#shadowbringers spoilers //

[elizabethrobertajones]

I love her so much

[yloiseconeillants]

cyella as the pendants visitor feels so different from the others and i am so glad i finished all the role quests that i could to get her for that cutscene

[jrpgdog]

[shalpilot]

last night i had a dream

[mosthuggableffxiv]

Primarily knowing Jonathan Bailey as the English voice of G'raha Tia gets funnier and funnier the more successful he becomes.

[arianwen44]

‘My people, my brothers… my friends.’

[tritoch]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[crystallinekitties]

why won’t you answer his skype call

[galacticsabc]

Let's haunt the narrative together!

[ciphox]

ghosts on the first

(alt under the cut)

[nephiieatsuranium]

With your unbeating heart, wish them well.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Yeah right, liar.

........... CYLVA. WHY. You can't just say these things to Jane when she has NO IDEA THE LORE BOMB YOU ARE GOING TO DROP ON HER.

Quite literally, I think :P

Unrelated but she absolutely ate this camera angle

anyway remember when I said that Jane joining the Scions was a terrible idea because she would become Completely Hydaelyn Pilled and turn it into a weird cult thing if no one else was going to do it for her?

I feel like this is the exact level of fanaticism that meets that freak :P Granted, Cylva is manipulating the Warrior of Light generation machine for the sake of causing a calamity, with the Most Manipulated Pawns In The Universe who are only on step one or two of like 6 in this chess game. But the stuff she's saying is 100% something Jane would believe and agree with XD Like yeah actually we SHOULD dedicate ourselves to Hydaelyn by following a regeime of self-sacrifice and toppling evil in a semi-gamified and marketable plan to increase your Mothercrystal Rankings -

I know you're being dramatic and also want that but that's 100% the angle of the cat in the picture with all the knives pointing at it and the cat is so so smug and somehow exactly where it wants to be :3

^ pictured holding back saying the name that would trigger a second Echo flashback in a row and force Jane to realise exactly why Cyella has been scowling at her all month and spilling every other drink she ordered onto her head.

(Jane thought she was like. Maybe a former guard, wounded in battle and kept around as a barmaid out of pity even though her arms were shaky, and Jane was being ever so forebearing with this treatment and didn't even go complain to Glynard even though she really wanted to)

"Like you, I'm from the Thirteenth."

"What!? I'm not a demon, despite the scythe I carry! I come from the Source?! I was born in Ishgard!"

Cyella's eyes widened, and for a moment her furious composure, seething with self-loathing almost as visceral as the shadows that had framed her in the memory, faltered. "You - you're not?"

"I'm not!" Jane protested, dazed with the sideways blow to her sense of self that had come out of nowhere as she processed the tale of the Shadowkeeper in her own voice. "Why would you even say that? Unukalhai said he had no idea what Elidibus knew about me so why do you know any different?"

Cyella paused, glanced away as if through the veil to worlds long lost. "He lied to you, then."

"Why would he do that? I asked him not to!" Jane all but stomped her foot in its pointy-toed boot.

The pity that flashed across Cyella's face was exhausted, deeply ingrained. She looked Jane up and down slowly, brow furrowed - "Your avatar. Of course. Give me your - whatever focus binds you two together."

Jane reached for her job stone, but only clutched it tight in her fist, gripped with a deep horror of the answers she'd been hunting ever since waking in Fallgourd Float. "Why?"

"Did you not feel a thing when you made that pact?" Cyella was looking flummoxed now, her sword arm dropped to her side, her head shaking slowly, mouth slightly open and corners nagging down.

"I don't know, I was trying to figure out what was up with all the voidsent following me so I talked to Drusilla and she gave me this stone, but then I got called away to the First before I could figure any of it out? And then I started absorbing Lightwardens and everything gets a bit blurry and strange from there? I - I hadn't thought about it since."

Cyella rubbed her forehead. "Are you serious. Across all lifetimes and worlds, even when you can accomplish all this and you're still - " She held her hand out more insistently. Terrified more of her than the truth suddenly, Jane dropped the soul stone into her palm.

