I passed a flower shop next to a tattoo shop and at first I laughed because I thought it was ironic and then i freaked because IMAGINE YOUR OTP IN A FLORIST/TATTOO ARTIST AU
I cannot BELIEVE a post I made when I was 13 is circulating! And also apparently started this trope? I thought somebody had the idea separately and it blew up that way😭
one of the places I think the writing for FFXIV has generally missed an opportunity is to explore in more depth how krile feels about the events of stormblood and shadowbringers vis-a-vis zenos and the resonant experimentation.
like, stormblood is in part a story about the gendered impacts of imperialism, which is why two of its leads include a woman sold into marriage at a young age and later forced into sex work and a woman whose unflinching loyalty to empire explicitly does not shield her from misogyny. the scene where zenos grabs yotsuyu by the hair is just straightforwardly a scene of gendered violence to the greatest extent the animations and the mores of the writers allow. depending on your wol's gender stormblood is either the story of how zenos exploits and abuses three women (two of them textually colonial subjects) on his way to do the thing that really matters, fight a man or The Woman He Has Decided Is Exceptional. and the third of the women violently exploited in this way is krile!
like the violence zenos does to yotsuyu and fordola is desexualized to the extent images of gender-based violence can be desexualized under current conditions (and I think it could easily be argued that square-enix's decision to be like And It Wasn't Sexual in the stormblood side stories is kind of a cowardly ass-covering move), which imo is why it matters that the violence done to krile is explicitly to violate her bodily autonomy! human experimentation, particularly performed in the service of empire, is very obviously meant to be a vile and horrifying thing to contemplate! zenos in the text deploys the metaphor of animal butchery: "[S]ilence that mewling little piglet. I would not hear another sound pass her lips...until I strip the fat from her." we are very explicitly invoking ideas of dehumanization, of women as objects of consumption, etc. and this pretty shocking culmination of this theme in the stormblood main quest...doesn't really get paid off and 100% just turns into a genre power up for the endgame, and stormblood's themes about gendered violence don't get any payoff in the text until fordola and yotsuyu's patch stories.
even just in writing this I can actually sort of immediately see why they couldn't explore it. it's gonna be pretty important that krile not be read by the audience as a victim in relation to zenos if endwalker's finale hinges on her having the ultimate say-so on the mothercrystal-shinryu situation. If it's at all about krile as a victim of his violence, it can read really horrendously to have her deciding "yeah I believe in zenos enough for this" as a factor of the finale. and it's conceptually cool for her to have the decisionmaking power here at all, zenos involvement or no. I like the idea that she specifically gets to make a dramatic gamble here at the end. but the idea that it only works because they pretty explicitly overlook what he does to her is....pretty bad! and it's not like it removes these implications from the text! they don't get undone by ignoring them! there are perhaps drawbacks to trying to have a character pull double duty as the Existentialism Understander and the Avatar Of Imperial Violence And You Better Believe That Includes Gender And Race-based Violence
just a bummer to me that they seem generally disinterested in fleshing out krile's understanding of the hydaelyn and zodiark saga, which is pretty disappointing given she's literally getting possessed by hydaelyn and making that choice with the mothercrystal. would love to be proven wrong and for the next expansion to get much more interested in her!
Would u maybe consider.. jabber with like.. heart shaped bubble braids for your au? like each bubble is shaped like a heart. If that makes any sense. I think it'd be cute that's all!!!
I did the main cast as classes from the 2024 Player's Handbook a while ago, but I'm getting more confident in my ability to talk about things I enjoy without getting crucified, so I'm here to expand on that.
In the tag of the class post, I went on a little tangent about the Kuan-Yin brothers being half tiefling and half aasimar. Now, you can homebrew that, but I'll be playing by the same rules as that post by sticking to things only kept in the PHB2024. So, while their backstory and character aesthetics might be flavored with mixing both, they will mechanically be sticking to one race.
Samiel: tiefling. subrace wise, I can see him going Chthonic, since the in-book description of this legacy uses words like "succubus" and "cadaverous", which is pretty Samielcore because there's no world where he's beating the vampire allegations. Chthonic tieflings also get resistance to Necrotic damage, which could be good flavor-wise since that resistance is shared with aasimar. However, since he's probably going to share a subrace with Zazriel, the Infernal legacy could also work since it has more traditional connections to the angel-demon theming. And it gets the spell Darkness at level five, so...
Michael: aasimar. While the subrace features in the PHB2024 (or even PHB 2014) don't have the titles most people are familiar with, I'll be using the common ones because they're basically the same as what's in the Handbook(s) and only add some flavor. In regards to Michael, he'd probably have the Inner Radiance/Scourge subrace that turns him into an beacon of Fuck You Take Radiant Damage (whether this also damages allies in his AoE and himself is up for the DM, but it's in-character for Michael to burn himself alive just to win a fight.) The Scourge subrace specifically comes with constantly wearing a mask, which matches up neatly with a paladin's helm and any distinctively tiefling features like solidly colored eyes or horns.
Zazriel: tiefling. As mentioned with Samiel, the most obvious subrace for him is Infernal, both because of the very demonic coding of these tieflings specifically and the inescapable red theming. I wouldn't be surprised if he did smell like sulfur. He could also go Chthonic, since they can appear more ghoulish than the others, but it would probably come down to flavor since both he and Samiel (and Mirela, if that would be a factor) would share a subrace.
Custodian: this one was the hardest to nail down, but I think the most interesting answer here is gnome. Not only because it's funny to put the Custodian's attitude three feet beneath the rest of the cast (can you imagine the Kuan-Yins getting yelled at by someone who comes up to their hip? Can you imagine how flustered they'd be that it works?) but because gnomes are clever and often associated with mechanics and clockwork. That's the real trick here, they'd be a gnome because Arius is a gnome. Bro was three feet tall and building elaborate fortune-telling clocks, and Alethea was also there. Another good answer for them is halfling due to the focus on family and community (and what it means to be without that), but they don't have Darkvision.
Ilyian: elf. i'm caught between Drow because I love Drow, although I know Wood Elf is probably more accurate. He's very outdoorsy, whether he wanted to be or not, and older versions of the Wood Elf even included proficiencies with bows. On the other hand, since so much of Drow culture comes back to being underground and therefore usually in darkness, there's something very silly about Michael being his love interest. Guy who was raised never seeing the sun x Guy who literally explodes with light if he gets too into a battle. I'm sure that would add no complication to a relationship stalled by awkwardness as it is.
Carys: human. c'mon, you know why. keeps consistent with the core of what his character is about (adaptability, perseverance, insane and anomalous amounts of charisma) even in a setting where there isn't the mortal-divine dynamic at play. While there have been human subraces, they're not in the PHB2024 (and don't really matter imo, since they just change the stat spreads). It's not a mistake that he's the only race without Darkvision, because I think I'm funny.
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