#ashe? theorycrafting? it's more likely than you think!

[grollow]

been thinking about this often so maybe u have insight on it

what was the relationship between hollow knight and the pale king in your opinion? i just cant stop thinking about whether it was like one-sided yearning for parental love met with stoic professionalism, or just something else...

Oh boy. Oh BOY. I've written a really long fanfic where this is explored heavily, I have some THOUGHTS.

So I'm gonna put this under a cut as I believe one of our mutuals has not yet beaten Hollow Knight and I don't want to spoil them, but ah

Okay, so. Uh. The first thing you should know is that Hollow is one of my two favorite characters in HK and I have so many emotions about them so this is gonna be long. The second thing you should know is that if I had to attribute a quote to PK's personality, it would be "The ends justify the means."

PK's thing is clairvoyance. Foresight.

I firmly believe that extends to having seen exactly how things end. Toward that end, I do not believe that he ever expected Hollow to actually last through what happened. I believe fully that he knew that Hollow was a thinking, feeling entity. My best support for this theory is the existence of World Sense. What use would this have for someone who felt nothing? Why give your unthinking object the ability to know the state of the world, unless you believed they were thinking? This argument can also be attributed to the existence of the fountain as well. Why make a monument to something you think isn't really thinking, feeling? Why honor it?

The answer is guilt, my dudes.

I truly believe that the Pale King knew damn well that his plan was never going to work, not long term. It was a bandaid. I believe his foresight showed him Ghost's arrival. Potentially what he saw was the Dream No More future, or you could argue that he saw the continued stasis of Hallownest, each vessel replacing one another in an endless cycle (which would explain the number of them). But I lean into the idea that he saw Dream No More ending, and therefore only needed Hollow to live long enough for Ghost to finish the job.

I subscribe to the concept that PK loved Hollow. Loved them enough to give them insight into a world they were not a part of -- as a desperate act of mercy and apology for something that he considered monstrous. Loved them enough to build a statue in his capital for them, a statue they probably never saw, but that his people did every single day, in hopes that their sacrifice would be remembered while he himself disappeared from public view. His own fountain is hidden in an isolated corner. He didn't want to be remembered -- he wanted them to be, though.

I also believe that what we see in the Dream version of White Palace is a metaphor. I don't believe void really killed PK. I believe guilt killed PK. Consumed by the weight of his decisions, he found a cost too great to live with -- but he could not, would not, back down from saving his kingdom. He did what was necessary, in his eyes, but he knew it for the evil it was, because he is fucking brilliant, and he's not a monster. He's a person stuck in a no-win situation doing the best he can to try and do damage control.

Did he make the right choices? We'll never know. And the greatest tragedy of it all is that: wondering what might have been, if decisions were different.

I actually explored some of what I view PK's motivations to be in the cost of life, which is one of my one-shots. :>

[stainedglassthreads]

I think a story’s themes sometimes get downplayed in theorycrafting. And that can occasionally lead to theories that clash with the source material, whether the theory supporters realize it or not.

For a very ridiculous example that few people probably take seriously, let’s begin with the Coma Theory from the Pokemon anime. The theory is an old one, and basically states that Ash is a boy from our world, who after being electrocuted fell into a coma where he dreamed the entirety of his Pokemon adventure. The presence of real-world animals from our world appearing in early seasons, but slowly being phased out for a world inhabited solely by Pokemon, is attributed to the deterioration of his brain, as is the fact he never appears to age.

I don’t believe anyone takes this theory completely seriously or claims it to be definitive canon, though some may appreciate its creepypasta style. For one, it reduces a story to an ‘all just a dream’ narrative, which is hard to do well and easy to make feel cheap and cliched. But I’ll also point out that it’s very at-odds with the themes of the Pokemon anime. Pokemon has always had strong themes of friendship, empathy, and compassion from episode one, and claiming that all the friends who Ash meets on his journey are mere figments of his imagination feels like the exact opposite to that. As such, even though the world of Pokemon is no stranger to dark subjects such as child death, this specific theory doesn’t feel like it belongs.

For a slightly more recent, but still not especially popular, theory, there is the theory that Gaster is responsible for the Determination experiments, amalgamates, and Flowey. While there is some theory Gaster may have dabbled in dt himself a little (the two strongest pieces of evidence being the DT Extractor’s design and the mention of vague ‘blueprints’, as well as some people noticing that Mystery Man looks melted.), in-game evidence in this video by Dorked proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alphys was the one responsible for the Amalgamates and Flowey. Even before I saw this video, though, I thought the theory was full of crap. Why?

