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illegiblewords · 1 month ago

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Zodiark's Tempering

A lot of people have been confused about whether the Unsundered were tempered (they were) and how tempering works.

Long post under the cut.

First, I'm going to point at the exact line from Emet-Selch in Shadowbringers: "He tempered us. It was only natural. There is no resisting such power."

I believe this was said in one of the ocular cutscenes, but explicitly in no uncertain terms--the Convocation was tempered. This includes the Unsundered. The tempering was, in fact, so powerful, that even after having their souls cleansed in the Lifestream Convocation members still make 'the best servants' according to Emet-Selch.

Zodiark was not only the first primal, but a primal on a scale beyond fathoming. This was half a star's worth of souls, billions of people. I'd argue that we also see what this tempering looks like in practice with Emet-Selch at The Ladder scene in Kholusia, where he is genuinely moved and expresses admiration of both the Warrior of Light and the people of Kholusia coming together only to be railroaded back to 'but the world as it was was better'.

That was not a natural thought pattern. That was tempering. We see further evidence in how Emet-Selch tried repeatedly to live alongside The Sundered and had only the most negative qualities amplified--preventing him from ever finding peace. Hell, it shows in his argument that the qualities of a soul diminish with sundering too. For one, the default quality in a person isn't positive. He frames things in terms of other shards becoming proportionally less intelligent for example, or less kind--but arguably cruelty should have been diminished as well. The civilizations and inhabitants of other shards are also, notably, not at a huge personally/intellectually different framework compared to The Source--where souls are more dense and would (by Hades' argument) have been more advanced and capable.

What we actually know of unsundered versus souls mechanically is that they are more aetherically dense. Being more aetherically dense, it takes more dynamis to influence them. The ancients still feel absolutely and are vulnerable to Meteion, but the sundered are probably a bit more reactive on the whole. It might also be like an inertia situation where once an unsundered starts to feel something it tends to continue and build. That's speculation though.

Zodiark's tempering appears to be closer to magically enforced mental illness in the sense that it warps thought patterns, elevates some tendencies and minimizes/negates others, prevents certain ideas, twists perception, keeps some memories or experiences at the forefront while diminishing or losing others, etc. Psychological wounds that are useful to the mission are kept open artificially well past the point someone would have naturally started to scar over. There is a reason I've been arguing that it's closer to coercion and insanity plea in terms of diminished responsibility. The tempered aren't even able to accurately understand the situations they are in due to thought warping, and claims that their position is reasonable amounts to a completely psychotic person claiming not to be crazy. It's not as simple as mind control from an external source. It's that the person's own thoughts and tendencies are manipulated in unnatural ways to form a cage forcing them into compliance with the primal's mission.

I'd argue it's also very suspect that Elidibus, the lunar shades, and (IIRC) the despairing post-Terminus ancients Venat encountered all separately repeat the exact phrase wishing for 'a world free from sorrow'. Lahabrea explicitly referring to Zodiark as 'the master' at Praetorium strongly indicates tempering too.

A major source of confusion stems from the following scene:

Creation magics are complex and highly sensitive, requiring a tremendous amount of focus. A single moment of distraction can change the outcome of creation. Hades creating his phantom Amaurot having an idle thought 'Hythlodaeus would know the truth' is enough to make the shade of Hythlodaeus aware, even if it wasn't on purpose. Even if it was a split second.

Zodiark was a creation that involved not only the sacrifice of half a star (so likely billions of people)--it also involved the active participation and focus of those people in the summoning process. We know from the environmental storytelling and evidence at Akademia Anyder that I cited in other analysis that Lahabrea was the mind behind the Zodiark concept. We know that the scale of the creation was enormous to the point that it would not function without elevating one individual to steer it--the Heart. This being Elidibus. But the actual summoning was still extremely complex and on a vast scale involving multitudes of people at different skill levels. Hythlodaeus, while experienced as Chief of the Bureau of the Architect, has very limited abilities in creation himself due to aether deficiency. He still sacrificed himself as one of the participants in Zodiark's summoning ritual.

Faith was necessary to simplify the process across that many people of varying life experiences and skill levels. The Convocation would have been handling the more technical elements and forms the concept would take, and guess who was at the head of the Convocation's efforts?

Lahabrea. Who has recently failed to contain Archaeotania despite his people's every faith in him, who we know to be extremely traumatized and has every reason to be terrified not only of the situation but of not performing up to the expectations placed on him. For god's sake, one of the last things Athena said to him involved calling him disappointing after getting full access to his soul.

A single moment of Lahabrea being afraid and hoping everyone would be able to join together to save the star, to be on the same page, would be enough to cause tempering. He's not perfect, but he's been expected to be. He's expected to have perfect composure, impervious to normal human emotions. And of course emotions bled through at a time like that.

The same hope that others would join in to support the mission has bled into every subsequent primal summoning where tempering became a problem.

Venat's summoning technique is different from the summoning technique used by the Ascians. It's also different from the technique used by the Loporrits. Venat used standard creation magic without elevating faith as a tool. She had less people to worry about. The loporrits decided faith would be a useful tool for The Ragnarok insofar as the primals could help fuel its journey, but going off of pure faith rather than the hybrid of faith and strict procedure is dangerous. So they combined the two in a controlled environment knowing the risks.

What Livingway is saying is that using the hybrid technique that is being employed for the first time in that scene, a primal as powerful as Zodiark would cause a slight tug instead of the full force of tempering. Normally there isn't any sense of influence at all with that technique. Zodiark is on a scale and at such a monumental power level that even the safe method would try to influence its summoners along with any bystanders. Zodiark has the most powerful tempering of any primal that has ever existed.

I also want to take a moment to point at what primals are and how they work as distinct from standard creations.

When discussing creations, the shades at Hades' phantom Amaurot mention that souls are gifts from the star and cannot be artificially created. This is part of why Hermes claimed to be so distraught about the way concepts were being handled--there wasn't any accounting for dynamis as a factor.

Livingway mentions that Venat forbade loporrits from making anything possessed of a soul (impossible) or similar.

Here I'm going to point you back to the lecture from the ARR quest What Little Gods Are Made Of:

Primals, brought into being with faith rather than as pure technical concepts, have something like a soul. They are archetypes shared by the living and when they are slain, they aren't destroyed because archetypes can't be destroyed. They return to the aetherial sea, like souls, until they are called forth again. These archetypes reflect common human experiences and desires shared across many, many people. It makes sense that Zodiark would be built off of this premise in the first place as a way of creating common ground with that many participants.

It also makes some sense that something resembling a soul is advantageous, since logistically in FFXIV souls are sources of power in their own right. Thordan, Nidhogg, Shinryu, and The Alexandrians can attest to that.

I understand that there are people who prefer not to use tempering as a key factor in characterization of The Unsundered, and disregard tempering from their headcanons. Obviously this is allowed, but it's not canon. The game is explicit on this point and underlines it multiple times in multiple ways. Hades when told about what lies ahead is completely horrified and does not want to go down the path the Warrior describes--not just for his own sake but because he morally disagrees with it. His line about staying true to his principles at Ultima Thule is deliberately ambiguous--is he referring to pursuit of the Ardor? Trying to save his people? Trying to resist tempering as best he could despite being helpless against it? Giving the Warrior of Light an opportunity to mercy kill him? We don't know.

And regarding the memory of Lahabrea saying he can believe he would get lost trying to save his people to the point of becoming something horrific during Anabaseios... it's very, very important to remember that Lahabrea hates himself. Lahabrea just accepted for years that Erichthonios is better off with the idealized memory of his dead, abusive mother rather than the living father who rescued him. Lahabrea has been ready to commit pseudo-suicide throughout Pandaemonium. His entire Savage transformation design reflects that he thinks the only thing he's good for is being used for his DNA and serving to protect people as Lahabrea. He tries to shield his heart with his wings and the left arm representative of his personal self is long/at a distance, anemic, and basically non-functional due to too many joints. He doesn't want to exist as a person because he hates himself and he expects to be hurt.

And that's before everything to do with The Final Days.

Lahabrea is not a reliable narrator when it comes to questions about whether Lahabrea is a good person. He might be the least reliable source you could find. He is a guilt katamari who is ready to think the worst of himself given the slightest opportunity.

A huge part of what makes Zodiark's tempering interesting is that even if any of the Unsundered are freed, it's difficult to definitively answer the question of whether they might have made the same choices organically. Anything in their heads that might have given them tools to make another choice was taken away. And we know the sundered Convocation members were not tempered when they decided to join The Ardor as Ascians. Fandaniel was able to kill Zodiark because of this.

As it stands though, none of the Unsundered were free. They cannot be judged by the standards of people who are.

I hope this helps clear things up!

