daughter of one of the region’s richest men.

“With a charmed life like his, you can never really lose,” an ad commissioned by the conservative Club for Growth sneered last month. “That’s why Beto’s running for president—because he can.”

“A life of privilege,” David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, told me.

It’s not just Republicans who think this. “He’s a rich, straight, white dude who, you know, married into what should politely be called ‘fuck you money,’” Sonia Van Meter, an Austin-based Democratic consultant and self-described “raging feminist,” told me. “His biggest success is by definition a failure,” she added. “He’s absolutely failed up.”

Even by the experience-light standards of the most recent occupants of the White House—a first-term senator followed by a real estate scion and reality TV star—the notion of O’Rourke’s uneven résumé blazing a path to the presidency is new and remarkable. For the moment, he is trailing and slipping in the polls, but it’s early, and he is still attracting besotted fans. The support O’Rourke built that even allowed this run in the first place did not depend on traditional concepts of meritocracy and diligent preparation. To look deeper into his past, to talk to his friends from his teens and his 20s, to read distant clips from money-losing media ventures, and to talk to voters, too, is to see a different kind of claim to excellence. In the end, O’Rourke’s best recommendation that he can win might be that he knows how to fail big—and then aim even higher.

O’Rourke’s ascent in some sensestarted more than 20 years back. In the summer of 1998, he made the choice to quit New York. He had graduated in 1995 from Columbia University, then spent most of the next three years playing, listening to and talking about music, reading theEconomistand theNew Yorker, drinking Budweiser, riding in cramped subway cars. He had worked for short periods as a nanny, a copy editor, a hired-hand mover of art and antiques, and in a series of odd jobs around the city that let him split cheap rent in a sparsely furnished Brooklyn loft where he liked to jump on a rooftop trampoline. Now, though, he wanted out, and so he bought a used pickup and drove home, steering toward more open road. He was, he has said, “young” and “happy” and “carefree.”

This decision to leave New York, his longtime friend Lisa Degliantoni told me recently, was and remains O’Rourke’s biggest, most consequential accomplishment—not just a learning experience or a tail-between-his-legs withdrawal, she believes, but an accomplishment. In her mind, it unleashed O’Rourke, allowing him to be “transformational”—first for his city, then for his state, and now potentially for his country.

Trading the bright lights and the bustle for the relative ease and isolation of the desert by the Mexican border, Degliantoni said, was risky, “because as soon as you’re there, you’re off all the radars.” That risk was mitigated significantly, however, by what he was heading home to, according to interviews with nearly two dozen people who have known him or worked with O’Rourke. Riding shotgun in the cab of that pickup was Mike Stevens, another one of his best friends, and when they logged the last of those 2,200 or so miles, Stevens told me, waiting for O’Rourke in El Paso was far from certain success but also “a pretty large safety net.”

He used it. Upon his return, he worked at first in the warehouse of his mother’s store. That fall, he was arrested after driving drunk in his Volvo at 3 a.m. and sideswiping a truck at “a high rate of speed” on Interstate 10. He went to “DWI school,” finishing the next spring.

It was his second arrest. Three years before, he had been apprehended by the police at the University of Texas El Paso after tripping an alarm trying to sneak under a fence at the campus physical plant while “horsing around” with friends. Prosecutors didn’t pursue the charge. (“No consequences,” said McIntosh from the Club for Growth.)

The next year, in 1999, O’Rourke started the Stanton Street Technology Group, an offshoot of which was StantonStreet.com. The website covered the arts and food and local politics and endeavored to be “the most comprehensive, interactive, and entertaining home page in the Southwest.” In the summer of 2000, it was registering 32,000 monthly “impressions,” according to O’Rourke at the time, a figure whose impact is hard to gauge given the early era of the internet and the size of El Paso—but the site also was bleeding money, taking from the coffers of the web design business. Even so, in January 2002, he launched a weekly print version. Bob Moore, the former editor of theEl Paso Times, told me he used to rib O’Rourke that one of his few advertisers was his mother—“his only advertiser,” he said, “for the longest time.” It lasted 15 issues.

