#hi it’s 4am I have a sore throat and a random comment I saw online made me want to ramble about my wol

[misedejem]

It always kinda annoys me how adamant some people are that there are ‘correct’ dialogue options in FFXIV because like… you don’t know my character? The WoL is a blank slate, you can write them however you want and if the writers wanted them to react in a certain way, you wouldn’t get a choice.

Though the… many, many arguments I’ve seen about a certain dialogue choice (one in Endwalker) gave me headcanon ideas so I guess I can’t complain?

EW spoilers and very headcanon-heavy below but

The options you get right before fighting Zenos are very good food, even though I disagree with the first option - ‘that, I can’t deny’ - being the ‘best one’. It’s cool and satisfying, but it’s not what my character would say. Not really accurate for myself either because I am Afraid of hard content, haha

For my WoL, Misede, I had to go with the third option (‘I’ve had enough of you. This ends here’) because after an entire journey of having to play the nice and noble hero around her enemies so often, she should be allowed to absolutely lose her shit with somebody who has hurt her and her loved ones again and again, and kill him for no other reason than for the satisfaction of removing him from her life. I generally play her as a polite, patient, reserved person, so in climactic moments where emotions are running wild, it’s a big deal that she can lose her composure and get quite mean.

In her story, it was never her that Zenos felt a kinship with, even though he’d never know it. Because the first option, word for word, is the answer her Azem would have given. Kassandra would spend all her time designing concepts with no other purpose than to pose her some kind of challenge in a fight (Proto-Carby may have been her doing, for example.) She was the physically strongest of the Ancients, an unparalleled master of combat, and she would have revelled at the thought of somebody like Zenos existing to face her, because only her Master and Venat) could have ever hoped to hold their own against her, (and Hades, but he never would), and she had surpassed them centuries ago. But she could never have taken a person’s life. Why would she? Who would deny somebody the right to return to the Star of their own volition, after all? Right up until the final few years of her long life, she had no reason to believe that anybody would be capable of deserving it.

Misede, bereft of the Ancients’ Paradise, never had the opportunity to see combat in that way. She grew up on the road, and spent most of her youth risking life and limb in Dravania, so it had always been something she did because she *had* to, not because it was what she wanted. It was part of Azem that never really manifested in her for this reason, even though she is an adventurer at heart in all other ways. Always a part of that Soul, but not always apparently so.

Zenos never truly knew the Warrior of Light in the way he thought he did. Maybe in a different life, that would not have been the case, she wouldn’t have denied him. But she is not Azem. And that is not the life she is leading.