#I only just finished shadowbringers

[mimleaf]

Ryne 💙

[sheeshiki]

many many many thoughts about shadowbringers and lightwardens and sin-eaters. a little thing i've been working on while i go through the expansion..........

[sapphic-luminosity]

me: oh veilguard is out, i should try and catch up on dragon age

me: *proceeds to play other games instead*

[anneapocalypse]

I absolutely love Urianger's walking-on-water scene, and I think what I love most about it is how much he's trying not to ask for help and what that says about him and where he's at right now.

At first glance it's easy to respond just as Alisaie does, gods above Urianger you have two friends with you who can breathe underwater, just ask, but the thing is he is trying so hard right now not to ask any more of the Warrior of Light than he already has. Look at how different this is from the early game's "Primal needs slaying? Dangerous thing needs doing? The Warrior of Light will do it!" coming from everyone. Urianger in particular is agonizingly aware of how much he has asked of all of his friends but especially Minfilia and the WoL. He knows what they went through to save the First and he knows it was ultimately all because of him that any of the Scions were dragged into this in the first place.

And sure, it's easy to poke fun at him for trying to walk on water rather than learn to swim, as Alphinaud does (and look, the twins have Urianger-roasting privileges, I'm not picking on them), but from another angle, he went and sought the help of the fae again at who knows what cost just to try and get around what I think from his dialogue is a genuine fear of deep water, just so he could handle this himself and not have to lean on his friends any more than he already has. And when it doesn't work, he's obviously embarrassed, not just at the indignity of falling in the water and having to be rescued, but also because he failed at something he's supposed to be good at, magic.

And of course, when Bismarck asks for help with the barnacles, the obvious thing to do is to ask the Warrior of Light and Alisaie. But his pride is still stinging from the previous failure and he just... doesn't want to ask any more of his friends than he has.

If he could, I think it would always be Urianger's instinct to handle everything himself and never involve anyone else, never ask for anything, never be a burden. That might even work if he didn't have an enormous heart that was always trying to help and do the greatest good and save the world--though it still wouldn't be good for him, in the end, because it would just isolate him further. He's still in the process of learning that not only can he not do it all alone, no one wants him to!

(Edited to add: I am still in post-Shadowbringers and haven't played Endwalker yet, so no spoilers please!) Update: I have finished Endwalker, I am FREE.

[wundergeek]

G'raha, I would die for you

Okay. Replaying Shadowbringers rn and G'raha just got abducted by Emet-Selch, and this whole scene hits just as hard on the fourth play-through as it did on the first. Look at this fuckin face. This is the face of a man who loved you from a distance for A HUNDRED YEARS assuming you didn't even remember his fucking name, until you call out to him just as he's about to sacrifice his life for yours.

He's about to teleport himself into the Rift and fuckin' die, and still, that proof that you remember him, that you matter to him makes him so fucking happy.

And. Like. Take a minute to think about that.

Not only did he come up with this insane scheme to rewrite history, then actually have the brilliance to pull it off, but... he has lived MULTIPLE LIFETIMES for you, and walked into this situation anyway, fully thinking that he was going to die, and totally prepared to sacrifice more than anyone could possibly comprehend. Like - imagine living long enough to see the small community of refugees you harbored to grow into a vibrant city. Imagine being part of their lives as the first residents of the Crystarium have children, grow old, and die, even as their children are having children of their own.

Imagine an attack that happens during that second generation that kills a couple with a young child and taking her in because she has no one to care for her. Imagine taking time, despite all of your responsibilities and literally being on the clock to save the world, to raise her to be strong, loyal, and unfailingly excellent at what she does. She isn't your blood, but she's the closest thing you'll ever have to a daughter, and still you don't hesitate to leave when it's time to see your scheme through to its ultimate end - your ultimate end.

Imagine what it would have been like making those final preparations without being able to tell anyone that you were saying goodbye.

Imagine having tea with Chessamile and agreeing with her that you need to do this more often.

Imagine discussing improvements to the Crystarium with Katliss that you know you'll never see.

Imagine gossiping with Bragi and knowing you'll never get to hear how things turned out.

Imagine visiting Moren to give him a book and saying nothing as he insists that he'll return it to you when he's finished.

Imagine having lunch with Lyna, your daughter, who will find herself in charge when you're gone, and having to give her instructions about what to do in the event of your death.

Imagine having that much love in your life - an entire city that you built from the ground up, and whose residents you loved with all your heart, and who loved you just as strongly. And calmly bidding that entire life farewell as you take an amaro to Kholusia to rewrite history by saving the life of the person you love, thinking that you were nothing more than a minor footnote in their previous adventures. Then imagine finding out at the literal last second that they not only remember, but cared deeply about you the entire time, and still having the strength of will to sacrifice yourself anyway.

What an icon. What an absolute fucking legend.

[koukouture]

I will forever think about this now because yeah this applies to an astounding amount of characters in ffxiv whom you could see their friendship with WoL as more of a convenience and how they use WoL as a tool. I think Aymeric is obviously guilty of it (bc of the above image) but I also think to some extent the Crystal Exarch is guilty of this (yeah ik it's not for HIS benefit but he still did kinda use WoL and he would not have taken it well if WoL stopped being a hero)

So many characters that are "friends" with WoL kind of only see them for what they can do. I think to some extent even the Scions are like that. Actually come to think of it, the Scions are the most egregious case of this because WoL is their champion. After we killed Ifrit that solidified WoL as something to be used and thrown at any danger that came at the world.

A lot of characters The Exarch included only know WoL as the hero. For what they can do for everyone else and it makes me insaaaannnneee. Likes yes OBVIOUSLY Exarch/G'raha admires the WoL as a hero and sure he got to know us for a time- but he just thinks that we are the hero from the books. WoL is inspiring; they give people hope and they give people the strength to push on but that's all he knows them for. Listen, I'm still on post Shadowbringers, but so far Exarch has done nothing but sing our praises as hero and yeah I'm sure he has good intentions but it's still a little dehumanizing that to him that's all WoL is. Everyone is free to make their WoL's relationships with the other characters whatever the hell they want ofc, but I kinda read a lot of the characters this way just because it's so easy to water down one person for only cherry picked parts of their whole personality. Celebrities are the best example of this but we also to this to the people around us every single day.

I think Aymeric and WoL's relationship has also sort of been put into question with this moment (for me at least) because now I'm thinking "Oh my god, Aymeric did extend his friendship to WoL for either his own gain or for that of Ishgard's" and it's not a rag on him I love Aymeric but he is a politician. I don't doubt he admires WoL for all they've done for Ishgard, but I also don't think that if Aymeric hadn't pushed us we wouldn't have ended the Dragonsong war. I wouldn't say he manipulated us, but he didn't exactly have any qualms about making us battle on the Steps of Faith for Ishgard- yk, the closed off nation that's pretty hostile to outsiders- despite not knowing us for super long at that point. He thought that we could get it done and was like "Sure. You can fight for my country" and yeah I think Alphinaud's handling of the whole thing was also to blame- but Aymeric being okay with letting an outsider deal with things that should be handled by the Temple Knights is kinda sus to me now lmao. Like you are in charge of Ishgard's military shouldn't YOU have dealt with this???? Okay lol.

Listen, obviously I still love Aymeric and Exarch/G'raha but I think the potential that they only see WoL for their deeds is great and would make for an interesting hurdle to get over in a relationship. Actually, you can literally just slap this onto almost any character you want to ship with your WoL and it will be an interesting point of tension. The possibility that they only love WoL for being the hero and not in spite of it.

Anyways I need to thibk about this more bc I just finished the little Elidibus plot of Shadowbringers which is sort of about how heroes are remembered and how history can easily twisted and/or forgotten so uh yeah. I have lots of thoughts and I am very normal.

[maybevillage]

my really really long rant about endwalker

i'm not kidding this is really long. spoilers ahead of course, like immediately upon entry. sorry i sound so angry the whole time

unfortunately for me and for anyone reading this, endwalker is one of those cases where i like/d so much of what happens that the many weak moments make me more critical of the whole than i would be if it was just wholly bad like stormblood, bc it's a waste of potential. a lot of the time the moments i liked would even be happening simultaneously with the things i find so problematic: cheap storytelling decisions, cheap moments that only serve as fanservice or for shock value that only detract from a characters’ pre-existing complexity, poorly done rehashing of elements from shadowbringers, a lot of hollow pseudo-intellectual arguments, rushed and underdeveloped writing in one instance and then meandering wastes of time immediately after….these issues are so consistent that rather than try to break up endwalker's story based on these things, i will just try to run thru the whole thing chronologically and hope i don't get too repetitive. that's why this isn't an essay with some pretense of structure. i'll do my best.

what's crazy to me is i thought endwalker was going to be my second favourite expansion. this was despite not caring about its original main conflict--i thought fandaniel just wasn't a compelling or even interesting villain. he comes out of nowhere. and he's also asahi so that association is hard to break away from bc i find asahi silly. and he suffers from the same writing issues zenos does, where nearly every cutscene with them did little to develop their characters further from the baseline, only reiterated what i already know bc they literally never say anything else: zenos wants to fight wol, he's bored with everything life could possibly offer, fandaniel will ensure zenos can fight wol through his towers bc he no longer plays to the tune of his unsundered masters... even though what fandaniel was promising to cause were the final days i just didn't really care. in the wake of shadowbringers the final days are like a pretty big deal, but something about reviving a catastrophe i had just finished wrapping up--i thought, naively--made bringing them back seem really thoughtless. i don't really need to see anymore final days...like how much more do i need to understand how bad it was? i mean i think shb did a pretty good job????? of making the final days seem pretty fucking bad. why not come up with something new because this is endwalker and not shadowbringers haha? the only fresh thing about this new uncooler final days was the motivation behind them. fandaniel wanting to bring about the final days bc he wants to die and thinks everything should die with him vs emet-selch's unwillingness to die no matter what bc the final days took everything from him and he needs to bring it all back. still, recontextualising the final days from a past event into a present issue ruins them to me. whatever, i thought, there's no way we're letting the final days happen so what does this matter anyways. there's no way.

so yeah post-shb into ew was starting to lose me plot-wise. not the end of the world (LOL?) though bc the atmosphere in the beginning was so subtle and fresh and rich like dew in the morning that i was willing to look past it. going to old sharlayan i liked a lot. i liked going there not as a more typical homecoming for your friends but to instead uncover the sharlayan forum's cryptic behaviour. this kind of intrigue was what i really wanted after the grandness of shadowbringers and i really do think endwalker gave me that for a while. i liked the opening scene on the ship a lot bc it felt exciting and uncertain and new, especially talking to hydaelyn. i liked how she had become such an unstable variable after originally being the most anchoring presence in the entire game: learning she's a primal, whether she's actually “good” after listening to emet-selch’s explanation of her origins and actions in shb, and the fact that her appeals to her champions have been fewer and fewer… i thought her meeting with you at the very beginning of endwalker was cool and foreboding. i also really liked the emet-selch narration btw, i thought that was a fun choice. who better to guide you into the final stages of your adventure than the person who left you with that final, most important task. i wish this had been the only callback to his character at all. 

so a big part of why i like/d endwalker so much is all that atmosphere. and something i can't really put into words. it just felt cool and cohesive at the start. old sharlayan is one of my favourite locations now; i like that despite its rigidity and (to me farcical but w/e tangent) pursuit of rationality/knowledge, there's the quaint island charm and fresh winter sea and overgrown greenery and forest paths. i liked that the game enhanced the usual hubworld tour chore by having g’raha and krile follow you around to give you more personal anecdotes of the place, really gave it a more lived-in feeling, which really added to both them and the location. i also really liked all this charm and familiarity in tandem with the secret hostility of the place bc of the forum, having to sneak around and so on, sharlayan citizens not really recognising you somehow? but being very aware of a warrior of light threat to their way of life, even if i find that non-intervention way of life silly.