#Lahabrea #ascians #zodiark #final fantasy xiv #final fantasy 14

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myreia · 4 months ago

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Sketches of Times Lost

ao3 | tumblr tag | my writing

short stories include spoilers from a realm reborn to endwalker. all stories are set in aureia malathar's canon. [❤] = fave entry/fic that I am proud of [g] = general (all audiences), [t] = teen (some language, more difficult themes), [m] = mature (implied sex, sensuality, strong language, and/or violence), [e] = explicit (mature themes, explicit sex scenes)

Week I

Week II

Week III

Week IV

#ffxiv #ff14 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv fanfic #ffxiv fanfiction #ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2024 #writing tag #myreiawrites2024 #aureia malathar

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dualcastimpact · 5 months ago

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Just went through the confrontation with Nabriales and Moenbryda's sacrifice (again) and out of all the major deaths that the story keeps coming back to, Moenbryda and Papalymo's feel the least organic, at least in terms of building up that emotional rapport with the Warrior of Light and/or player enough for the Warrior of Light and/or player to be impacted by their passing. Haurchefant interacts prominently with the Warrior of Light and is a reoccurring character all the way from ARR and halfway into Heavensward. We get a whole expansion with Ysayle. We get a whole expansion with Ardbert. Emet-Selch gets TWO expansions, and even Venat and Hythlodaeus get two whole dedicated levels for us to hang out with. You can't argue the same for Moenbryda and Papalymo, who barely interact with the Warrior of Light and in fact never seem to have any significant one-to-one moments with them.

You could argue that Moenbryda's and Papalymo's deaths don't in fact affect the Warrior of Light all too badly like the others' deaths do—and you'd be right! Moenbryda's death is Urianger's grief. Papalymo's death is Lyse's grief. The Warrior of Light doesn't grieve them the way they grieve Haurchefant or Ysayle, or Ardbert, or the Ancients they meet in Elpis, and that's not the issue. The issue is that the game, especially with Moenbryda, tries to make the player feel something for their deaths when they've not allowed the player to engage with the characters enough for us to feel anything for their passing. I'd argue I feel worse about Wilred dying than I did for Moenbryda and Papalymo, and that's because we see so much more of him with the Little Ala Mhigo sequence and his interactions with us while he was in the Crystal Braves; we see him grow as a character, however brief and unrelated to us it was, and we don't get that with Moenbryda and Papalymo.

To make matters worse, Moenbryda's and Papalymo's deaths were driven by their connection to Louisoix: Moenbryda in wishing to understand his motivations for leaving her behind and sacrificing himself for the sake of some no-name place called Eorzea, and Papalymo in wishing to prove himself Louisoix's finest pupil, following his master's footsteps in sacrificing himself to temporarily seal the dread primal Shinryu. Again, that's not the issue—the issue is that ARR only gives us crumbs about Louisoix and the Circle of Knowing, crumbs that are nowhere near enough to make us care about him! Oh, Moenbryda and Papalymo are both paying homage to Louisoix through their sacrifice? Oh well, nothing to do with me! I don't know anything about Louisoix to warrant my caring!

It wouldn't be such an aggravation if the story doesn't insist on making the player care. You have a sequence with Moenbryda's parents comforting Urianger in Endwalker, and there's a sidequest involving Papalymo's father as well—their deaths are not forgotten! They're hearkened back to! They're even included in this image of the fallen made floating in the aetherial sea!

Clearly their sacrifice is considered as major as Minfilia's and Haurchefant's and Ysayle's, which would make sense if the game bothered to put in the effort to make us care about Moenbryda and Papalymo in the first place!

Okay. Rant over. I initially wanted to write about how Raginmar very likely called Kirika to help heal Moenbryda before he went after Nabriales and Minfilia—in-game it makes sense for the Warrior of Light to not be able to call anyone, but by post-ARR Raginmar's adventuring party is pretty established; they're all connected by linkpearls and can contact each other in an emergency, and Moenbryda getting blasted in the stomach by a column of dark aether very much counts as an emergency. There's one issue with that scenario, however:

Papalymo: "She was counting on the theory that a soul's aether burns brightest at the moment of its passing. A scholar until the very end..."

Moenbryda was dying when she gave up her life to temper the aetherial blade. That was the theory she was counting on: that her soul's aether, near its end, would burn brightest at the second of her death and be enough to augment the aetherial blade.

Thancred: "She gave her life to temper the blade of Light? I...I have no words."

If Raginmar was able to get Kirika to come and try to heal Moenbryda, that makes this plot point implausible. She wouldn't have been near death if a healer was at hand. A solution to that problem would be Kirika actually failing to heal Moenbryda and managing to only staunch the wound instead of healing it, but that's additional trauma for Kirika that I have to think about and work on, and I do not have the time for that— oh no— I can feel the brainworms coming—

#ff14 #ffxiv #final fantasy 14 #final fantasy xiv #character lore #lore: raginmar #lore: kirika #just player things #there's a read more because there's a wholeass rant in there and i didn't want to clog up anybody's dash

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yamisnuffles · 1 month ago

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38 foy HythAzemEmet if you want!

(first of all, how dare you)

…because they’re running out of time

Hythlodaeus watched Azem pace. Ever was she happiest on the move and that included when it was only her own fear that set her on her feet. Emet-Selch was the one to look to for stubborn calm. Usually. But little existed anymore that acted as it usually did. While Azem paced the length and breadth of their bedroom, Emet-Selch stood on the balcony and glowered at the horizon. The skies over Amaurot still glistened peacefully but they all knew it would not last. And so, neither would sit with him, let alone consider something like rest.

"I'll think of something," Azem said. It had been a common refrain for her of late. Every time she said it, her voice pitched a little higher. Grew a little tighter. One day, Hythlodaeus was afraid it would strangle her. "I just need more time."

Emet-Selch rounded on her with a frustrated growl. "We haven't got it."

"I know. I know. But I can't... we can't..." Azem dug her fingers into her dawn colored hair and pulled. "There has to be another way and I'll think of it."

Emet-Selch strode toward her, his golden eyes ablaze. He hounded her every step. "And how many of our people will die to buy you that time? How long do you think it will be before the star chokes on their blood?"

Finally, Azem stopped. She looked as though she'd been struck. Tears gathered in her eyes but the rest of her face sharpened in anger. "Do you have so little faith in me?"

"Do you have so little faith in me? In the rest of the Convocation you have sworn to serve?"

They'd tread that ground before, many a time. Hythlodaeus knew from experience that it marked the beginning of a very long fight. He'd heard every point of it. He had tried, and failed, to build a bridge between them. However, there was no middle ground to be found. And, since Azem had yet to provide a solution of her own, he knew that he could only help one of them. Which meant, whatever time the star might have left, he had less.

He pushed up from his seat on the edge of their bed and walked between them. "Please," he said. He took their hands and joined them in front of him. He could feel the tension strumming through both of them. "Whatever time we have left, may we not spend it like this?"

"This must be decided," Emet-Selch replied.

Hythlodaeus brought their hands up to his lips and kissed their knuckles. "But not tonight. You can give us one night, can you not, Hades?"

Emet-Selch huffed. Though he tried to remain firm, Hythlodaeus knew he'd won. The anger drained from his handsome features and his shoulders slumped. "One night."

For once, it was Azem who needed further convincing. She bit her lip and turned her head away from them both. Confident that Emet-Selch would not go back on his word once given, Hythlodaeus released his grip on the other man. He used his now freed hand to gently turn Azem's face back.

"One final night of peace is all I ask," he said. "Who knows, perhaps it is all you need for inspiration to strike at last."

Her eyes danced over them both. "Hythlodaeus..."

Emet-Selch crossed his arms. "He has a point," he said, sounding as though every word pained him. "We can put this aside for one night, Helios."

Azem's final mote of resistance fell away. She melted into Hythlodaeus' palm. "One night."

Hythlodaeus closed what space remained between them and kissed her until he felt her lips curve upward. "There's my Sunshine," he said with a matching smile.

United once more, they turned their attentions on Emet-Selch. Lips met lips and fingers found skin until even his stubborn scowl melted away. When their Helios smiled at Hades like that, he could never help but trade a soft, indulgent smile of his own. It was all Hythlodaeus asked for. If he could make sure they lived to smile on, he would happily trade every day that he had left.

#ffxiv #hythazemet #azem #hythlodaeus #emet selch #emet-selch #fic #endwalker #prompts #my writing

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cinnabun-faerie · 20 days ago

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Dating Hythlodaeus Headcanons

A/N: I noticed there was two of these...and posted 4 days of each other in 2022 (January 16th & 20th). A good show of my memory, really. So I'm gonna put them together into one with a revisions and delete the other two.

Dating Hythlodaeus would include:

giggling together

being partners in crime

living your best lives as thorns in Emet-Selch's side

where Emet-Selch went, so did you and Hythlodaeus

“You two can come out of the bushes. You’re not exactly being discreet.”

It’s very hard to him to be professional with you and Hythlodaeus together

when you're reprimanded it was a toss up of who would crack first and laugh

and you loved his laugh

it was infectious, just like his charming smile

one smile and you were a goner

he knew that

why do you think he did it?

he didn't want you falling for Emet-Selch

not that you would, right?

he wasn't a jealous man

he knew he had your whole heart

and even if you had fallen for Emet-Selch, Hyth wouldn't care cause he has more of your heart

getting the chance to braid his hair

and he loved feeling your fingers brushing softly through it

he could sleep with his head in your lap

He’s so clumsy yet adorable

he gets embarrassed and shy when he trips in front of you

or perhaps he would just flash you that smile you know and love

perhaps he just fell for you again?

quick trip him again to make sure

yep, fell for you again

imagine that

he loves hearing your sweet giggles from his silly antics

calls you sweetheart and darling

but he calls you my love in intimate moments

especially when his lips are pressed against your neck

he's a sweet, passionate lover

he makes your feel so good and loved

there's never a moment he leaves you wanting

you are truly spoiled by him

He truly cherishes every moment with you

He loves to hold you in his arms

and he holds your hand at every chance

your hand fitting perfectly in his

his favorite time to hold your hand is when you're making love

his arm wrapped around your waist as you both hit your high

his kisses would be addictive

regardless if they were soft & sweet or needy, desperate kisses

and his touch always sent shivers through your body

luckily for you, he was handsy

always wanted to be touching you

and he knew you were at his mercy

he was devilish, but a fierce lover

his love for you is overflowing

he would do anything and everything for you

you were so special to him

he would never let you go, no matter what

Even should you both perish in this life, he’ll find you in the next and fall in love with you all over again

#ffxiv headcanons #hythlodaeus x reader #ffxiv #hythlodaeus

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feralkwe · 6 months ago

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TOP FIVE ANCIENTS

a question most unfair!

