#dawntrailer spoilers

[adahlenan]

— Calm before the storm.

[laspocelliere]

Day Twenty-One: Shade

“Come here?”

Aymeric’s hand at her wrist was gentle, and she went willingly. The sun was bright and glaring over Tuliyollal, setting the ocean waves crystal shades of turquoise and sapphire. In the shaded dock of their private cabin, the couple had been sequestered for the better part of the day, door locked firmly against any intruders, and any prying eyes were sorely disappointed to find that their view of the sea was completely blocked from anywhere else on the mainland.

They were alone, and she could breathe again.

They’d done little through the day but sit in gentle silence together, but he pulled her out of the burning sun anyway, down into the comfortable lounge chair on the deck and into his arms. His skin was warm with sunlight, and he was golden all over in the way he’d taken so well to warmer climates; first in Radz-at-Han, and now here in Tural. She let him wrap his arms around her and pull her back against his chest, dipping her head to press her lips to his bare forearms, and feeling his brush against the top of her head in turn.

“You were meant for this, you know,” she told him quietly, gaze drifting out towards the picturesque scene before them of crystal waters and coloured coral. He made a questioning noise against her hair, and she leaned more comfortably back against his chest.

“Travelling like this,” she clarified. “You fit in everywhere you go, and I’ve yet to find a place you didn’t immediately adapt to.”

The unsaid was just that, but he heard it anyway. Unlike her.

She, by virtue of her status as the Warrior of Light, was never going to properly fit in anywhere. She was a hero and a guest wherever she visited, and the enormity of who she was no longer allowed her to simply exist anywhere, regardless of how her traveller’s heart would want to slip anonymously from city to city. That, combined with the very nature of her, made it impossible for her to fit in anywhere. She was unsettling in ways that Aymeric could never be, and cold in ways that were foreign to his nature – inner secret workings of his heart aside. He could play the game better than she could; always had.

Nosing into the curve of her neck, Aymeric kissed her bare skin, porcelain pale but still warm from the same sunlight that had touched him. “It’s because of you,” he reminded her softly, and his words whispered against her skin, setting down a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. “I would never have left Ishgard, if not for you. I would never have been who I am, if not for you.”

“That’s not true.” She turned slightly in his arms, enough that she could meet his piercing gaze. “Even had the war not ended, you would have gone. You knew what Ishgard needed before anyone else, and you would have found a way, outside of her walls if you had to.”

With one hand, he hooked his fingers under her chin, and tilted her face up to look at him. The whole world was in his eyes, always had been, and it still managed to take her breath away that every day he chose to look at her like that. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere, if it weren’t for you.”

His lips tasted like salt and sea when she kissed him, and he was always the warmest thing in any room. With the sun shining high above the peaceful, bustling city beyond, he kissed her slow and languid, because they suddenly had all the time in the world. Hands smoothing across her bare skin, he pulled her into his arms and carried her further back into the cabin and its cooling shade, as far away from prying eyes as possible. What he had in mind next was for no one but the two of them.

[prismbearer]

meanwhile, elezen glowup overall, but I still wish they'd have played with the eyebrows a little...

[simonsaysletsgo]

My real Dawntrail hot take is I wish Sphene got to girlboss harder. I liked the sort of creepy vibe she had in the beginning, but they dropped it too fast to make the biggest slog of the game and we only got a hot second of "I AM THE DEVOURER OF WORLDS" which I suddenly I was into but we barely see it.

[xen-the-salt-mage]

There's a spot in the lvl 99 dungeon where you can see the soul tubes in the wall twist and turn for no obvious reason.

This was almost certainly an aesthetic choice

But

I am mildly obsessed with the idea an important step in Soul Processing™ is giving the souls a little shakey shake.