i also really liked labryinthos. it's a really creative place. i liked its uncanny false sky and controlled environment, and yet all the people scrambling about inside. and the music felt kind of magical like i had encountered another fairy area or something idk it all felt very whimsical. thavnair i really liked as well but i feel like my immediate impression of the place was kind of poisoned by the stereotypes, like the huge focus on trade and the first impression being undercutting foreign tourists but then i started to really enjoy the part where you run around with matsya and help him sell fish. i liked the mundanity and slow pace of that exercise bc it felt like a much more involved way of learning about thavnair and its current issues through conversations rather than the fetch quest slog, and this is one of the things i like a lot about the beginning of endwalker. the gameplay really improved i think bc they found more creative ways of having you interact with your surroundings, rather than having the usual running between npcs to fetch things for them or other chores. like rather than doing a string of quests and then being rewarded with development of the story, the gameplay simultaneously develops the story. like turning into frogs i thought was fun, testing nidhana’s aether lamp was fun, etc. it felt like they had better ideas about how to progress the in-between parts.

thavnair quickly started to upset me though bc it started to feel like the only relevance the location had was what they could give you for your military cause, that is, the scales. like alchemy is this place’s big highlight and its just the scales the scales the scales and the tower aughhhhhh!!!!!!! the tower!!!!!!!!!! i wish they had focused on something but i guess this is just to be expected with ffxiv...any interaction with a foreign ("foreign" as far as square enix eorzea is concerned) culture really boils down to how they might bolster your military efforts, the azim steppe for eg. so it felt like my concern for an individual (matsya) and the experience firsthand trying to help him with his day to day; the idea that every single person on earth is important and shouldn't be made to suffer, and helping that single person... was like overshadowed by something more focused on a “greater good", that is, the construction of the scales to defeat the towers to save the world ad infinitum. but if you played endwalker then you would know how this idea of only concerning oneself with a "greater good" and this diluting of the importance of an individual's life for the sake of this idealistic whole causes some problems for a certain someone..................so why didn't the game focus more on these themes? probably because at the end of the day it's a video game by square enix and you need a big boss to fight or something or bc this expansion is insanely unfocused i don't know. i feel like this concept about the importance of the small things that can add up to one life and how that one life is beautiful and important crops up with the significance of weeds despite its importance overall. i don't know if i think this is one of the main underlying themes of endwalker just poorly executed so as to not even be there or if i just wish it was one of its main themes. anyways i'm getting distracted, what i mean to say is thavnair gets dehumanised throughout the entire expansion in the most horrific ways possible so i guess this was just the start

moving on... i liked the part in garlemald a lot, which i didn't expect bc i don't expect this game to handle anything regarding imperialism well. i liked that the garlemald you finally experience, after it being one of your main enemies and this very proud nation, was just this dead quiet and ruined place. the quest where you follow that girl is another eg of how the gameplay was a bit more immersive, i think it helped me feel the loneliness and the danger of the place, that i could be a danger to this girl. that i really had to try if i wanted to help her. what i didn't like was alphinaud's and alisaie’s babying attitude towards the garleans? like ok yeah of course we’re gonna have patience and grace for GARLEMALD meanwhile lyse was losing her head at the ala mhigans whenever they disagreed with her. like sure arguing won't get anywhere but it felt like the twins were reckoning with children sometimes, it was so strange. but i did like that the game didn't shy away from making the garleans just unpleasant to be around at best, and an actual danger to you at worst. it's just better to me to make them harder to reconcile with so that there's no frustrating cheap shots at redemption but rather a good, sobering look at a society that's been totally and willingly misled. and i liked that alisaie's and alphinaud's attempts to help those garlean kids ended so badly, even though i'm not usually a fan of such cruel outcomes. it felt like we were seeing a garlemald not necessarily being punished for its actions more than we were seeing a place built on shitty ideals crumble bc of those ideals. i thought jullus was a good char and helped to carry that idea of disillusionment forward. i didn't care so much about sympathising with what he'd lost, but i did find it interesting how they contrast him with the legatus he's working under, who even while the place is in ruins is still more concerned with war than providing for the people relying on him. i don't think the part in garlemald is perfect by any means, like it doesn't do anything too brave, but ig it was a lot more subtle and complex in its storytelling than i expected. and it wasn't meaninglessly cruel. like i'm glad those shock collars put on the twins were only used to gauge jullus' emotional growth or something like him not wanting to activate them rather than them actually being fucking used which would have just made me close the game and not look back.

from here on is where i struggle to lock in for the rest of the story. starting with when zenos kidnaps you in the midst of the fighting at camp broken glass--i don't think i have ever been more immediately mentally locked out of a story. endwalker is darker than usual, trapping people in fleshy towers, two young girls lying dead on the ice, tentacles erupting out of tempered garlean soldiers... and so on. and while i don't personally like things that are overly dark or cruel, it's not that i think they're bad, just that with moments like that it's a lot better imo that a point is being made or they add something to the story, and that it doesn't feel soullessly random or disrespectful. unfortunately this stops being the case for the rest of the expansion..... like something about the weird eldritch feeling of fandaniel pulling you out of your body and putting you in a random soldier's was throwing me off immensely. it felt like i was playing a different game, like so disconcerting i found it distracting, because why would he not just do this to screw you over more often? i didn't understand them having access to such an unrestrained power. at the same time it was also just too wacky to really take seriously despite the apparent gravity of what was happening. zenos inside of my bunny girl's body??? i don't even understand why they did it? to piss you off?? the duty where you play as the imperial soldier was interesting i guess but i couldn’t understand what the meaning behind being made to struggle through that experience was... like didn't we just spend all that time sympathising with the garleans and wrap that section up already? why do i now need to sympathise with/experience firsthand what its like to be a garlean footsoldier? and it annoyed me because these parts felt emotionally rich, like stumbling across those garleans fighting that machine and trying to do your best to help them; dragging yourself across the ground to get to your friends before something bad happens to them, and running towards them before zenos hurts them while in your body--i thought all of that could've been really poignant if not for the actual situation being so silly?? they could have just kept some of those ideas, wol dragging themselves across the ground for eg--the extent to which they're willing to stop harm from reaching their friends (which reminds me of what vrtra says to you about the importance of protecting your friends the first time you meet him. but that was such a one-off moment that goes nowhere... i just wish ew would pick something, anything, to be a poignant message about love on planet earth if they want nihilism to be the main villain, and just stick to it)--and do something that felt a lot more relevant to the established story thus far? just felt totally pointless

what makes this worse is this ridiculous part is iirc right after fandaniel reveals that the entity tempering all of the garleans is varis reanimated as an ancient oh-so-important primal...?? like here's (what i thought was going to be) an actually important point in the story being sidelined for a moment that just goes absolutely nowhere. they certainly made it seem important for a moment, and i think this would've rounded off what was being said about garlemald well; the garleans are so taken in by the farce of their homeland that they think varis is calling them to reclaim their country over the radio, but all along what's actually causing their nation to fall apart is this monstrous version of their late emperor. the irony would've been interesting but they just do nothing with it... (i think desecrating a dead person's corpse by turning it into a monster is really weird btw, even weirder that they do it for no reason. whatever ew is weird.) i thought, considering that this plotline was being established from before endwalker started, that anima was going to take some time. not so. ffxiv would rather have you and zenos enact tropes from a disney channel movie. you merk that guy at the end of the tower of babil and from then on every important plot point the expansion could possibly have moves at fucking mach 567472838758745745

because why all of a sudden are you getting beamed up to the moon? and fighting ZODIARK? i was so confused when asahi i mean fandaniel was punching shit into that fuckgin allagan computer like fandaniel what the fuck are you talking about... i couldn't process anything that happened here. like i'll willingly put aside boring practicalities like why anyone can breathe on the moon, but not so much how fast this all happened and how out of nowhere--is this the reason fandaniel is also amon btw? so that he can use their allagan computers to do this? bc i honestly can’t find any other reason why him being amon is relevant when they revealed that in the tower of zot...like i dont get why that's important

and it doesn't get better after this is the sad thing to me. it doesn't pick itself back up. it is just extremely unfocused right until the endwalker. i was willing to move past getting rid of zodiark so quickly because it's not that i hold standard storytelling rules so dearly in my heart that i need the biggest final boss of the entire series to get a bit more gravitas. it actually ended up being a pretty interesting decision--dispatching the largest villain at the heart of the game being the catalyst for the biggest catastrophe you've ever heard of. like i like that wol gets played. but the entire mare lamentorum section that follows is disrespectful. this expansion suffers from some extreme tonal dissonance, bc how does wol learn that the final days are now upon them and then proceed to spend their time leisurely touring the moon rabbit facility to tell them that the clothes they’ve made for humans to wear isn’t fashionable? why on god's green earth does that matter at this current juncture? this part is one of the worst story-writing sinkholes in the expansion to me, bc why are the discrepancies between what the loporrits know of humanity vs what humanity is actually like something the story chooses to grapple with? we're building an ark to save humanity, and instead of approaching this in a contemplative or emotional way, the point of conflict they choose is logistics? in the expansion about nihilism? at best this conflict was overly realistic..... mostly it's just boring, and at worst the FINAL DAYS are now upon us, so why am i taste-testing carrots? how could the sharlayans, the most focused group of people on the entire planet, have been collaborating with the loporrits for decades and not even have one of the most basic aspects of staying alive squared away? i’m supposed to not only believe that nobody knew after all that time the lopporits think people only eat carrots, but also waste time on fixing this? whyyyyy would they even devote any time to this at all when there are so many more complicated and interesting ideas that they let flounder bc they rush through them at breakneck pace constantly? we just fucking killed zodiark! is this why they stick urianger up there to do all the fixing actually? to save time offscreen? maybe that's why they chose this asinine chunk of the story to start processing his character? though why they would choose to add more to a plate they can barely balance i don't know. i don’t even feel like getting into what they did with urianger bc it will just piss me off. i think only my love for rabbits and how i will never ever not find urianger precious were stopping me from putting a hex on square enix

the following section of the story is easily the worst part to me in the entire game. like i would rather replay stormblood multiple times in a row than ever sit through the final days coming to thavnair ever again. i've already said bringing back the final days would just be bad; a disservice to the time spent on it in shadowbringers. what more is there to say on that front? nothing. and the way ew utilises the final days tells me that the answer is nothing. it just wanted to unleash the violence of that event on the non-white area and spends an insane amount of time doing it. i can think of no other time in this game where there is so much wanton death and destruction for no useful storytelling reason other than to relish in the cheap shock of witnessing violence, violence they are unwilling to inflict on its white areas, because even in garlemald you only see the aftermath of what happens rather than being in the midst of it. it was actually making me feel fatigued. it was just so much of the same thing over and over with no real meaning to any of it. and that's not to say that meaning justifies suffering, but this is a game.....with a story... first and foremost? there needs to be some kind of reason to move the story forward? but nothing new or inspired is being said, just "the final days are really bad"

i’m actually not even sure where to begin so i’ll start with a glaring issue: i hate that people turn into abominations. people “randomly” turning into monsters just feels too unwieldy--how could there be any sense whatsoever that that situation is controllable? even learning that it's caused by feelings of despair is shit because emotions are so vague, how could there be any worthwhile attempt to control your emotions, let alone while watching your loved ones turn into/be eaten by monsters? this entire part felt so wildly out of hand/unpredictable to me that every single moment onward that wasn't more or less focused on maintaining this extremealy volatile situation felt like an unforgivable lack of priorities. it was extremely distracting to have it hovering over everything; everything else felt absolutely inconsequential in comparison. bc what the fuck do you mean people are randomly turning into monsters?? also the stakes were already really high just knowing the final days were coming, so raising them that much higher felt unnecessary to the point of it being hard to believe. and then bc you know there's no way any character important to wol is going to turn into a monster, subjecting commonfolk npcs to this just feels absurdly cruel, and also just made it obvious how much of a cheap scare it all was, bc it can't have any real narrative importance as a result of only happening to random npcs. it was all so blatantly fake-deep. there was no meaning behind them originally being people except for the useless horror of it--the scions still referred to them as monsters to be put down rather than as the people they used to be, just like any other monster in this game. dynamis was more of a retroactive explanation for why people turned into monsters, rather than people turning into monsters bolstering any understanding of dynamis. in shb the sin eaters had some method to them that made them more believable. you fight them throughout the story rather than them just being dropped on you midway through, they helped provide a picture of what kind of world the first was, they were emotional diving boards for characters like alisaie to develop personal goals and so on and so forth... the horror of the sin eaters had a narrative purpose. in endwalker it feels like they didn’t know what to do but wanted to replicate parts of shadowbringers, but didn't know why those parts worked so well bc they're too obsessed with trying to shock their audience. this part just sucked beyond description.