5. loghrif/gaia -- her story really compels me and includes some of my fave tropes

4. hegemone -- whom amongst us could say they would have resisted athena's charms any better? certainly not me!

3. emet-selch/hades -- i will not elaborate beyond fuck you, sir, and your stupid smile

2. elidibus/themis -- my 5ever murder/murdered husband

1. hythlodaeus -- objectively the correct #1, my new-old friend

honorable mention to mom of the millennias, athena. what a queen.

#from the annals of my askholebox #icescrabblerjerky #ask memes #b plays ffxiv

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caladhel-iarian · 2 months ago

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Say It Like You Mean It

Emet-Selch inspects the selection of drinks with a critical eye. A splash of scotch here, a tankard of foamy ale there, a finger of neat gin with a sprig of rosemary…

Ah .

His hand is already reaching for the whiskey a split second before his eyes register what they’re seeing. If he has truly resigned himself to an evening of Azem’s incessant chatter and Hythlodaeus’ constant teasing, he has a feeling he will need a glass of something strong–and possibly the rest of bottle to follow. One of the two idiots is already grinning at him unabashedly while the other does a fine job of pretending at propriety.

If, of course, one ignores the impish glee in his eyes that says he’s already concocted some new and terrible scheme.

As the attendant moves on to the next table, Emet-Selch sighs and takes a sip of his whiskey to bolster his nerves before he arches a brow at Hythlodaeus.

“Well?” he prompts. “Are you going to share this juicy gossip of yours or aren’t you?”

Insufferable as ever, Hythlodaeus only mirrors Azem’s grin. With one hand cradling the drink he’d all but demanded in exchange for his information, he holds Emet-Selch’s eye and enjoys tiny sips from the sparkling wine. Exceedingly tiny sips. Exceedingly tiny sips that don’t appear to empty the glass at all.

Emet-Selch grits his teeth. Those sips, he is swiftly realizing, are purposefully designed to drive him straight up the wall.

And damn him, it’s working.

“Patience,” Hythlodaeus drawls, “is a virtue, Most Esteemed Emet-Selch.”

Emet-Selch scoffs. “I have no time for virtues,” he retorts. “I have plenty of work to do and that does not include sitting around with baited breath while you malinger in your melodramatic revelations. If you–”

“Ah, but all work and no play makes Azem terribly sad,” Hythlodaeus counters with annoying cheer. Beside him, Azem’s enthusiastic nods are nearly enough to snap their neck and belie the big, sad eyes glued to him.

With herculean effort, Emet-Selch ignores them.

“Our duty to Etheirys,” the Chief of the Bureau of the Architect continues, “though important–! can wait while we celebrate our dear friend’s happy return. After all–” He tips his wine glass in Azem’s direction as though intending to toast the miscreant. “We have so little time with one another these days. And I plan to make the most of it before we fulfill our promise and return to the star together.”

Emet-Selch swears he feels his teeth cracking as his jaw clenches. His knuckles whiten around his glass.

“Yes, well,” he grinds out, shooting Azem a dirty look. They only lift their brows in return, the picture of innocence. The effect reminds him of an owl. “That assumes we live long enough to see that blessed day come.”

He waits. A heartbeat. Two. It takes about ten seconds before his words really sink in.

“Hey!” Azem splutters, spraying grape juice everywhere. They bolt up straight from their lazy spawl and swipe a hand across their chin, frowning at the Third Seat. “Are you trying to imply that I’d get us all killed?”

He gives them a withering look that has them quickly averting their eyes and clearing their throat.

“Oh, please. As if you have not dragged us into countless dangerous situations,” he says, his voice coated with sarcasm and disdain. “You are a magnet for trouble, Azem. Frankly, it is an absolute miracle you have survived this long.”

“No, it’s isn’t,” Azem replies, and their smug smile has him torn between wanting to throttle them and licking the drop of grape juice from their lips. “Lady Luck loves me. I’m her favourite.”

Hythlodaeus’ quiet laughter breaks the tension. “I can see why,” he agrees, eyeing Azem with no small amount of admiration and interest. “That just-crawled-out-of-bed hair and those rumpled robes are quite fetching on you.”

“Thank you,” Azem chirps, oblivious. “That’s very kind of you, Daeus.”

Emet-Selch rolls his eyes. “Lady Luck has peculiar tastes, then,” he mutters into his glass. He downs another mouthful of whiskey, using the alcohol to keep his tongue busy before it can say something incredibly stupid. Something like But she will have to get in line because her favourite flavour was my favourite flavour first.

“Yeah?” Azem challenges him, their tanned cheeks reddening as Hythlodaeus continues looking them up and down. “What does that say about your tastes, huh?”

The whiskey burns as it travels down the wrong pipe and Emet-Selch coughs, his eyes widening in sudden concern. Has this complete fool somehow learned to read minds?

“W-What?” he gasps, covering his confusion and unease with his trademark scowl. “What is that supposed to mean?” He dabs at his chin with a napkin and turns his head away, his nose in the air. “I have no particular tastes, I will have you know. I simply have high standards.”

“Remarkably high,” Hythlodaeus agrees, and there’s a note in his voice that has Emet-Selch narrowing his eyes in suspicion. “How fortunate the sun is the highest thing in our world, hm?”

Cheeks slightly flushed–and by Etheirys, he hopes Hythlodaeus mistakes it for the blush that accompanies alcohol, though his hopes, admittedly, don’t soar high–Emet-Selch huffs. The glare he offers the Soul Seer tells the other man that the implications of his subtle ribbing have been perfectly understood and are equally unwanted.

At least by one person at the table, anyway. Those implications have apparently flown straight over Azem’s head without ever stopping to roost. And that is just the way Emet-Selch prefers it.

“Shut up,” he grumbles, downing more whiskey to hide his discomfort.

“Oh, but if I were to shut up,” Hythlodaeus trills, “you would never hear that absolutely fascinating bit of gossip I picked up recently. And I assure you, it is something you will not want to miss.”

A long-suffering sigh escapes Emet-Selch. Hythlodaeus, blast his hide, knows exactly how to bait his curiosity and reel him in. When he isn’t leaving him writhing on the hook, that is.

“Fine,” he says reluctantly. “Spill it, then. Before I change my mind about this whole affair and leave you both here to drag yourselves home later.”

“We-e-ell…”

Emet-Selch swallows a groan. He’s known Hythlodaeus for over a century and the first thing he ever learned about his friend was that his sly grins never mean anything good.

“I have it on good authority that a certain someone–due to his stubborn nature and unfortunate sense of decorum and embarrassment–missed a perfectly mind-blowing evening last night with an exceptional ray of sunshine,” says Hythlodaeus. “Complete, I was told, with smooth jazz.”

Emet-Selch stares at the other man with a mixture of confusion, horrified fascination, and an undeniable sense of mounting dread.

“Are you… Are you telling me that I missed out on a night of… jazz?” he echoes. This is the interesting gossip Hythlodaeus has been alluding to all afternoon? A night of jazz? He can listen to jazz in his own home whenever he pleases–

“In a manner of speaking.” Hythlodaeus’ fingers trace the rim of his glass in slow, continuous circles. Every rotation creates a soft squeak that sets Emet-Selch’s teeth on edge. “But the jazz was not the important part, Emet-Selch.”

“I hate jazz,” Azem interjects.

He fights the urge to roll his eyes and, instead, spares Azem a brief, exasperated glance.

“Noted,” he says dryly, before returning his attention to Hythlodaeus. “But I fail to see how missing an evening of jazz equates to missing a mind-blowing night.”

“I was there,” says Azem.

“Yes, thank you,” sighs Emet-Selch. “I fail to see how missing an evening of jazz with someone I could not care any less about equates to missing a mind-blowing evening.”

“Ow.” Lips curled in a winsome pout, Azem rubs their chest, directly over their heart. They brighten up a moment later when Hythlodaeus gently pats their hand.

“Ah, well,” says the Bureau’s Chief, his eyes gleaming dangerously in the restaurant’s mood lighting. “Perhaps I should also mention there was nudity involved.”

The sudden sputtering has several diners at nearby tables turning in their direction. Emet-Selch coughs until he’s certain he’s lost a lung, his throat and chest burning from the unexpected whiskey. He does his best to ignore the stares leveled his way, but he feels the eyes boring into him, curious and condemning by turns. Ignoring puzzled glances is a skill he acquired only a few weeks after meeting the gremlins currently having dinner with him, and it’s a skill he isn’t sure he appreciates developing. When no other disruptions seem forthcoming from his table, the other diners return to their meals.

