The Lone Miqo'te

FFXIV musings, photos, possibly fanart and NPC fangirling (especially on a certain Elezen knight). Spoilers ahead!

[arcadion-fanzine]

Only 1 more week until Donation Drive for Fight Club ends!

Happy EU Fanfest! Thank you so much for all the donations so far! there's still plenty of time to get your digital copy of the zine! There's two ways to give:

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Please note that we will send the download links to the emails inputted on the form and the bigcartel transaction. Thank you so much for the shares and enthusiasm 💗

art by @bearshearth 🐸🪩💗

[glysreia]

Once again seeing people have horrendous takes of "they should work on a way to cut down on expansions so you can just start playing end game content right away"

Go play a shooter game

Go play Fortnite

Literally go play WoW which has you thrown into end game content

I don't understand why all games need to satisfy this need for immediate gratification while basically building absolutely fucking nothing

You wanna press shiny buttons for 8 hours and get a reward each time? What is this, a gambling arena?

If they cut down on expansions, why even play the game anymore? Taking the meat off an entire organism and leaving it as bare bones for yet another instant gratification video game

It's an RPG for fucks sake! It happens to be online as part of the concept. ROLE. PLAY. GAME. THERE'S GONNA BE ROLEPLAY IN THE ROLEPLAY GAME. YOU PLAY A ROLE. OF THE HERO PROTAGONIST. IN A STORY.

If it was a take that talked about ARR content and needing some further refinement or reworking here and there to draw the audience in, I'd understand. I tried FFXIV 4-5 years ago and ARR put me off. I gave up in the post patches. I came back for the Viera last summer (and because I could afford a sub) and forced myself to push through ARR and eventually came to really like the story and the game itself after being a literal hater for years before.

But to outright ask that they let you play the game without the story and just have you jump into current content while being a completely new player with no knowledge of your own class? Do you also not care about all the other people forced to play with these newcomers? It's bad enough they can job and story skip to 90 right now. Next year they'll make it 100 probably. You'll wanna run an Extreme for DT or something and suddenly you have a guy who doesn't know how to use either of the gameplay modes available, but oh it's fine cause they just wanted to play with their friends so they bought a skip, the expansion and the game license and a sub.

Playing THROUGH the story with your friends is an even better experience! Makes the way to the end worthwhile instead of throwing over 60€ away on a subscription based, expac based game, just to play with your level 100 friends for a week and then dump it cause you didn't actually enjoy it even with endgame fully available.

[estrogenpatchnotes]

I don't think there's ever been a funnier piece of lore in a video game then the etymology of the word "gun" in FFXIV

[estrogenpatchnotes]

@wibbley-wobble So in XIV lore there was a queen named Gunhilder who ruled a country that was conquered by the big bad guy nation, galemald, and she had a royal guard called “gunhilder’s blades” who fought with swords that had triggers on them and were used for channeling magic, and these were called gunblades after the royal guard, When garlemald conquered bozja they copied the design of their swords but garleans can’t use magic so to adopt their fighting style they switched to a mechanical design that used black powder. Later on firearms were developed off of this concept and since they were “gunblades without the blade” people started calling them guns.

[bogleech]

masterpiece world building actually

[paranoir-antares]

you know what's even better? that lore is a magicalized remix of the word's irl etymology and i think that's brilliant

[bogleech]

Oh. it’s just real. It was really that silly.

[estrogenpatchnotes]

Seeing this going around again for the umpteenth time I’d like to reiterate that I know about the real world gunhilder and about allagan siege weapons. To me the funny part is that in eorzea, gunblades were invented before muskets

[badaxefamily]

Given how many weird things in FFXIV are based on real world crazyness, I imagine the Gunhildr thing was intentional. The lore team are big nerds and do that all the time.

Except for cellphones being thousands of years old technology that nobody uses anymore. I think they did that one on their own.

[badaxefamily]

I think it's because the lion furries are kinda the most normal thing going on here. Like, most of the time a character's race won't ever be mentioned by other characters unless it's relevant, and it's very rarely relevant. The mysterious hypercapitalist that actually isn't that evil and funds a lot of important stuff is a lawn gnome and everyone respects him, at least to his face. The Aztec king has three kids, of which two are different species from him (and each other) and the only one anybody says anything about is the trueborn because the king was supposedly sterile. All three kids have equal claim to the throne and no one ever questions that. There are multiple times that literal aliens from outer space come down and everybody is just like Oh hi, nice to meet you.

[tiniest-hands-in-all-the-land]

Day 5: Invocation | Sacrifice

[glysreia]

"Zenos was too emotionally stunted to be a villain, that's why Emet is a well rounded well written villain"

THE FACT HE'S EMOTIONALLY STUNTED IS THE FLAVOUR!!!! YOU GUYS WILL ONLY LIKE VILLAINS IF THEY GO BY THE USUAL FORMULA OF SAD BACKSTORY LEADS TO EVIL DRAMATIC WORLD ENDING PLAN

I'm not here to bitch about Emet since I also like him and I like the way he was written and even how it makes you question yourself: if you too had to live while everyone you know and love had to die, would you not go to some great lengths of trying to bring them back IF YOU COULD? Would you not also be stuck in the past in some sort of melancholy and nostalgia and would you not also feel like every time you presently believe you're getting better, you're only proven wrong by your peers and find them lacking and imperfect, and then that plan of bringing everyone back starts ringing back into your ears?

Cool, cool, but Zenos having the also very human backstory of despite being born into the most privileged family and class of his country, ending up as an emotionless husk of a person because he was not even RAISED into an adult, he was merely allowed to exist only by Empire rules and FOR the Empire's goals, is apparently not enough and only gives him the "emotionally stunted" tag? That's the whole fucking point!!

