#lobcorp tiphereth

[leonawriter]

These are all promo arts! I'm sure I remember seeing someone share higher quality ones on twitter recently, but I've lost that, so I found what I could.

The top set are the Lobotomy Café - Face The Fear, Drink The Coffee!

My favourites in that set are Chesed, who is in his element thank you very much, and Yesod, who... I dunno if anyone else has noticed this detail, but Café Yesod isn't wearing his turtleneck, nor is he wearing gloves. I'm so proud of him. Hokma I just find somewhat amusing, because okay sure he, too, is also in his element... but his element isn't coffee, it's just plain Serving Sir Ayin.

The rest of them are from someone's listing for a gaming mat, but there's full artworks for each Sephirah in their department, with details such as Yesod working away at his desk covered in paperwork, Hod's whiteboard/screens explaining the Standard Training Dummy Rabbit (perfect for the Training Team), and Netzach simply having given up on everything, Gebura being right outside one of the containment units, Hokma next to what I assume is one of the Records machines, and Chesed and his coffee machine... and piles of unfinished paperwork.

It always strikes me as funny, how there's this art of them as the cognition filter sees them, but underneath it all they'd still be in their metal bodies. :')

Angela's fascinates me not only because it almost seems like she's floating, but also because we can see the microphone Ayin would have been using in his office, talking to the Sephirot on anything from a 'normal' management work day to a Core Suppression day.

[uniquezombiedestiny]

tiphereth a. :)

[leonawriter]

Tiphereth is basically that one person playing the multiplayer game where everyone is supposed to party up and she's playing her role just fine and she is constantly losing her shit because why is everyone being such dumbasses why can no one figure out how to do their jobs around here?!

She's out there with a tank who doesn't know what mitigation is, one tank who keeps shirking all the aggro onto other people, a healer who only does DPS, a DPS who only heals (and doesn't get why it isn't working), the other healer who's under-levelled and not getting why they aren't able to do the job of two people, a DPS who's not upgraded their gear since they started, and another one who has but only has the wrong gear for their class.

Of course she's pissed off all the time, it's like she's the only one around who knows what they're doing! Who even cares what the rules are!

Tiphereth is the one who is trying to play chess while the others are eating the pieces and instead of being ignorant to the fact that they're doing that, she calls them out and goes "Why are you EATING THE PIECES?"

To Tiphereth, she is the only sane person. Because nothing around her makes any sense.

It's only in coming to terms with the fact that she doesn't, actually, understand everything, that she reachers her Expectation of the Meaning of Existence. Because if you think you already know it, you can't find it - even if it's right in front of your eyes.

[leonawriter]

You Can Take the Sephirot Out of the City, But You Can't Take the City Out of the Sephirot

Chapters: 17/?

Fandom: Library of Ruina , Final Fantasy XIV, Lobotomy Corporation, Limbus Company

Relationships: Ayin & Sephirot, Hokma/Ayin/Chesed , Scions of the Seventh Dawn & Warrior of Light , Netzach/Yesod

Characters: Ayin, Chesed, Hokma, Netzach, Yesod... basically all Sephirot. Also the Scions.

Additional Tags: Ayin as the WoL, author is on the most recent expac so there may be ffxiv spoilers, canon-typical content warnings in chapter notes, Dante is Ayin, he/they pronouns for Ayin

Summary:

In which Ayin and the Sephirot reincarnate into Eorzea, remembering their past lives and finding each other.

Ayin - against his better judgement, and purely by accident he'll add - ends up becoming the Warrior of Light. Which really is a new experience. He's far more used to taking a managerial role rather than the front lines. But when he finds himself fixing some rather important problems without backup and gets recognised for it, what's he to do?

Start from the beginning?

~ NEW CHAPTER ~

Chapter 17 - Great Expectations - A Tiphereth chapter!

[leonawriter]

Sudden and strong feeling of "You cannot blame Lisa saying That to Carmen on Carmen choosing to take it to heart."

I have seen a couple of people now, probably more implicitly, believe that Lisa was basically responsible for Carmen's death. I think that's a lot to put on a probably eight-to-ten year old girl's shoulders, when she really is just a kid. A kid of that age and temperament saying that sort of thing is not outside the bounds of possibility, and should not have come as that much of a surprise to Carmen or the others.

If anything, I would even say that judging by how she talks to Ayin in that field, she DID predict how Lisa would react!

But. In so many ways, what Lisa does or doesn't say and whether Carmen could predict it or not is irrelevant.

The fact is, she was an adult in a position of power, and Lisa was a child who had no power, and now she has no one left in the world who she cares about as much as she did Enoch.

Carmen, if she had been mature, had the ability to stand up straight, maintain discretion, and accept responsibility for her own actions- well, for one thing she wouldn't have accepted Enoch as a test subject in the first place. But even if she had and everything happened as we saw it, she would have accepted Lisa's words, and worked to make Enoch's sacrifice at least not be in vain, and strive to become better.

Carmen is not the one to do anything of the sort. She is the adult here, and she basically acted as though Lisa was the one with all of the power over her. She let her shame and her emotions overrun and overrule her.

