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Wedding: See you, Inspector...
So, I no longer associate with the "bride" and while I'd like to forget about them and move on, I have to admit that I enjoy some of these screen shots (Especially the one above where their not in it). The video at the end is also pretty good... so I'll this up. For now.
No normal glam map night for us! Our good friends [REDACTED] and Wildrin tied the knot for glamours and the mount and invited the FC and friends along for the ride. Here are some choice screen shots and an *AMAZING* video of us all dancing at the end. I'm sure you can gather what the theme for the wedding was...
Just when you think we're a bunch of normal people...
CHAOS! (That's the father of the groom with the flamethrower. Because reasons.)
When the groom pre-games too hard...
The happy couple! <3 With a surprise cameo with Lalli and a friend.
And last but DEFINITELY not least... what's a wedding without some dancing!
The video is pure gold. Speaking of that, with what maps we DID do, we managed to get a final room!
I don't know that I can fully convey how much I LOVE the joke in the Hildibrand quest line where they fully explain the backstory of the Manderville family line, define how it accounts for his unreasonable resilience and his father's beastly strength, and then... ... at the end of the episode just completely undercut their own entire explanation, first by poking holes in it (like, it doesn't explain his mom at all and she is, if anything, even more of a raw physical powerhouse than Godbert) and then by saying that they're almost certain the whole thing just isn't true.
The timing of it is an important element of the comedy, too.
Just today I saw OSP's Trope Talk on the topic of Noodle Incidents: That is, situations where something's alluded to and never outright explained, leaving viewers to fill in some of that story with their own humorous ideas of what Calvin did to be so worried that The Noodle Incident had put him on Santa's naughty list. One of the things Red mentions in the Talk is that viewers often feel like they want that story filled in...but almost never do. Just as getting to see the monster head-on in a horror film often makes it less frightening, not more, the vague version of the story we came up with for what might have happened in an Incident is funnier or more narratively satisfying for us than what gets cooked up by the writer.
So there's this weird sense of letdown when you get those blank spots filled in. A Natasha/Clint prequel adventure in Budapest would almost certainly not be worth making, because it wouldn't live up to "Budapest" as a Noodle Incident.
The cool thing they did with the Manderville quest is let you feel that letdown. They gave an explanation, and even though the explanation is kind of funny, it also felt kind of...hollow, somehow? And then that hollow feeling is what's getting subverted when they reveal the whole explanation probably explains nothing.
Definitely day 4 and not 5 of my artwork leadup to Fan Expo Vancouver this Saturday!
Heres 3 different stickers ive made for the con, 1 of aaravi from Monster Prom 1of gigi from ffxiv and one of some fluffy Dango
ill be at table A126!
Camera Obscura
We love a Manderville Man.
My Miqo’te dude Kheda’a because he’s too cute not to draw
White Means Death
The color white is associated with death in Japanese culture.
But I was thinking about the whites of the eyes. In FFXIV, someone opening their eyes really wide is usually a sign of some kind of madness, or a design flourish to make them look beady-eyed or wild-eyed.
And FFXIV’s writing is not kind to madmen.
Basically if you see someone’s eyes go “kind of freaky-lookin’” in FFXIV, you can bet their odds of surviving the next half-hour of story have just gone WAY down. More frequently they die in the next twenty seconds.
The only exception I can think of is a creature who has transcended life and death and is no longer subject to the laws of nature or, for that matter, common sense. Inspector Hildebrand Manderville opens his eyes really wide all the time and, um...arguably he then survives.
