#and this is obviously wayyyyyy way way way less of a consequence than that but it did fuck with me to see ppl act like you were a freak

[perenlop]

people pearl clutching about preteens knowing what sex is is so wild as someone who was given the talk at age 6 because i asked my mom if she bought me from target’s secret baby compartment. and literally just took it like “oh okay. gross. :(“ being more sad that it affected my fantasy of being bought from target

[emcapi-gaming]

Aha, fun fact, the DRK quests were more of a consequence of the breakdown, rather than the breakdown being a consequence of the DRK quests. Like I mentioned, she's been more or less repressing a lot of stuff from the entire MSQ that she just hasn't had time to fully process. (Ardwin lore dump incoming.)

Especially through the second half of Endwalker, because. The Zodiark situation was. Bad. And definitely tipped the scale from "concerning but still (barely) manageable amount of repression" to "oh this is real dire."

For context: She still has Ardbert hanging around in her head. She initially thought he was completely gone after they fused - he sort of went dormant and fully intended to just fade away - except then he spoke up during the Seat of Sacrifice trial and she sort of yelled at him afterwards. However, during that dormant period, they blended together a bit, and had to put in a lot of work afterwards trying to figure out whose memories and feelings were whose.

So with that said, Ardbert - and Ardwin by extension - have, uh, some pre-existing trauma regarding the whole situation of "there's an Ascian causing problems! QUICK! HIT THEM WITH AN AXE!... oh fuck I accidentally the apocalypse." (See: Mitron and the Flood of Light.)

As such, their immediate reaction to the Zodiark kill and the immediately following Meteion vision of the star being consumed was "...did. did we fuck up again."

They were seconds from turning into a blasphemy when the Watcher showed up and managed to distract them long enough to shove that wayyyyyy into the Pit of Emotional Repression.

And then Ardwin had to go through THE ENTIRE REST OF ENDWALKER while very intentionally NOT dealing with The Zodiark Situation or ANY of the things that followed because it literally was not safe to do so. And this is on top of the preexisting issues. She is now basically the emotional equivalent of an unexploded nuclear warhead.

At some point after coming back from Ultima Thule, she went to Ishgard, and found a body, and touched the dark knight soul crystal. And to be honest, this is probably the single best thing that could have happened to her at that time. The soul crystal acted as a catalyst; it latched on to the Pit of Emotional Repression, the residual memories from it's previous holder, and a sliver of Ardwin's soul that was hanging on to the rest by a thread after the Lightwarden incident and didn't get sufficiently reconnected by the Ardbert-superglue. And the combination of those resulted in her Fray/Myste/Esteem.

This did not magically fix the Pit of Emotional Repression, obviously - but it did force her to confront all those issues, in a way that was, relatively speaking, manageable. Her personal dark knight questline definitely diverged from the canon version at some points, but a lot of it did follow the canon quests that address a lot of things from ARR/Heavensward/Stormblood, and forced her to also come to terms with the fact that she hasn't been OK for a long time. (It also got her to deal with part of Mental Breakdown 2, which is probably the most minor of the three and is the slight identity crisis resulting from Ardwin plus Ardbert plus Azem.)

Basically she sort of got therapy (and also probably got to make out with Esteem at least a little bit because she is a freak (affectionate)).

(And this is not even getting into Mental Breakdown 3, aka The Entire Zenos Situation, which is a whole other can of worms - I may expand on this later.)

Spent the evening fiddling with my mods for Ardwin to try and get her to a body type that actually comes across as, like, healthy, instead of running on nothing but stress. I partly wanted to do this because I wasn't happy with my current mod setup, but also as a character development thing for her.

Her personal timeline for MSQ, from ARR through the end of 6.0, was something along the lines of 2 years. She has not had a chance to actually, properly rest. Post-Endwalker, heading into Dawntrail, is really the first time she gets to relax for more than 5 minutes. And also deal with the unholy amount of emotional baggage she has been repressing in order to function this entire time, especially through ShB/EW, which resulted in at least 3 distinct mental breakdowns between the end of 6.0 through 6.1 (one of which was The Entire Dark Knight Questline). 6.2 onwards has very much been about recovery for her, which I think is gonna be a process that continues forward into summer vacation in Tural.

Without further ado, I give you:

Before...

...and after.

(mod list for "after" pic under cut)

Base textures: Bibo+ ("buff & smooth" texture)

Body: rue+ (buff small chest, small skullcrusher legs)

Scaling tweaks: DIY set of Customize+ scalers - if anyone's interested in a copy, let me know and I'll figure out how to export them

Smallclothes: Yet Another Sporty+

Skin details: All-Gen Body Freckles, Rough Travels (scars)

Compatibility: Atramentum Luminis

Face details: Proper Freckles (medium), Hair Defined, Everyone Bites, Eyeworks (looking forward to the graphics update when hopefully I won't need as many of these lol)