and it just continues to get worse. how can you be the one writing the parametres of a situation and you create something that's literally unmanageable, so that when its only manageable bc you need it to be, it's just so obviously shit writing? my sister described endwalker's writing as really contrived, like when they need something to happen (and that thing is often a really bad idea) they just shove it in there at the cost of keeping their characters in character, or having their story threads--both the interesting ones and the stupid ones--fall totally flat. she says they shortcut the writing. and it's true. for eg, the characters literally don't feel like themselves at times, or get utilised in really moronic ways. like when wol just watches the satrap die, another cheap scare btw he literally gets grabbed an eaten in a way my sis (i was ranting to her a lot about this game ok) described as straight from attack on titan. just gets grabbed and eaten. and this happens to him for such asinine reasons: 1. so that this random asf plot point of vrtra revealing himself as the true satrap can bear fruit. for some fucking reason. i struggle to understand why this is important at all but i guess it's yet another little sideplot that ew just can't seem to resist adding to its already towering plate at the plot buffet, like whatever is going on with urianger and moenbryda's parents/the loporrits, or zenos who now spends most of his time offscreen, or the twins and their father, etc, bc ew likes to waste time 2. so that g'raha (???????????????????????) out of fucking nowhere can have a big boy moment and direct the scions and the people of thavnair in their time of need. what on earth was that scene supposed to be? fanservice? a reminder that g'raha was a leader back in the first? which blows my mind bc mere moments before he had a scene i really enjoyed despite the circumstances, where after a man witnesses his son get turned into a beast and then stepped on by another beast because endwalker is literally jacking itself off to suffering and expects me to be doing the same... g’raha goes up to this man and stops him from panicking and turning into a monster himself. while i don't think any of this should be happening, i thought it was a nice take on his character to have a more sensitive moment in such a harrowing situation. i don't know, have a character demonstrate some emotional skills instead of the usual fighting ones. ofc all of this i thought mere moments before disaster. why was any of this necessary? literally why not just have the satrap, i don't know, take charge of his country when he's needed most, even if he's only been a figurehead the whole time? why let him go out so horribly when he obvious loves his people with his whole heart just so that vrtra can step in without any sort of conflict? i don't understand the focus on vrtra at all

and it actually just keeps getting worse.. the following part where you have to find matsya's friends at palaka's stand was awful. the friends have a newborn baby, so it's obvious that only that baby is surviving bc ew is convinced you don't know how harsh the world is yet. that must be why this part is so long? i'm repeating myself but so many other things that shouldn't be rushed get rushed, only for ew to devote a lot of time to sections like this where nothing changes or develops except for compounding how bad it all feels. i think it was at this point actually, that i realised endwalker actually had some underlying point it was trying to make. it would've been impossible not to realise bc of how heavy-handed it is. i'm not even going to try and paraphrase bc it was so random the way it was introduced i thought i had missed some lines of dialogue or something when it happened:

the suddenness of this felt like when a writer forsakes trying to show what a story is about and instead opts to speak to their audience directly through poorly disguised self-inserts. like i know things are bad right now guys, but the preaching tone of this is jarring. like maybe if you spent some time trying to develop your themes you wouldn't have to be doing this endwalker. i know you need your final villain to literally parrot these ideas for the rest of the game, but if this was supposed to be such a core point of the story why wait all the way until now to just beat me over the head with it? was watching a child be crushed underfoot supposed to make elderly man of palaka using the phrase "at journey's end" seem profound?

anyways then you go and try to save matsya’s friend (the mother bc the father has now died, of course). this leads us to another forced decision that doesn’t make any sense: alisaie and alphinaud fail to kill a single abomination--just the one solitary abomination that was stalking the poor woman--so that we can see it fling her into the water and her corpse dangling on the surface. in what fucking world do alisaie and alphinaud, who have single-handedly dispatched numerous abominations prior to reaching this point, fail to kill just one of them between the two of them in a way reminiscent of a cartoon, one being knocked into the other and them both falling over? how is that fucking possible? and then to somehow make things worse, because that's still possible, despite the fact that wol spends this entire segment in palaka’s stand being told by alisaie and alphinaud not to leave matsya alone because he can’t fend for himself, the twins suggest sending him back on his own to deliver the baby to palaka's stand? why??????????????????????????????

this is what i mean when i say the characters get used in the most bullshit ways for the most bullshit reasons. it's like the game needs as much suffering as possible to happen so that it can make a worthwhile point on this later on (spoiler: it doesn't) so it pulls shit like this. why would the twins, who we just watched try to spoonfeed the garleans cereleum straight from the tank, leave matsya on his own if not solely bc the story needs the doomerism of the Resolute Citizen to ring true? and this is also what i mean when i say the scions try to manage a disaster that is just not manageable, bc they for some reason believe that bc they've taken care of the abominations they saw in the area, that means the area is safe enough for matsya to go back on his own? like are we just suddenly pretending the nature of these creatures doesn't imply that anyone can turn into one at any moment? everyone is ALWAYS in danger? we're just going to mill around while matsya weathers the most potent fear of his life running back to the village on his own, with the baby of his friends who just died moments before, while we all know that extremely negative emotions cause people to turn into the monsters? why are we doing this after we just went to so much trouble keeping people safe (or failing to, really)? forget turning into monsters for a sec, why are we even letting him experience such painful emotions at all? anyways the fucking baby starts turning into a monster because this is endwalker.. but i will say that matsya running and chanting that little piece up there about how life is suffering to try and convince me it's true calm himself down was one of the cutscenes i liked the most from this entire part, maybe endwalker in general. it was another one of those emotionally poignant and well-executed moments that just suffers from how much i wish it was happening under totally different circumstances. i don't even remember why one of us doesn’t go with him, like i don't remember what we were busy doing bc it was that unimportant--no wait, i remember! we were waiting for matsya to reach the total end of his rope so that when all things seem lost, when those monsters obviously show up on his path back to the village out of nowhere like they've been doing the past painstaking quest after quest of this entire part, estinien and vrtra can get this really cool moment of jumping into save him! it all makes so much sense now. i've never seen estinien do anything really cool before like diving down from the sky with his lance, so i understand how this was a really important moment that the game needed to make happen. also how vrtra really needs to prove to the people he can be a good satrap bc ahewann just died and all. yeah, i totally get it. perfect. just great. 

what is the message behind despair turning you into a monster? we're about to get into it with meteion and try to convince her she's wrong--come out championing the idea that suffering is just one of the many aspects of life we need to accept, and yet we're going to preface that with a part where to feel despair is bad? you get punished if you do it? honestly?

whatever. elpis...we go here because we need to learn about the elpis flower. i'm thinking we're definitely just going to ask the watcher, right? like the guy on the moon who told us the name of the flower in the first place? and time is of the fucking essence here, so surely we just go back to the watcher and ask him what we need to know and come back? wrong. we're going back to the first. to talk to elidibus. i thought we killed elidibus? does nobody truly die in this game except for my favourite character? so wol gets sent back to the first, and there's this upbeat tonally dissonant little section where you catch up with some old friends like beq lugg and those kids you helped back in shb bc now is just the perfect time for pleasantries and remembering how good shadowbringers was. ew trying to relive shadowbringers was already something i was feeling out in thavnair fighting leagues of "terminus" creatures and not "forgiven" ones, and watching the carefully constructed horror and gravity of the final days get reduced to an average apocalyptic shitshow. so i can't say i appreciated this part. also people are indiscriminately turning into monsters. i can't help but have that hang over everything constantly until the end of the expansion.

anyways we go to the crystal tower and drag out elidibus even though i personally prefer when characters have their final moments and are properly laid to rest. like i hate to not only beat a dead horse but also reanimate said horse and then drag its corpse around. well fuck what i want. so elidibus willingly does this favour for us i guess and sends us to the past somehow with some useless warnings about how we won't be able to interact with our surroundings or change the past. i say useless because the former is just untrue, i'm not sure why he bothered to say it. the moment we step foot on elpis you get a nice gift of aether from emet-selch that renders you tangible and now you can proceed to live love laugh with him and hythlodaeus on elpis even though people are indiscriminately dying back home. and the latter warning, well. i don't know, that just seemed obvious. i'm kind of just a hater.

time to be positive again for a short moment, if you can believe it? emet-selch is one of my favourite characters. i enjoyed this new light cast on him...for a short while. i like his relationship with hythlodaeus and i really like hythlodaeus; i’m really fond of the faceless simulacrum version of him you meet in shb and i'm really fond of him now. learning about the unsundered world in person rather than through hearsay was interesting, and although i can't lie and say i don't think this all kind of felt like a huge tangent despite the important aspects of the plot that come out of it, i still like it. i guess it feels this way because a lot of big plot points have already been established, like the ark on the moon and the sharlayans' involvement and the final days, so this was all kind of too big to me to be coming this late into the story. it doesn't feel all that relevant to prior parts of the expansion either except for hermes, who has been poorly developed throughout, so okay, i get it. it's time to give one of the main villains some depth (i want you to guess if this is successful or not). hermes has a lot of qualities i really like. has a child, secretly nurturing a potent sadness, thinks differently from the world around him because at his core he’s too deeply empathetic…. even though i was still largely aware of the insanity happening back at home which i'm going to keep repeating, i still enjoyed elpis At The Start. the exposition of this part was easily better than its resolution. it was taking the time to develop hermes’ character so that you could see if the game was written well anyhow how he became the fandaniel of the present. i really liked his relationship with meteion too. it's getting hard to talk about what i like without simultaneously talking about what i don't like so i'm going back to criticising now, positivity over, sorry....

personally, i’d have been totally fine without any more development to emet-selch’s character. i think it was nice to see a fresh perspective on him and all, really rounds out who he is from what you know and what he talks about in shadowbringers. and i actually like a lot of the things he said throughout, not all of it, but a good amount of it was fun and sorely needed whenever hermes was being annoying, which was often. but there was a lot of times wehere i thought, i don't really need to be hanging out with emet-selch right now? i don't need my wol and emet-selch to be friends? considering who he is....? .............and what's going on back home? how many more moments showing how endearingly prickly he is do i need to see? like sure, i can enjoy this emet-selch fest in isolation of what's going on because me love emet-selch like it's not like i think these moments are bad or anything but i don't know, don't we have other things to be doing? i'm not diametrically opposed to fanservice, i like when things are kept fresh and lighthearted. but. well you know by now. about the people turning into monsters. i guess i just both enjoyed this part and wished it happened under different circumstances or in a different way or something, or maybe not at all, bc as things progress his character just gets more and more diluted.

