#I just don't play a lot of video games at all for someone who ostensibly loves them a lot ^^;;

[blujayonthewing]

finally finally started playing hollow knight recently after having bought it on sale I literally can't remember when, and man it's been a long time since I played a platformer I forgot how fucking fun it is

[gemsofthegalaxy]

I just watched a video on how Sevika was the most loyal character in the show, it was just that she was loyal to the idea of Zaun and progress and i don't disagree, but, i am a tiiny smidge confused. maybe i am just misremembering something?

in season one she gets pissed off at Vander for working with the enforcers because she wants Zaun to rise up, i think? then she goes to Silco who also wants Zaun to rise up, but shit happens, and by the time skip we see that Silco also has a deal with the enforcers, and not only that, has a hand in increasing addictions to shimmer in the Undercity

he's still a good leader to an extent and, well, he came close to striking a more notable deal with Jayce, but it didn't come to fruition. and i get that maybe he's just the "best case" out of all the people with any influence, and maybe Sevika is just playing the long game until the actual revolution is finally ready to happen for real this time but...

Sevika is a doer, clearly if she wanted to be a leader she could be. At any point, she could have killed Silco in his sleep and taken over, but she didn't because she ostensibly didn't one to be the one IN Charge. she's a woman of action. That's fine to an extent, but, honestly, I think the fact that by the end she's the one forced to take the seat on a council is good for her because... well, Silco was very similar if not worse than how Vander ended up. Neither of them pushed Zaun very far towards progress. Silco arguably made Zaun a worse place, albeit probably not as bad as the Chem Barons would have made it had any of them taken the top spot.

Sevika is the only one we see that seems to truly want to put Zaun above all else, who has few other loyalties, who would not put their child's life above the city's wellbeing, etc. so she SHOULD be the one on the council - she also has the benefit of being well known to the people and having firsthand experience with the struggles people face. and, if she were going to be tempted by shiny things and luxury, she would have already gone the route of the chem barons but she hasn't. Being forced to put actual political action into play instead of being a grunt for a drugmonger is an interesting development.

and on that, i'm still not sure why she tolerated as much of Silco's proliferation of the drugs though? like. i dunno maybe i am just sensitive as someone from a place with a lot of addiction- i don't think drugs are inherently bad and stuff in real life, either, humans are going to have fun in different ways and there's a difference between knowing your limits and. well, not. but. seeing how badly shimmer effects some people IN the undercity kinda sucks, y'know. they want to liberate Zaun from Piltover but who's liberating Zaun from them and the chem barons? recreating the hierarchy of the other society in their own backyard isn't much of a revolution i guess.

idk, i'm just ranting. the only person who's vision I really agree with is Ekko <3 i dont even blame him that much for having a more reclusive private community, because mutual aid is often hyperlocal and targetted. they could expand as resources actually allowed them to, i don't think Ekko ever wanted to abandon anyone so much as was limited in scope.

[liketheinferno2]

Like any other series in the world, FFXIV does have it's ups and downs. No matter what though, I think you'll find things to love and enjoy in Stormblood and i'm personally quite excited to hear your thoughts as you go through it.

Truly the WORST I've ever seen FFXIV get was still really good for an MMO. I feel like fandom types tend to get skewed certain ways depending on stuff they've been into before but after digging in the ground for cohesive characters and story in shit like Borderlands and Far Cry for years of my life I'm like hey it seems like Final Fantasy is actually a big budget popular video game series that is good. Who'd have thought THAT possible.

Nier was similar for me, just, holy shit this game is narratively complete. I don't have to feel like a suckered-in narratively-cucked idiot for expecting it to satiate my artistic mind. For so long I was the Genuinely Expects Queer Rep In The MCU Guy of gamers and now I'm playing stuff where it's like the writing was taken seriously as a piece of art, god fucking forbid, y'know?

Excuse me hijacking this sweet ask to rant about vidya gaem fanwank but I just... I enjoy Final Fantasy very very much. Generally I prefer to play stuff that HAS that wealth of content and fidelity that you can only get from a big studio but I feel like that usually comes at a cost to tight writing and emotional impact. It'd be like, common practice to discuss what parts of the story we'd "fix" or delete entirely, to go over and over what parts we hate about the thing we're ostensibly enjoying, but I'm no longer someone who's like "fuck canon I rewrite my own better version" BECAUSE THE GAME IS ALREADY GOOD. THE GAME IS GOOD!!! GOT DAMN!!!!!!!!

Like fuck me I'm thinking about Estinien a lot right now as you can probably tell but it's because I've never had a game crack into that feeling this hard before in my life. We've all met this guy. Angry difficult traumatised person who you know is in a bad situation and maybe they could get better if you could just help them out, but they don't want to leave. In real life you probably cannot save this guy, but this is Final Fantasy!

And even then they don't make it easy, the consequences for people giving up on Estinien are fucking DIRE, but it's the way this story takes you as low as you can go before letting you crawl out of there together. The process of getting you to think of a certain person as a partner or best friend or like-family to your protagonist and then taking them out in a way that makes you understand for a moment why Estinien and Nidhogg have fallen so far in grief and anger themselves. ..

And what I really love about FFXIV is it gives you a space for recovery and reflection, it's not throwing tragedy at you just for spectacle or shock. When someone dies, you mourn. When you retrieve Estinien from what was essentially a kidnapping, he's in the hospital for a while. Shit like Aymeric reaching out almost desperately for companionship after the events of Heavensward and the way they build such a protective relationship between the player and Alphinaud is like there's so much CARE in this, they take feelings so completely seriously and really that's what you need to do in a game like this. When the literal situations are all JRPG levels of absurd nonsense it's like you either go hard on the feelings or you've lost me.

There's been a big push in recent years that art has to SAY SOMETHING or TACKLE THINGS but that attitude can often be antithetical to stories that are effective and cathartic and that feel genuine. The other thing I like about FFXIV is it's weird and atypical fantasy in a lot of places but it doesn't do any of this in service of defying or subverting the tropes to make a statement or whatever the fuck. You can just have weird stuff like the GO LITTLE BETA BOY GO thing with the Tias, or that their elf-equivalent is the racial majority instead of humans, or the massive height differences any time you interact with anybody, or that the Lalafell are the little gnome wombat ruling capitalist class, without knowing that it's only weird because it's trying so hard to not be normal.

I gotta stop before I carry on forever but there's so many little good things in FFXIV that (along with the overwhelmingly caring tone of the entire game) make it a very special experience; ESPECIALLY in comparison to the stuff I used to play, so I'm pretty much enjoying everything it throws at me. :D