#happy dawntrailing everyone!!!

[starrysnowdrop]

Happy Dawntrail Full Launch Day Everyone!

So technically I’m still on hiatus from Tumblr as I’m not finished with the DT msq yet, but I wanted to make a post wishing everyone a good launch day and I hope the queues aren’t horrible for you! 🥰

Don’t worry, this is NO SPOILERS, but I’m in the 3rd zone, level 95 MSQ, and so far the design of the zones and the world building overall is absolutely fantastic! As a Latina, I knew I’d be going into this expansion with many high expectations, but so far, I’ve enjoyed every moment learning about Tural, its history, cultures, and its peoples. I can’t stop looking around at the landscapes and getting excited about it. I have some minor complaints so far that I won’t go into, but overall I’m loving this experience and I can’t wait for the second half of the story (Come on, I’m dying to see Solution Nine!!!). Oh and Picto is AWESOME and it’s my new favorite DPS job by far. I haven’t tried new Astro yet however, so I’ll have to see how I feel about the changes to my healer main.

Anyways, I’m going to go back to leveling, and I’ll be back once I’m done with the msq! Happy Dawntrailing everyone!!! 🌞🌮🍹

[fairygodpiggy]

Everyone has lost something precious.

Everyone here has lost homes, dreams, and friends...

Working together, now we can make

new homes for ourselves, and new dreams.

Although I know the journey will be hard, we have lots of time.

The road is ahead of us, so let's start out today.

Just, one more thing…

...The people and the friends that we have lost,

or the dreams that have faded…

Never forget them.

Bonus vertical shot of the group:

[zylphiacrowley]

Happy Nameday Catman! || 15th Sun of the 3rd Umbral Moon (6/14)

Part 2

Eorzean handwriting font made by arty-ffxiv

[verflares]

at this point i have a good mental image of how i want botw/totk link to look. but until i actually draw a ref for him everytime i draw his scars out its an exercise in "fuck it we ball"

[ephemeralxjustice]

May your journey be as long as your star is bright.

[koko-mochi]

we are so back

[yuri-is-online]

I do not trust this tinkerbell bitch as far as I can throw her.

[gailiag]

etrii motherfucking hartrael

[matcha-bnuuy]

THE HROTHGALS DONT SUCK!!!! 🥳

[eorzeanflowers]

Dawntrail Countdown - 3 days to EA

The poster boy of Endwalker, paladin! Yasha and Zero clearing out some Voidsent before they part ways.

[mnemosyne-xiv]

Just a heads up! This lil blog of mine is going to be posting story spoilers for 7.0 so please please please be sure to filter out tags like | #dawntrail spoilers | #7.0 spoilers | and so on if you don’t wish to be spoiled!! The last thing I want is to ruin the story for those who haven’t had the chance to go through it yet so I’m being doubly sure to tag my posts appropriately <3 hope everyone is having a lovely Dawntrail experience!

[nyotamods]

A lil sneak peek at the mod I'm currently making in celebration of Dawntrail's release! It's not nearly close to being done but hopefully i can knock it out before DT's official release on the 2nd (o´ω｀o)

[eorzea80]

I waited about an hour and a half in a 2k queue, but I finally got in. Checked on my retainers, puttered around the bar [game], then stepped away to the kitchen for a snack [IRL] before starting a new play session. I come back to:

I mean, I'm getting the real expac launch experience, I guess.

[wine-dark-soup]

YoshiP basically said "The update will make everyone look better. Maybe even enough for Magnai to find his Nhaama"

[tritoch]

i have seen people be like "if you think what the dawntrail protagonists do in zone six is valid you have to conceded emet's approach/perspective was valid, what you do is basically what he does" and it's like...nah. it's obviously intentionally very similar ("it's like poetry, it rhymes") but there's some key differences:

emet is disgusted by sundered life, which he sees as inhuman, and longs to return to the unrecoverable past. so he does seven(ish) planet-wide genocides. the endless aren't new life, their ability to grow and learn is specifically in question (at the very least they are fundamentally incapable of taking in new sensory experience of certain forms), they're shades from the unrecoverable past, and you are destroying them in favor of those still alive.

also, we aren't disgusted by them nor do we think anything is fundamentally justified if done to them (everyone pretty much no-sells cahciua "we aren't alive so it doesn't matter if you kill us :)," in fact). we don't have like 12,000 years and the most advanced magic known to anyone alive. we are forced by serious exigency to destroy them due to a political impasse with their leadership's policy re: resource extraction. this tonal difference is in fact extremely important.

the endless themselves seem pretty ambivalent about the whole deal. they're bored or they're wary of the way their world keeps shrinking, and it's very explicitly neither a functioning society by any recognizable human terms nor a paradise.