Anyway

[dress-up-tataru]

ppl on twitter are arguing in circles about the wol taking a backseat in dawntrail but frankly i think its refreshing as hell. literally the last two expansions have been about your character experiencing the horrors, its nice to give them a break and just be along for a laugh while others get the spotlight. besides theres still plenty of moments where someone has to be like "hey this guy is really powerful u know. dont fuck with them" about you. which is hilarious as a lala btw, especially since it seems like theres almost none native to tural. literally imagine these foreigners pointing at someone eye level to a toddler going "this is the strongest person on the planet, so you better watch it"

[rabid-catboy]

he hates her autistic girl swag

[tainbocuailnge]

erenville is so funny to me. everything about his backstory wants him to be a protagonist but he's so effortlessly normal that it just never happens. he worked for the secret government space-ark of noah project. he's childhood friends with the princess of unified continental america. his mother was essentially one of the american warriors of light and told him to find the legendary golden city that nobody ever returns from. his hometown got swallowed by the tokusatsu dimension and that same mother died as part of an underground resistance movement in the tokusatsu dimension but persists as a cyberghost. erenville is normal though. he's a guy with a job and he never learned how to fight. his special skill is being a completely regular wildlife expert and he is far too employed for any of this high stakes sweeping epic business.

[worldformula]

if only for one more day. one more day…a joyous one, if i could choose.

[rene-elric]

Could you have held fast to that which is dear without sacrifice

[viiioca]

i know that solution 9 representing imperialism is The Point but it really is something to get hit with a weepy "the war was so hard on us, we needed unobtanium just to survive complete climate collapse and everyone burned each other down for it" after a tour through the Mall of America and seeing that the unobtanium that the world burned itself down for in a desperate bid for survival is being used to produce self-heating coffee cups and disneyland retirement village for dead grandma. they have an amazon warehouse full of souls they keep in kcup pods that they hand out in a state-sponsored work program.

"i guess we just have to respect their cultural differences 🙂" girl they figured out how to burn a soul up like the Go Faster button in fast & furious movies. one of the 17 year olds they have fighting in the thunderdome just huffed your mom's soul like a whippet on pay-per-view and he's going to do that 9 times a week until he gets victorian coughing baby disease and dies. you don't have to be ok with that. this place sucks

[jojostory]

she's gonna spoil him rotten!!

[koyoriin]

"I’m out of time, why did it stop? I'll bet my life before it's lost; The final line I'll cross." ⚡

https://twitter.com/koyoriin https://patreon.com/koyorin https://instagram.com/koyori_n https://bsky.app/profile/koyorin.bsky.social

[rookiebe]

Memory

[tritoch]

the other thing I find very funny about trying to write a canon compliant wol is taking all the wolship hints extremely seriously.

I don't really wolship because I'm just fundamentally not that kind of fan. But I know for those who are, the sheer number of romance hints FFXIV throws at you can be overwhelming to parse in a context where you have a preferred/intended wolship, particularly if you're not attracted to the gender the hints are coming from in the first place (a particular tip of the hat to wlw fans navigating the g'raha of it all). I've seen plenty of people write around them or write them out or be like "no aymeric was for real inviting my wol to a nice platonic zero-subtext dinner," and God bless all of you.

But it's really funny to imagine them all as all-too-real but unreciprocated or perhaps unreciprocatable. The sheer scale of it is comedy. Spoilers for all of FFXIV follow.

Oh God, the Lord Speaker wants to have dinner, just the two of us, at his family estate and not a government building. I hope he doesn't bring up his crush on me. Thal's balls he's about to bring it up—oh thank God there's an emergency. Oh no someone got hurt! Oh no it's the teenage girl with a crush on me.

Your life is a cosmic joke. You watch the Sultana get poisoned and all your friends probably die to save your life and it's kind of all your fault in some ways, I mean at the very least you should've spoken up when they gave the teenager a private army, and then the teenage boy speaks up and is like, "hey, I guess we have at least one ally. What about if we go visit that guy who is really obviously down unbelievably bad for you and wants to lick the sweat off of you." and you have to be like, yeah, Alphinaud. Great idea. Let's do it. I'll call him.

(brief interlude: also haurchefant's DEATH hits so good if you don't reciprocate. It's okay. He gets it. You're going through a lot and even if you had time to sort through your feelings maybe you're just not into him. That would be okay! You can love someone, or the idea of someone, without needing it to be romantically reciprocated. That's chivalric, even. Knightly. So he won't ask you to lie to him and say you love him as he lies dying in your arms. He's not so low as all that. But could you smile for him as you used to? That true hero's smile of yours. And you do, and he dies. And you both know he died for a lie, in a way, or a flight of fancy. And he's okay with that. Are you? Should you be? Should he?)