The newspaper was, said Degliantoni, who worked on it with him, O’Rourke’s “love letter to his hometown” but also “probably in hindsight not the best move.” Even O’Rourke joked about it recently in his remarks in Storm Lake. “In a brilliant stroke of genius, just as print newspapers were in decline,” he told the standing room only, shoulder to shoulder, coffee shop throng, “I started a print newspaper.”

The result? “We bankrupted the operation,” O’Rourke said to what sounded like good-natured, forgiving titters.

No matter.

He had run the website and started the paper “to be as engaged as I possibly could,” he later explained. “The logical conclusion,” he continued, “was to run for office.”

He ran for City Council in 2005 and won, and won again in 2007, backed by El Paso’s business elite, and then he ran for Congress in 2012, challenging in the primary Silvestre “Silver” Reyes, an eight-term incumbent who would have the endorsements of a pair of presidents (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and never before had had even a close call in a reelection. It was, political analysts in the area agreed at the time, a bid that smacked of audacity and risk. “It’s close to impossible to get a sitting member of Congress out of office because of the privilege and power,” O’Rourke said early on in his campaign.

But O’Rourke, of course, had a share of both as well, hailing from “an old El Paso political family,” as a local columnist pointed out, calling O’Rourke “just as ‘household’ around here as the stately congressman himself.” A company owned by his father-in-law, the real estate tycoon Bill Sanders—he’s worth at least an estimated half a billion dollars—gave $18,750 to a PAC that supported O’Rourke’s campaign. Reyes threw around the words “family wealth” and charged that O’Rourke was “a show pony” and “part of the 1 percent.”

In the end, though, painting Reyes as an aging Washington insider, and employing block-by-block door knocking, O’Rourke won with 50.5 percent of the vote.

Friends and admirers say O’Rourke is nothing if not a hard worker, wearing out shoes and racking up miles. “I think he’s the hardest-working man in U.S. politics,” said Steve Kling, a Democrat who lost last year running for the Texas state Senate. They describe him as an exceptional listener.

In his three terms in Washington, O’Rourke compiled a moderate to centrist voting record, which in this left-leaning primary could become problematic. He was known in D.C. as sufficiently affable but also something of a loner, say Capitol Hill staffers, a floating, unthreatening member who had undercut his clout by pledging to stay no more than four terms.

When he began his race against Cruz, it’s easy to forget, O’Rourke was close to unknown—even in Texas. Cruz, on the other hand, was one of the most prominent Republicans in the nation, and no Democrat had won a statewide campaign since 1994. Texas Senator and Majority Whip John Cornyn dubbed it “a suicide mission.”

But what, strategists and operatives say now, did O’Rourke really have to lose? He had engineered his own congressional exit, anyway, 2018 was shaping up to be a favorable year for Democrats, and Cruz was a legendarily unpopular foil against whom he could rally support. And the worst-case scenario? Something O’Rourke had done before. Just go home. Go back to El Paso. Failure, in fact, was an option.

“Beto,” Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson toldTexas Monthlyin March 2017, “lives life with a cushy net beneath him.”

“It wasn’t that big of a risk,” Texas-based GOP strategist Brendan Steinhauser told me.

The biggest risk he took in the Senate bid, in the estimation of politicos in Texas and beyond, was to listen to people who lived in all 254 of the counties in Texas more than he did to people who could have armed with him with more targeted data. He tended to rely on feelings more than numbers. It was a root of his populist allure—and also perhaps the reason he didn’t win.

In his concession speech, he positioned himself at the center of a stage decked out with floodlights and speakers and drums, a scene evocative of a rock concert more than a convening of the dejected supporters of a failed candidate and campaign.

“I’m so fucking proud of you guys!” he hollered, eliciting squeals from his fans.