related to the above, basically every named endless turns to the person most relevant to them (cahciua to erenville, krile's parents to her, namikka to wuk lamat, otis to you) and is like, huh, i really appreciate having this moment of grace at the end of my journey to see that it was all worthwhile and to resolve my lasting regrets, but i understand what you're here to do and yeah, it's probably time for us to go. (does the writing put a finger on the scale by doing this? sure, but the writers also designed and built the scales and everything they're weighing on them, so i find it hard to discredit any one aspect for being the writers' invention.)

finally uh no one in the party has kids with the endless or lives a full human lifetime as one of them lol.

it's important to remember that emet was definitely at least somewhat lying about not seeing the sundered as real people. the fact that he has "lived a thousand thousand of your lives . . . broken bread with you, fought with you, grown ill, grown old, sired children and yes, welcomed death’s sweet embrace" makes everything he did soooooo much crazier than what you do. if i managed to convince an endless to fall in love with me and i had a kid with them and i loved that kid so much that their death threw me into a permanent grief spiral then like. yeah i guess i would have to be like "well hats off to emet, folks." but luckily the game doesn't make you do that.

even if you insist everyone in living memory was a full living person that we killed, you're still weighing like a city of people versus 7+ planet-wide mass murders. you do not under any circumstances got to hand it to him.

living memory absolutely is evocative of everything that happens in shadowbringers. but rather than placing us in emet's shoes, it forces us to relive what we already did, to really fully face up to what we have done by promising to remember emet's culture after destroying any chance of its return. after two games going hard on the hope part of the game's central theme of hope arising from grief, now we're doing grief. we are forced to see the past of our memories not as a cold, ghostly art deco cubus-plagued socratic method hellscape but as the most beautiful technicolor theme park where everyone's happy and no one's sad and there's parades every day and your parents are alive and they love you so much. and then the game's conclusion is, yeah, you were still right to let go. in fact, you were and are morally obliged to let go. the living were and are worth more than the dead. our grief in letting go of them may be immense and turns our world to bleak nothingness for a time, and that is important to recognize, but at the end of the day our most pressing duty is to those we can yet save, not those we have lost.

[shera-dnd]

I have decided against my better judgement to be weird about the Dawntrail MSQ

and we can't talk about an expansion set in the fantasy americas without talking about

COLONIALISM

oh yeah, we're going there baby

So disclaimer that I may be brazilian, but my ass is white as hell, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. Also if any native americans have made posts on this please let me know so I can boost their analysis as well

Also also I'm more than happy to delete this post if I mess up. I'm genuinely trying to make a thoughtful analysis, so if I fuck up just say the word and this thing is gone from this website

Oh also also also, Dawntrail MSQ spoilers ahead!

So FFXIV has had a... messy relationship with colonialism over the years

The fact that the major antagonists for the first half of A Realm Reborn a literally called "beast man tribes" is absolutely not a good start to this story

Add to that the fact that The Twelve (Eorzea's gods) are shown to be kind all powerful deities, while the Primals (the tribal gods) are evil spirits summoned to bring destruction to the world

and yeah no ARR is not good with that shit. It's EXTREMELY not good. If I hadn't been told it got better later on I would have dropped this shit before I got to Titan

But they have been taking steps to unfuck things. First we're shown that even the "civilized societies" (in this case the catholic elves) can summon Primals, then that Primal summoning isn't an actual native custom but was introduced by foreigners with malicious intent, and that not all "beast man" practice that

Then they changed the names of the "Beast Man Tribe Quests" to "Tribal Quests" and then finally to "Allied Society Quest"

Which would have been an empty gesture had like half of the post-Shadowbringer patches, as well a lot of Endwalker, not been about forming alliances with those people and working together with them, recognizing that they have as much right to the land and to life as any Eorzean, this all culminating on the Primals being summoned with the express purpose of helping you protect the world you all share

I guess they realized that they couldn't have their big bad for most of the game be the evil expansionist empire, if they didn't like actually reflect in their own imperialist fantasies they were propagating

Then the teaser trailer for Dawntrail drops and everyone in the fandom is like "wait... are we gonna do a colonialism?"

And memes were abound of how all those lessons from before don't apply to the "New World" of Tural

THANKFULLY the actual questline leading to Dawntrail helped to settle some of those worries

We're not going to Tural to explore a new uncharted land, but are actually being invited over by the local royalty in order to aid them with their right of succession. We get introduced to the nation of Tuliyollal and how it's a thriving land with its own culture and not just a "terra nil" waiting to be colonized

Still there are some worries that this is gonna turn out poorly and that we're just gonna end up being white saviors

But I think they managed to avoid that pretty well

For starters neither the Scions nor the Warrior of Light are the protagonists of this story. You're all simply supporting character's in Wuk Lamat's story

A story that centers her people, her culture, and her family

And it's not even one culture. They don't portray Tuliyollal as this monolithic mish mash of every single native american culture

No, the lands of Tural are in fact comprised of multiple different people's and nations, each of them with their own customs and traditions which are informed by their history and the lands they live in

