Echoes of a Safe Return

Odin, she/her | Main/art blog: @caragaffneyart

[caragaffneyart]

Rin Kettar, Shard of Azem, Warrior of Light.

Elbowing my way out of a few months of art block with some FFXIV! My FFXIV sideblog is @rinkettar - intending to use it to (hopefully) go through and crosspost some of the Twitter character building stuff I was doing earlier this year...

[ffxivxd]

Y'rhul Nunh, the father to Y'shtola and her eleven siblings, had deep knowledge of their passions. Despite his love of travel, he knew what inspired each of his daughters and gifted books that would help their lives upon his death.

[screamingvikings]

Zero is such a good character concept, i wish the writers let her have teeth. I wish there was any suspense or tension around her presence at all. Half mortal, half voidsent, zenos’ avatar, so dangerous even other voidsent are afraid of her. And we trust her completely. Don’t worry, zenos is so evil he picked the sole good voidsent. She asks to cannibalise yshtola’s aether and there’s no danger to it. It’s like gil, estinien glibly says and we all move on. Garlemald is actively under assault from a voidsent army and trying to stamp out the remnants of an reaper village. Nobody blinks at her massive scythe, they don’t even ask. And it’s not that i don’t like the power of friendship and teaching her the joy of a fresh honey crisp or whatever, its just… this should have been so much more than it is. Why do they insist on stamping out their own tension at every turn?

[myrfing]

think it’s mildly unfair to claim that people who were ultimately dissatisfied with DT’s handling of alexandria (a super-myopic and jingoistic nation who dropped themselves into tural, immediately severed everyone in yyasulani from their land and family for decades, and then tried to turn tuliyollal into an extraction resource for souls to keep their lives of comfort) as just being sexist. in the patches of DT you can pretty much entirely omit the invasion at tuli and have almost zero impact on the story because that is how it was handled, beyond gulool ja. much like how they handled garlemald, there is nearly zero recognition of alexandria as an imperialist state even though that is what the events of the story identify them as. lamaty’i and sphene’s character arcs are both fine and even compelling when totally removed from the politics around them. the problem is that their story is inherently a political one and they spent way too much time trying to write a “stevens universe” style character thing for them while playing dodgeball with the political themes. and not that ff14 is in any way high brow fiction, but maybe if xiv was ever introduced as a kid’s show about how to handle conflicts with friends and family and be true to yourself or whatever, yeah sure people are reading it wrong. but it’s not, because the setting is in a fantasy world shaped by themes present in adult oriented fantasy and i do not think it’s stupid or wrong for the players to ask that they take the politics of it a little more seriously and thoughtfully. it’s not that the story offers no critique of or conflict within alexandrian society, it’s that it seems to completely sidestep the most critical ones in order to write for palatability and marketability

[hunxi-after-hours]

love it when an extremely high-functioning and put-together character gets slammed with something that would topple any lesser person but continues to function in an alarmingly efficient manner while everyone who knows and cares about them flutters anxiously around them like "please lie down please rest please accept medical attention" while the high-functioning character just looks askance at all their concerned faces like "what are you talking about? I'm perfectly fine" as tiny cracks start appearing in their demeanor and facade

[baidar-oroq]

The WoL in Shadowbringers.

[fandaniel]

hermes ffxiv is like the saint of disability advocacy

[se-na-support]

you're not getting away with leaving this in the tags

[darquingdragon]

Nhaneh, this is an excellent analysis of the problem, so I'm going to add it to the main part of the post

[tainbocuailnge]

so many people in those tags sharing horror stories about being left behind in old prae on their first run. one time i ran old prae with a first timer who got lost at the elevator and the whole raid went back to get them and popped heavenscrackers and /showleft /showright for them at every step

[strawberrycircuits]

chosen one not as in the one the prophecy foretold but as in lamb to the slaughter. as in the only person both brave and foolish enough to do it. chosen one as in sculpted, molded to be the perfect sacrifice to something expertly, divinely crafted to annihilate you wholly and surely. chosen one as in taken away. chosen one as in death sentence. chosen one as in goodbye

[tigeristired]

i think 'I trust you with my life but not your own' as a trope is one of the ones that can always fuck me up no matter what

[myrfing]

i dont think it’s by accident that the ancient’s big saddest man who was sad enough to destroy their world was the guy who was made to spend all his time caring for the lesser lifeforms. living a life where he was never equal to the things he loved. this is again not an ancients are all irredeemably evil post but rather just It Is What It Is

[misophonie]

I hope this is how you all feel about me

[rontra]

over a week of total art dry spell, broken by finally playing through Coils and being cursed with my very own pet imperial. FUCK!!

[yloiseconeillants]

MAYNCIENT :: Day 26 - Ascian

you gladly gave me everything you had and more you craved my happiness when you make me feel joy it makes you smile but now i feel your stress

[pubby-paws]

Thinking about the conversation with Venat where she asks if our journey was good and if it was worthwhile. I think a part some people overlooked is that she's asking us, like. "Hi, you are both the beginning and end of this decision that you're telling me that I make. In the end: was it worth it?"