They chanted his name.

“Beto! Beto! Beto!”

After O’Rourke’s recent event in Sioux City, Iowa, I talked to two people who had traveled from different states to see him specifically because of that night. Because they had been inspired by how he spoke about losing. Chris Untiet, 35, had come from California. He works for Habitat for Humanity, and he told me he had watched the speech on the screen of his phone while on a trip to build houses in Vietnam. “I was really moved to tears,” he told me. The other was Claire Campbell. She’s 17. She saw the speech sitting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and will vote for the first time in next year’s presidential election. And she hopes she can pick O’Rourke. “I literally love him,” she told me. In the question-and-answer session, she raised her hand and asked him to her prom.

“So, he had to lose the Senate,”Kim Olson, a Democrat and staunch O’Rourke ally who last year lost her bid to be Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, was telling me as I hurtled ahead on a ribbon of road slicing through flat fields, from one Iowa campaign stop to the next. “He had to get the nationwide name recognition. He had to do the hard work. And let me tell you: It’s fricking hard work running as a statewide candidate—as it’s going to be countrywide … grind, every day, all day—and here he is, after losing in a hard-fought race, he said, ‘I’m still going to serve, I’m still going to go, and I’m going to run for president.’ So, yeah, you could say his greatest accomplishment was to lose by, you know, 300,000 votes to a guy who almost won a primary for the president. But that wasn’t his greatest accomplishment. It wasn’t the loss—it’showhe did it—that was his greatest accomplishment. It was going to everywhere, all the time, speaking to people, getting out there, not being afraid of anybody or anything and doing that hard grind that it takes. That’s why it makes him an incredible candidate for president, I think.”

Olson, affable and voluble, in essence attempted to redefine the idea of failure. O’Rourke hadn’t failed. Because he had tried and worked so hard. Because the experience had opened other doors.

At many of the dozen or so O’Rourke events I attended of late, most of the people I talked to knew not a whole lot about him—hardly anything, really, about what he had done, or not done, before the race against Cruz. Maybe they had seen what he said about the kneeling National Football League players in a clip that lit up the internet. Maybe they had seen the Oprah interview. Maybe they had seen the Annie Leibovitz shot on the cover ofVanity Fair. The conversations were a reminder that most people not in Washington or even Texas have basically just met him.

“Is he a lawyer?” 70-year-old Ruth Lux from little Lidderdale, Iowa, asked me after O’Rourke’s pit stop in nearby Carroll.

“No,” I said.

“What did he do before he got into politics?” she asked.

I provided a speedy rundown to the Cruz race.

“I think the fact that he came so close to unseating Cruz, that’s pretty important,” Lux said. “A lot of people are relating to what he’s saying, you know.”

I asked her if she was bothered by O’Rourke’s lack of experience compared with other candidates in the Democratic field. She wasn’t. “I don’t know that Obama had much more,” she said. “Did he really have much more experience than this guy? Really probably not.”

The man who introduced O’Rourke at Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge responded similarly. “I heard the same thing in 2008 when I was supporting Obama,” David Drissel, a professor of social sciences, told me. O’Rourke, he pointed out, has not only more congressional experience than Obama but “more congressional experience than the past four presidents combined.” I did the quick math. Trump. Obama. The second Bush. Clinton. True enough.

Obviously, the bar for the requisite experience for the Oval Office has been recalibrated over the past decade or more of presidential campaigns, and doesn’t necessarily run through Congress at all. But voters haven’t entirely abandoned their desire for a candidate to win—and then actuallydo something. For all the shrugging over his résumé, people at O’Rourke’s town halls clearly, too, were pressing for specifics. I listened to multiple people ask him explicitly to put meat on the bones of his ideas.

Their questions to him often boiled down to one word: How?

Then, when I asked them if they had heard from him what they had wanted to hear, their answers often boiled down to one word as well: No.

Jason Levick, 27, who had driven from Omaha to see O’Rourke, wanted to know how he would cut down on wealth and income inequality.