In fact learning about their cultures and partaking in their customs is the whole point of the Rite of Succession. It's all set up so that the next Dawnservant would be someone who understands and respects each of the peoples that comprise Tural

(I could, and probably will, write about what Dawntrail has to say about what makes a good ruler)

And our girl, Wuk Lamat, is shown to be the rightful heir because she really goes out of her way to understand each of the nations and show her appreciation for their customs

Putting her well above her Sharlyaboo brother Koana, The King of Unresolved Daddy Issues Zoral Ja, and whatever the fuck is going on with Bakool Ja Ja

(I joke, I love my two headed traumatized dumbass)

Tho I will admit that this does end up giving the tribes a somewhat "planet of the hats" vibe. Like their named NPCs are diverse and interesting, but you can just assume that most random NPCs of any given people are gonna act according to the stereotype

Which is unfortunate, but I have hopes that with the next few patches and the addition of Dawntrail's own Allied Society Quests, we'll get to see more to them

But that... is only up to lvl95 and the end of the Yok'Tural (southern Tural) segment

because then we get to Xak'Tural (northern Tural) and holy shit does it feel like they drop the ball there

Like they really COULDN'T keep themselves from making Shaaloani a fucking Wild West map

Instead of doing anything with the actual cultures and histories of Native North American people, they just do wild fucking west

Because there's ceruleum in them thar hills! And apparently Koana turned most of the region into Sharlyaboos too

So we get a bunch of Wild West frontier towns mixed with native american tribes and mud brick cities. We have trains and guns and a sheriff and a duel at high noon, but now everyone got native american names

At least there's one group off to the northern side of the map who seems to stick to tradition and live in harmony with nature, and that group is shown respect by the other people of the region

so we at the very least avoid the "cowboys vs indians" crap, but my god does that region just feel bad compared to everything else they had done so far

Then we get to the big twist: THE CYBERPUNK PORTION OF THE GAME

because yes, we go full fucking cyberpunk

so turns out that a whole segment of Xak'Tural got colonized by the kingdom of Alexandria, including the lands of the Shetona (Erenville's people)

And I feel like this is the most poignant section of the MSQ when it comes to colonialism

Because here we have Alexandria, an empire that has reached the limit of what it can do sustain itself on its own world, and so has decided to spread out and colonize others in order to gain resources

We see the Shetona and other natives of the region being separated from their families and kept in isolation from the rest of their people

And tho Queen Sphene is shown to be a kind and caring ruler who gives people a choice when it comes to joining the empire, WELL SHE'S STILL THE QUEEN OF A FUCKING EMPIRE

Like her form of kindness and just stagnant peace is put in stark contrast with Wuk Lamat's own love for her people and more proactive pursuit of happiness and harmony

(again with the "what makes a ruler theme")

Also the people that choose to be assimilated into the Alexandrian Empire? Yeah, they're doing so because Alexandria has advanced medical technology and you can only receive their aid if you're a citizen

Not only that, but you have to be a working citizen. We see later on a character being denied medical aid, because he lost his job, thanks to the King's decision and at no fault of his own

yeah this is cyberpunk, not just sci-fi

ALSO can we talk about how the technology used for that medical aid and the little gizmo they give you to signify you're now a citizen, will literally erase the memory of the people you lost

So the Turali who are assimilated into Alexandrian culture not only lose ties to their culture and their loved ones, but are not allowed to grieve their loss, because what they once had is slowly being erased

How their choices add up to survive on their own OR be assimilated

How this all takes place IN NORTH FUCKING AMERICA!

THE CYBERPUNK CITY IS LITERALLY SET IN THIS WORLD'S EQUIVALENT TO THE UNITED STATES

So yeah, I don't think is is accidental. I genuinely thing that they're making a point about the realities of imperialism and colonialism, as well as taking some shots at the US while they're at it

Of course this part is still centered around Wuk Lamat, and instead of having a moment of "the only ones who can stop the evil white europeans are the GOOD white europeans", we have Wuk Lamat be the one to save the day, defeat Sphene, and save her people from the colonizing empire

So I would like to argue that everything that happens from lvl97 onwards is them picking up the ball again and making a real point

buuuut that comes at the cost of us being unable to engage with the native peoples of Xak'Tural outside of the context of colonialism

Which genuinely fucking sucks, and I hope it will be remedied with the post-Dawntrail patches

As well as handling the whole shared land situation they ended up with and how this might end up in a Land Back sort of movement, and oh boy can they mess shit up royally there

So in conclusion FFXIV has had a messy relationship with colonialism and imperialist fantasies and tropes, but the devs seem to be making a concerted effort to undo their mistakes and show respect in their depictions of american natives

They still fuck up

boy do they

but they're at least trying, and I'd say Dawntrail so far has been quite well executed

so yeah, look forward to more insane rambles like this one I guess