i actually really liked meteion. i will say i’m really tired of non-human, overly childish girl children creature characters who become villains, because i think there's this concept where…idk how to say it? i wish i could find something that talks about this more... it's like the dehumanisation involved when non-binary characters or non-white characters are often not human (not that these things are done in the same way). but i feel like women or females ig are often the ones chosen to be non-human in this particular way...? like, when emotional labour is involved. or when it needs to be some taboo evil entity. it's like a guy and his part-animal female second lead or part-alien love interest or female-voiced ai system or android or abandoned girl he finds/rescues. it's kind of like the born sexy yesterday trope but without the blatant sexuality (i don't want to go on a tangent). quite often this weird quirky alien and playful girl child is a harbinger of destruction. take drakengard, for example, or fire emblem engage, or cc from code geass iirc, or veronica from fire emblem heroes.. there's apparently something about childishness and girlishness and innocence and corrupting that innocence or being fooled by that innocence that seems to incite fear of the unknown enough in people for villainous children to be a trope in general regardless of gender, but it was just something i was thinking about in regards to meteion's character, especially when she becomes evil. and this blurry line between her as a "being" with a consciousness and free well as GIVEN to her by hermes, and her as a "tool" to be used by him as well, doesn't really get addressed in any meaningful way at all. like sure, she doesn't need to eat but she can still enjoy candy apples and flowers, and can empathise bc often of her own volition she wants to cheer hermes up, but actually her ability to empathise is programmed; so let's send send her, this highly empathetic being (with consciousness and free will and tastes and personality) into the cold expanse of space for as long as it takes for hermes to find his answer, that's totally fine. why did he make it a girl? why couldn't they address the fact that the loneliest bastard in this entire game made himself a child? like i'm not saying there needs to be clear-cut definitions on what meteion is or why she or hermes take certain actions, but it feels like a lot of things regarding their characters are really complex and implied to be really deep, and then just don't go anywhere or are completely ignored or unexplained? and because these things are so present yet passed over, it leaves me genuinely confused about most of what happens on elpis and how these two specifically reach any of the conclusions they do once things start going south

like i thought what she and hermes were going to add to the story was going to be a lot more interesting and complex than what it turned out to be.....a banal mantra on the "mercy" of nihilism. i can barely reconcile what bothers hermes in the first place with what meteion concludes from her sisters' expeditions, like they almost feel irrelevant to each other. he's upset over man's lording over who deserves to live and the callousness of making and unmaking life. he feels sadder about the coming death of his friend than the average ancient, and doesn't want to accept meaningless platitudes about dying for the good of the star. ok, i agree with that. so he wants to know what meaning there is to life, if it can be so easily judged and discarded...? okay. so his answer is to....secretly create creatures without any of the rigourous testing they usually go through to prevent them from being dangerous, and then send them on a potentially dangerous and traumatising mission to answer his vague philosophical questions? like.......? so when she reports back traumatised and tells him every single society out there is suffering (which i just find so unbelievable btw), then the answer to his question must be that suffering is the meaning of life--which she figures bc she's an entelechy so i imagine she's highly susceptible to her emotional surroundings, and because his pseudo-intellectual question is so poorly framed (something only emet-selch points out in a throwaway line btw). and this alone spurs him on to allowing meteion to unmake their entire society in the most violent way conceivable? you literally tell him that the final days are coming as a result of his actions, but he's fine with it because he'd rather that than enact some policy changes at his workplace, or talking to someone? everyone seemed to listen and respect his decision when he suggested helping that creature learn to fly instead of just killing it, i'm sure he could've talked it out? isn't he in charge of the place? this entire section was so hard for me to follow bc i kept thinking something more complex was making everyone behave the way they were, when it was actually just totally senseless.

as an aside, i hate how they chose to make the way meteion reports information so cooly technological btw, it felt not only anachronistic but corny. i’m sure there's a better way to have her impartially report things without making her sound like she's reporting weather conditions on some distant planet in star trek. anyways, when you frantically search for meteion after she receives her transmission was another part that took up a lot of time for no reason. it just made everything feel so dire when i could barely understand why any of what was going on was such a big deal. and i’ll never be one to say that any bureau of anything should “detain” anyone, but why hermes was so frantic to prevent meteion from being brought to the convocation i just don't know. like he goes on the run with her so that he can hear the end of her report? is that really it? i just find it hypocritical that he doesn't want her to be sent to the convocation where they'll limit her free will or fucking whatever but he's totally fine with ordering the meteia into space? why am i being made to guess what the convocation is going to do to meteion when hermes is making it seem like such a big deal?? what fucking sense does that make? what on earth was he afraid of? their judgment? the convocation members deciding whether meteion is good for the star or not? could they not have just reasoned this out? aren’t they a "highly advanced" and "reasonable" society? like okay he sees through the veil of his utopian home but i just did not get a sense of how much it was bothering him at all, like i cannot stress enough how him going turbo feels like an insane jump from what his problems seemingly were. why did nobody stop to think this through or communicate to each other? is it because of the bullshit time paradox this game has trapped us in so that nothing we do will amount to anything anyways so we might as well make the most confused villain of all time be responsible for the biggest event in this game's history?

but it annoys me because meteion and hermes felt like such a waste of potential, maybe the biggest waste to me in the entire expansion. i was really intrigued by their wholesome relationship at the start, knowing that hermes was a main villain. and that he can't find connection or meaning in an otherwise "perfect" society, so he has to create it for himself and try to find it elsewhere, as far as the reaches of outer space... he wants to make what's hurting him stop hurting him. i like that he approaches such human desires with meteion despite her non-humanness, and that she can return those feelings to him. he wants to signify meteion’s return with a flower because they both like flowers… like those things we can’t put into words but share with others, moments, emotions, connections……..but nope. nihilism beam. it feels like the worst sort of retroactive writing ever. they didn't even think too hard about dynamis--this hugely important thing, except nobody has ever heard of it, aside from nidhana back at home? while members of the highest office in the most advanced society earth has ever had are left squinting.

and the entire section after you fight hermes just pissed me off. we kicked his ass so that we could stop him from inciting meteion any further, and yet we just let him hear her out anyways? he's yelling at you during the entire dungeon that he just wants the time to hear her out, we're chasing after him so that we can stop him from doing that, and then we just let him hear her out anyways? and then even when we do that she doesn’t even say anything different? she just goes right back to reporting on different worlds and how self-destructive they are and That's All She Really Proceeds To Say For The Rest Of The Expansion But Fucking Who Cares Anymore. so we let her repeat herself. this sends her into a spiral, because she's an entelechy who just got hit by a high frequency nihilism beam, but subjecting her to all that despair is only ever addressed by one of the scions in a throwaway line near the very end of the story in ultima thule... and then hermes...captures venat, emet-selch and hythlodaeus??? he captures two of the strongest characters in the game? did we not just kick hermes’ ass??? what is going on?

emet-selch: that's bullshit, and you know it's bullshit

hermes: *says more bullshit*

i really think hermes might be one of the worst villains in the game. it's a shame bc i think he's such an interesting character. i'm not sure why he started behaving like such an incel when he was right to be troubled by the things he was? why did they even bother have wol relate to him over experiencing sadness from loss if that just went totally nowhere? why does he behave so hypocritically? being saddened by loss leads to him setting the stage for the final days? him hating man's jurisdiction over other lives leads to him wiping emet-selch's and hythlodaeus' memories, and subjecting the entire planet to the worst test ever? he's not even morally grey or anything! just annoying! i saw someone say that it's even worse that he wants the ancients to prove that their life is meaningful to them, bc it's true, they do??? like isn't that what venat interrupts them from doing in the answers cutscene, calling back for that lost life? isn't that what you learn in shadowbringers? didn't an entire half of their population sacrifice themselves so that the other half could live? what the fuck else did they need to prove?

this part was pissing me off even more because i never even wanted hythlodaeus or emet-selch to learn about where wol came from or about the final days coming in the first place. i thought that was an awful writing decision. telling them just felt weirdly cruel to me considering elidibus explicitly told you there was nothing you could do to change it. maybe this is just my opinion, but why would anybody want to know that their planet is going to go up in flames and there is nothing they can do to stop it? telling venat i was like sure, she becomes hydaeyln so this makes a little more sense to me, but the other two…….? this is around when i was getting tired of the emet-selch cameo, because i don't really care to know what he thinks of his future self? i couldn't really understand what the point of any of that was? so it annoyed me even further that it amounts to nothing anyways when they get their minds conveniently erased. it felt like a fucking joke. why did we revive these characters, develop them, and then just treat them like tools...? like now that we're done using their powers and creation magicks--i thought, naively--we just toss them aside? like ohhhhh noooooo now they won't remember all the fun we had on elpis this is so sad......but at least before he got his memories wiped emet-selch, even though he definitely totally doesn't believe a fucking word i say, renews his shb vows to wol and leaves the future in my hands again? yeah, i totally wanted to hear him say that a second time. forget how deeply affecting and important a moment that was at the end of shadowbringers. i really needed to see him do that one more time in this shittier, more contrived context. that's really what i needed from endwalker. also i've been on reddit reading what people have to say about endwalker out of curiosity (ppl make a lot of good points that i haven't) and someone pointed out that moments before all this happens venat literally pulls memories from the aether around you so that we can watch hermes send the meteia to space. what on earth is stopping anyone from doing that for hermes, hythlodaeus, and emet-selch? but whatever, i already know the writing doesn't care how silly it is anymore. two of the strongest ancients get bound by a weakened hermes, only break out after the story conveniently needed meteion to start flying into space, and then venats lets her escape somehow even though doing so essentially dooms their entire planet. ok

so we’re back home and we have to go immediately help the thavnarians who are being punished for not being white again. the sharlayans were going to bring them to the teleporter to the moon in garlemald to start getting them on the moon, but oops, the final days have come to garlemald, so now we can't use the teleporter, so if you're thavnarian your life sucks. who saw that coming? absolute waste of time. so then we have to get rid of more beasts because we need to waste even more time doing something we already spent an agonising amount of time doing in thavnair. and then immediately after this we need to......wrap up yet another asinine plot thread endwalker is so obssesed with adding to it's already convoluted story: fourchenault excommunicating his children...? it seemed really important when he did this in post-shb, but materially nothing for alphinaud or alisaie really changed, everyone still gets into sharlayan no problem. ultimately i just didn’t really know why they chose to pursue this mini-plot at all because how many more pushes does alphinaud (i'm saying alphinaud bc he does not share that spotlight with alisaie lmfao) need to become resolute in his goals? he already does this throughout the series? they ruined arenvald's legs in post-shb so that alphinaud could become more resolute in his goals, why keep dedicating time to this? just keep juggling endwalker, just keep juggling. anyways we’re in garlemald, we calm the final days for now, zenos shows up out of nowhere to remind us he’s still in the game. and to be fair to him that was one of the most interesting cutscenes he’s had the whole time, and, get this--they have him randomly answer hermes' question? about the meaning of life? while talking to jullus? like jullus gets mad at him for not giving a fuck about causing what happened to garlemald, and zenos responds by saying: "ask any creature of this star and those above for answers, and they will tell you what suits their fancy. and they would be right to do so. what meaning there is to be found in the petty vicissitudes of your existence must be gleaned by you and you alone." like......? he just provides the answer right there in a conversation with jullus? did this expansion have any interest at all in putting any of its different parts in conversation with each other, or are we supposed to just try and build a good story like a puzzle, where the pieces, albeit interesting, don't actually fit together? weren't zenos and fandaniel working together at the beginning of the expansion? he should have just posed this question to zenos because the answer was apparently right fucking there, with the flattest character in the entire game, this whole time? whatever, i still liked this scene. alisaie putting a curse on zenos was very cool of her. so we're back in garlemald and....….tonal dissonance! puddingway shows up. cute scene where g’raha’s ears perk up also bc he's the one who hears the loporrits coming. just in case you forgot about g’raha, which is an oxymoron. and then maybe the second worst segment of endwalker...........we go back to labryinthos. 

now i love labryinthos. i thought it was interesting we only collected one aetheryte the first time we were there, and i was hoping the place would be as intriguing to me as it first was when we got back. admittedly learning that the sharlayans' secrecy only amounted to contributing to the moon project was kind of a let down, but i thought maybe there was still more to it. i mean, an ark to the moon? the abandonment of one's home planet? it's not like the ideas aren't there. let's go back to elpis for a second. one of the moments that really stood out to me during that part was a throwaway line that emet-selch says to wol after hermes starts freaking it:

he's right. i don't think hermes found society so truly beyond help that he couldn't turn to any one of his peers for help before devising such a reckless plan. but i'm not trying to rehash my issues with hermes, more that i think an interesting parallel could have been made, possibly, with the ark flying to the moon as currenlty the most viable solution to the final days problem? challenging this notion of just throwing it all away as a last resort? especially because it's so obvious to me that by the end of this expansion nobody is actually going into space to start a new life out there; trying to sort out living accomodations and acquaint the lopporits properly with earth is just a waste of time. so why not pose the underlying question of the entire expansion, about what makes life meaningful, to the last bastion of hope in the entire universe--the sole planet amongst millions of dead stars that still believes in itself? would it not just be free real estate to try and connect this story's multiple parts together by ...connecting this story's multiple parts together? the scions say repeatedly how much they'd prefer to protect their planet rather than leave it, and everyone on earth vouches for you because they don't want to leave, either. could they not have made a connection in some way between that ark and the meteia's voyage to outer space? could the writing not have turned around and asked the actual inhabtants of the planet of that we've helped and saved and laughed with and broken bread with or whatever the fuck what they think about the meaning of life, now that they have to leave that life behind? i guess fucking not??? i guess endwalker would rather only highlight civilians when they're being turned into abominations to drive home the same points about life = suffering constantly, and not the points about how despite the suffering life needs to be lived? because they don't actually seem to care about challenging meteion's nihilism when that can just be lazily solved by beating her up at the end. hermes could have been learning to love the world he was on, the smaller things that make it beautiful. because that's what he does, he creates this creature that is built to understand him, and it does and it shares these small joys with him. but nope, time to waste time doing fetch quests in labryinthos. find every single researcher who is obviously losing their mind with stress in labryinthos and give them their government-assigned lopporit while this hectic music with only one minute's worth of loop value plays in the background. go and deliver these papers with alisaie and alphinaud bc if you do a former friend of their father’s will tell them that their father actually loves them duh that’s why he disrespects them publicly every chance he gets. go follow one of the lopporits around while they sample fruits so that they can learn to make food other than carrots. go and watch urianger reconcile with moenbryda's parents even though she died all the way back in a realm reborn. fuck you. also everyone is still just a bad day away from turning into an abomination. just in case you forgot.