“A little bit rambling and not really to the point or concrete,” Levick told me.

Brendan Grady, 26, asked O’Rourke in Denison how he would address the “lack of social cohesion.”

“Didn’t really address it,” Grady told me.

Mike Poe, 64, asked O’Rourke in Marshalltown how he would manage to enact meaningful gun control.

“Vague,” Poe told me.

I heard the same thing in South Carolina. In Denmark, at O’Rourke’s town hall in a threadbare auditorium on the campus of tiny Voorhees College, Sailesh S. Radha from Columbia stood up and expressed his frustration that so many presidents can’t seem to make good on their promises after they get elected. How would O’Rourke, Radha wondered, turn his words into actions? Into accomplishments?

After the event, when I asked him what he thought of the answer, Radha shook his head and made a face. “I need to hear more from him,” he said.

And yet, and in spite of a stageof the campaign that’s started to feel more like an ebb than a flow, if I had to divide every crowd into two groups—the squinty, not-quite-satisfied versus those inspired by O’Rourke’s table-hopping battle cries and open to the viability of his candidacy—there was no shortage of dewy-eyed believers.

Many people were struck by his energy and his charisma and his gauzy optimism. They heard echoes of iconic Democrats from the past and saw, they said, a possible path forward—a potential winner—somebody who might be the one to take on Trump. “I’m thinking back to the first encounter with President Obama here at Morningside College,” retiree Mike Goodwin told me after the event in Sioux City.

Lux, meanwhile, the woman in Carroll who thought maybe O’Rourke was a lawyer, waited in line after the event and shook his hand and told Robert Francis O’Rourke he reminded her of … Robert Francis Kennedy. O’Rourke told her thank you. He told her RFK is one of his heroes.

“The charisma,” Lux said when I asked her about the comparison. “The compassion for people at the bottom. Actually, even the physical appearance—the hair, the rolled-up shirt sleeves.”

She told me she had entered 2007 enthused to vote for Hillary Clinton in the caucuses and then for president. But she ended up going for Obama.

“You know, always, it comes down to: How do you present yourself? How charismatic are you?” Lux said. And she said something I heard from many others as well. She was less interested in policy proposals than she was in the possibility of victory. Especially now. “I am more interested,” she said, “in who can unseat Trump.”

It’s one of the few things, it seems, all Democratic voters seem to agree on. “I think that what caucus-goers are looking for is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Norm Sturzenbach, O’Rourke’s state director in Iowa. “That’s ultimately what’s driving it.”

Steinhauser, the GOP strategist from Texas, agreed. “I wouldn’t want to run a campaign against O’Rourke,” he said. He pointed to what he was able to do in … almost beating Cruz. “Look back at what just happened here. It’s pretty incredible. Who else out there on the list really excited people in that way and is the young-looking guy? He reminds a lot of people of Obama or John F. Kennedy or those kinds of candidates.”

Even with his thin résumé? His hazy policies? Steinhauser cut me off.

“Nobody cares,” he said.

“Donald Trump’s policy positions did not matter,” he added, although it should be noted that his visceral pitches in areas like immigration mattered a lot. “I think Democrats want to beat Donald Trump. I think that they’re smart enough to know they need somebody who can win, whatever that means.”

Whether the failed-upward O’Rourke can be that “somebody,” of course, very much remains to be seen. The Iowa caucuses are nearly nine months away, and there’s a long year and a half to go between now and November 2020.

But one recent morning at a seafood restaurant in Ladson, South Carolina, all the booths jammed full, people standing in the back and all the way toward the door, an O’Rourke aide handed the microphone to 69-year-old Stephen Johnson from Mount Pleasant for the last question of the event.

“Congressman O’Rourke,” Johnson said. “I really like you a lot. But there’s one thing I want to know. If you get the Democratic nomination, will you beat Trump?”

O’Rourke answered the question almost before Johnson could finish getting it out of his mouth.