Well, because it would render Alphys’ arc in the game entirely moot. Her arc was about the lies she had told covering up her own mistakes, and gaining the courage to tell the truth and fix things for the amalgamates. If it were abruptly revealed that, whoopsy doopsy, it wasn’t her mistake and had instead been the mistake of some mysterious figure who everyone just so happened to forget, conveniently lifting responsibility for the initial mistakes from her shoulders and removing the origin of the guilt that prompted her lies... it would abruptly become a much, much, much weaker arc. For both Alphys and Gaster. Alphys loses much of the power behind her eventually coming forwards, while Gaster’s arc, presently left largely in the background, is dragged into the forefront to be blasted with a glaring spotlight, highlighting the lack of closure and unsatisfaction. What lessons does Gaster learn? ‘Maybe if you blow yourself into non-existence, someone else will come along, be tortured by your mistakes to the point of suicidal depression, and then eventually fix your fuck-ups’?

This isn’t exactly a widely-popular theory, though, so let’s go for a more recent and more popular one. Such as, Chara being ‘pure evil’ and responsible for the No Mercy route. A major theme in Undertale is the effects of your choices on others, how any has the choice to be a good or bad person, and how all the monsters you encounter have much deeper and more complex lives than you initially anticipate. Chara is almost certainly not a saint, but to declare that they’re pure evil with no depth, no motivation, no trauma, and no chance of redemption, who also allows the player a convenient escape from blame, is to refute basically every moral that Undertale tries to convey. Chara’s depth and complexity may not be as explicit as, say, Flowey/Asriel. But by paying attention to themes and parallels, (such as how MK’s admitting that Undyne isn’t the best person, followed by them immediately shifting idolization to Papyrus, is paralleled by Asriel, Chara, and Frisk, or Asgore remarking that Frisk reminds him of Chara only in a True Pacifist run but not mentioning humans or Chara at all in No Mercy.), one can assume that Chara was, at the very least, neither pure evil nor exclusively motivated by power when they began their plan.

I do admit, sometimes a theme can be introduced early on, only for the story to viciously tear it apart and show how it’s a deeply flawed belief. Undertale initially introduces ‘kill or be killed’, only to show two different ways that it’s a very flawed belief: in No Mercy, it shows that this belief can only end in self-destruction, while in True Pacifist the saying’s most ardent supporter is forced to acknowledge it was a flawed ideology fueled by his trauma and hurt. But the point remains.

[scrollsfromarebornrealm]

dragoon theorycraft headcanons: Azure Dragoonage

Posting in response to @mariyekos 's most excellent analysis of the new Rising side story (i hope you don't mind a small stream of consciousness xD)

Lifespan of Elezen, Estinien and Haldrath

You hit some really good points with these. I feel that you're right, the Eye probably stopped Haldrath from aging. And it probably could have an effect on Estinien.

However, when it comes to the aging aspect--and I'm applying this to not just Estinien, not just Haldrath, but I'm applying it to everyone--I'm choosing to be leery right now. And I've got one big reason for that.

The Source has been Rejoined seven times. Hell at the start of the Dragonsong War, it had already gone through the 6th! To this day, we do not know what effect this has had/will have on the people living there. If we go by the Ascian's planning, it was basically them putting a puzzle piece back together and everything was gonna go back to the way it once was. We don't know if that would have happened or not.

What we do know? Those Rejoinings have resulted in the people of the Source--many of them probably reabsorbing their Sharded selves. They're unaware of it, but it's happened. What kind of effect are you gonna get out of that?

Are you gonna live longer? Are you going to stay healthier? Are you going to age but still be in your prime? We have a LOT of cases of people well past their 40's, in their 50's, in their 60's still fucking wrecking shit like they're in their 20s! Now factor in for the dragoons--including the Azure, exposure to draconic aether and it's...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It is hardcore up in the air right now. And honestly I'm waiting an expac or two to see how stuff goes on the aging front.

Fuckery in the Land Of The Azure Dragoon

I think retirement for an Azure Dragoon (followed by at least two decades of survival) is EXTREMELY uncommon in Ishgard's history.

So maybe Ishgard kills Azure Dragoons who are too far gone (whether they're actually too far or whether the people in power are paranoid about it).

You may be more right than you think. And here's why. I strongly suspect once Haldrath breathed his last, Aureniquart probably reached out to his old brother-knights, who probably took charge of Haldrath's body and the Eye (I honestly think he probably had the second Orb of Evil stuffed in a traveler's bag or something like that). Haldrath's corpse and the Eye then gets turned over to the Church, who then gets told everything the prince revealed. From there, we don't know. But we do have the following from EE1:

761: The Azure Dragoon Valeoryant repels an attack by the wrym Nidhogg, who had been dormant for several decades.