that shit where asahi shows up to take fandaniel away for the final time might be top three most bizarre scenes in all of final fantasy fourteen btw. i almost didn't want to mention it, but i need it on record how silly i thought that was. we are in the final stages of this expansion and it still can't stop wasting time. did we see ardbert's thoughts on elidibus using his body? no. but asahi was who they chose to get upset about this? ok.

i liked the trial against mother. you might have noticed i've had very little to say on venat this whole time. that might just have to be its own post or something if nobody is sick of me by now. but anything to do with working together with your friends to overcome a trial is good.

that's what i liked about ultima thule. at the same time, this is where the game finally just loses me forever. i think, somehow, even despite all the things i didn't like, the way the story is told i still enjoyed, even if what it was saying was often. bad. there's still a lot of moments i really liked despite it all. but after ultima thule i was just done. we get on the ark. great. i like that things don't go as planned because meteion intercepts our ship. but now meteion is finally here, which means it's finally time for me to reckon with the pseudo-intellectual nihilism she's been touting every chance she gets. it's hard for me to suspend my disbelief that every single society out in space wanted oblivion, but if that's what endwalker wants me to believe for the sake of its story making sense (oxymoron) then fine. ok. but that's all that's ever said. "life is suffering" "life is suffering" "the final days are really bad"

just the same pseudo-intellectual browbeating about how living just leads to constant strife and the most beautiful thing to do is to just end it all for everyone ever again. like sure, empath hears death cry repeatedly--i can see how meteion could change so permanently. i think that's fine. i doubt that's why she's so repetitive. i genuinely just 't think there's nothing anyone really had to say on this. and the thing is, we've heard this argument before? the idea that humanity is imperfect so they don't deserve to live? it will all amount to nothing, so why let it continue to exist? these are major points of conflict from shadowbringers because it's what emet-selch was always saying. the difference is that emet-selch is just an easily more interesting and fleshed out character whose arguments are largely more complicated, even if they're just as morally wrong. like it's extremely easy for me to answer whatever meteion is saying with a resounding no. and while i feel that emet-selch can also be easily disagreed with on what he believes, bc i do disagree--he at least introduces ideas that complicate the story and his own character. he challenges the scions on their hatred of primals--their god is a primal. he offers visions of a world where nobody has to struggle ever again, where strife doesn't exist, and so on and so forth. while that doesn’t justify his actions, nor do i think they should, i think he at least gives the characters something to think about. he throws their own actions back at them. why would the scions not want a world without suffering? when emet-selch asks alphinaud if he believes half of the sundered world would give up half of their number to save the other half, alphinaud is unable to answer because he knows that the answer is no. i don't think humanity should be tested, let alone with such an insane standard, but i at least think that the questions being asked in shadowbringers were interesting. there's a point to them. with meteion, all she basically says to the scions is that she’s going to fucking kill everyone they know and love in the worst way possible. nothing to chew on that wouldn't better be solved by just getting rid of the threat. i don't know why they even bother arguing with her ever. she doesn't even feel like a character to me in that last section of the game. and they keep trying to have her seem all scary by having her get really close to the screen or move around without warning which is all very silly to me. i at least did like how much of a threat she was, and the way thancred vanished, and then everyone finds themselves in that dark area in front of the ship wondering where he is while the ultima thule music plays for the first time, distantly and quietly. i actually really liked that part. i thought it was really moving. i wish it had stayed that way.

the first area of ultima thule was the best part imo. i liked the immense darkness and quiet and lack of wind and the foul air and  yet, green grass. i liked the strange horror of being the only person at first who could really see the dragons, and then learning that estinien can see them too. i liked how that was the segue for his sacrifice. having those "final" moments with a specific scion each time until that climactic moment that pushes the group forward i really liked. i liked that thancred was no longer with them but still with them, a presence over them keeping them safe from harm. i found that very touching. but i was actually really confused while going through ultima thule becuase of how they visually shows what happens, like while the swirling vortex each scion would stand in was cool, and then standing to face off against that dark bird, i think what those things actually represented i just did not really understand what was actually being done or going on. i think that might be because dynamis suffers a bit from being just too nebulous or underdeveloped. i don't mind how abstract of a concept it is, i mean aether is used to do all sorts of never-explained things all the time.. it's more like... if ultima thule is going to be a place ruled by emotions, with laws different from what the scions are used to, it's hard for me to see how they were able to really draw any conclusions about where they were or what to do. it actually kind of reminded me of the logic of jojo's bizarre adventure where an attack only overrules another attack not becuase of some fundamental power scale the reader understands, but bc of what araki feels like contriving to get the story moving the way he wants. and that's fine because it's jojo. but this is ffxiv, so in my mind ultima thule should have either remained abstract and they don't try to explain the rules of the place so much, or they should’ve just made what was going on less abstract if they were going to try to logic the place out

what i mean is: the scene where estinien argues with that dragon so that he can overcome its despair is really cool. i liked that he turned into a cool wind. i liked that your friends sacrificed themselves for the sake of their home, that the power of their hopes for wol to overcome this final challenge was the only way they could move forward in such a stagnant place, as well as the only way they could be protected by meteion's violence. but after estinien does it--and he admits that he doesn't know how, just that it was the right thing to do--it feels like the writing immediately tries to specify what's going on so that there's some easy way forward the scions just have to follow the rulebook for, so that they can get to meteion. when urianger takes wol and g'raha aside i was actually just so lost. i don't know what it was i wasn't getting. i still don't. like to kind of say that there’s always one "individual" in these fake worlds who is despairing more than the others that can be located if they just identify a certain set of behaviours... this kind of just waters down what the scions are doing and the magic of being at the universe's end or w/e to me. we use language because of our inability otherwise to really express the depth of emotions and sensations that exist in this world, not the other way around--trying to box in something so complex through things like processes and so on...so to try and narrow down this part kind of rung a bit hollow to me. it was somehow both overexplained and underexplained at the same time. this might seem kind of nitpicky but i guess it was just hard for me to enjoy ultima thule when i was genuinely confused almost the whole way throughout. and bc the ea and the omicrons were so goddamn annoying. trying to do this slapdash learning about their societies at the very end of the game was just like...? okay? why bother, all they really care about is dying anyways. and then that final dungeon, ew's final attempt at replicating the wins of shadowbringers (the amaurot dungeon) with meteion's voice over. like who cares now meteion, you are somehow still just repeating yourself. endwalker is almost at it's end girl, i get it. everyone wants to die.

where i actually started to get annoyed though was where y'shtola says in no uncertain terms not to use the retcon crystal hydaelyn gave you to call their spirits back. y'shtola, you shouldn't have bothered, because you know wol is going to do absolutely that. why even have her say it? there is no sense of risk whatsoever because that crystal is involved. i still liked the sacrificing, but maybe they should have framed it in a way where it wasn't obvious that the scions were going to be totally fine. ew literally didn't seem ballsy enough to kill all of the scions, and i don't think it should've either. but then it just makes this all very wishy-washy. and even worse was when wol used it to summon HYTHLODAEUS AND EMET-SELCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY!!!!!!!! WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?????????????? i was so annoyed. i'm still annoyed. back when their memories got wiped hythlodaeus was like oh yeah by the way emet did you know that in the aetherial sea you can get your memories back haha? and i was like okay cool so when they die they can get their memories back, whatever, still don't think me and emet-selch should've been live love laughing on elpis. i didn’t actually think this game would be so juvenile as to let you get to meet them once more with their memories fully intact. i don't know why ew has to dot every i and cross every t and sign off every single bit of intrigue with the biggest fucking full stop The End ever where emet-selch is concerned, holy fuck man. i hated this decision so much. your friends SACRIFICE THEMSELVES so that WOL can face meteion. they believe that at the very end of everything, hydaelyn believes that at the very end of everything, WOL is the one who can defeat meteion. they all put so much faith in you. and the first thing you do is summon emet-selch and hythlodaeus because what? because you just can't fucking help yourself? just shit all over the importance of carrying your friends’ beliefs in you. christ i hated that. i loved seeing the elpis flowers grow all over that fake sun. why couldn't that have been wol who grew them, wol's turn to use dynamis to overcome meteion's despair, flowers that represent the hopes every single person on earth has placed in them to see their star to safety? why? emet-selch there for what? to set in stone his position as the Tsundere once and for all? is that it? to have him renew his vows to wol for the millionth time just in case you forgot that he wants you to take up the mantle of their future? i wish they would go back to never making emet-selch palatable and less hostile to the warrior of light, it feels like such a disservice to the character he was in shadowbringers and to just their characters in general like i do not want to be canon friends with emet-selch! it's not necessary! it's fucking emet-selch! what's even worse is that for some reason while the flowers are growing, emet-selch is just point blank explaining what's going on. he literally says something like, "these flowers are the hopes of everyone meteion you're washed. by the way, if you didn't catch that, wol. you can summon your friends back now." immersion gone. any sense of playing a game that actually gives a fuck gone. so we call our friends back, only to send them away again with the teleporter because meteion is just too strong for us. to be fair i liked that decision, but why fake me out a second time having me think yes, finally wol is going to face meteion ON HER OWN. and then have ZENOS show up? i actually just stopped playing and went to bed. genuinelly just fuck me. who fucking cares anymore.

and then after you finally get meteion to stop being emo and she offers to reconcile with you by sending you safely back to your friends it's like, actually i can't even accept this meteoin. because i have to go fight zenos now. and then it's crazy to me that after you kick zenos' ass for like the millionth time, we're literally on the edge of the world so i'm finally expecting him to say something worth listening to, he opens his mouth and says "you know, wol, this whole time... i've been so bored... and the only thing that gives me joy is fighting you...” like. stuck record. the writers dragged him all the way out here to be a stuck fucking record

i like endwalker btw. kind of. like i know nobody who reads this is going to believe me but i really do. if it had just, well. i don't even know. there's too much wrong with it. it wastes too much time and just doesn't seem to be able to let go. how is it possible that an expansion can make me tired of callbacks to haurchefant being important to wol? i've never felt that before. like how many more flashbacks to his grave does one need to have to know that when wol is fighting for their world they're fighting for their friends too. but this game just cannot let things go. it NEEDS to make that joke about alphinaud gathering firewood four more times. it makes anything i appreciated the second or maybe even the third time just upset me. they can't let anything go, they have to wave it in front of me like it's a dog treat and i'm a dog. a fucking dog with blonde hair and blue eyes

[improvised-finish]

FFXIV Write 2024 - Prompt #10 - Stable

Content Warnings: Lehon'a is referred to with he/him pronouns, as this takes place before her transition in Shadowbringers, but not in a transphobic way.

Spoiler Warnings: None

Summary: After many moons away, Lehon'a returns to the Shroud to take advantage of the Grand Company system for an entirely selfish reason (the reason has feathers).

Check it out below, or on Ao3:

Lehon'a was over the moon, the happiest he'd been in days.

After being paraded from one major city to the next like a touring circus attraction, he'd finally settled on joining a Grand Company (though to be frank, he found the whole distinction a bit silly). He'd picked the Order of the Twin Adder, mostly out of lingering fondness for his home in the Shroud, if anything. He'd heard the stories of how outsiders to the forest had been treated by the Adders in the past, and he knew it was simply good fortune that they hadn't stumbled on him before his adoptive mother had.