“Yes,” he said.

The people roared.

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[subtletyislost]

Worldbuilding: The Scion Way

more spaced out version here

Anonymous asked: 25. What is your worldbuilding process like? 

[TL;DR for my TL;DR: Worldbuilding is tough, but my very basic model is “if I have a question, answer it. If someone might have that question, answer it. If it’s even possible to question that thing, answer it.”

TL;DR: my worldbuilding process is basically I have a dream or fantasy about a story I want to write, this gives me a glimpse into the world, then I start writing and answer questions as they come up, making notes as I go. Sometimes the answering questions leads to connecting other stories to the world that weren’t originally part of it simply because the combined worldbuilding aspects that have been accomplished for each one simply make sense together. Sometimes it means that I sit down and actually think things out because the world is huge and I’m excited but also I need to understand X,Y,andZ or I’ll end up so frustrated that I give up.] 

Alrighty anon, I said this deserved its own post, and it does. But first let me clear up one or two things. First, my worldbuilding process highly likely won’t work for other people. Second, for just because I don’t work like other people work, does not mean my process (or theirs) is inherently bad in any way, it just means that I am an individual and my experiences and mind are different from other people’s experiences and minds. With that out of the way let’s move on.

More under the cut because this is going to get long.

 The first thing I do in worldbuilding is unusual in that it doesn’t happen intentionally. I dream. Most of my worldbuilding begins with a dream. That’s why I say my method won’t work for most people. A lot of people, can’t or don’t want to, remember their dreams. With the dream, I usually get a first look at the world, and sometimes if I’m lucky the story within it that needs to be told. That gives me a big picture view, I know what kind of world it is. Then it varies depending on how much like our world that world is.

If it’s enough like our world, I just start writing and make everything up as I go along, or research it and pick and choose the things I want in the world.

If it’s different enough, I start big picturely. I think about what kind of things live in the world, how they get along, what kind of government there is, if there’s money, do they all speak the same language, ect.

Let’s go with an example, the most detailed worldbuilding I’ve ever done is for the universe that contains several stories: Light in the Dark, Sk8r Girl, The Invisibles, The Forgotten Realm of Dreams (Scion in Space), Space Cadet Luka, Is This Home Yet?, and an unnamed sequel to Sk8r Girl (tentatively I’m considering calling it “First Contact, or How to Talk to Aliens: An Autistic Scientist’s Guide to Proper Miscommunication”).

Within it I began with a few dreams, and then story ideas.

It all began when I was 12. (No really, Space Cadet Luka is a story I began when I was 12). Back then the first bits of worldbuilding I did was this: deciding that the story took place on a human colony on a planet that isn’t Earth, that there are animals that can do magic, that the colony maintains regular contact with Earth, that there’s nonhumans living in the colony too, that the people who could control the animals went on a journey and competed in some kind of competition, that they stayed in hotels for free while on their journey (because most of the time they did their journey right around age 13), that they could listen to “holiday” music from Earth on the radio whenever they wanted, and that there were cards that could help during fights between two people who could control the animals.

Some people might say that’s bad worldbuilding because little me didn’t include important things like: what they ate, the non-placeholder names of the animals or nonhumans, who ran the contests, if someone oversaw the journeys, what kind of money they use, the moral implications of the animal/controller relationship, who founded the colony, why is there a competition, what the hell are the ‘cards’ and how do they work, ect. But in little me’s defence, I was 12.

That was it for a while, I went to other stories. Then I picked up, Is This Home Yet? To be honest, I almost didn’t include it in this post because it started/currently lives it’s life as Frozen fanfiction, but it is part of the universe and I did create its entire world by scratch. It started with one simple thing: hatred directed toward some really asshole-ish politician who said those dumb things about rape like “it should be legal to force sex upon a woman because if it’s a legitimate rape the female body has ways of shutting that down.” From there I build up the world as I went, there was the true beginning of actually worldbuilding the entire universe.