“N- Nudity?” he hisses in a strangled voice. “You are joking, right? This has to be a joke.”

“Not at all,” Hythlodaeus demurs. “I never joke.” He doesn’t bother acknowledging the incredulous noise that crawls its way up Emet-Selch’s throat and out into the world. “There was nudity and, my source confided, a full bottle of someone’s favourite wine.”

“It tastes like dzo piss and vinegar,” Azem chimes in, and their face scrunches up the way it does after they eat something sour.

Emet-Selch's sharp frown goes blissfully ignored by its intended recipient.

“First, I do not ever want to know why you know how dzo urine tastes,” he snaps. “And second, that wine is an acquired taste only appreciated by those with the most refined and discerning palates. That is… I can’t understand why anyone, even an idiot, would waste an entire bottle of it on… whatever this is.” He gestures vaguely at the table, his companions, the whole restaurant and the city at large. Why would anyone ever use such an extraordinary wine to get wasted and nude? It boggled the mind.

“Ah. That is the unfortunate part.” Hythlodaeus heaves a dramatic sigh. Closing his eyes, he shakes his head and tsks softly. “You see, that wine was not drunk nor the smooth jazz enjoyed because the esteemed personage for whom they had been prepared never bothered to show up.”

“I was lonely,” Azem agrees, nodding.

Emet-Selch has always believed he knows the limits of his patience. The last century has seen it pushed, pulled, stretched and compressed. Though he knows ire is a sliding scale and the goalposts can be moved at any time, he also knows that scale always operates within certain bounds. He has always thought he could confidently say he’s seen it all, that he knows just how annoyed he can get. He also thinks he is usually good about heading off his temper before it takes a nose-dive over a cliff.

But Emet-Selch is wrong and tonight is proving that to him. His irritation is reaching new and unusual heights the longer he listens to Hythlodaeus’ drivel peppered with Azem’s accompanying remarks. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he notices the throbbing in his temples and resolves to drop in at the apothecary for some aspirin on his way home.

“...You are telling me,” he says in the tones of someone reaching the end of his tether and accelerating, “that someone went through the trouble of preparing a romantic evening complete with wine and jazz and… and nudity , and they are upset because I wasn’t there?”

“Hm.” Hythlodaeus hums, tapping his lips as if in deep thought. “When you put it that way, then yes. I suppose that does sound similar, doesn’t it.”

Setting his glass carefully aside, Emet-Selch groans and buries his face in one hand. What he wouldn’t give for the floor to open up and swallow him right now. A combination of frustration, disbelief, and something that feels a little too much like guilt to be comfortable washes over him and he rubbed his eyes, wishing he had chosen to work overtime instead of leaving his office.

“This is absurd,” he mutters, his words muffled by his palm. “Why on earth would someone go through all that trouble for me?”

“I’m sure I can’t imagine,” says Hythlodaeus. He glances at Azem, amusement dancing in his eyes. “Can you, dearest Azem?”

“Because I wanted to fuck,” says Azem. “But you never showed up.”

Emet-Selch’s head immediately snaps up, his eyes widening and his face deathly pale. He stares at them in complete and total silence for several seconds while his brain tries to process what he’d heard. His mouth opens and closes wordlessly, repeatedly, and his tongue scrambles for something–anything–to say.

“You… You what?” he finally manages. It’s little more than a whisper.

“I wanted to fuck,” Azem repeats. “Bump uglies. Get down and dirty. Do the horizontal tango. Make the beast with two backs. Do the hippidy-dippity. Shake the sheets. Get my corn ground.”

To Emet-Selch’s rising horror, they make a wide circle with their forefinger and thumb, then poke the finger of their other hand through the hole to illustrate.

“Bake a cream pie,” they tell him and anyone else with ears in the nearby vicinity. “Glaze the doughnut. Put the sour cream in the burrito. Assault with a friendly weapon. Dip the wick. Walk the snake. Hide the salami. You know. Fuck. ”

Beside them, Hythlodaeus presses a fist to his lips to stifle his laughter. When that doesn’t work, he tries a napkin.

Emet-Selch is reasonably certain his face has caught fire. His cheeks burn darker and hotter as Azem continues rattling off various euphemism, most of which he has never heard in his life and all of which he could have happily done without ever hearing. The longer they go on, the more he regrets ever being born and Hythlodaeus’ barely suppressed laughter is not helping anything.

“Yes, yes, I understand!” he blurts, desperate to stop Azem’s litany of lascivious language. “No need to go into further detail!”

“Get that daily dose of vitamin D,” Azem replies.

Emet-Selch chokes on air.

“Are you sure?” Hythlodaeus’ voice is sugar sweet, but his eyes glint evilly. “I must admit, I am curious to know what other delightful terms our Azem has learned in their travels.”

“Ride the bony pony,” Azem supplies helpfully.

Emet-Selch emits a sound somewhere between a mortified groan and strangled gasp, his eyes so large they nearly engulf his face. They dart around the restaurant, checking on other diners while he silently prays that no one else has heard Azem’s contributions to this horrible conversation. Hythlodaeus, damn him, is fighting a losing battle to keep his face straight; Emet-Selch can see the tears of laughter glistening on his cheeks.

“Board the train to pound town,” says Azem just as the attendant walks by and Emet-Selch feels his soul leave his body.

“Stop,” he pleads, his voice hoarse. He holds up one hand, palm out in surrender. “Please. Just stop.”

#writing #my Azem #Emet-Selch #Hythlodaeus #the world unsundered #Amaurot #Azem is like a parrot #they're gonna repeat whatever words they're taught #Emet-Selch nearly has an aneurysm #Hythlodaeus isn't helping anything #FFXIV #ffxivwrite2024

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aethercurrent · 4 months ago

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If you've been around, I just finished Time Travel AU. If you're from AO3, you know what this post is and you can skip further down to read more. If you don't know what Time Travel AU is, it's a long FFXIV fanfic I've been working on for the better part of six years. Five and a half of which it's been online to read.

This post is to document some of the early plotting that I never talked about written down into a coherent-ish(?) post. Mostly to get it out of my system and to hopefully stave off the absolute breakdown I'll have once that "it's finished after six years" thing settles in.

Let's start this off with something funnier, because this a looooooooong post: the name.

(That isn't a word, for the record. I just mashed two nouns together to be funny.)

And then, finally, being a class clown at heart, I follow that up with:

It wasn't too long, and that joke that took me half a minute to come up with stuck around. It still makes me chuckle.

But, I suppose now we go back to a couple months before that conversation took place.

The first idea for the AU started rotating in my head a few days after finishing Shadowbringers. I’m kind of a sucker for time travel of any sort (a good chunk of my favourite media of all time includes it somehow!), and another thing I enjoy is enemies to “unfortunately, we’re on the same side for a while”.

So, as one does after a game thoroughly rearranges their brain, I started throwing darts at random points and saw what started sticking.

The first major things decided for the fic at that early conception stage were the following points:

the time travellers are WOL, Exarch, Ryne, Elidibus

the Final Days were caused by the star itself

Hythlodaeus (shade or real deal) is involved (maybe as 14th?)

Hydaelyn and Zodiark are non-violently undone by the end

it ends with a city by the Crystal Tower on the Source

I started drafting a few ideas for it over a couple weeks while waiting for 5.1.

Initially I genuinely wasn’t sure if the WOL in the story was going to be Meteor or my own WOL (every iteration of her has been in this fic, but when it started she was actually still a male Seeker… he’s the jumpy conjurer tagging along in the Praetorium; and the Dunesfolk, Highlander, and the Hrothgar are all obvious or hidden in the background, too). It took me a while before I settled on Meteor, mostly because I don’t want to ship her with NPCs, really. Also, Catboy Lahen was extremely jumpy and wouldn’t have been able to keep him being a time traveller and an Ascian secret for long. I needed someone made of sterner stuff, sorry Catboy Lahen.

The party was a proper light party at that stage, too, even before I settled on Meteor (Meteor / Ryne as tank, Exarch as healer, Ryne / Lahen and Elidibus as DPS)… and then dropped that once I started getting into the more detailed part of plotting.

By the time 5.1 rolled around I begrudgingly accepted that the WOL was going to be the 14th member of the Convocation, but I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t like that. I still don’t like it, actually. I would’ve liked the WOL being a genuine random soul choosing the road and becoming modern day Azem just as Venat and her successor were before them, instead of having it just be Venat’s successor 2 electric boogaloo.

I also finally accepted the clown’s nose and admitted that my favourite Ascian was Lahabrea because he was a good villain back when I started in the last couple days of 2014. I was disappointed that after how much Emet-Selch and Elidibus got and were getting throughout the end of Stormblood and Shadowbringers, Lahabrea still hadn’t gotten much of anything else. Yes. The first time I met one of my now better friends, she joined call for Endwalker fanfest and the first thing she ever heard from me was me straight up bursting into tears over FFIV references and Pandaemonium.