763: The Azure Dragoon Valeoryant leaves Ishgard to defend a small village from the Dravanian Horde, but is slain in battle protecting a group of shepherds.

(really? really? this motherfucker managed to get Nidhogg to fuck off and go back to sleep and two years later gets KO'd protecting shepherds? Yes I know it's possible but at the same time that man was probably staving off the MOTHER of all the fits during Nidhogg's attack and came out of it somehow in one piece and then two years later it's 'oopsie?' That's what we're going with?)

1058: The Azure Dragoon subdues a massive dragon in the western highlands of Coerthas, aided by a contingent of mages from the Holy See who spellbind the foe into slumber. The body and limbs of the great wyrm are enveloped in ash and stone, forming the floating isle known as the Dreaming Dragon. (this Azure is unnamed)

(now here's a real interesting bit)

1146: The lady dragoon Reinette carries out her revenge on the dragons who killed her lover. She then lays down her spear Gae Bolg and takes a vow of poverty, living out the rest of her days as a nun in service of the poor and downtrodden.

1189: Lady Reinette, the former Azure Dragoon, expires in a nunnery at sixty and six.

1289: Lady Reinette is canonized by the Holy See a century after her death. Unpopular with the clergy for having abandoned her duties as Azure Dragoon at a young age, she is beloved by the commonfolk for having devoted her life in service of the poor and downtrodden. The See elevates her to sainthood, in what is widely seen as an attempt to distract the public from corruption within the church.

Aside from Reinette being a real one (YES QUEEN), looking back at this story with the lens of As Azure Fades...for me, this is coming off a little sus. It's plausible. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was the truth--but at the same time if it was, holy fucking shit. And if there was something else behind this, the implications are not good. There is potentially a lot of fuckery in the story of Reinette.

1560: Upon the death of his predecessor, Thordan VII is ordained Archbishop of the Holy See.

1562: The mountain village of Ferndale is laid to waste by a recently awakened Nidhogg. (Ser Alberic Bale, the Azure Dragoon, forces the great wyrm to retreat. He takes in Estinien, sole survivor of the attack, as his ward and resigns as Azure Dragoon.)

From then on, it's kaput until Estinien is encountered either in ARR with the dragoon 30-50 questline or is encountered post-ARR/pre-HW.

I also kinda want to point out, by 1562, Coerthas/Ishgard has been having a bad time. They've lost all but one of the Vigils (which gets taken out during the Calamity). They lost chocobo grazing pastures to the Horde. They lost LARGE portions of land to the Calamity. They can't catch a break because whenever Nidhogg's out of it, there's still his offspring/Horde/heretics still raging. They have lost public face because they refused to come to the Eorzean Alliance's aid during the events of Carteneau.

And honestly? It's a little weird we don't have a single peep from the Eye or hear anything else Azure wise until Estinien shows up either in DRG questline or post-ARR.

(I need dinner and my brain is like 'bleh' so there's probably going to be another part to this later XD)

[exaliant]

who are some characters you ship your muse with? + would your muse ever get married?

RE: SHIPPING

WOULD YOUR MUSE EVER GET MARRIED?

As a king it’s something he’s sort of figured is an inevitability in his life; though if it happens out of love or politics nobody knows (and fuck it, he might not even marry a woman. just wilding out over here!) While he’s in Spirale though he’s not thinking about it unless the person he got interested in was also from Fodlan, then it might be something worth considering. 

WHO DO YOU SHIP YOUR MUSE WITH?

HEADS UP: im sticking to castmates with this, and don’t take this to be a push in any one direction with a character – there’s also going to be some ship opinions here.

OUT OF SUPPORTS/PAIRED ENDINGS HE COMES BAKED IN WITH; I’m fond of Marianne, Felix, Byleth and Dedue for him. Marianne’s supports were really soft and I think they’d be able to understand each other’s flaws in a way that I’m personally weak to. I am, unfortunately, always sad about the amount of energy Felix puts into taking care of Dimitri, and to go back to the love language stuff thats something that absolutely isn’t lost on him. Dimileth and Dimidue are alright but they have a lot of caveats for me; Dimitri really wants Dedue to be his own person first and foremost I think and he’d feel TERRIBLE about trying to pursue a relationship with Dedue unless they thought they were on equal footing. IMO he’s more likely to be Dedue’s wingman than Dedue’s husband lmao. Dimileth HAS to be post-timeskip for me or I don’t wanna think about it just bc Dimitri’s 17 through most of the Academy phase (His birthday being in December and the Academy Phase ending in February)