I decided how the garbage is taken care of (trash pickup in Elsa’s neighborhood is every Wednesday); what they eat; how the government works; what kind of laws they have about things like discrimination against the lgbt community, racial issues, children wandering around without supervision; how the healthcare system works; what kind of problems (gangs, the mafia, human trafficking, drugs, ect) the police have to deal with on a daily basis; how insurance works; among other things.

From that I was able to build the world of The Invisibles, by adding in some simple but essential details: the inclusion of multiverse travels and theories; the everyday life of some adults (as opposed to high school students); what kind of companies are the same as our world; and minor details like the timeline and history.

For a while there were missing pieces in The Invisibles/Is This Home Yet world that broke the story for me. The most important one being that there was an agency regulating multiverse travel from a different universe in the multiverse, but I didn’t know anything about them or the world they lived in.

Then I had a dream about a skateboarding competition, two autistic lesbians, and an organization dedicated to ‘finding the truth’. And Sk8r Girl was born, and the world got bigger and better. I was able to decide more important things about the world like: who runs the school system when the government couldn’t care less about making sure people are educated because there’s ‘not enough money’ for that; who builds parks and bridges and handles the general infrastructure of the cities and towns and countries; how things might be different if exploration of the ‘new world’ focused a little less on ‘this is our land now’ and a little more on cooperation; how museums work; how children are handled when it’s discovered they’ve willingly (through either their own choice, or the choice of someone who was supposed to be taking care of them) fallen through the cracks of the system; how the general public handles autism, mental illnesses, and minority religions/people; and slightly more obscure things like differences in ancient myths.

After that I was able to create Light in the Dark, because it was in the same world, just set a few years earlier and about two side characters from Sk8r Girl. This allowed me to build up how the economy works; how companies work; how arranged marriages for business deals work; how college/university is different when it’s mostly handled by an organization dedicated to knowledge instead of private companies; how someone who doesn’t work for the big organization views it.

From all of this I was able to tie together The Invisibles with Sk8r Girl by allowing the big organization to be the organization that oversees multiverse travel.

The single most packed with worldbuilding story of them all is The Forgotten Realm of Dreams, which began from a dream and was originally not part of the universe.

[side note: The Invisibles/Is This Home Yet (though always in the same universe as each other) weren’t originally part of this large universe and neither was Space Cadet Luka (which is kind of duh because Space Cadet Luka existed well before any of the rest of these did). So originally this universe consisted solely of Light in the Dark and Sk8r Girl, the first one to get added to it was The Invisibles, when I realized that the organization was what I was missing from it, that brought Is This Home Yet with it; the second thing I added was The Forgotten Realm of Dreams and Space Cadet Luka when I realized the organization being the leader in space exploration on Earth (having unified all the disparate space organizations under their one banner through the clever use of money) would make for the perfect organization to be the face of humanity in a relatively peaceful galaxy, and being full of scientists and knowledge seekers and explorers would have made for excellent colonists to start up colonies on other worlds (and then study and work hard to cooperate and live in harmony with any native beings of the planet). Space Cadet Luka was easily attached to The Forgotten Realm of Dreams because I was lacking names for the nonhumans, and having them be some of the same species as in The Forgotten Realm of Dreams adds like 5 extra levels of stuff to the world.]

For it I have to build up entire alien civilizations (including religions, histories, biologies, governments, health care, cultures, ect); answer science questions; create multiple money systems; construct multiple languages with regional variances and both ancient, middle, and modern forms; design spaceships; interweave among all of that a deep secret and mystery of the universe; design entire planets and ecosystems; create new technology; repurpose ‘old’ technology; then I have to take everything I’ve created and put it through the lens of a nonhuman character or several; and be able to answer literally any question a fan would think to ask me about any of it.

Worldbuilding is tough, but my very basic model is “if I have a question, answer it. If someone might have that question, answer it. If it’s even possible to question that thing, answer it.”