A few more plot points were also starting to come together:

I wanted Emet-Selch and Lahabrea as POV characters

Hythlodaeus definitely was going to be one as well

he was going to have sat by and watched all of history

he was going to be tempered by Hydaelyn and Zodiark

Unukalhai, if not a POV character, was going to be somewhat important

the party was going to try saving some NPCs who died (success rate varying)

Meteor’s characterisation started to crystallise a bit more

because of that, they were going to try and substantially alter the Steppe section

Lahabrea would be explosive early on, leading to him being taken out of 2.55

Minfilia vanished before she could catch on to Ascian shenanigans

Ysayle would catch on to that, though

It’s glossed over in the finished fic because it’s mostly irrelevant, but as I worked on on the plot draft more and more, I noticed that the party accidentally fit into the elemental chart rather neatly:

Lahabrea as lightning; most volatile and destructive party member

Emet-Selch as fire; also fairly temperamental and not easy to work with

Elidibus as wind; easier to handle but still fairly dangerous

Meteor as earth; unmoving object that can bury a lot of things if they want to

Exarch as water; that one was mostly a “river of time” joke, I won’t lie

Ryne as ice; it’s the closest to light and once she’s determined she’s unyielding

Hythlodaeus as light; absolute stasis due to his circumstances

Unukalhai as darkness; always on the move and always thinking

A lot of the character dynamic comes from that! Emet-Selch and Lahabrea don’t get along, Elidibus manages to get along with both of them. Ryne as the most interesting mortal out of the bunch as far as Emet-Selch is concerned stems from a fire and ice joke that ran away with me; him and the Exarch butting heads is a water and fire joke. The reason why Ryne was the one to surprise Elidibus comes from the fact that she’s a solid ice wall to his wind, and so on and so forth.

That’s also why Unukalhai remains closer to the Ascians to some degree, while Hythlodaeus has absolutely no qualms whatsoever interacting with mortals as long as his restrictions are adhered to even if he doesn’t like them in the end.

It became extremely less relevant as time went on, but a lot of the early fic can be traced to that elemental balance.

Along with the elemental balance of the team, I started working on the magic system for the Ancients. I was extremely stuck on the sidequests in Amaurot and how two of them dealt with the WOL not being able to use creation magicks. I thought it was interesting that it seemed as if the one making clothes didn’t use a concept crystal, while in one you were handed one to summon those funny slimes.

The final point was that you had to catch a cubus for one while you didn’t for the other.

So, eventually I came to the magic system in the fic. Three classes of magicks (body, soul, environment), and differing levels of innate ability and trained skill. Ironically, the three antagonist Unsundered all fit into three out of four extremes of that latter scale…

Then there was the question of what was considered “dark arts” before the Sundering. It wasn’t necessary, none of the main characters would be students of the dark arts, but it was a fun thought experiment. Eventually I came up with the idea to animate something inanimate with malicious intent. Living weapons, defensive automatons, sentient traps, and so on and so forth.

I started applying that to all of the relevant Ancients, and it was a lot more fun than I want to admit here.

Essentially what the concept crystals thing came down to in the end was a certain level of intricate casting and preservation. Lahabrea can create a flock of his birds effortlessly because he knows the concept inside out with all its details and intricacies, while someone trying to summon it themselves would have to use a crystal to get the details right. That’s also why most of the time the Ascians don’t seem to be using concept crystals—they aren’t creating much, and when they are it’s things they already know how to make.

Actually, I dug out the notes on the innate/trained scale. There’s a lot of things that are irrelevant for the fic on that, but let me write down the most relevant ones:

Emet-Selch: soul; high innate/low trained

Lahabrea: body; high innate/high trained

Elidibus: environment; low innate/high trained

Hythlodaeus: soul; high innate/not trained

Alexis (Meteor’s ancient): environment/dark arts; low innate/medium trained

Igeyorhm: body; medium innate/high trained

Minfilia: body; low innate/low trained

Venat: environment; medium innate/high trained

Rafael (previous Elidibus): soul; low innate/high trained

There was also the question of what to do with Ancients in general. True, we had the shades in Amaurot as a general idea, but just like with Azem above, I wasn’t a fan of the featureless or just “human” thing. I still am not, for the record. I think it’s goofy to have everyone be proto-Hyurs and then post-Sundering we suddenly have Hydaelyn give some people a goddess-assigned fursona. And that’s coming from someone who previously played a Hyur, for the record!

But just like how magic focused on the elements specifically instead of the broader strokes, I decided that in ancient times there would be one term for the different tribes. I tried to handwave the shades away with making the region around Amaurot the ancestral home of proto-Hyurs… and then only had one of them in the party. Oops!

Overall, my thought process was to address the weird lore bit that apparently interracial relationships are frowned upon in Eorzea. I mostly wanted to… not… have that apply for ancient times because it’s fucking weird. Not gonna call it anything other than that.

From there, it was as simple as… naming everything and everyone, giving them a place they come from, and… oh god I wrote so much stuff that never came up just so it stayed internally consistent y’all, I almost don’t want to talk about it.

The main notes on that are in Astral Scions, Umbral Sinners I, but to recap:

Hyurs were Amaurotines

Elezen were Atlanteans

Miqo’te were Children of Sirius

Lalafell were Saronian Marchers (Saro)

Roegadyn were the Galg

Viera were Lunarians

Hrothgar were the Watchers

Au Ra were white-scaled Steelhearts and black-scaled Flareseekers; formerly the Volcana

Specifically the Au Ra have a lot of background history that gets mentioned due to Lahabrea being a Flareseeker. Long story. Too long for this already long post.

Speaking of Lahabrea, though; there was rhyme and reason behind why the Ascians were what they were.

Lahabrea (Flareseeker+Amaurotine) is a renowned scholar who also is something of a social outcast both in Amaurot due to his Flareseeker heritage and in Bodhum due to his Amaurotine heritage, which leads to him being quite hard to deal with thanks to bad experiences way in the past

Elidibus (Child of Sirius+Saronian Marcher) is both very quiet and observant and still relies on company if not community and is rather lost without the support of those he deems his family

Emet-Selch (Amaurotine) is the one who misses home the fiercest out of all of them because that’s where his family and he always belonged, that’s where everyone he ever loved was

Hythlodaeus (Atlantean+Amaurotine-Lunarian) feels all over the place and cuts out his paternal home under the waves and his maternal home high above ground to find his own home

Venat (Amaurotine+Lunarian) grew up on her father’s stories about how the star looks from the Floating City of Babil and wanted the more grounded people of her home to see that as well

Another fun thing about ancient times was the fact that I could do whatever I want. It’s not that glaringly obvious with their names, but when it comes to their cities and settlements in general, I got to go a bit wild with it.

And with “wild” I mean I had some fun picking settlement names across the Final Fantasy series. I hope people who know the series a bit outside of XIV itself had some fun with the interludes; I know I had a lot of fun with it. I think if I had to pick a favourite it’d be the Floating City of Babil, the underground city Insomnia, and Archades on the mountains by the sea.

Again, I think having everything, apparently, be Ancient Greek Mythology is… stifling. I admit that even in my more canon-compliant other works I struggle with it. There’s a lot of myths to draw inspiration from; I for one would’ve loved Hermes to deal with a mfing Wolpertinger. Creature of all time.

But… at that point I was writing two different drafts. One where Unukalhai joined shortly before Hythlodaeus as POV character (which also was a joke about the darkness-aligned character joining before the light-aligned one because darkness is active), and one where he remained a non-POV but important character. Kind of similar to what Minfilia became after she was saved! It was the same for both of them up until he joined the party for good.

If I had gone with 7 POV characters instead of my full party set-up, there was a bit of an act dedicated to unravelling his feelings on this nonsense. Specifically a non-POV Unukalhai wouldn’t have spent as much time with everyone else and would have gone down a different mental rabbit hole of eventually struggling with not being able to get his revenge on Igeyorhm while also starting to feel like a replacement heist from an alternate timeline self is extremely creepy considering how the “heroes” of the Void all changed until they were effectively replaced by alternate versions of themselves. He’d have tagged along for Meteor’s Regula mission and would have gotten to hear their version of the replacement heist after they escape from Garlemald together. (Meteor taking over this timeline’s version of themself grew much less important overall as the drafting continued, so it never really came up again beyond Titan where the alternate self died during Living Dead).

After that Unukalhai would have mellowed out a bit until he would join the Ascians and Cylva on the First to deal with the Flood of Light. That would’ve been the last of him until the part where Meteor and G’raha come to the Empty.

Overall, a non-POV Unukalhai would have been less gloomy but also would have been a completely different beast. He remains fairly introspective and reclusive across both drafts, but the reclusion gets the better of him as non-POV character.

The setting itself was also becoming rather rigid—part of having so many things set in stone while adding more and more. It would be extraordinarily hard to integrate whatever canon proceeded with. I couldn’t add or remove characters because that led to a ripple effect throughout the whole plot, and the ending was admittedly the first thing I decided on after I got the idea for the premise. It was the only thing I couldn’t negotiate myself out of.

I can work with that! I’ve worked with that before!

But unlike previous longfics, something about TTAU felt daunting in ways I couldn’t articulate at any point. Still can’t. I guess I just really wanted it to be everything I’d want to read at any given time, and I really am my own harshest critic. Great going, Ms aethercurrent née vanitaslaughing, now you’ve made yourself anxious about disappointing the target audience (yourself).

I also struggled with not only making it fun for me but also for readers; I wouldn’t have posted it if I didn’t want to share it with people. I hope I did a good job in the end, but really I can only speak for myself here. If you read it, even partially, I hope you at least had some measure of fun before you dropped that absolute behemoth of a fic, and if you finished it entirely there are no words in either language I speak to convey how happy I am that my silly big baby entertained you to stick through with it until the end.