Sure, by dying she was sacrificing herself to keep the project going - but in many ways, just like Phillip, she was merely running from her problems because once she was dead, all of her coworkers would have to take up the slack, and it would no longer be her responsibility.

In short-

Blaming Lisa's pained words for what Carmen does is little different from saying primary/elementary school teachers should take every complaint that the children in their classes have against them to heart.

Or a parent hearing their kid go "Mommy, I hate you!".

It's just more proof that she lacked (and still does!) the emotional maturity to handle that.

Like... yeah, Lisa needed to learn that You Shouldn't Say That. And yes, Tiphereth still needs to learn that You Still Don't Say Things Like That. But note the difference between how people react to her saying such things in the rest of lobcorp (Netzach, Angela, Netzach not being bothered because "Yeah yeah it's what I want anyway" and Angela calmly and bluntly refusing her) and later in Ruina (Netzach, Chesed, with Netzach being hurt this time and Chesed recognising that Tiphereth is just in a foul mood and doesn't truly mean it). No matter who or why or how, they're STILL more mature in dealing with the situation than Carmen was.

They can definitely take her aside and she can definitely learn her way out of the bad habit, as we see her start to do with her inability to ask others for help. She can grow out of being such a petty child, into an adult who goes "Wow, I was a real brat, wasn't I?" and someone who goes "I don't know how anyone took me seriously when I said that."

[leonawriter]

I dunno I think I kinda like Tiphereth and her tsundere attitude. Like, she's the EXPECTATION of the meaning of existence, she hasn't got there yet! Of course she's immature and comes off like a brat!

Of course she doesn't fully understand everyone's issues yet! Of course! She doesn't understand herself yet either!!

Enoch was the understanding one, not her. And now she has to live up to who he might have been, for the both of them.

I really want to see her reappear, so that she can be seen to have grown since Ruina, by way of having started to talk to people and understand their perspectives and points of view.

I still want her to be tsuntsun, though. It's part of her charm.

[leonawriter]

I was just thinking. Okay but. Netzach slowly showing that he's capable of doing the work he's given but everyone's so used to him skiving off that their first reaction to him actually having DONE something and done it well is to be surprised and impressed, but this has the opposite and unintented consequence of actually pissing Netzach off and making him less likely to keep doing shit.

Netzach at one point being overheard when someone's just told him "good job!" about actually stacking and ordering his books properly snapping back, saying he's not a kid and if they're gonna be like that maybe he doesn't want to work.

The others don't get it.

He and Tiphereth are weirded the fuck out by the fact that for once, they actually feel like the only ones who understand each other on something, and have a long session of complaining at each other about how they feel others treat them in a patronising way.

It's kind of cathartic. Tiphereth doesn't invite him back, and she forbids any alcohol on her floor, but she's somewhat more forgiving of his bad attitude after that.

[leonawriter]

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Tiphereth blowing up against Netzach in the short story where she finds him plastered is a multi-layered thing of:

-Netzach has been gradually de-conditioning himself from following after Carmen so religiously (as shown/implied in his previous scenes with Hokma), has started to question things, and isn't happy with the answers he's finding, but the game does not spoon feed this to us, so it is only there in subtext.

-Tiphereth having, with no small amount of effort on her part, come to start relying on the Asiyah Librarians in ways she never would have back in Lobotomy. She now has expectations of them, and of herself. Even Netzach, who she had the least expectations of and for before, she's now started to see favourably.

-Tiphereth sees Netzach over-indulging in drink (substance abuse, slacking off) which triggers her into acting how she used to. Mostly, however, the important thing is that she does not have context for his behaviour when she walks in on him here, so she has to fill in the blanks herself.

-We see literally everyone else struggling with how they're still trying not to be their selves from Lobotomy, especially Hod, who points out rather clearly how her assistant librarians were wary of her idea to start the book club, but I think it also bears bringing up that Gebura still takes her anger out on Chesed, Chesed stilll has self-worth issues (he lets her, and he baits her) as well as hiding those issues behind his blasé attitude since just stating that he can feel shame doesn't make that clear most of the time. Why, then, not also have Tiphereth still struggling with knowing that she still says cruel, harsh things to people she cares about, even when she should have learned better?

And that, I think, is where Chesed's "Don't take it so hard, she doesn't mean it" comes from.

It's Chesed being his very socially aware self, and seeing that more was going on than Tiphereth could piece together in a few seconds flat, as well as recognising that her first reaction would be to get angry before she has all of the information.

It's him being aware that later, she'll be thinking about everything that's happened, dwell on it, or talk to someone (maybe even Chesed himself) on it, and go "oh shit, I fucked that up, didn't I," and Chesed might well go "Mmhm~ you really did."

I remain frustrated that there weren't more of these scenes with the Librarians, and that they didn't go into more depth, and that we can't see all those behind-the-scenes moments of context.

Because if I'm right and this is how it was, then I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that it was all obfuscated to make the reveal that Carmen's behind everything that much more of a, well, reveal, and tbh? That's probably made a LOT of people playing the game not follow most of the Librarians' character arcs as well as they could.