#the stars are blind my love

[anneapocalypse]

The ship dynamic of "I love you but I will always choose the world over you. I love you but my conscience binds me to the greater good in a way I can never escape. I love you but I would sacrifice you to save the world if I had to, even though it would kill me and I would never forgive myself. I love you and a part of me wishes that I could be the kind of person who would sacrifice everything for you. But I'm not, and I never will be, and if you're going to love me I need you to understand that."

[anneapocalypse]

How it started:

It's fair to say that neither Ariane nor Urianger took particular notice of one another when they first met! He was a Scion. She was a new recruit. They worked together on primal business and were friendly enough but they certainly weren't close, despite having a fair bit in common under the surface, until a certain confluence of events brought them a lot closer to one another. (Which is the subject of the fic project I'm currently working on!) But to sum it up:

Urianger lost Moenbryda, his oldest and dearest friend (and, in this universe, a relationship that was romantic for a time), and subsequent spiraled into much deeper isolation.

Ariane fled to Ishgard where she fell in love with Haurchefant, and had a whirlwind affair with him ending with his sudden and tragic death.

Ariane, in the wake of the Warriors of Darkness incident, coming to terms with the losses of both Haurchefant and Minfilia, and haltingly trying to reach out and connect with others again, recognizes in Urianger someone also experiencing grief and isolation... and in that, they find a point of connection from which they discover other common interests, and grow to be close friends.

In Shadowbringers, those feelings turn romantic, but it's not until after the First is saved that they finally come to fruition.

How it's going:

(Sneak peak from a Wolianger Week set, under a cut for Dawntrail glam and location.)

They're doing pretty good. :)

Hey... hey anyone with wolships or other FFXIV ships (since I know not everyone's characters are WoL).

Show me your "How it started // How it's going" can be gpose, art, writing. I just want to know about your ffxiv ships. Can be OCxOC, OCxNPC, Polyships, multiships, or anything else I didn't account for.

[mroddmod]

tried the blind color palette challenge a few times with some suggested characters :))

[bamsara]

being an adult means we can buy or make as much self-indulgent shit (as we can afford) and unironically have trinkets of our fave things cause our teen years was bullied for liking things and hiding/denying we were ever neurodivergent to the point of suicide. sucks for anyone that thinks its weird cringe but I'm going to try and allow myself to love myself in little ways now

[carouselunique]

Introducing the one taking the place of Sunburst in the AU: Bon Bon! She still thinks about her old friend Lyra and hopes she's alright...

[anneapocalypse]

The "oh" moment for me with Arianger was sometime post-Heavensward. Me simply falling in love with Urianger as a character came first, and initially, I wasn't thinking of them as anything more than a friendship and a brief attraction that never went anywhere because they were both too deep in grief, but it wasn't long into Stormblood before I fell down the shipping rabbit hole with them and knew is was going to be a whole Thing, once the characters were ready for it. :)

For the characters, they've become close friends over the course of Stormblood with Ariane regularly aetheryting back to the Waking Sands for tea... and then Urianger collapses along with the other Scions one by one and Ariane is a mess of worry and feeling helpless and trying to hold it together for Alisaie, and the person she'd go to first to talk about it isn't there.

Meanwhile, Urianger has three years in the First without her and it doesn't take him long to know how much he misses her, but it does take some time to admit to himself (much less anyone else) what his feelings for her really are. Not that he quite needs to admit with anyone else, because even Ryne takes notice of how much he talks about his friend Ariane and how great Ariane is and how it's all going to be all right when Ariane gets here. Thancred notices, the Exarch notices. (Y'shtola also notices but her general stance on getting involved in other people's romantic affairs, is "no, hells no, and one more no for good measure.")

Still, by the time he gets word that she's arrived, he has a very real fear that he's built up a fantasy in his mind in her absence, and maybe his feelings aren't real (whatever that means), and anyway he could never expect her to feel the same, and even if she did he cannot act upon it while he's actively deceiving her and everyone else. Compartmentalize that shit and do what needs to be done.

Ariane, meanwhile, takes the news that he's been there three years hard. He's had a whole life here without her. What if the friendship that for her existed between them mere weeks ago isn't there anymore? What if it isn't the same? What if--

And then she finally sees him, and he greets her so warmly, and they are so incandescently happy to see one another that Thancred is thinking, Gods be good, do I need to leave the room?

She starts to know it then, and as they work side by side, those feelings only grow. Of course, then a lot of other things happen, and it takes a long time for them to actually confess those feelings. But that's when they know.

fellow wol x npc shippers- If applicable, what was the "oh" moment for you and your oc falling for their love interest? Was yours seperate from your WoL's?

[skullinacowboyhat]

a much needed smoke break at the temple.

[puppyeared]

my brothers been playing elden ring recently and he let me draw his character ^_^

[anneapocalypse]

Listen, I just really needed to see him in the new glam. And I like what I see.

[anneapocalypse]

Ariane isn't really "strictly" anything; she's only been in monogamous relationships and that's probably the way she's most inclined, but she'd be open to polyamory under the right circumstances. After Haurchefant's death she finds out that Aymeric has feelings for her and she's too deep in her grief to accept them and has to let him down, but had things been different and Haurchefant lived, I think both she and he would have been 100% on board with Aymeric simply joining them; unfortunately due to circumstances it just didn't work out that way. Also somewhere there's an AU I'll never write where Minfilia lives and returns to her mortal life and is in a throuple with Ariane and Urianger. But in her canon storyline, as of now, she's monogamous.