OUT OF OTHER CHARACTERS: Sylvain and Claude! Admittedly I don’t really know what the Dimiclaude dynamic would look like personally but what fans tend to theorycraft is interesting? Their personalities would play off each other well I think. Sylvain only has a B support with Dimitri but I have a lot of feelings about this sdhgha basically it seems like they’re both in a position to listen to each other and accept each other for who they are ugly parts and all and thats the sort of shit that makes my heart tender rn 

Dimiashe is interesting but I think Ashe needs to like assert himself more for it to be properly functional.

also fine: just uh. shoving dimitri/sylvain/felix or dimitri/sylvain/claude together as poly units

[alexchristin]

Design for Theorycrafting

Recently, Danny O’Dwyer and the team over at Noclip have done a documentary series, interviewing prominent independent developers (Derek Yu of Spelunky, Jim Crawford of Frog Fractions, and Jonathan Blow of The Witness), talking about the games that inspired them as children, discussing their own takes on the significance of mystery in games, and explaining how they weaved elements of it into their design fabrics. The documentary series is fittingly titled “Rediscovering Mystery,” and a solid must-watch.

It takes courage for a developer like From Software to even attempt to include such a vast, and totally missable areas such as the Painted World of Ariamis or Ash Lake in the original Dark Souls. And there’s no doubt, that the effort from Jonathan Blow and his team, to build an island full of mystery and surprising treats, elegantly placed on the fine line between obscurity and conspicuity is absolutely commendable. However, aside from being a big help when you need it, the Internet is also a land riddled with spoilers. People are always discussing, debating, and engaging in joint-efforts to unearth even the most obscure secrets of all in games. And often as a result, the easy and most logical answer from developers on how to retain the player’s interests in games is to keep expanding their worlds, and to include even more obscure secrets for them to find out.

I do believe that this approach is, not only costly for sure, but also fairly limited in its efficiency. Not to undermine developers’ effort and control over the experience, but there’s one thing that many designers I know will probably agree on: the most profound, interesting, valuable and effective drive of all stems from within people’s heads. And the most common manifestation of such drive that one can see, comes in the form of theorycrafting.

A spoiler-resistant design paradigm

According to Christopher A. Paul (2011), the word theorycraft originated from World of Warcraft, which describes “the search for the optimal set of strategies with which to play, by using statistical analysis and mathematical modeling.” In the broader context, theorycrafting refers to the practice of analyzing theoretical scenarios, speculating possibilities, performing statistical reports, planning strategies for unexpected events, or simply “connecting the dots.” All of these are done mostly off-game, or at least not within the context set up by the games they’re playing.

Take a look at almost any game, you’ll find a universal advice suggesting that starters do a “blind” playthrough first, then come back a second time with a strategy guide to “one-hundred-percent” the game. While there’s nothing wrong with avoiding spoilers before you can enjoy a good book or a good movie, I do think that the old method of adding depths and maintaining player’s interests no longer holds itself well. What if instead of discouraging players from communicating with others on discussion boards, or encouraging blind playthroughs, we can design games around the reality of gaming today?

Minimal handholding

While this is a popular mantra adopted by many modern designers and may seem ostensibly obvious, I’d still like to stress its importance. Instruction on basic controls and maneuvers is fine, but make it so that players will have to do their own homework in order to overcome bigger challenges (say, higher difficulties). They can take notes, read up, discuss with other people, or even come up with their own ideas and strategies. You may be told how to move around and perform various attacks in Dark Souls, but nowhere in the game will you find an explanation on how Poise works, or how sometimes having low-to-no Poise is actually beneficial. The user interface and functionality of Darkest Dungeon may imply that you should treat your units as precious and cure them of devastating mental afflictions, but you’ll have to learn for yourself that it’s really costly to maintain a sane army, and the path to victory involves treating your units as expendables.

I myself have spent about 1,500 hours on the Long War mod for XCOM 2012 by Firaxis, and tried to pinpoint exactly what about it that reeled me and thousands of others in, even during its development period, and how it had us all absolutely enthralled. XCOM 2012 was fine, but it certainly, most would agree, did not have much to keep people playing for hundreds of hours. And that’s where the mod steps in. In direct opposition to Sid Meier’s idea at GDC 2010, which is basically to occasionally “cheat” in favor of players so that they themselves won’t ironically feel cheated, Long War relieved XCOM of every last bit of its shackles. As a result, the game was significantly harder, but a majority of XCOM players found the honesty and transparency worth a lot more in the long run than the ocassional helping hand.