I eventually reached a point where more and more details were starting to form that were needed to keep things straight while probably never coming up.

Every member of the Convocation before the Sundering has a name and was assigned a race. Most of them are mentioned in an Interlude, but in most cases there’s some sort of underlying joke to them. Similarly all of them received titles similar to Speaker, Emissary, Architect, Seer; I attempted to keep it somewhat balanced and/or in line with a fantasy government. Messenger Mitron and Listener Loghrif sound a bit redundant with the Emissary Elidibus around, but those two specifically mostly stick to Amaurot and the more immediate surrounding settlements—specifically calling back to that one city mentioned in the sidequests in Amaurot where you deal with the debating shades. Something akin to a national relations minister, an international relations minister, and one specifically for the neighbouring countries.

At around that time the Twelve were also decided to be actual genuine deities of the star. A bit of inspiration comes from Sailor Moon (nothing concretely 100% similar, but the Twelve are effectively the star’s Sailor Scouts who also have the ability to become a new small system if they decide to leave), but I mostly just wanted them to be, y’know. Gods. Coming back to the issue I have with canon going “everything’s Amaurot”, I can’t say I love how the Twelve are in canon but I do adore them as characters. It made me choosing Menphina as the one to speak with the group all the more sweeter since I think out of all of them she’s my favourite design-wise.

There was also the thing with the Seer position that needed to be tackled at this point. I’m morbidly fascinated by characters who know the story they’re in but can’t do much to influence it because they can only tell what path they’re on depending on the ending.

I think the biggest struggle especially towards the end was the fact that I often drafted at least two possible POVs for a chapter. I often went in expecting to write one POV, got stuck irreversibly on it somehow, steamrolled the whole thing, and wrote out the other draft. I’ve cannibalised previous drafts into complete rewrites of the same POV a lot more than you’d think I have. And I only save a copy of a chapter that reached a certain word threshold or if there’s something integral written to a degree I like.

One of the worst offenders of the bunch was Chapter 78… which became Chapter 79 when I posted it. Yeah. It got so bad and frustrating that I had to make dealing with Hythlodaeus future me’s problem. Thankfully it didn’t cut too much into the pacing thanks to Act XI being extremely slow due to how introspective it was.

In the earlier days one of the other struggles was formatting. Something about my documents went haywire when pasted, leading to endless strings of completely superfluous <spans> that added strange spacing issues between all that mess. It was something that my older works struggled with too, which became a non-issue over the years (thankfully. I shudder thinking about possibly having to deal with that issue while already spending 48 hours formatting Eden Rewrite correctly).

The documents just eventually started to bug out because they were so damned long. I never expected them to be in one, but I have five documents holding all of this fic. It’s rather funny to see four chilling and the fifth on top with a 00 as its first characters in the document title so I see it first.

It's... really bittersweet to remove that 00 and seeing them all together now.

That's... about it for the fic as it was posted there. Whether you read the fic or just read this post, once again: thank you.

Thank you for sticking with me for six years, or for reading about the earliest of these six years!

For those who remember at a certain point I was considering overhauling the fic and implementing canon from Endwalker at that time, there's a bit more post to go specifically relating to that idea!

You’d think I’d struggle with keeping the canon characters and the fanfiction versions apart as someone who prefers staying canon compliant, but over the years those guys became their own beasts. Ophion could never have been Themis, but why would I want them to be the same? I needed Ophion for this fic to work, after all.

A lot, and I mean a metric shitton of stuff, breaks and changes there. It’s been a fun thought experiment at the very least. I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t like the Warrior of Light being a reincarnation of Azem’s sundered soul; I just like them being a nobody with no preconceived notion that they’re bound to adventure no matter what because that’s what their soul always did… but Hythlodaeus likewise can’t replace them in that case.

The solution to that first massive hurdle? I suck up the Azem thing, and instead of an Unsundered Hythlodaeus, the one that joins the party is the Shade. His plot stays surprisingly intact through all of that, but instead of dealing with forced indecisiveness it becomes more of a plot about identity and what to do when you’re a creation on the path to freeing the real deal you were based on.

Out of all of them, Lahabrea changes surprisingly little—I wrote him like a stern father to Igeyorhm in this, and you can mostly mix and match a lot of that onto Erichthonios. Instead of dealing with her ascensions and the fact that she needed to be taken out, Lahabrea gets to see his son reincarnate and die over and over again.

Honestly? I could even keep the dual Elidibus approach. Instead of Ophion (the previous one’s student) and Rafael (the Zodiark sacrifice), it would be Elidibus (the Heart of Zodiark) and Themis (the rest of the Heart still remaining with Zodiark). There would be a lot of overlap with the Shade here but in the end the Shade and Hythlodaeus would exist independently from one another while the Heart of Zodiark reunites and becomes Themis again.

I think the parts where I would have to genuinely start rewriting it entirely is where to integrate canon Venat over TTAU Venat and the Endsinger. TTAU Venat is a lot more mellow than canon Venat—a shitty mother but an excellent politician versus canon’s all-loving hero with an understanding of but no love lost for politics. The Meteia as a villain are a lot less vague and distant than the Star Itself. Instead of a journey to the innermost reaches it’s to the edge of the universe. Doable, yes, but marginally harder to do. Honestly, thinking about it as I’m writing this, I think I would have to do an arc where at least Meteor if not all Sundered go to Elpis in the past to learn something while the Unsundered+Shade remain in the present to deal with the Final Days…?

Actually, let’s tackle the characters one by one in a canon-adjusted remake.

This would be assuming that there is inter-shard travel so the starting group would still be Meteor, Ryne, and G’raha. The one major major change would be that instead of Elidibus the “Ancient” to go with them would be the Shade.

Meteor would change the least. They don’t care about being Alexis, they don’t care about being Azem either. They’re one of a handful children of a farmer family in La Noscea, not some sort of government freak from ancient times long before they were ever born. They didn’t start travelling because their soul told them to after they got the Echo, they started travelling because they damn well wanted to after seeing the Calamity, get outta here with that “Azem” nonsense.

In an Elpis episode they would do the opening section for the most part. Not much else to say here.

G’raha would be a lot more cheerful once the initial horror stage of travelling through time to prevent the end of the world again faded. He’d still have his struggles with the idea of possibly letting down the future Ironworks and being arguably the least experienced in the adventuring department.

In an Elpis episode, G’raha would likely be the one to deal with Venat overall. She’d be the perfect foil to him; an experienced traveller to his inexperienced adventurer. They’re both old but he’s barely a blip on her lifespan. They’re both incredibly determined to find the reason for why this is happening.

Ryne would feel a bit more resentment towards Ascians in general at that point. Other than that, her struggle was always being the odd one out amongst the Sundered, about being face to face with the woman she was named after and seeing why that woman was so beloved. About finding her own niche and staying there, no matter the people she loses.

I think out of all of the Sundered in a possible back-in-time-again Elpis episode, she would be the one to sympathise the most with Hermes despite also possibly interacting with him the least; she would likely lead the charge right before Ktisis Hyperboreia and her plot in Elpis would mostly be about travelling treacherous foreign terrain just the way Thancred taught her.

Unukalhai’s a bit of an odd case. After all there’s still two drafts, one where he joins the party as main POV character, and one where he becomes something along the lines of TTAU Minfilia. In a rework of that, I’d have to apply a lot of the Void lore since revealed to him, which makes him go from an odd case to an even odder case. He’d… either possibly involuntarily make Azdaja’s predicament worse, or free her before Endwalker happens but she loses her memories and becomes his cool new partner in crime until a completely flabbergasted Vrtra has to drop the facade immediately because no one told him a thrice-damned Warrior of Light had his sister tagging along what the fuck.

The hypothetical Elpis Episode would have a POV Unukalhai likely be the one to help Meteion get a gift for Hermes. His already intense internal hatred coming to the surface to turn a flower from bright white to darkest shadow, mirroring what happened with Hermes and the flowers in the past? Yeah. That’s the good shit.

In a non-POV case he’d stick with the Scions to help deal with the Final Days and his section of the story most likely would have gone to Ryne.

Ophion would likely still be a soul in Zodiark. Other than that, he’s not relevant.

Themis or the Heart of Zodiark… wouldn’t necessarily be the first one to join them. Actually, I think he’d be the last one. Immovable object without memories meets unstoppable force that draws in his allies. Overall he would be a lot colder on account of having no memories, and be rather fiercely protective of the other Unsundered for reasons he cannot recall. He’d make for an excellent diplomat, but it would likewise lead straight into his greatest vice: vague, foggy memories of something other other that might float up to the surface on occasion. Claudien would be an extremely weak spot for him, except unlike Lahabrea in the same position, Themis cannot tell how or why he’s reacting like that.

While the Sundered are off for their Episode Elpis, Themis would likely scour through the Crystal Tower to find a way to interact with the him from the timeline the others came from.

Emet-Selch would be the first legitimate Ascian to “join” their cause.

Mostly out of morbid curiosity, partially because he wants to figure out how in the name of all good graces a recreation of Hythlodaeus with sentience so advanced it can be deadpan sarcastic and have an identity crisis is with there, and it’s driving him just a bit insane. He’d actually be a lot more antagonistic as a result, and he’d be the one mostly bemoaning the Sundered and how Meteor is a disgrace to Azem early on until they have enough of his nonsense and beat him up. That would serve the purpose of actually confirming that they have the strength to kill an alternate timeline version of Emet-Selch and he mellows out a bit. Not much. Just a bit.

