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Art nouveau flower shop, Brussels

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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 (edit: I meant endwalker) 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!

#ffxiv #ffxiv spoilers #nods nods nods nods