Ensure High Interactivity between Game Elements

The first thing that comes to mind when people start thinking about strategies is how different elements within a game will interact with one another. And good news is, you don’t have to make such complex network of interactions obvious. Human beings are good at noticing and distinguishing patterns, and we love playing the game of connecting dots. What would happen if I combine Element A with Element B, and then sacrifice Element C, which on its own is very beneficial, to go for Element D? Would I then have to change my playstyle now that this setup is in place? And how? These are amongst the questions players are going to ask themselves when they theorycraft. Try to think ahead of them, and leave footprints on the ground behind so that players will follow them.

Extra Credits’ episode on Depth vs. Complexity explores this particular topic further.

Encourage micro-and-meta strategies

To reiterate a point previously made: the higher the difficulty level (by which I mean the amount of depth the game can and may provide to the player) the more the game should require the player to think outside of the immediate in-context scenario being laid out in front of them and plan ahead for future possibilities. The player should have to not only care about major factors and decisions, but also minor details that at first may seem trivial, but will make a difference in specific scenarios. For example, a 5% hit chance boost may seem negligible—not a lot of difference between an 80% hit and an 85% hit. But in the specific scenario where the player’s hit chance is penaltied down to 0%, and the 5% boost will be applied after the penalties, then it becomes the difference between chance and no chance.

To do that, a game needs to require players to acquire more knowledge than it can offer explicitly inside itself (unless they decide to constantly break the 4th wall and rain down paragraphs after paragraphs on the player, which is a bad idea by the way.) Obviously, this requires the game to contain a lot more depth. People won’t have a lot to read up on or talk about if the game they’re playing is Flappy Bird!

Micromanagement in gaming is often referred to as tedious. However, I do think it can be interesting and sometimes deeply profound if the player can see that:

It matters. It’s not going to matter if your SPD stat gets a 25% boost if you’re already the fastest moving unit in a turn-based combat and others have no way to catch up, which is what a lot of old RPGs were guilty of.

Everybody else is doing it.

The game is designed around the fact that everybody is doing it.

I found immense joy in discussing strategies with other players in the XCOM Long War community, and to play around with various ideas and theoretical scenarios in my head whenever I was on break at work. That made me feel like I was improving even when I was away from the game, and the game also helped me learn to think and to plan things carefully, and deliberately.

Reduced Linearity

Just like minimal handholding, even though reduced linearity isn’t anything new to experienced designers, it is amongst the key qualities of games designed for theorycrafting. Naturally, if every scenario in a game is scripted, every puzzle has but one single solution, and nothing that the player can do will make any significant impact to its outcome, then that game’s resistance to spoilers is clearly low. Someone nonchalantly tells a player that maybe they can turn left at this juncture, and they can’t unlearn that! You want to make sure that problems almost always have more than one answer, and there is a moderate space in which the player’s theorized solution may go off-track.

Maintain control over gameplay

With that said, in certain games, even if they’re non-linear and designed to encourage theorycrafting, there is still the risk of the player figuring out the optimal play and sticking to it rigorously, ultimately ruining their own experience. Soren Johnson, one of the Civilization designers, wrote “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” (2011)

The current most efficient ways to tackle this problem that we know of, is to introduce random elements, or in some context, procedural generation. The idea is to allow the computer to systematically and algorithmically generate environments or outcomes based on the player’s input and a dice roll. Randomness is not necessarily “lazy design,” but rather meant to serve as insurance against optimal play always producing the same results, making sure that no strategy is without its flaws. Allow people the freedom to metagaming and micromanagement, but at the same time try to mitigate certain-win strategies as much as possible. Work closely with testers and even the community.

Final Words

Designing a game that is challenging, complex, with a lot of depth, and which encourages strategizing, planning for possible scenarios, coming up with creative ways to solve problems, might seem to be an overwhelmingly difficult task. But I do think it is a good ideal to push towards. If people are going to read up on games before diving in and perhaps spoil it for themselves, let them do it as much as they want. Make it so that the challenges in your game can take that fact on the chin and still give them a hard time. And a good time.

Lastly, I’d like to leave you with a few words from Professor Brian Moriarty’s lecture back in GDC 2002, The Secret of Psalm 46.

“If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them? Is our imagination so impoverished that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks to keep players interested in our games? Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous.

The treasure is right there.”