Overall he’d be a lot more prickly—which makes for an interesting switch when during the Final Days on the Source he very swiftly drops the antagonism. It’s a bit of a “been there, done that” attitude but since the star itself is in danger he has surprisingly few qualms about saving a few Sundered while he’s at it.

Lahabrea wouldn’t change much like I said, though there would be a lot more ruthlessness behind anything and everything he does. He’s willing to walk over corpses no matter what instead of calming down a little on that once he’s been thoroughly humbled (and untempered).

He’d also be a bit more strangely sentimental internally around Minfilia specifically; he already compares her to Igeyorhm a few times in TTAU proper but in a canon-compliant rewrite the comparison point would be Erichthonios. No matter how ruthless he is, at the end of Pandæmonium he and Erichthonios started the long journey of making up, and Minfilia reminds him of Erichthonios’s best qualities in a quite haunting way. They’re both tenacious and care about everything and everyone from the bystander to the one causing the mess… except Minfilia is a bit more spicy and willing to speak her mind. He wouldn’t be as fond of her by the end, but he’d still accept her terms and teach her.

Lahabrea during the Final Days would likely be recruited by Urianger and the Loporrits as additional quality control.

I’ve gone over the Hyth Shade, but the endgame there would be essentially affirming that he is as much a person as the Sundered are. Sure, he may have been someone else’s creation but that doesn’t make him any less a person on this star, not to mention he was one of the time travellers.

The real Hythlodaeus also would’ve been rather delighted to have an identical twin, and one who’s fighting against the Final Days no less.

Can’t go into too much detail otherwise, since this canon compliant version never quite left the drafting phases for obvious reasons. He’s the one character who more reacted to the plot than being the one to move it along, and without the plot there isn’t much to say.

He’d have stayed behind to deal with the Final Days, and he’d likely have been one of the first to go to Garlemald when news of the skies changing there broke.

The one major departure from canon would be that Zodiark and Hydaelyn aren’t fully slain—Zodiark specifically it put under a complete stasis spell in the middle of unravelling, but that breaks the protective shroud He has over Etheirys and the Final Days start happening again. Hydaelyn created meticulous seals and mechanisms to ensure that despite being bound the protective shroud remains, but under full stasis and while the whole thing is falling apart…

(Hyth Shade was the one to suggest it to the Watcher, Elidibus, and Emet-Selch as an absolute last resort. None of them really wanted Zodiark to suffer; the main goal still remains to bring back those Ancients should it prove possible).

All issues with how wonky and not finished that is aside, I’d also get a lot of extremely fun things to explore. Jullus already is one of my favourite characters introduced in Endwalker, but having him tell his story to Emet-Selch would be super interesting. There’s knowing what you’re doing, and there’s coming face to face with it, and that would genuinely be super cool to do.

Then there’d be the whole Heart of Sabik business—I’d unironically love for that whole mess to unfold with the real Lahabrea and Elidibus there while there’s memory-creations Erichthonios and Themis there as well. That would be absolutely chaotic on top of Athena also being there. Atrocious vibes, ten out of ten.

Likewise, Ryne and Vrtra would also be an interesting pair of characters to interact; they’re both the youngest siblings (of a sort in Ryne’s case), they’re both intensely protective of the people they care about, and they couldn’t bring themselves to hurt those they love even if it were absolutely necessary until someone else confirmed that this was the only way. There’s also that loss of family (Azdaja missing, Ratatoskr/Bahamut/Nidhogg dead; the whole abandoned timeline) that would have them interact in a neat way too, they’re quite similar to each other.

Unukalhai and Zero. She’s effectively everything he was said to be and they both failed. There’d be an interesting dynamic between them because of that—even if getting Zero in on the plot would be rather hard. Unukalhai would definitely try and sympathise with Zenos’s voidsent and maybe try to get them to abandon their master, and through that realise that she might not be there entirely willingly.

But overall, the hardest character to implement would be the Meteia. There’s eight main characters and there’s eight different opinions on this mess, ranging from intensely sympathetic and willing to rebuild burnt bridges (Ryne, Meteor, Hyth Shade, Elidibus if he regains his memories before Ultima Thule), apathetic despite how high the stakes are (Unukalhai, Elidibus if he doesn’t regain his memories), different levels of less sympathetic (Lahabrea, Emet-Selch), and the option where G’raha has such intense issues with being not overly sympathetic and having no sympathy at all that his understanding of the situation is wildly out of control until the very end.

Having worked with them as both individuals and as a hivemind in a couple writing exercises, I honestly would have had a Meteion for every main character, and give all eight of them a proper story on top of what’s already going on there. Narrative foils that lead both parties to Ultima Thule.

Putting that one lightly: that would’ve been a goddamn motherfucking nightmare to write. Fun, but a nightmare.

And that's a lot coming out of Ms Almost Half a Million Words Across Six Years.

#long post #really fucking long post #if that read more doesnt work im. literally so goddamn sorry

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alicesadventuresinffxiv · 3 months ago

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What are the most popular F/F Final Fantasy XIV ships?

(*on AO3, as of October 13, 2024)

I like writing femslash, so while I was doing the FFxivWrite challenge, I had the thought: wouldn’t it be fun to try writing each of the top 10 most popular FFXIV F/F ships?

I figured it would be a good way for me to learn to write characters I wasn’t used to, plus hopefully it would mean some of the well-liked but rarely-written pairings would get more fic for them!

But then I ran head-first into the question: what are those F/F ships? I hit some interesting challenges attempting to figure that out, so here’s a post about how I reached my answer!

First things first: I’m using AO3 stats for this analysis, entirely because AO3 has the most robust searching and filtering tools. Trying to wrangle this kind of analysis on tumblr or twitter would be a nightmare, as much as I’d love to know the answer on those sites!

Second, let’s quickly double check my assumption that F/F ships are indeed rarepairs in this fandom.

Yep, if you’re at all familiar with @centrumlumina's work on AO3 stats (which this analysis is somewhat inspired by ^^;), this is exactly in line with general fandom trends! For reasons that I understand intellectually but not in my heart, F/F fics tend to hover at around 6% of AO3 output overall.

Interestingly, this small slice of femslash makes FFXIV more similar to large, broad fandoms like the MCU or MHA (pictured above), and less similar to other online multiplayer videogame fandoms (pictured below). You might think that given its friendly reputation, FFXIV would attract more women and/or LGBTQ+ players and therefore have a higher proportion of femslash. But nope!

(Admittedly, pitting FFXIV against the fandom that contains Arcane feels a little unfair... :P)

So alright, with that out of the way, let’s start by doing the obvious thing. Hey AO3, what are the top 10 relationship tags when searching FFXIV on the F/F category?

[Note: Since the Warrior of Light is typically written as the author’s original character - especially in cases with multiple WoLs - I am combining the WoL/WoL and WoL/OC tags together.]

If you’ve been in FFXIV spaces for a while, you probably already guessed the #1 result! But as someone relatively new to the fandom, I was actually quite surprised. None of my previous fandoms had nearly this much focus on original characters!

Indeed, WoL/NPC ships and OC/ OC ships absolutely dwarf the numbers for any NPC/NPC ships, with the exception of the three largest M/M pairings (Aymeric/Estinien, Emet-Selch/Hythlodaeus, and Thancred/Urianger). Also, given that not everyone tags their OCs using either of the WoL or OC tags (ack! please use tags, your works get lost otherwise!)… you can always expect results for OCs to be an undercount. Woah!

Anyway, since WoL ships are so huge, I decided it made the most sense to give them their own list:

Another thing that surprised me is that male characters in FFXIV are so many times more popular than female characters that genderbent M/M pairings will show up in these F/F lists.

And… I wasn’t quite sure how to count those ships in my tallies.

On the one hand, genderbending (not to mention trans headcanoning-ing!) characters is a fun and often subversive way to approach popular ships. More power to everyone doing it!

On the other hand, part of the underlying motivation for my own writing goal was that I wanted to write pairings that fandom somewhat overlooks.

As such, I went with a compromise: I’m including pairings with canonically male characters in my graphs (those are the pink bars), but I kept the lists going until I reached 10 pairings involving characters who are portrayed as women in the source material.

(There were no nonbinary FFXIV characters which placed on any of my lists, sadly. Apologies to Feo Ul, who is still the loveliest of branches in my heart.)

Other than that caveat, the results here aren’t too far off from my own guesses. Anecdotally, I’d seen that a lot of WoLs are self-inserts for their players, so it makes sense that typical WoL ships are with NPCs that are generally considered to be attractive by the fanbase. Correspondingly, the Reader/Character fics that are somewhat common in other fandoms don’t even rank on these lists, which might suggest WoL/NPC ships are largely fulfilling that niche.

(Something something, FFXIV is a dating sim with combat, in this essay I will…. :P)

Anyway, WoL ships are nice, but what I actually wanted to write were NPC/NPC ships. So let’s add a bunch more excludes to the filtering… and…

Hm. That's interesting. There's a bunch of F/F ships that I know I’ve seen fic and art for that are missing from this list!