Is your WoL polyamorous or strictly monogamous? Or are they simply uninterested in the whole thing?

[wwillywonka]

jim getting angry at bones for blinding spock in operation: annihilate versus one half of jim's glasses shattering after spock dies in wrath of khan

[gomzdrawfr]

We are getting words in as I wrestle with my brain

this mtf (points at myself) loves stars and galaxy imageries

also random thought, does any fic writers do the thing when writing from art like this? xD I always like to pick things I've noticed from the piece itself, putting it in bullet points and then expand my ideas from there then try to connect them to paragraphs

[nyatbinary-81]

@vulpixisananimal sifstem art jumpscare!! more specifically i got bored and decided to mess around with sif and mal's outfits.

[anneapocalypse]

I have a few ships for Ariane (she has a big unrequited crush on Minfilia before her disappearance, and a brief but intense love affair with Haurchefant up until his death; yes she has had very terrible luck), but her "endgame" ship is Urianger. They have a long friends-to-lovers slow burn, and Urianger was kind of a slow-burn fave for me as well! It was in the Heavensward patches that I really began to love him and pay more attention to him, and I truly had no idea at the time how well that was going to pay off later with how much wonderful character development he gets. He has become one of my favorite characters in FFXIV, and I find him both deeply relatable and fascinating to dig into in terms of the lore surrounding him. Also he's just an absolute delight to write, and I'm really looking forward to sharing more of what I've been working on.

I mostly prefer NPC ships for my character because I can write what I want for them and indulge as much as I like without having to depend on someone else's interest in the ship remaining as strong as mine. I'm a mostly solitary writer and while I'm not totally opposed to collaboration, or RP, when it's a ship I deeply love, it's nice to have it be my own space.

My husband and I do have an AU where our characters are together, but we haven't done all that much with it; he has NPC ships for his character as well, which I love for him.

I had toyed with the idea of Urianger as a ship for Ariane for a while, but it took some time to figure out how it would happen and when the timing would be right. It definitely couldn't have happened for them any earlier than it did, because neither of them would have been ready for a relationship. Ariane is grieving Haurchefant for a long time, and Urianger is grieving Moenbryda, and they both have a lot of complicated feelings about themselves tied up in that, with Urianger blaming himself, and Ariane blaming Hydaelyn. But in many ways it's that grief that draws them to one another.

Ariane wasn't close to Urianger when Moenbryda died, and felt there was little comfort she could offer at the time. The Warriors of Darkness incident was a sort of confluence of things happening for her. In saying goodbye to Minfilia she accepted that Minfilia had made a choice, had not been taken against her will, and that Haurchefant had made a choice too. And in seeing how long Urianger had labored alone and in secret, she realized he really wasn't okay and hadn't been since Moenbryda, and she thought, maybe somebody better like. Check in with him, now and then.

So from then on, and throughout Stormblood, every week or two when she could she'd take the aetheryte to Western Thanalan and stop in at the Waking Sands. "Just checking in" turned into "Wilt thou stay for a cup of tea?" and they talked about magic and books, and Ariane started bringing little gifts like a new variety of tea or a new translation of Far Eastern poetry, and it turned out they had a lot in common actually: both big readers and students of magic, both inclined toward the healing arts, both fond of poetry, both socially awkward nerds with complicated relationships to their families who treasured deep friendships but did not form them easily, and of course both having experienced great loss and grief in their lives.

When Urianger got pulled away to the First, they both realized how terribly they missed each other, and of course things got a bit complicated in Shadowbringers, and they might have confessed their feelings for each other a lot sooner had the Exarch's secrets not driven some distance between them. Ariane needed some time to be okay about it, and Urianger gave it to her. But they worked things out, and on the eve of the Scions' risky return to the Source, they did finally confess their feelings for one another and have been together since.

What I love about them is that even with how much they have in common as people, I don't think they would ever have ended up together if not for connecting over certain shared experiences. Both of them have loved and lost (my headcanon is that Urianger and Moenbryda were on-again off-again romantic, they definitely loved each other but it was complicated), and those earlier loves were no less real to either of them because they were ended by tragedy. Neither of them could have been with somebody who expected their love to eclipse all others in their life, or to heal all the wounds of the past just by existing. Love, and life, are bigger and more complex than that.

Almost forgot to add pics!

Chatting in the Waking Sands:

Making eyes at each other in Il Mheg:

Staying warm in Garlemald:

Another random WoLQotD/OC question

I thought I'd ask this while I worked on my other questions. :)

If you're a WoL x NPC shipper, what drew you to that ship and why? What makes that ship the pinnacle for you and your oc? Is it that you love the canon character you write them with, you find their dynamic interesting or something in between?

If you're not a WoL x NPC shipper, but you have a ship with another person, how did that come about? What makes that ship fulfilling for you? Has the ship impacted your relationship with that other person? Feel free to gush, I wanna hear it!

Oh, and pictures are a must (if you have them).

[pearl-crystals]

Ive been slowly playing through In Stars and Time and Siffrin needs a dang minute and a hug man. So I'm drawing him getting a hug that he could get with only some possible razzing and/or scalding.

Ive also added a couple other drawings as a treat for myself hahaha.

[seabunnieart]

a tiny briar for myself after the work week.