All of that pointless pomp and circumstance was in the past, though, and now he could get to the really important part: the mount issuance.

He didn't want to say it aloud, but the promise of a license to ride a mount across the land was pretty much the only thing that kept him from telling all of the Grand Companies to buzz off. He'd patiently sat through meetings and completed stacks of paperwork, doubly so for his more unique mount situation. But the day had come at last, and he'd gotten the approval from the postmoogle that morning, all that remained was the walk to the stable at Bentbranch. 

—-

It ended up being more of a run, really.

He really just couldn’t help himself, given how many summers it had been since he’d last been to the stables. He came to visit in what seemed like every free moment he could spare as a child, but eventually he couldn’t keep up as his adventuring duties took him further and further afield. He really had missed spending so much time with the birds, smell and all. There was a unique type of bond that it seemed only chocobos were capable of, and one that Lehon’a hadn’t realized he’d valued so highly until he’d gone without it.

Lehon’a barely had time to worry that Felicitas might not recognize him; the stable quickly came into view and he heard that distinctive chirp echoing down the road. He spotted his chocobo not long after, and in a matter of moments he’d hopped the fence and just about tackled Felicitas in a hug.

“Felix!” Lehon’a yelled, overjoyed. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again!” He felt a familiar beak ruffling his hair, and let out a laugh. “Couldn’t ever get enough of messing with my hair, could you?” 

It was at this point that Lehon’a noticed a very bewildered looking stablehand holding a clipboard, presumably with some more forms for him to sign. 

“Oh! My apologies, I just uh… Well, I… I’ve known this bird since I was a kid, and I… suppose I got a bit carried away.” Lehon’a sheepishly untangled his arms from Felicitas’ neck, and turned to reach for the paperwork.

“That’s quite alright, just a signature here, here, and here,” the stablehand replied, relaxing into a smile upon realizing the person who’d practically assaulted the chocobo in his care was, in fact, the person who was supposed to take him. “Has he changed a lot since you saw him last?”

Lehon’a finished signing, and then walked a quick circle around the bird to see if he could spot anything different, or more importantly, any possible health concerns that had cropped up. Without a second thought, Lehon’a bent down to inspect Felicitas’ legs, sitting right in the sweet spot to take a kick to the head that would leave him dazed at best, and headed to a chirurgeon at worst. The stablehand looked on in shock and horror, but Lehon’a simply went about his work before hopping back up. 

“Looks like he’s grown just a little, but otherwise just as happy and healthy as the day I left him,” Lehon’a replied, answering the original question before noticing the concerned expression directed at him. “Oh, don’t worry. I know that’s usually the trouble spot, but Felix and me have had many years to get close to each other, so it doesn’t bother him if it’s me under there.” 

The stablehand’s expression changed again, into a sort of fearful reverence this time, but Lehon’a barely paid it any mind, fishing some pieces of apple out of a small pouch on his hip.

“So, anything else you need, or…?” Lehon’a trailed off, focused on making sure Felicitas got his treat. The stablehand shook himself out of the bizarre trance of admiration he’d fallen into. “...No, no! I’ll submit this to the Adders and you’ll be good to go.”

“Okay, thanks!” Lehon’a dusted his hands off on his pants, gave Felicitas a few good head scritches, and then hopped up into the saddle with the ease of a practiced professional. “See you ‘round!” Lehon’a yelled as he and his steed tore out of the stable, leaping over the gate and flying down the road. It seemed like after such a long time apart, Felicitas was eager to stretch his legs, and Lehon’a was happy to oblige.

[autumnslance]

Year of the OTP - November 2023 - Missing Scars

(An unusual look at the "De-aging" prompt, perhaps, but Shadowbringers' resolution for the Scions sits with me. 980 words.)

The differences were so subtle, it was difficult to explain. Six years all told had passed, which was not many, but just enough.

In six years in the First, he had watched children and adolescents grow up—had watched Ryne grow up, most importantly. Yet now, looking out over the Toll, local children exactly as he remembered them played in the yards and through the streets of their small frontier town.

Animals too; six years could be quite some time for many a beloved pet or farm animal. In dangerous lands and uncertain areas, six years was an entire lifetime for many. Yet the same dogs and cats scampered through the Toll after their masters.

The external similarities, where he expected changes, were not the only ones, of course. He turned back to the hand mirror and inspected his eye once more.

After his misadventure in the Lifestream, and all that had followed in Coerthas, and then their participation in liberating Ala Mhigo, he just hadn’t taken the time to let it rest and heal. The best he had done, that he could do, for so long was to keep it covered and unused, or at least as little as possible. His depth perception had suffered, and even now he had to practice to get back to using both his eyes, instead of compensating for missing one.

His body’s enforced slumber, tended to by their excellent healing staff, had finally allowed the aetheric damage time to heal. He didn’t see so much as a wisp of aetheric underlay, there was no eye strain, no clouded vision. He had been concerned about that, returning from the First to his own body once again. But the damage was finally healed.

A few other aches and pains he thought he ought to have seemed to have vanished as well; he couldn’t be certain if it was due to the rest, or if their healer team had taken advantage of his soul’s absence to repair some old damages.

Not to mention missing scars; he knew when he had arrived in the First, his mental image of his Self had neglected a few minor ones, or those he did not see and think about often.

Aeryn had noticed. The first time they were together as lovers again, she had noted the differences in his scars; some missing, some new—to her anyroad, there in Norvrandt, and his misadventures over the years he had spent caring for Ryne while missing Aeryn.

He had not asked yet about the changes to his scars again now. The ones they had forgotten, the ones that were now missing—all the evidence of his time in that other realm. Scars were stories, and so he had always been proud of his. Evidence of times he had survived, his years of experiences.

Six years wiped away and lost forever.

He finished shaving, cleaning and packing away his kit, tossing the soapy water. “You look years younger, clean-shaven and with your hair cut” more than one person had told him, in more or less those words. He had, perhaps, let himself go a bit, after Dravania.

After the Antitower.

Aeryn had never minded the stubble and long hair, but Ryne had quietly bullied him into shaving and trimming up. And it had made him look more fitting to be her guardian in the First, rather than a rough wilderness scout.

He turned, and found Aeryn silently watching him now, arms crossed, leaning on the doorway as he stood on the small balcony. “The washroom not bright enough?” she asked.

He shrugged. “That, and I didn’t want to disturb you, sleepyhead.”

“As if I ever mind being woken by you,” she pouted.

“Oh, you mind. I simply know best how to distract you from your ire,” he teased.

She blushed, as he knew she would, tracing her finger down an old scar on his bare chest. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Fit as a fiddle—though we shall see if Krile agrees, and allows me to train with Radovan yet.”

“Just don’t overdo it, old man,” she joked.

“Oh, don’t you start that again,” he grumbled as she giggled. He frowned, looking down and away in thought. “I do keep forgetting how old I am now. I have to think about it.”

Her fingertip hooked under his chin, turning his gaze back to her lovely gray eyes. “Old enough,” she said gently, pulling him in for a kiss.

He hummed thoughtfully as they broke, leaning his forehead on hers. “There is some time before I’m due to see our healers,” he noted. “Perhaps a private demonstration of just how young and healthy I feel right now is in order.”

“You’re incorrigible,” she murmured, blush tinging her ears now. She traced another scar, still reacquainting herself with his reset appearance.

“That isn’t a no,” he pointed out, slipping his hand under her shirt to touch her skin, fingertips finding a scar that she had earned in the First, that she got to keep, having been there in both body and soul, only five physical years between them now instead of six. It wasn’t much time at all really, and yet—

His thoughts came to a stop as she pulled away, clasping his hand to draw him after her. Her face was very red now, the ease with which her blush appeared ever endearing. “It wasn’t, and there is time,” she said.

Five of those years had been spent missing her. There had been an underlying fear of growing old—worse, growing old without her.

But only a handful of moons had passed in the Source, those years he spent in the First reset, only the memories good and bad remaining. And here she yet was, here they both were, finding what had changed and what remained the same for all those years that had passed in no time at all.

[thevikingwoman]

FFXIVWrite 2024 - prompt 19

I was halfway done with this, so I decided to finish it despite the event being officially over. Timeline wise this is set post Shadowbringers, but only has Stormblood spoilers. Paladin job quest spoilers too, if you're technical

Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV | Words: 885

Tansui & various confederate pirates, background Meryta Khatin (wol) x Tansui | Shadowbringers patches | romance Rating: Teen. Tansui is deeply in love, he's really in it now, friendship, flirting, pirate headcanons, alcohol mention, alluding to sex

Taken

Tansui likes these evenings, food and music and comfort. It’s a reminder that they’re not just scraping by, but thriving. Conversation tonight has been lively, the sake plentiful. He has indulged in both, the latter mostly with Raowul and some of his friends, who’s been with the Confederacy for a while - but despite that Tansui doesn’t know him well. He’s Eorzean, the increase in travel and trade with a freed Doma bringing both profits and people. There’s always someone running from something.

They’ve traded banter and stories easily enough, Raowul telling an audacious story of the time he was a merchant in Ul’dah. It is, probably, vastly exaggerated, but that hardly matter.

“… and the next thing I know, the blasted Sultansworn shows up! I have been informed your wares are a danger to the Sultanate – or some such nonsense. He looks so boring while going on, so I just smiled and nodded, you know – “

“What’s a Sultansworn?” Reisha asks.

“They’re sworn to protect the Sultana, and take their job very seriously.”

“Like the seikugami?” Tansui asks. He’s been getting sour looks enough once or twice he dared to set foot in Kugane, before making a quick exit.

“They’re not really supposed to involve themselves unless it’s like – the Sultana’s life that’s in danger and some such, the Brass Blades are the ones supposed to keep general order. But this guy – so full of himself in his shiny armor, decided my hair tonics were poison.”

Raowul grins, and briefly places a hand conspiratorially on Tansui’s thigh before he lets it slide off again.

“Go on,” Tansui says. The attention and the company is nice; friends and acquaintances and the sake warming his belly. Raowul has broad thighs and solid chest, and seems to enjoy himself. There’s no harm in letting him.

“Well, at this point there was naught to do but fight or flee – and fighting wouldn’t have done me much except ending up dead.” The pirates around him makes sounds of assents, they all know there’s little reason for dumb bravery if you can save your skin. Raowul drinks again, smiling at his audience. “Behind me – a wall. In front of me – a bulwark of a man, his ego even wider than his shoulders. I did the only thing I could do – first I threw the alleged poison in his face – truly I swear it was harmless – then I dodged sideways into another stall. It happened to be a cloth merchant, and I swiped his samples off his tables, and threw them behind me before I hightailed down the street. The Sultansworn set after me, elixir running down his face and wrapped in silk fabrics streaming behind him. It was quite a sight.”

“Did you escape?” Ishi asks, his ears twitching forward with excitement.

“Of course.” The confidence is rolling from Raowul, his chest puffed and grin wide. “I ran all the way to the Silver Bazaar, and found passage on the first ship there. Never set foot in Ul’dah since.”

“That’s quite the story, Raowul.”

“I have more, and I’m sure you all have just as exciting things to regale, if not more exciting.” He’s addressing them all, but looking straight at Tansui. “Or perhaps you’ll prefer to tell in private. Maybe go over what must be an impressive training regimen.” Raowul eyes travel down Tansui’s body in a brazen way that’s impossible to misunderstand.

“I’m flattered Raowul, but I’m taken.” Raowul is attractive and nice, but he’s not interested. He can’t help the happiness in his voice, nor the smile on his lips. He made a promise, and so did Meryta. She is his. “But everyone has to show up for training in the Coral Court at some point,” he adds.

“You say that, but I don’t see no one.” Raowul makes a point of looking around, slight smirk on his face.

“Well, I’m –”

Reisha interrupts “Tansui is fucking the Warrior of Light, don’t you know?”

“The Champion of Eorzea?” Bazen’s eyebrows climb up his face. Tansui feels quite smug.

“Quite loudly and vigorously, I may add,” Ishi chimes in.

Tansui flushes with pride and embarrassment. She’s into him, and he’s not going to apologize for that.