"Janey," Cyella said, to the stone. "What happened to you now?"

The avatar poured forth from the stone in a rush of shadow, pooling at Cyella's feet before rising in a pillar to a hooded figure carrying a scythe; a young woman who looked startlingly like Jane. But a few inches taller.

She looked from Jane, to Cyella, to Jane again, then back to Cyella. "Do you know how long I was trapped as a mere grub crawling in the slime of the shattered world?" she demanded in a scratchy, hollow voice. "Trapped in the rift alone while you broke free and left me to rot?" she added, in a screech that somehow sounded like another's voice entirely. "Ten thousand years severed and you lived as a king!?" both sides of her voice screamed.

Cyella wafted a hand through Janey like she was smoke, and the avatar dispersed, sucking back into the stone. For a long time, the two of them stared at the object gently shaking in her gloved palm; whether from the contained rage, or Cyella's own trembling.

"She seemed angry," Jane said, after a while.

"She ran off with some ascian and doomed our world, then had the gall to come crawling back to me when the Flood of Darkness came. Of course I kicked her away. What a bitch." Cyella threw the stone to Jane, who fumbled and barely caught it. "Well, you did me no harm, you poor mangled thing. Maybe you'd even be better if you'd never met her. I'm sorry I blamed you for what she did, for what it's worth. It seems the little leech climbed into your soul somewhere along the way and was simply biding her time playing at being your avatar until she could put herself back together."

"But I only picked up this job a day before I came to the First?"

"Something has been wrong with you for a while, though, hasn't it? I see - in your memories - falling through the dark. Moments before you're dashed to pieces on the rocks below your precious city, a rift opens, and something pulls you in. And I can see what you did not, thanks to the Echo. Elidibus was the one who caught you. Who saved your life only to feed you to that thing. All your magic, all that sorcery you've been able to command since? That's Janey, feasting on your aether and giving back just enough to make you feel special."

"Um... did you know her?"

Cyella buried her face in her hands for a moment.

After swallowing back several replies, she looked at Jane again with contemptuous pity. "I thought I did. What you have there, though... Flakey and useless as she was, is not even the Janey who let Igeyorhm walk all over her until our world was consumed by shadows. The last time I saw her, she was clawing her way into a rift to hide from the Flood, and I'm not ashamed to admit, I tried to stop her. To make her look, just once! at what she had done, and own up to something."

She sighed in disgust. "I don't regret watching her torn in twain, one half swallowed by the rift, the other twisted and mutated into a voidsent before my eyes. It's your bad luck you seem to be the perfect vessel for her to attempt to sew those parts back together. I'd advise not letting them."

"Oh... But... I'm actually pretty good at the art of the Reaper."

"Are all of you as stupid as each other? No, don't answer that. Just. Don't encourage her. Seek help. Be better than her - more like Ardbert. I know you can be, at least sometimes. Stop her from ruining everything all the time!"

"Um. Sorry about your big Shadowkeeper moment. Do you - do you want to keep doing this? It seemed important."

Cyella huffed and made another gesture like she wished she could waft Jane away as easily as she'd banished the voidsent Janey. "Let's get this over with. I don't even care." She looked out over the purple woodland below them. "Although, I have to say, I had learned a lot from Janey and Igeyorhm about how easy it would be to lead the First's heroes into a trap to flood their world, just as blindly as she had done, and thinking they were heroes every step of the way."

She took another, long, moment to compose herself, then resumed her tale.

And at the end of it, her plea rang hollow and empty; Jane bursting into tears as soon as Cyella begged her for death; her scythe remaining firmly sheathed, frozen by the horror of letting Cylva down again.

"Oh, hello! I'm Jane!"

"... of course you are."

[celestial-bl00m]

I love when Emet-Selch enters a scene and all the scions are just like

[demilypyro]

This is my favorite FF14 npc btw (gay alcoholic dwarf girl)

[ikeimen]

custody battle (shadowbringers in a nutshell)

[jrpgdog]