I don’t know if any of this helps you at all, but it should give a weird look into my brain that is unedited and possibly doesn’t make any sense.

[katzenkrieg]

Loredump: Cam’s thoughts on Y’shtola

I have a massive loredump (see link in my bio) I work on updating occasionally, recording all kinds of details on my WoL, paladin Camille Delane, and his journey to date. Got Y’shtola’s updated just now! So if you like reading other people’s thoughts on their characters and on NPCs, here you go.

Spoilers through all of the ShB!

Y'shtola (canon, Scion; 23 at start, 27 before ShB time jump, 30 after; 31 at end of ShB) – For most of their fight against Gaius, Camille was deeply curious about Y'shtola; he suspected she had a complicated past and a lot of deeply-rooted beliefs and values that she rarely articulated but always acted on. He respected and found intriguing her commitment to understanding and valuing the beast tribes, and turned to her, hesitantly and diffidently, for insight on their cultures, histories, and their relationships to the city-states of Eorzea. Of all the Scions, he trusted her most to give him thorough, accurate information untouched by nationalism, stereotypes, or old grievances, on both the beast tribes and Eorzean leadership.

Whenever she seemed open to spending time together or being joined in her studies (even if it just meant he sat quietly in the same room and worked through reading and taking notes on something), he would join her, though he always kept to himself. Y’shtola was the first one to notice Cam’s reading/writing/learning disorder and to begin making accommodations for it without any fanfare (reading texts out loud when the Scions were discussing them, making sure there are note-taking materials available at meetings, etc.).

In a lot of ways, though Cam himself hasn’t really realized it and would be a bit mortified if he did, Y’shtola reminds him of his mother--crisp, uncompromising, incredibly competent, driven, an unconventional scholar and magic user, devoted to family and friends in her own way but also difficult to reach. In the same way that Cam held his mother in something like fear and awe and simultaneously felt like he was always a bit of a disappointment and a mystery to her, Cam always feels insufficient around Y’shtola but not in a way he really even notices or holds against her. He just accepts it as fact (though it would be good for his personal growth and self-esteem if he noticed and began to work to get over it).

During his time as a fugitive in Ishgard, Cam didn’t have that much time to think about the other Scions--and that was a good thing. Though it didn’t affect his relationship with Y’shtola greatly when she reappeared, his time working as an equal with Ysayle and Estinien helped him value and trust himself more.

With Y’shtola’s recovery from the Lifestream, Cam quickly went back to treating her as the de facto leader of the Scions, especially in the light of Papalymo (the other Scion Cam regarded as a senior)’s absence and then death. He did notice her blindness before the plot canonically has him do so--he has his own disabilities, after all, and is sensitive to them in others--but didn’t press her about it. It took him more than five years to feel comfortable with his own muteness, after all, and he’s *still* not comfortable with his learning disabilities. He gets needing time and space.

When Cam finally met Matoya, it explained a *lot.* Cam understands growing up with a mother figure you just can’t seem to be good enough for, although he wouldn’t easily articulate that fact to himself or anyone else. If Cam’s intimidated by Y’shtola, he’s near-superstitiously terrified of Matoya. 

Losing Y’shtola to unconsciousness when the Scions’ souls were being summoned to the First left Cam much more uncertain and lost than the loss of any of the other Scions--except for Alisaie and Alphinaud, of course. Without Y’shtola’s knowledge and directness, Cam had no idea how he could possibly figure out what had happened to his friends and how to get them back. (True, he could have tried working directly with Matoya, but, honestly, that thought never occurred to him. *Talking* to Matoya is something that Cam hardly thinks he’s capable of.)