References

Christopher A. Paul (2011) Optimizing Play: How Theorycraft Changes Gameplay and Design. Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/paul

Sid Meier (2010) The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know is Wrong). Available at https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012186/The-Psychology-of-Game-Design

TangledAxile (2016) Yes, XCOM2’s RNG cheats - in your favor. Here’s how. Message posted on Reddit. Available at https://www.reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comments/45u81x/yes_xcom_2s_rng_cheats_in_your_favor_heres_how/

Soren Johnson (2011), GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack. Retrieved from https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=369

Brian Moriarty (2002) The Secret of Psalm 46. Available at http://ludix.com/moriarty/psalm46.html

Extra Credits (2013) Depth vs. Complexity - Why More Features Don’t Make a Better Game. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU

[warsofasoiaf]

What do you think about the new Secretary of Defense James Mattis?

I like him, but I admit that I’m biased. Mattis is an intellectual military theorist, and so am I. He believes that the soldier should be educated on the nature of war and the culture of the land they happen to be in, and I agree. His views on foreign threats match much of my own, especially his commitment to America’s NATO allies, as well as Japan, South Korea, and Australia. In an increasingly global world, and with a far more assertive China and Russia, I’m of the belief that we need to clasp hands with our strategic partners around the globe.

There are good things about this. Mattis is a soldier’s general, and this could go a long way to fixing a problem that a lot of the enlisted guys are seeing, with those inside the Beltway concerned more about their careers than the soldiers outside it. That was on my fellow soldiers’ minds and can help raise morale. DoD could use a new head at the helm to bring new ideas applied more at the field-level than in theorycraft.

I know the big thing on a lot of left-leaning minds is that Trump seems to listen to Mattis and can get him to backpedal, and thus he can act as the voice of reason to Trump. I don’t know how that will translate into more operational concerns or in moments of crisis. The optimistic part of me has faith in General Mattis to handle concerns rationally and present the soundest possible path in such a fashion that Trump will take the sober path, the pessimistic part of me says that even if he does it perfectly, that might not matter.

Now, the elephant in the room is that he is a hawk, and Trump is quite bellicose. Aside from the obvious concerns about proxy wars, there’s a concern that even if he’s a great choice to help reshape the DoD to handling the threats of the modern day, he might not be the best choice in an aggressive administration, rather instead a more moderate voice might be called for as SECDEF. I personally don’t agree, I think a SECDEF is naturally going to be one of the more hawkish members of the Cabinet, and State is the sobering counterbalance. I also think Mattis understands the price of a combat posture on the cerebral level, so I don’t think he’d be reckless even if pressure came from the White House for forceful responses. But it is a more aggressive posture, even when compared to Ash Carter, and State will have a tough time of it.

The big challenge for Mattis at the personal level would be to adopt his ideas to a role that is quite different from being a theater commander, even for a command as large as CENTCOM. There’s no guarantee that Mattis’s successes would necessarily translate into success at the Cabinet-level. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to predict that, so I’ll just have to wish him the best and give him any support I can.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[transtrendhumanity]

its been two weeks since our last roll call so we’ll do that tomorrow, but for now, here’s some memories from the new friend, casey!

alright, Morgan is here! it seems like I'm part of team cat in here, echo and cilla adopted me. i think cat ears look good on me :3

i think robin was a single parent in my childhood? it's not exactly memories but if i had to speculate id say that part of the reason that timeline turned out so badly was because robin didn't join up with the others in the first place

i think i had ash blond hair like my parent but i dyed it all sorts of colours. sometimes with magic if i didn't have actual dye

there were some mixed results with that, for sure!

iirc i went by another name in the timeline i ended up in too, after robin & chrom married. of course i don't remember what it was, though! i just wanted that timelines Morgan to have the name i guess. it felt right to give it away. it was sort of symbolic of giving that timelines robin away, too. they said they'd always care for me as their child but

i think that being the same age and all, we ended up as rivals more than anything

umm. robin in our good timeline sacrificed themself before having my alternate self, but then they sort of reappeared again anyway. i guess i had some complicated feelings about that but, you know me, i wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth

me, flirting terribly with owain after his concerts with inigo and brady. like not disrespectfully, i knew he was taken just, for fun

i also think i learned to dance somewhere along the line. not as well as inigo but well enough that i could keep up with him if we hit the floor together. i think i learned from someone else after we all went our separate ways but he did give me pointers when our paths crossed!

as far as family goes, i do remember chrom and robin getting married but like.. that wasn't the robin i was born of, so i sort of considered myself an only child.