Of course she's also asking us, adventurer to adventurer, Azem to Azem, did you enjoy the journey? But she's also asking us, I think, whether or not this decision she's about to make will be a good one

And we don't answer her.

[unionizedwizard]

by far my main criticism about dawntrail is how uncannily nice everyone and everything is. i'm the #1 slower path/smallest stakes/fun cultural discovery narrative fan, but my problem is that they didn't seem to scale the conflict sources accordingly? they literally had to drop giant monsters on top of the characters' heads TWICE to give them an opportunity to act all heroic and cool when the narrative itself had constructed a (very good and nuanced) conflict in the first place, as a way to avoid actually addressing it and magically solving everything—the hostile yok huy faction being attacked by a giant bird right before worqor zormor (so that wuk lamat could save the day), and the rroneek reaver attacking the hhetsarro tribe (so that koana could save the day and also his own conflictual feelings about his cultural heritage out of NOWHERE). this is NOT how you do storytelling especially not when the seeds for inner/interpersonal conflict were right there??

everything gets resolved nicely, the cowboy town moneylander was actually nice and you dont have to pay him back riiiight now if you don't feel like it and he definitely doesnt charge interest rates (??) (sir how are you staying in business.). the exploitative bosses were not actually that bad and anyway everyone wants what's best for the company :) the decades-long war between the mamool ja and the xbr'aal was solved with one (1) feast and slavery was ended with one (1) round of negociations. don't worry about it 👍

like, you can't write a whole storyline about multicultural societies (especially YOUNG societies) without showing the uglier, more realistic aspects of it all; there has got to be tensions, more or less warranted by history, more or less addressed over the course of the story, you HAVE to have annoying, selfish, racist or conservative characters who don't get to change completely overtime—why are the yok huy genuinely and seemingly universally ashamed of their past as slavers and colonizers when it ended less than a century ago? that's not how it *WORKS*! why are the pelupelu genuinely good merchants and not even trying to establish a kind of capitalist mafia empire or something? why isnt there any CONFLICT??? WHY IS EVERYONE SO NICE ALL THE TIME!!!!! you can't have sappy well-intentioned speeches about the power of friendship when the worst set-back you've experienced is having to fight a giant bird that came out of nowhere, come ON

and don't get me started on gulool ja LMAO what the fuck is wrong with this kid why does he talk like a therapist while being (checks notes) like 8 and one of the most traumatized children in the entire game. COMMIT, damn it

[myrfing]

i luv rynegaia for the fact ryne has to choose to be the interloper to be with her and she chooses this so desperately. wee ryne who spent all of the msq straight up hoping she would be erased so someone else's loved one can come back

[rin-khatayin]

A small detail I picked up on while writing the Rak’tika section of my Shadowbringers rewrite - the Night’s Blessed know sin eaters well enough to tell when one of them is likely to corrupt others:

Night's Blessed: Runar! Night's Blessed: In the woods... <pant> <pant> Sin eaters. I fear they may have the touch. Runar: Where!? Night's Blessed: In the grove to the southwest. For a mercy, they've yet to wander any closer to Slitherbough. Runar: Then we have no need to engage. Inform the guard that no one is to set foot outside the village until they have moved on. Night's Blessed: But sir, what of Toddia's heartstone? Night's Blessed: It must be retrieved before the service. Runar: Of all the times for sin eaters to appear... Minfilia: Are you just going to leave them alone? Runar: Under normal circumstances, we would not hesitate in striking the beasts down. But if they indeed have the touch, I will not risk them corrupting one of our own.

I love this. It makes perfect sense that this is knowledge the Night’s Blessed have, that other factions don’t make mention of.

The farmers of Kholusia aren't equipped for combat, and aren’t protected by any military; they need to avoid sin eater conflicts at all costs. The Crystarium, on the other hand, fights sin eaters from a position of strength; the citizenry can shelter safely behind the Crystarium barrier, and their armed forces are free to (/obliged to) indiscriminately kill any sin eater they encounter, regardless of the risk.

Only the Night’s Blessed and the other residents of Rak'tika are in a position to make a cost/benefit analysis of whether they need to run and hide, or stand and fight - they are the only civilians who have equipped themselves to deal with the new normal. They're a very spiritual community who are also extremely canny and practical about the dangers surrounding them (see: the decision not to rebuild Fort Gohn), which I like a great deal.

I do feel like the Scions' involvement, particulary Y'shtola's, diminishes this a bit; I would have liked one more named Night's Blessed character to flesh the group out a touch further, and also to stop the story being "outsiders step in to uncover the local history and save the region" - perhaps a historian/spiritual guide who works with Y'shtola and the Scions on the tablet transcription, for example. (But these details are what Umbra Dei is for!)