Finally meeting Y’shtola again in the First left Cam in an interesting emotional spot--he simultaneously continued to find her intimidating and also began to be concerned for her. Taking Matoya’s name and, in many ways, her role directly made it hard for Cam to look away from the fact that Y’shtola, too, likely shares Cam’s struggle to live up to an image of a parent figure--and after she jumped into the Lifestream a *second* time in order to save others she’d decided she was responsible for, she made it clear she valued herself much less than she should. Throwing one’s life away recklessly to save others leaves a burden on them and makes them feel like you didn’t understand what you meant to them--it’s not a gift. It’s not something Cam would ever do, if he could help it.

As the events in the First drew to a head and finally concluded with the final banishing of the Light, Cam had finally moved beyond thinking of Y’shtola as a superior. Though he still will default to deference around her, he’s, uncomfortably, realized this probably isn’t good for either of them. Cam’s made a point of getting to know Runar better and encouraging Runar in getting closer to Y’shtola; Runar is one of the only people, if not *the* only person, Cam’s seen get anywhere close to breaking through Y’shtola’s distance. He’s talked to Runar about Y’shtola and about his experiences with her quite a bit by this point. Runar’s shown Cam how to make certain teas and snacks that Y’shtola really enjoys, and Cam makes sure to make them for her now and then, and to remind her to take breaks from her work.

Cam is *incredibly relieved* that Y’shtola finally gave her true name to the Night’s Blessed. Y’shtola needs family that she doesn’t feel like she has to keep up walls around. If the Scions can’t be that for her, than at least, possibly, the Night’s Blessed might be, some day. 

Cam was stunned and horrified when Y’shtola didn’t recognize him when they first met in the First. To have his aether and soul altered so much that someone that smart, in Cam’s estimation, and who’d known him that long couldn’t recognize him and to not have even felt the change himself left Cam very, very lost and confirmed his growing feeling since arriving in the First that events would, inevitably, erase his identity and turn him into something he would no longer recognize. And that his friends would eventually have to kill or imprison him. He very much appreciated and was surprised by the fact that she made a point of telling him about his condition directly and that she continued to confront Urianger about it. To have her respect him enough--and even care for him enough--that she would let him know what was happening and continue to advocate for him was a surprise to him, and one he was grateful for.

Cam appreciates that Y’shtola’s more forthcoming about her blindness now and has tried to talk to her about it--and has definitely talked to Urianger about it, to see what Urianger’s learned that Y’shtola might not yet have revealed to Cam. 

Cam wants to know what Alisaie, Alphinaud, and Y’shtola did and talked about while Y’shtola was claiming mom time with the twins during their work distracting Eulmoran forces in Amh Araeng :| DID THEY TALK ABOUT HIM. WHAT DID THEY SAY.

Following events in the First, Y’shtola is the *only* Scion Cam thinks would be able to keep cool enough to lead the Scions and kill or imprison Cam if the transformation Cam still half-suspects is inevitable, even after being purged of the Light, ever happened. He’s also been surprised by the fact that now, he thinks she might try to save him, first. He wouldn’t really have expected that from her. 

Following events in the First, Cam is also less cagey about his learning disabilities around Y’shtola and publicly and openly uses some magical tools she gave him much earlier that can make reading more accessible for him--particularly a small device that can read out many printed texts (and can make a go at written texts). What Cam *doesn’t* know is that Matoya gave Y’shtola this device without any prompting and told Y’shtola to give it to “that boy of hers who’s terrified of books.” It took Y’shtola a few moments to figure out who the hell Matoya was talking about… (The device is actually one some Sharlayan institutes give students with learning disabilities like Cam’s, specifically to help them have access to higher learning.) If Cam knew it came from Matoya, he’d probably throw it right across the room. It might do something! Weird! And scholarly! :||||| Why would Matoya be nice to him?

Prior to events in the First, Cam would have sworn Y’shtola and Thancred were going to get together eventually. How that broke down and Thancred ended up with Urianger is still a story Cam’s not sure he wants to hear…

Cam and Y’shtola both have an unspoken agreement at this point to regularly butt into Urianger’s life and private business to make sure he’s not up to something secret, tragic, and unnecessary *again.*