me and lucina looked nothing alike, and i think the morgan or that timeline had darker hair than me? time is weird

i have one (1) sort of bad memory with brady but like it was entirely justified and ill probably include it in the fic instead of talking about it here

i think i was a little bit in love with everyone from that generation, but i dont really recall any steady relationships. i managed to make out with at least half of them at one point or another.

i think my fling with noire was the longest lasting but im pretty sure she ended up getting married to brady in the end? i think? they were going steady for a while at least

tbqh im like 90% sure gh0st will kin brady so i would not be surprised if i end up getting some gay memories about him lmao

callon or whoever was playing didnt like yarne much but personally i love him and i would love to pull on his fluffy ears again

oough being able to think about memories and actually get something is INCREDIBLE i feel like ive gained a superpower

since me and laurent were both travelers, we traveled together sometimes. i think we made good counterpoints to each other. i would get him into enough trouble that he'd have something interesting to write about and he would bail us out lmao

once i dropped in on gerome with him but even though they both insisted i wasnt, it really felt like i was intruding on their time together, so i didn't stay long

i honestly have no idea what i did professionally. i think i was a bit of a jack of all trades. i helped people settle arguments and solve problems... actually i might have worked as a city planner for a couple years, but i grew restless and left

lucina said she was going back to the past after all was said and done, and for a while everyone thought she had, but eventually laurent found her out in valm working as some sort of city guard

it took a while, but chrom eventually did convince her to head back to ylisse and live as part of the royal family. they tried to convince me, too, but i.. well, i'd feel weird about it.

ok fea fic #3 is up! the first half of the part with brady is right out of my memories but the rest of it it sort of a mix between that and theorycrafting

i way bummed myself out writing that....

[scrollsfromarebornrealm]

Dragoon armor–historical evolution (continued)

Okay. From last night.

Trueblood->Drachen->Dragonlancer->Trueblood (again)->Pteroslaver->Tiamat

-cough, adjust glasses-

(Disclaimer: Theorycrafting ahead. I typed this out on my phone, there may be errors in my post and my lore gathering.)

At this point, I feel that it’s safe to say that the proto-Ishgardians were dragon-riders. Period. Estinien’s short story (From Azure Ashes, Tales from the Storm)-

Along with an ingame line from either Vidofnir or Vedrfolnir (but based on his bio in EE1 I think it’s Vedrfolnir) proves this. It may have been highly common to see knight and dragon working as one unit to maintain the peace, and as a result it’s not that far off to assume there might have been a proto-Knight-Dragoon order.

Therefore, that means it’s time to poke at the armor!

———-

Trueblood/Drachen:

Okay. Last night I said this possibly was a bit of a difficult one, for the simple fact that Haldrath is seen wearing Drachen-mail. While this can be attributed to story purposes and DRAMA…I don’t think so. While we don’t know if Haldrath was a dragon-rider himself, it would make sense that he knew of it or even *had* training for it. Kings and princes are almost always automatically slotted in for training in the arts of war in many contexts, historical and fictional.

There’s another reason why I don’t think Square plopped that armor on Haldrath for superficial story reasons as well. And it’s very simple.

Haldrath fought Nidhogg.

You do NOT fucking tangle with any dragon, ESPECIALLY A FIRST BROOD DRAGON THAT IS RIGHTFULLY PISSED, IN REGULAR ARMOR.

You don’t. You CAN, but uh…you are not going to survive unless the gods fucking love you that day and I’m willing to bet Halone took one look at that situation and went ‘you fucking morons.  You absolute idiots!’

So now possbily at this point, we reach an interesting point.  Why don’t we see Haldrath in the Trueblood then?  Why the Drachen set?  

Honestly?  I couldn’t tell you.  But I will say this.  It’s very interesting that the Trueblood set is armor that’s forged using dragonfire, while the Drachen set is forged using dragonblood.  Dragonfire requires (ideally) a willing and active participant (insert your level of enthusiasm here) in the forging process.  Dragonblood on the other hand…you really don’t need permission to take from the newly dead, now do you?

I’m also beginning to suspect that maybe we could have had differencing armor sets.  I mean, it is possible that with the bonds between man and dragon, you could have had some dragons giving the a-ok to use their blood.  It could be that the Trueblood and Drachen sets were both actively used during that time period. But then we have this quote from the story…

While this is a direct reference to the murder of Ratatoskr, it could possibly also imply something darker.   It very well could be that the Trueblood armor was spurned for the Drachen. Dragonfire is all well and good, but blood historically irl and in fiction has always been touted as the source of great strength.