Then you're into Stormblood and it's like wow, okay. That last part was all high fantasy, of course there were loyal knights and elegant princes. But this is war. Imperialism. Grim business, surely there's no way—oh no BOTH handsome young revolutionary leaders seem to have a special interest in you?! And so does the Crown Prince of the Empire? Come on, man. I should get to do the whole horrors of war thing without having to also deal with this. Gaius sucked and it was weird that he let his foster daughter run around being openly obsessed with him but at least he never made it my problem.

You can't even get away from it across dimensions. Shadowbringers is a horror story about going on a teambuilding camping trip with your work colleagues for some reason except they all suddenly got really hot and they keep touching you affectionately on the shoulder and being like "I care for you and your happiness. Truly." And also you're being stalked for the whole camping trip by two old men who are obsessed with you. The false climax of the story is that the one old man tries to betray you and give a dramatic monologue about how he loves you but the two of you are doomed by the narrative and then the other old man shoots him in the back like "no actually its MY turn to betray them and give a dramatic monologue about how our love is doomed by the narrative." Then the real climax is old man #1 backstabbing old man #2 in the middle of said monologue before old man #2 dies and gives ANOTHER wistful monologue about his doomed love. Then for the patches they're like okay so we have this even CRAZIER old man who's gonna strike when you're weak and give a dramatic monolo—

and that's without even getting into the literal soulmate ghost only you can see

my warrior of light never felt more betrayed than in that scene where Y'shtola is like "haha Alisaie and G'raha have crushes on the warrior of light." Like I thought we were COOL, Y'shtola! I work here! This situation is already in such a delicate balance! Right when I got here I met Alisaie's "friend from work" who was like oh haha so YOU'RE the one she can't stop talking about and we never followed up on that because the woman died horrifically like five minutes later right in front of us! Then when Vauthry got away and we had to do all that shit with the dwarves, G'raha kept pausing every ten minutes to be like oooooh I'm so old I'm gonna die soon...at least I got to spend some time with some people who are really important to me...in fact here's what I'd tell the person who's most important to me...actually u know them really well haha. And I just had to sit there and be like wow, dude, crazy.

even in the face of apocalypse you still gotta go back in time like 12,000 years and there's somewhere there who makes you sit and listen to his story which is that the purpose of his whole godlike immortal life was to be in a throuple with you and old man #2 from the camping trip. and you just gotta sit there the whole time knowing you/your past life is the one who broke up the throuple over politics. He's like come help me harangue the old man into streaking in public, he'll do it if you ask.

then you meet and fight and kill God and you gotta turn to the team and be like hey sorry guys can you give me a sec. I'm gonna call God by her real name because we met one time for like four days and after that the promise of meeting me again was one of the things that sustained her through her millennia of suffering. Not like that but like. Idk. Just gimme a sec!

It's a relief when you finally get to Lahabrea and he's like actually I still don't fuck with your vibe. Like thank GOD.

And my WoL is very obviously dad-shaped so Dawntrail had a very specific energy for me but I understand that for plenty of people your deepening rapport with Wuk Lamat had a romantic subtext (same for Koana depending on how you read a few of his lines). And personally I think it's the height of comedy to be like, noooo, babe, your highness, I know you and your brother the king are in love with me and want me to stick around and support you emotionally through this governmental transition haha. But it's just...the cursed wineglass, babe. I GOTTA go figure out what's up with this cursed wineglass.

It's a running gag in some of the more optional content that people are like "you have an unreasonable number of hobbies and side gigs" to the WoL from time to time. But if every time you tried picking up a new hobby some new elf started baring their soul to you, you too would be like Hey Jessie (or sometimes Krile or Tataru), my good friend who is one of the only people in my life who knows what professional ethics and work-life boundaries are, any chance you need muscle on a gig on the other side of the world? Ideally with only Cid and his ex so all libidinal energy in the room is directed towards machinery or someone who isn't me?

ironically one of the only places you get a break from psychosexual obsession is the nier content

[etroveria]

Forever mama's fussy little bunbun