“Mayhap I just know how to satisfy my lovers, Ishi.”

“There’s no doubt when she’s here, that’s for sure. No rest for anyone.” He laughs and downs another cup of sake, his tail wagging with mirth.

“What a shame to be missing out, then,” Raowul says, backing down completely. There’s something other than disappointment in his eyes, awe or disbelief maybe. Tansui doesn’t care. He knows she will be back and he’s quite happy to claim her interest, and to be claimed in return. To have her close, his arms around her. Kissing the freckles on her shoulders. Her tail sliding close, the way she moans when he tugs on it –

“See he’s got that look on his face again,” Reisha says. Did he miss something? He feels hot, too much sake.

“I better turn in,” he says, and gets up, nodding at his comrades. Better to retreat before his pride turns to embarrassment.

“Not just taken, but smitten, I say,” Ishi mumbles behind him.

“Well, what about you, Ishi?”

He leaves them to it, he thoughts already back to his longing.

[rabbitr]

dawntrail thoughts (you know the ones)

finished msq so here are thoughts. spoilers under the cut

did i like dawntrail? eh.

dawntrail is perfectly fine as an expac. i didn't go into it expecting dawntrail to be able to top the shadowbringers/endwalker combo. but i also didn't expect them to fumble like that.

overall, dawntrail isn't bad! i like a lot about it. getting to explore tural, the competition during the rite of succession, new cast of characters, uh...... solution nine. i think you can tell which half i like more. solution nine and alexandria were perfectly serviceable, i just liked the slow and lighthearted pace of the first half better.

my major issue with dawntrail is that the first half (rite of succession) and second half (alexandria) don't feel very well integrated.

if you like the rite of succession, then all the interesting bits about tural's history and culture are thrown out the window once you get to alexandria. none of the characters you meet and see grow during the rites will travel with you and offer their insights in alexandria's state of affairs. except for a few, which well. i'll get to them.

if you like alexandria, then the rite of succession feel like a slow and meandering beginning. characters in alexandria don't show up until you slog through the rites, and then aren't given all that much space to grow. i don't particularly like the second half so i'm sorry that i can't say more on it.

in short, dawntrail's theme is "legacy". both halves deal with how people pass down their legacies - who will remember them and what will they be remembered for? the ideological differences between different parties about how they should be remembered drives the conflict.

while alexandria fits the story thematically and is foreshadowed fairly well, the transition falls flat. there's no good bridge between the two sections. i've seen some people arguing that its about wuk lamat's arc, that she needs to learn what happens when she can't make peace. but... not really.

wuk lamat definitely undergoes development during the rite of succession. it's somewhat subtle while also being fucking beat into your head with a sledgehammer, but afterwards she doesn't really... change as a result of going to alexandria. she doesn't really struggle with what she needs to do to keep peace. wuk lamat kind of resolves herself that some people need killing if her people want peace and her gripes are mostly that the people who need killing are her brother and a new friend.

the focus of all of dawntrail is on wuk lamat alone, with erenville and krile getting incredibly minor spotlights during alexandria. so when her development grinds to a crawl, it's noticeable. because erenville and krile don't change at all throughout alexandria.

we get to know erenville a little better. and that's it.

krile, despite being part of the impetus for us to even want to explore alexandria, is regulated to a bit part with a grand total of about one quest and a handful of cutscenes wherein she asks people about her grandfather and earring. i like wuk lamat, don't get me wrong. but why couldn't krile have shared the spotlight? in the endwalker patches, she talks about how she wants to go on this journey and that she can defend herself now. where was any of that?

speaking of scions. oh boy, the scions.

in dawntrail's need to focus on wuk lamat, the scions entirely fall on the wayside. not even in that the WoL's relationships with them don't come to fore, i mean, not even wuk lamat seems to get to know them. while i understand this is a time constraint (only so much expac), i would have rather... not had the scions there?

they don't really contribute much to the story except to play the brains to your and wuk lamat's brawn. towards the second half, it felt just like they needed an excuse to justify alexandria and explain it to wuk lamat, as well as making sure the whole cast is back together. like, did we really need a y'shtola cameo?

my major issue with how the scions were handled are that none of them got any sliver of the spotlight. i don't even mean in a character development way - they've all had their time already - i just mean. why not have wuk lamat expand on her relationship with them? most of the gentler moments are between the WoL and wuk lamat while the scions mostly follow the two of you around, occasionally solving academic problems.

but dawntrail focused so intensely on wuk lamat. which is fine! shadowbringers/endwalker and even the expacs before were pretty much about us, after all. that story's concluded. i don't mind that it's wuk lamat's story.

except the sheer amount of wuk lamat starts to get aggravating after a while. because i kept waiting for krile's story to start. or erenville's. and i kept waiting and waiting and ultimately in the second half was served a story mostly about wuk lamat still and... sphene?

let's talk about sphene.

i hate her. she appears to be a sympathetic villain, yet she is suspicious from the get-go, and her entire purpose is to serve as wuk lamat's antagonist. does she serve the plot well? yeah, no arguments there. do i feel sympathy for her? absolutely not!

furthermore, the confrontation with sphene appears to be mostly a bootleg version of shadowbringers' ending, a decision with utterly baffles me. like the writing team wanted to parallel sphene with emet-selch, except one of those characters was a through-line since before the expac dropped and remained relevant until the end of the story and the other one is sphene.

crucially, emet-selch is a villain that has roots in prior plot. the narrative is constantly pitting us against the ascians between the political intrigue, so when emet-selch shows up and gives us his motivations, it recontextualizes an entire group of antagonists who were previously just a generic evil shadowy organization. it feels powerful to realize that all the prior struggles are because of a sympathetic motivation.

sphene recontextualizes nothing and appears hollow throughout her screentime. she loves her people and wants to protect her people, and that gets driven into our heads over and over. it is possible that sphene is purposefully written that way - to show that as an endless, she's only memories and a vague motive, not a living person. but if so, then the emotional impact of her would have to lay in wuk lamat's relationship to her.

who as i stated, has a character arc that slows way down and does not really struggle with the fact that sometimes you have to kill some people to keep peace.

lastly, the writing itself started to grate. it felt like more than ever, the writers were reaching through the screen attempting to beat the themes of the story into my head. so many times, characters will just... say the meaning of the plot at that point in time aloud. or sphene being the worst offender, repeating that she wants to protect her people over and over like a broken record. (again, which could be the point. but wuk lamat does this too with her understanding others line.)

one of the best parts of the writing for me was during the trial with zoraal ja. he sees mirages of different aspects of legacy - what came before in gulool ja ja, what is now in wuk lamat and koana, and what comes next in gulool ja. and his next action rejects them all. it's a good scene! i just wish more of the writing was like that and didn't give me a feeling of being directly told what i should know about the story.

while i've mostly been critical of dawntrail, it's not awful. it's a fun romp even if i vastly prefer shadowbringers/endwalker (but who doesn't). wuk lamat and koana were fun to get to know, alexandria was interesting, and running around gathering aether currents lets me to look at some very pretty videogame landscapes.

would i play dawntrail again? no. am i going to continue thinking about whatever gulool ja ja and ketenramm's deal was? yes. why were they like that- //shot

anyways this has been a long rabbithole of something i will likely never think about again but wanted to exorcise. if you've made it this far down, feel free to send me an ask or something with your thoughts.

[digeethegenie]

Coffee, Biscuits, Coffee Biscuits.

Day 23 - On Cloud Nine Shadowbringers (5.3) - Reflections in Crystal Shadowbringers Raid Series - Where I Belong

Soft Ryne and Gaia shinanigins.

With The Empty restored, and life on its way to flurishing on the once light-blighted star, Ryne and Gaia finally have a moment to just be a couple of teenagers and enjoy some Coffee, Biscuits and, well, Coffee Biscuits.

In the weeks that followed both the confirmed felling of the last cardinal virtue and the empty's restoration to habitable land, a change had begun to take place in the general populace. One such instance of this was the fact that the children of land had begun to socialise, and dream of lives beyond the desperate struggle against an inevitaible and painfull death that had marked the last centry of the star's history.

This also meant that businesses were adapting to the demands of youth culture. This included The Leaky Keel making the most of the daylight hours to serve more youth aproperate drinks and meals.

Two such youths were Ryne Waters and Gaia who were taking a break from their respective duties, both in studying and in perparing for the festival that had been in the plans even before restoration of the Empty was finished.

Gaia, for her part, took the cup of coffee to her nose and allowed the arouma of the drink- made from beans imported from Eulmore- to take her out of the moment.

Partly because that moment was spent by Ryne sighing very loudly.

Dragged back to reality by the haggared sigh, Gaia could only look in sympathy for the Oracle of Light.

"Long night of it?"

Ryne leaned back on her chair. "Oh, like you wouldn't believe! Sometimes it feels like herding torama cats with the other committie members. Especilally that Seifer jerk!"

Gaia hummed, wanting to know more.

In an impressive bit of agrovated manouvering, Ryne took a coffee biscuit and took an impressively large bite out of it.

"I don't-" she stopped to swallow the current infused biscuit, "I don't care that his father is a big shot in Eulmore. If he speaks out of line or gets his flunkies to back him up one more time, I'm going to take that beanie of his and pull it right down his face!"

The name was fimilar to Gaia but for the life of her she couldn't put a face to it. There was a lot about her past life in Eulmore that she couldn't remember thanks to Mitron's influnace. It had been quite the sorce of frustration.

But that was then and this was now. And she was enjoying the now where Ryne was just venting her frustrations. It was cute. Sort of like, aproperatly enough, a torama kitten that was meowing out of frustration for reasons beyond the ken of man.

That wasn't to say it was all her taking in Ryne's woes in organisation.

"But enough about my rotten luck. Hows things going with Lyna?"

Gaia looked at bit put out. In order to make herself useful, she had joined The Crysterium's guard. She hadn't ment to out herself as anyone special, given how that went the last time, and given the fact that monster- and, more pressingly, sin eater- attacks were starting to dwindle. But no, a big old monster rolled up, nearly flattened Lance-Corperal Lyna who was only spared her fate via vigerous application of Gaia's hammer to the monster's forehead.

That made it twice that thing had embarassed her.

So now Lyna had taken her under her wing to train.

And she was not a soft hand.

"I genuinly don't know how the Exarch raised that woman but I have questions about his partenting style" she scoffed angerly. "She's a complete battle axe!"

Ryne tilted her head. "I thought she was trained in dancing artes."

"I- sch!" Gaia splutered, caught off guard before she shook her head. "You know what I mean!"

A smile crossed Ryne's face. As embarassed as she was, Gaia knew that the Oracle of Light found it adorable when she got flustered so that sort of teasing comedy act had become a frequent thing.

Not that she mind.

Oh no, far from it.

The two took a sip of their cofee and felt the heat warm them up. There would be trails, tribulations, and probably some reality shattering disaster being stopped by three foot of drawf that they would have so get themselves involved with in the future but, for now, the two oracles of The First were simply on cloud nine.

[senespera-ffxiv]

also this is the only time I'm gonna post twice in a row but I finished up my thoughts about dawntrail in my media list so I'm posting them here completely unedited

//spoilers for like all of dawntrail

a more detailed rating is that this is like a 4.7/5. It’s a solid story, if a bit boring and cliche for some of the first half. I do enjoy how clear-cut the story is in terms of thematic content, though, and how through and through it is an exploration of differing cultures and the ways in which you can understand them

The second half was also an interesting continuation of said exploration as it gives you a culture that is in direct opposition to you with ways that are so alien, and yet continues to ask that you understand them while also criticizing the more inhumane effects of those cultural practices

making it about me again but it’s basically just my stance about criticizing China. A lot of the criticism becomes extremely sinophobic because it simply rejects the culture without first trying to understand it. It’s a bit easier for me since I’m deeply steeped in said culture, but I do think it’s possible for someone who isn’t Chinese to criticize China in a non-sinophobic way

Idk just a lot of the way Wuk Lamat and the others handled their reactions to Alexandria felt like a good way to do that to me

Like it’s nowhere close to being as insanely character-driven as shadowbringers and endwalker, nor is it as interestingly politically technical as heavensward, stormblood, and certain parts of endwalker, but it’s still definitely Good. Just not as good in comparison to the rest (and even then I’d rank it above Stormblood lmao I didn’t have any moments where I was actively annoyed at the characters for losing brain cells and shit jksdlfhskldjf)

My ranking for the expacs would be something like this

Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Heavensward ≥ Dawntrail > Stormblood > ARR

Gameplay-wise, though, oh my God this Fucks. This Fucks So Hard. Way better than Endwalker.