And if we're going there...who's to say that Haldrath’s Drachen was made with the blood of Ratasokr? Who’s to say that maybe some long-ago armoror got an idea in their head one day? We may never know. All of this is my own idle speculation.

But the fact that we see Haldrath in the Drachen set is pretty fucking telling, I feel.

——————–

Dragonlancer:

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CAN WE JUST GIVE A SHOUT OUT TO THE SHADOWBRINGERS TRAILER MOVIE FOR SHOWING US DRAGOON MID-AIR COMBAT?!

(3:20-3:13)

Seriously. I know the biggest gripe about this armor is that it gives one a fat ass but DID YOU SEE THOSE MANUVERS?!

Dragonlancer was originally created by a famous Ishgardian armorsmith named Urseille the Meek. This armor was specifically designed to allow the dragoon to be more aerodynamic in the air, yet the Church rejected the design because it wasn’t old and stogey enough (aka 'tradition’).

Dragonlancer is more than likely created via the same means–hot metal and dragonblood–but given the 'wings’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there was actual dragon hide included in the design. Or at the very least, a strong leather component. There’s no details in EE1 on how the armor was made.

————–

Trueblood (part 2):

EE2 goes into detail on the Trueblood, and it is lovely. The set itself is metal and cast-off dragon scales merged in dragonfire. The greaves provide traction, and the description goes so far as to *specifically* state Coerthas weather as one of the reasons the greaves needed tractionproofing. The helm is stated to have been forged when the people of Coerthas and dragonkind lived in harmony. In From Azure Ashes, Ratasokr is only all too happy to participate in the forging of such sets, and Hraesveglr states that the original dragoons wore such armor. EE2 states that forging with dragonfire was rediscovered after the Dragonsong War, and it’s my personal headcanon that dragoons now primarily wear variants of the Trueblood set once more.

--------

Pteroslaver Mail:

Um.

So yet again, disclaimer.  Anything I say on this set and the following one, the Tiamat armor--this is strictly all me.  To the best of my knowledge, we have no lore yet on any of these.  However we do know Encyopedia Eorzea III is coming out soon, and hopefully it’ll have some detail on one, if not both these pairs.  My take however--

To begin with, Ptero.

We also have Pterodactylus, which is an extinct genus of pterosaur, which were basically flying reptiles that lived during the Late Triassic to the Late Cretaceous period on Earth.  Some people generally know a critter from this group as pterodactyls.  So...

Ptero = Feather/wing 

Slaver = A person dealing with or owning slaves

So...Featherowner, Wingowner?  Featherslaver, Wingslaver?

?_?

There’s also the design.  (rant on the female Drachen mail aside).  In comparison to every other set (again, aside from the female level 50 Drachen) the entire body is covered.  The Pteroslaver? Not so much--it’s not as blatant as the level 50 Drachen set on female characters, but...

(yes i’m using Reinhardt pictures do not @ me I SPENT ALL DAMN DAY FIGHTING VARIS SO I COULD DYE THIS ARMOR GODDAMN IT WE’RE USING IT)

Methinks you DO NOT want the entire underarm exposed in combat.  Just saying.  That is a big fat target zone.  

Nor do you want toes possibly exposed-yes look at the top picture.  I'm also not saying anything about the tail because the Dragonlancer had the same thing and it looks purely ornamental so you can lose it no problem in a fight.  

Honestly to me, this looks like something one might wear in a gladiator ring.  Take my words worth a grain of salt, I’m not an armor expert.  If you’re using this in combat, my thinking is you have to be fast and nimble as fuck, because again, you got two big old areas of attack.  I can see the underarm armor being sacrificed for more maneuverability, but...yeah. You have to be fast.  

-----

Tiamat:

...I got nothing. The name certainly intrigues me, as does the make. Everything is streamlined, the dragoon wearing this is gonna be fast and nimble as fuck, possibly even more so than a dragoon in the Dragonlancer armor. Considering this is of Thavnarian design, and Vrtra's involvement in the warding scales, I would not be surprised if this is metal and insert-whatever-dragon-part merged with an absolutely bonkers Thavnarian alchemical combination/compound/what have you.

Another headcanon I've been nursing is Tiamat and Bahamut basically having their own version of mail they gifted to mortals--if they ever did so. Or a thank-you gift for freeing her and her children. In comparison to the Raident Host gear, which save for the caster and healer, definitely sport dragonish motifs on the armor itself--clawish hands and feet, fanged faceplates and tails--the Tiamat gear stands out for only having the dragon image on the chest, greaves, and gauntlets.

We'll see come EE3!