The whole fucking point is nature vs nurture, the whole fucking point is showing that the Empire was so rotten from within it wouldn't even support its royal class, the whole fucking point is lack of any kind of human connection WILL bring you into this state. We've had this guy on and off for 2-3 expansions, reaching a boiling point in EW where he gets that one moment of epiphany, given to him by a teenage girl no less, where he turns around, thinks on it for a while, then COMES TO OUR RESCUE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE. He could very well let us die there since he himself talks about how much he doesn't like being alive. He even tells you you can walk away from him at the very end and that he won't force a fight on you anymore (not my fault that the game still pushes you to fight after cause duhh script).

But sure, he's emotionally stunted :( he doesn't qualify to be a villain. I guess only the guy who allowed 5000 years worth of nostalgia, melancholy and depression to make him attempt mass cross universe genocide gets to be a villain, oopsie.

[cultofzenos]

Zenos’ big beautiful nose. reblog if you agree.

[itsartbyjonathan]

i think the apples rotten right to the core

[hallabun]

aymeric has got to be the funniest character ever. notable pretty boy. serious and stern in appearance. has clawed and scraped his way up ishgardian society to gain the power needed to enact reform. has immense political connections. an expert in diplomacy and manners. attends formal events on the regular since it is required of him. a skilled dancer who is the talk of noble women. is voted in as lord speaker and is in charge of the temple knights. is by all means the ultimate catch who could have anyone he wants.

and yet! he does not like doing Any of this!!! he is still single in his 30s. he wants to quit his job and see the world, but won’t because he feels morally obligated to stay. despite having his pick of anyone in ishgard, he becomes enamored with the adventurer who not only arrives in ishgard as a fugitive, but immediately gets in trouble with the heaven’s ward and crashes into ishgard on the back of a dragon more than once.

he is the cause of awkward silence at alliance meetings on more than one occasion due to how passionate he gets, and he fumbles around when asking wol to dinner and can’t keep his emotions in check around them.

his adoptive parents (who were by all accounts a nice elderly couple) have passed on and the only family he has left is his birth father who mocks him for his idealism and does not love him; he is visibly ruffled when this is used against him in a debate. he loves sweets and gets excited about the starlight celebration and volunteers to hand out gifts to children. he has a dodo omelette recipe he uses to convince lucia, the literal garlean spy he spared, about the joys of cooking. this does not work.

he walks around on guard duty in a neon blue elephant suit for reasons we can only speculate about. what the fuck is wrong with this guy (affectionate).

[pamelya01]

"Forgive me... i could not bear the thought of...losing you."

Finished the Vault, oh Haurchefant...

[arcadion-fanzine]

Please welcome @lonemiqote as page artist!

Thank you for joining our project. Check out their Bluesky!

[feliciadraws]

So I’ve gone insane and decided to make a Haurchefant alt for funsies and so I can play dolls with him haha

He’s currently on Kraken in the Dynamis data centre but since Lila and my Mei alt are on Malboro he spends most of the time there!

[glysreia]

I'm unfortunately so deep in the Zenos dissection table that now I'm sitting here like

Of course we always only see this man walk instead of run or even jog or anything of that speed

He has this slow, heavy walk, and combined with his sheer size, you look at it and think "that's meant to be imposing, that's why he's always so eerily slow", but knowing him (and the design motifs maybe), it's probably symbolic of him feeling emotionless.

You run when you're in a hurry to catch someone/something, when you're feeling threatened and want to get away, when you're alert, when someone calls you somewhere quickly.

But every time he's shown anywhere, he walks. He walked with his soldiers, he walked when he ambushed us the first time, even in EW in Garlemald he was in no hurry to kill that one monster that was chasing someone. Each time he has this slow approach of knowing there's no point in putting more emotion or effort into it than needed. He doesn't chase, as it's never worth his time, and when it comes to WoL he hunts through different means which have him draw us out to him instead.

It's very interesting to watch him have incredibly slow movements when out of combat, since in a fight he's severely energetic and even throws himself at you (while being extremely loud and vocal). He even blinks slowly a lot of the times?? When facing someone to speak, he turns his head just as slowly. He really is just that bored and feeling so much dread regarding his life on the daily that it reflects in all of his mannerisms. He has nothing that makes him seem energetic besides fighting WoL.

[glysreia]

Me watching the whole Emet debacle as I've already looked at all the characters being hinted as being into WoL and deciding they're all some flavour of queer cause the game is kinda designed as """""playersexual"""""

Don't see anyone arguing over G'raha being one sexuality or the other

Or Aymeric

Or Haurchefant

And many others lmao

[glysreia]

Anyway need y'all to go have fun in the grass with your blorbos and accept that most of the shit we come up with regarding extra stuff about these characters are headcanons

Be the change you wanna see in the fandom and make art and writing for the headcanons and pairings you enjoy

My own Zenos takes ain't canon lol, even the analysis I sometimes get into isn't necessarily what the writers or design team probably meant, and we can't exactly know that unless they talk about it

I just do it for fun cause I come from a literary analysis background when it comes to my school/uni majors and interests

[sunnythanalan]

The aesthetic and implication of Halmarut dressing like she's a Victorian and clutching her cursed doll possessed by a child who 'died' of consumption (Calyx), scratches my brain in such a delicious way, I cannnn't.

I really hope they'll be the main baddies for 8.0

[destiny-islanders]

oh they're going to be the *worst* (/affectionate)

[arcadion-fanzine]

Please welcome @lonemiqote as page artist!

Thank you for joining our project. Check out their Bluesky!

[hotvampireadjacent]