Out of curiosity, I did a few searches specifically on these missing pairings, in case they were so rarely tagged as purely F/F (or so commonly shipped alongside a WoL ship) that trying to find them via excludes didn’t work. These were:

Alisaie/Tesleen (20 total, 13 tagged F/F)

Krile/Tataru (14 total, 7 tagged F/F)

Ysayle/Heustienne (5 total, 5 tagged F/F)

Wuk Lamat/Sphene (4 total, 4 tagged as F/F)

[Note: The first number is what I used during the writing challenge last month… which is how I ended up putting Krile/Tataru over Lucia/Hilda. Oops! But the second number is more in line with the rest of the analysis here, so I will use that going forward.]

Seems my expectations were flat-out incorrect! Of these four, only Alisaie/Tesleen makes the top ten. Meanwhile Wuk Lamat/Sphene is a pairing consisting of very new characters... so perhaps it will grow over time!

Right then, let's add Alisaie/Tesleen in, and while we're at it, let's run direct searches on all the potential candidates rather than using excludes to ensure no fics are getting needlessly thrown out.

With those adjustments in place... I reached my final top ten!

Not bad! Predictably, pairings that get more focus in canon (Gaia/Ryne and Sadu/Cirina) tend to place high, as do pairings involving Y’shtola (since she’s a very popular character overall).

As a Lyse-enjoyer, I found Lyse getting 3/10 spots on the list to be pretty funny, as was the heavy presence of Stormblood characters! Apparently I’m not the only one who thought StB was a good expansion for lesbians. :D

There are also a few pairings here that I hadn’t ever considered before doing this analysis. But hey, that was the point of making the list! And trying to figure out the dynamics for pairings I didn’t usually ship did indeed turn out to be a fun writing exercise last month.

So what do you all think, tumblr? Did the results surprise you like they did me? Or did I overlook a pairing that really deserved to be included?

In any case, I hope you enjoyed reading this analysis!

#ffxiv #ffxivwrite #ffxiv analysis #fandom stats #fanfic #wolship #femslash #wlw #my ramblings #read more #I was thinking of analyzing race/ethnicity stats too #but boy oh boy attempting that would be like...#multiple nested cans of worms #if there's interest I might make an attempt though!#also it looks like I owe everyone a lucia/hilda fic sometime #hehe

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brineffxiv · 1 year ago

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We're having a nice chat back in Anagnorisis when suddenly we're interrupted by a researcher. A seasoned researcher, by his title. Apparently, something has happened with one of the creations. A "lykaon".

The lykaon has been indiscriminately slaughtering other creations with no provocation. It sounds like this has been an ongoing problem, and it has finally reached the point where the researcher in charge of them has concluded they need to be reverted. This news seems to distress Hermes, and he rushes off to the scene of the incident. We follow him.

No sooner do we arrive at the scene of the slaughtered okyupetes than Hermes is off again. Meteion and I catch up to him just as he himself finds Doros; the researcher in charge of the lykaons.

Doros appears to have done his due diligence in determining the fate of the lykaeons: they are unsuited to any environment and must be reverted. Nevertheless, Hermes wants to ensure all avenues have been explored. Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus will accompany him to this meeting.

Meanwhile, I get to babysit Meteion.

Which isn't a bad thing. I like Meteion.

That's a Deep Thought, little bird. You're touching on a debate we still deal with in the real world, and one for which there are no easy answers.

Meteion wants to find a flower for Hermes, to help cheer him up after what will surely be a fraught meeting. We consider several less than ideal candidates - including a morbol - before once again stumbling across Elpis flowers.

Hermes apparently has a complicated relationship to the Elpis flowers, as they reveal his internal pain to a world that can rarely empathize. When I tell Meteion that I, too, have seen the flowers dark she asks to borrow my pain. She wants me to turn the flowers dark in front of Hermes, to show him that he's not alone.

OOF. Oof, I say. Dear reader, forgive me for forgetting which of you told me to keep playing, because there was some plot I could relate to. You were right. Ouch, right in the heart.

That night, with the meeting concluded, we lure Hermes over to the Elpis flowers and I get to work thinking dark thoughts. Meteion tells Hermes he's not alone, and that others feel sad too. And, while Hermes seems to be a bit off balance at how much Meteion has told me, he takes off his mask and asks to speak with me for a time.

Oh wow, Hermes, you have lovely eyes. OMG all the ancients are so beautiful! Goddamn!

Hermes is greatly distressed by what he sees as callous disregard for the lives of the creations under his supervision; death may be embraced by man as a reward, but no other lives are afforded that privilege. "Lesser" lives are brought into being and ended at will, with little regard for the individual experiences of the creation in question.

Hang on.

Was I supposed to feel guilty about Hythlodaeus making me the robe out of butterflies?! Hermes would definitely not approve of that.

I mean... I'm a level 90 leatherworker, and I harvest most of my materials myself. I can recognize and understand what Hermes is feeling without... necessarily agreeing with him.

But then, I am reminded - of all things - of school, and being required to dissect frogs. And I thought it abhorrent that we bring these creatures to life for the sole purpose of killing them. "Education" was such a paltry excuse, when a simple diagram would fulfill the same purpose.

I think, in the real world, Hermes would be a vegetarian.

What painful irony; that which so troubles you now your future self... future incarnation. It seems unfair to call Amon Hermes' own self. But regardless, that man will delight in brining upon others that which you so abhor.

You're not alone Hermes. Please remember that.

I get the feeling you've never opened up to anyone about this before. I think if you had, you'd find that you are not as nearly alone here in Elpis as you may think. On both fronts; your respect for the lives of the beings you tend here, and your feelings of sadness. Several of the sidequests I've been doing have touched on similar themes - there was a woman who did not wish for her mentor to pass on, and a group where we preformed a remembrance ceremony for deceased creations, among others. I wish I'd known these themes would come up or I'd have taken screencaps.

To wind up our heart-to-heart, Hermes tells me a secret: Meteion is one of many. Her sisters are even as we speak making their way from star to star, searching for other worlds and the life upon them. Hermes wants to know what those other beings live for.

I am... a little bit unnerved by this revelation. Oh dear. Especially when, as we are walking away, Meteion turns and looks skyward, as though she hears something... Hermes... Has it occurred to you that not everything you find out there will necessarily be... good?

I mean, the people that created Omega are out there somewhere. And Omega was just one of their weapons.

DID ALIENS CAUSE THE FINAL DAYS!?!?

In the morning, Doros has had an accident with the lykaeons; he's managed to take out four of them, but three have escaped. Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch quickly locate the escapees and the two of them leave to take care of the ones that are flying above Elpis. Hermes and I are left to deal with the one hiding in the fields. So we do.

It was perhaps a mistake to give these creatures the power of flight.

Hermes is not dealing well with what we've been forced to do.

Hermes... This job is killing you. The responsibilities you are required to take on, the duty you are to perform... You are ill suited for it. And it's tearing you to pieces.

Emet, I swear to Zodiark if you say something insensitive... Hermes is having a wee bit of an emotional breakdown and the last thing he needs is your brand of conversation.

Oh right. That's why you're here; to offer him a different job.

I misjudged you. My apologies.

This is... perhaps not the place for it, but, in contrast to Hermes' pain, I think I am understanding why your future self looks back on the world now as a paradise. Not just because of the reasons you gave in the phantom Amaurot beneath the Tempest: it's because you are happy here. You are fulfilled in your purpose and duty, surrounded by those you love and who love you. You have friends and companions aplenty, and you are lauded and respected for the work you do. You see all of the good that your world and your people embody. What more could a man ask for?

In contrast, Hermes is-- Wait. It cannot be a coincidence that my path has led me here, to this time and place. I am here because something that happens here is the key to understanding the Final Days.

Hermes is experiencing anguish over what he sees as the wrongs of his society. He hates what is happening, feels alone in his suffering, and he's been experimenting with dynamis; the energy fueled by emotions.

Something Hermes has done, is doing, or is about to do is the key to the final days. Did he cause it?? That seems almost unfathomable. That a man as compassionate as Hermes would willingly cause what is to occur. But. Perhaps by accident?

Well, now I wonder. Is there not some dark part of Hermes that wishes to meet the same suffering that so pains him onto those he sees as having carelessly inflicted it? Whether deserving or not, if dynamis is purely fueled by emotion, not requiring logic or intent, he wouldn't necessarily need to mean to enact that, provided the correct vehicle, would he?

Satisfaction would certainly be preferrable than the fate that waits for all three of these men. Far preferrable than the "orgy of pain and suffering" Fandaniel will seek to bring. Everything that lives must one day die, Hermes. We can only hope that while we live, we live well.

Hermes, I would argue that your unique perspective is a shining example of why you should represent your people. You are seeing an issue that no one else is, and you are being offered one of fourteen positions with the power to work towards alleviating it. You have the choice to stay here in Elpis, where you will continue to suffer in silence, or to move on to Amaurot where you can actually make change happen. Take the job.

After his outburst, Hermes begs time alone to gather his thoughts. Hythlodaeus guides Emet-Selch and myself back to the Twelve Wonders, for what I presume will be the next leg of our tour. Emet-Selch appears to be deep in thought after what Hermes said... He admits to understanding, on a rational level, the sadness that comes when someone returns to the star...

Oh no, oh Emet... I wish you never have to suffer what you do.

#ffxiv liveblog #rhesh'a tag #hermes #meteion #emet-selch #hythlodaeus #I did it! I did it! I made a post!!#even with a broken hand I did it!#sorry if this post is a bit all over the place #it took me a LONG time to write it

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