I imagine this is kind of what it felt like to play this game back in Stormblood and early Shadowbringers where things were much more complex and messy on the player side, except this time the complex and messy stuff has bled into the normal content boss design and I am enjoying it so goddamn much

(disclaimer: I started playing at the very tail end of shadowbringers so while I still remember some shit like old monk back when it had positionals on all of its buttons, I am mostly A Young'un. I did not have to experience the dreaded TP management, nor have I gone through all the stages of grief with Summoner getting reworked every fucking expansion lmao)

Part of the reason why I love doing EX trials is because at that difficulty level they aren’t afraid to do some just batshit things that would cause you to lose it in normal content

and now it’s bled into normal content hell yes

For reference my two favorite EX mechanics so far are the Biting Halberd combo from Zurvan EX (death puddle under boss → giant cone → baited aoes → tank cleave) and the add phase from Hydaelyn EX (both tanks get an add and have to pull them away from the glowing crystals while party dps’s them, rotate once the glowing crystals are dead)

Like obviously I’m biased cuz I’m a tank and those are largely tank mechanics (cuz yes if you forget to move properly in the Zurvan one as MT you just kill your entire party so I kinda count that as a tank mechanic) but more importantly I like them because of how dynamic the movement is.

And they’re dynamic in different ways, like Zurvan’s is extremely rigid. You will dance in this specific manner (back → tank right, everyone else left) or else you die. Hydaelyn on the other hand can be a bit looser and you have at least a bit of room to do different strategies (ideally it’s a “everyone focus down one crystal at a time” situation but the like three-five times I’ve done the fight the positioning has always been very loose as long as none of the glowing crystals are getting tethered).

And a bunch of fights in Dawntrail are doing stuff like this that feels like a dance

Like the first example I can think of is Ar1/R1/whatever we’re calling it when the boss flings out a sequence of like 8 aoes across tiles before hitting you with an uppercut that sends you flying into the air and in order to not die from said uppercut you need to position yourself so that you land on an uncracked tile

The second iteration of this where it’s the clone that does the uppercut and the main boss is hitting you with line stacks is my favorite because that’s where the amount of stuff you do starts to offset how slow the actual mechanic is to make it feel like you’re in a time-sensitive dance and if you step wrong you’ll fuck things up

Another good example is the final boss The Queen Eternal which just. aughhhh I love that boss. There’s so many fun ideas being thrown around in there lol. You can really tell that Zeromus from the Endwalker patches was intended to be a test run for some of the mechanics in this fight because both occasionally devolve into randomized Chaos as you try your best to just Not Get Hit by aoes can you tell I loved the mechanic when she deploys her drones lmao

LIke okay last thing to yell about but Absolute Authority is literally just a mini Relativity mechanic from E12S/Big Bang from Zeromus but more chaotic and I absolutely loved it

Plus the more chaotic nature of the mechanics in this fight serve a bit of a narrative purpose, especially when you consider how desperate Sphene is at this point in time

Like she doesn’t give a shit about keeping up appearances she will kill you as best as she can, “random bullshit go” included

And both of those mechanics also force you to do more dynamic movement, only now it's typically erratic and panicked compared to the more methodical and freeform dances of Zurvan and Hydaelyn EX respectively

We need more insane shit in the gameplay of the normal mode stuff keep doing it Yoshi-P

[mages-ballad]

some stuff regarding dawntrail now that ive finished and had time to collect my thoughts, spoilers up to the very end inbound of course. sorry if its long i have many MANY a thought.

ok so i wanna preface by saying i DID like dawntrail. i love wuk lamat and i cried like 3 or 4 times, tural is a great location and it was very fun to meet all the different kinds of npcs there

HOWEVER theres some things that kinda feel awkwardly paced? if i can be completely honest, it feels like the first half and the second half of the msq are two entirely different plotlines that were smushed together. and this isnt even saying that everkeep/sphene/s9 are "too different" because its not even an aesthetic issue for me, its moreso the themes presented first half? a little slow but in a GOOD way, helps you get a feel for the land and the people and shows wuk lamat's growth. the succession plotline feels like a whole, coherent thing. i like it. as soon as thats over and you hit shaaloani though, its slow and quite literally filler aside from a few tidbits for erenville. it felt awkward how it was trying to show xak tural culture, but also heavilyyy favored screentime for the "cowboy" stuff over the hhetsarro (who also very much live in shaaloani and are part of tural), who we spent practically 1 quest with and it was to ask them for lumber. and THEN it goes right from that to a high-stakes plot with zoraal ja's attack and heritage found and everything progressing after that. on its own the plot has potential... but by living memory i got the impression that everything from the end of shaaloani and refitting the train to running through the memories of alexandria, it just felt like it was trying to be Shadowbringers 2/Endwalker 2. and it wasnt really working out the same. "a society faced a calamity and a leader figure cant let go of the past and will gladly sacrifice other worlds to keep the memory of their people alive/go back to how things used to be. theres also a city full of people that arent alive and are just memories. also you get to run through a dungeon that shows the destruction of the past world that said leader figure cant let go of." like thats just the ascians and emet and amaurot right there. we KNOW how this stuff goes. from endwalker and venat we learned that its impossible to strive for absolute peace and perfection and that suffering and death are unavoidable, and the importance of maintaining hope and being able to go keep going forward at those lowest points. the whole time between solution 9 and living memory i was just sitting there thinking to myself like??? have we not seen this same stuff before??? why isnt anyone saying anything??? i knowwww this is mainly wuk lamat's story and development but it felt almost wrong to have these plotlines and themes and neither the wol or any of the scions even point out how familiar it is. i was under the impression that dawntrail would be a point for the wol to take a backseat, but to ALSO use what weve learned from 1-90 to help others. i genuinely feel like they pushed the idea that this is a fresh start *too hard* and everything weve gone through as the wol emotionally feels pretty ignored. aside from the whole "oh yeah btw were super strong weve been to the edge of the universe lol dont worry lol" like i hope this doesnt come off as me hating dawntrail. because i dont, and im interested to see the extent of travel between reflections and how thats handled going forward. but i cant help but feel like something was missing in that 2nd half of the msq. i can only hope some of this stuff gets addressed in the patches, because as it stands rn, even with sphene gone solution 9 still feels weird. the theme of dawntrail wants us to respect their culture, but from past xpacs we already know that a society like that is factually not sustainable, especially when multiple npcs have already pointed out its flaws (declining birth rate, for example.) maybe thatll be resolved later, but as it stands rn, the contradictory of themes is confusing. this is getting reallllyyy long and rambling now but WHEW i just needed to get this all off my chest. on a positive note to end this, im very much enjoying the dungeons and combat so thats been good.

tl;dr, 1st half of msq good, 2nd half confusing, combat good.

[anneapocalypse]

It didn't have to be you.

I'm not just okay with it, I actually really like the fact that the Warrior of Light and their companions take a more supporting role in Dawntrail. I enjoyed the Scions' role in the story and was happy to see all my faves onscreen, I just didn't mind them taking the backseat to some new characters. I really loved Wuk Lamat and also enjoyed Erenville and Koana and Bakool Ja Ja and even Zoraal Ja as a villain a great deal. But it's more than just the fact that I loved the new characters and the focus on developing them and their setting.

So much of the Warrior of Light's story has been about... the burdens of being the Warrior of Light. How awful and exhausting and isolating and even depersonalizing it can be to be the only one who can solve the problem, again and again and again. It's such a thing in ARR that the patches kind of lampshade the dehumanization your character faces, the way the Scions kind of take the WoL for granted early on, something I've written about before. It's still present as late as Shadowbringers, being a major point of that story's plot that only the Warrior of Light can do this thing, and they very nearly die as a result. This theme finally finds its resolution in Endwalker when you meet Hydaelyn face to face, you learn of the promise made in another time, you learn why it had to be you.

That story arc is finished now. You've done what only you could do. You know why you were the Warrior of Light. If you were at Carteneau, you know why you survived and came back. You know why Hydaelyn had to keep you alive, even as so many of your friends died around you. (That last thing in particular is such a major part of Ariane's story arc; it's the central thing she's wrestling with in the fic I'm currently working on, so it was at the forefront of my mind playing Dawntrail.)

It doesn't have to be you anymore.

That's not a downside for me. That is the appeal. It felt so appropriate to me after the tremendously heavy, world-ending stakes of Endwalker. My character could be invested without everything riding on her shoulders. She could help, voluntarily (in-universe, obviously the game asks you to accept this premise in order to like, play it), without everyone looking to her and going, "Well, it has to be you, so you'll do it, right?" In fact, had that continued, it wouldn't have felt right to me. It would have felt like it undid some of the narrative and thematic closure that Endwalker offered.

So this felt like the natural progression of the Warrior of Light's role in the story following Endwalker to me, and I thought it worked for the story, while allowing me to still feel invested and see a cool new setting and meet some great new characters.

[smol-nevi]

You know...I took the entire last raid tier off from FFXIV. I was so burnt out. I couldn't even look at it. I got to such a peak with what I was doing on an individual level that I've got an orange aDPS parse in P5S (that's the one that's just your damage and your own buffs, mostly good for tracking rotation improvements). For the more common rDPS metric I had straight purples. That was without any parse runs and a not-hardcore group. I literally could not get a better parse under those circumstances and I kept beating my head on trying anyway until I wasn't even tolerable to be around.

I'm actually excited about Dawntrail? I'm cleaning out my inventory a bit (major feat, I've been playing since ARR and I have five retainers). I did something like three runs of Delubrum Reginae last night with my partner because they want to finish a relic and I just love Bozja that much.

I'm so tempted to spend some time in Eureka farming bunny boxes alone while everyone else is leveling and doing Dawntrail...

It feels nice to be able to be back. I'm not sure if I want to raid yet or not, but I'll play it by ear (aka if someone I know needs a dancer/ranged phys, I'm in, lol). Whatever the case though at least I know I proved whatever I thought I needed to with my numbers, and I'm a lot better at spotting burnout in myself and others now.

See, the difference between burnout and no burnout is that I couldn't even remember what I used to do for fun outside raiding, and it didn't sound fun if I did remember. Then I quit, slept for a while, eventually got my shit back together, and suddenly horked up an entire novel—of fanfic, but that counts—within 4 months, and then another in another 4 months. (Tellingly, both of them plus the third one I'm working on are about a lot of things, but they're all heavily about the devastating mental effects of burnout.) Now I'm like, do I even want to raid, if I could be doing all this other cool stuff? And yeah, kind of. My FC and our friends had a huge photoshoot to say goodbye to Endwalker and it reminded me of what's good about raiding: shooting the shit, laughing when things explode, being social around people on a schedule. I got way too focused on the math and not the people.

Slightly in my defense, it is hard to keep your head up when you run the same content for that many months. We cleared P4S week 31 and P8S week 34, if I'm remembering right. But also, absolutely not in my defense, until I intentionally took a short break during the P8S slog I had missed one single raid day since the second tier of Eden, and that was only because I'd had top surgery the literal day before and couldn't hold the controller yet for long enough without it seriously hurting. By the next raid night I was already back in it. I've never had perfect attendance in anything so that was a very hard record to let go of. What I needed was to let it the fuck go about six months before I actually did.

Anyway I'm literally just rambling because that's what I do, but I'm excited to be back. I think I'll level pictomancer because yeah, everyone is, but that's fun too. Bandwagons can be good or people wouldn't get on them. Dancer has been my main since Shadowbringers dropped and one of my favorite memories is still spending hours rolling over the Gyr Abanian maps with a bunch of half-dancer, half-gunbreaker fate trains like a steamroller covered in blenders and bayonets, laughing with strangers. I'm hoping pictomancer and viper will be that way too. It was good shit and I'm looking forward to it. I'll have a slightly late start because I've got a friend visiting through Friday, but that's fine. The point is friends anyway, and I need to remember that this time.