#m: ffxiv

[mmediocreman]

i've been reunlocking pandaemonium on my viera alt

and it hits kinda different...

[juunipupu]

Hidden grove for us and the stars    Roegadyn and Viera private commission – He/him for both

[grumpy-bat-central]

Wuk Evu.

please watch this unedited clip from the digimon movie

[wilderrest]

do you know our lord and saviour the cornservant

[sierrasketches]

The Daydreamer 🌈

My page illustration for @ff14untamedzine, a Final Fantasy XIV creature zine.

[deathflare]

long hair erenville.. 💭

[petite-guignol]

i dont know if i want to revive my FFXIV OC blog, where this would be relevant because he is actually an arcanist, but

the thing is that the job of managing one of the biggest ports in the entire world, in a setting which has a lot of tech/magic advancements that would increase manufacturing, trade, and communication but notably NOT anything like a computer for storing and processing information (at least not on a wide, usable scale)...

that's like, a staggeringly huge task, and that's not even accounting for stuff that has no counterpart in the real world, like the wizard crimes mentioned in the tags or like, the fact that you have to account for like a dozen different sentient species on a daily basis, or the fact that the world keeps almost ending.

keeping all of that organized and running, in a city populated largely by former pirates under a series of tenuous and complicated alliances, IS an epic feat for a guild of magicians to undertake, i think

we learn in Aloalo Island that modern arcanima is partially descended from the scholars of Nym, who were also known for their logistical skills (their main shield spell is even called "adloquium", Latin for an address or exhortation -- for a while this led me to headcanon that the "shield" is just the mechanical representation of the scholar's quick thinking and incredible tactical advice, and while it's pretty clear now that they also have actually physical geometric math barriers, I still think this is somewhat true). and both Mhach and Amdapor seem to have found Nym to be incredibly threatening, even though they didn't seem to actually be at war with them per se and Nym was a good deal smaller. Mhach even ended up creating a voidsent plague specifically to wipe out the scholars and then took the ADDITIONAL step of deleting the city from existence with whatever the fuck Ozma is

modern arcanima combines that with the advanced geometry which was used by the people of the south seas islands for some flashy stuff like summoning magical guardians but also for more down-to-earth purposes like maintaining records and preserving knowledge

what the arcanists' guild does is simultaneously a staggering undertaking that might very reasonably require the full attention of powerful wizards and the most mundane boring pencil-pusher shit you've ever seen

that's my favorite thing about them

also its maybe worth noting that one of the only glimpses we get into the actual culture of Amdapor is a record in one of the gubal library dungeons of a painfully long bureaucratic meeting about how they were going to name different healing spells. i know this is a joke but also maybe they could have benefited from hiring an independent Nymian consultant rather than like, killing them and shoving their soul crystals into automatons, ya know?

arcanists: we wield the most complex form of magic... arcanima. one must master arcane geometry to weave patterns that respect the flow of aether, which in turn will create powerful creature that can help you in combat. this is very dangerous and very powerful, it's not for the weak of mind

also arcanists: anyway we use that power to inspect ship crates lmao

[varethane]

Return to Ishgard

[ageha-sds]

remarkably remembered her whole name sans one letter

[puddraws]

a while back i asked luke allen-gale (zenos' VA) to read this dumb comic i drew and i don't think i ever posted it here lolol

[yumeijin]

There's some irony in the notion that people respond likening the comparison of the protagonists' morality with Emet-Selch's by rejecting the idea and then moving right into the equivocating and moral relativism Emet-Selch does. Suddenly it doesn't count as murder because "they're not really alive," or "it's justified because I deem their existence is worth fundamentally less than this other existence."

Let's ignore the matter of it being a written contrivance that the Endless require more aether than exists on a shard seemingly primed for rejoining. Just for a minute.

The people in Living Memory aren't shades any more than any sundered is compared to an Ancient. They are fragments of people, specifically the memories that have been extracted from a soul which is then scoured of any trace of the imprints the memories made. They are, for all intents and purposes, all that remains and can remain of that person. When Emet-Selch judges a person on a shard "not truly alive" he consigns them to rejoining, and the etchings of memory on the soul are then combined with their like. We've seen this happen with Ardbert. We've seen it happen with the WoL. Some part of the person lives on in the soul.

Not so when we purge Living Memory. We shut down the terminals sustaining them and they cease to exist. Their souls have already been scoured, their bodies have already decomposed, the aether that makes up their mind is all that was left. There is no "I'll see you again in another life" for these people.

What we do is, on some level, worse than what Emet is doing. And using the justification that some of them are ok with it is incredibly weak. It's not as though we polled the populace, it's not as though the majority of people even knew what to expect. Imagine shutting down a whole ward of people on life support because a handful of them would rather pass on.

What makes this really vexing is that the writers were clearly going for an angle of "Life belongs to the living, honor the dead but don't deprive yourself of life because of it" angle and the best they could come up with was this nonsensical contrivance that makes you a monster. They could have just as well made these actual shades, they could have made them powered by souls so that at least shutting them down is just restoring things to the natural status-quo, but nooooo

We've got to be settle for "What if we made the players kinda morally just, but also genocidal--less genocidal, don't worry."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[nights-at-crystarium]

getting closer to how i really wanna draw him

[yuunos]

A collection of FFXIV doodles that I forgot to upload here

[deathflare]

aether seeker~

[sapphiresword]

Well, that puts things into a new perspective that I haven't considered. Might be due to the fact that I'm not a fan of Zenos in general (High key hate him actually. Doesn't mean I won't acknowledge his contributions as a character). Or just with my warrior of light, they just have a different motivation to go on the adventure in the first place.

everything post-Endwalker hinges on the idea that even after saving the world and being released from their duty as Warrior of Light the WoL will seek adventure for it's own sake. They're still doing the same things they always do but this time purely because they want to.

And I don't think that change would have been possible without Zenos.

The final confrontation with him at the end of Endwalker, his questions spurring the WoL to think about why they do what they do, or the duel that serves to show them how fun it can be to fight without the weight of the world on your back. It's crazy to think that for all of the harm he caused the positive consequence of Zenos's actions was inspiring his friend to live freely.