Falerin Arcita

Aka Failerin Fartcita; BRD at heart, SMN by profession. Player is too scared to RP, but occasionally writes in-character here and on Ao3 under the name AsphaltValkyrie.

[the-wardens-torch]

((Work has been very slow this week so I wrote a poem about a griffin.))

Oh children born of blood, listen well to this refrain, of the proud Ala Mhigan griffin and the cruel Garlean chain

The Mad King's hands did push us all 'neath fortune's crushing wheel allowing the cursed men of Garlemald to bring us all to heel

But twas not just men who lamented when Theodric's war was lost For the palace's royal griffins also paid a hefty cost

They too were sentenced to toil beneath the Emperor's rule Overworked and underfed as a pauper's lowly mule

Faced with pain and torture, one by one they bowed But one would not forsake her birthright, as she was just too proud

She was tall and strong and vicious, her feathers white and clean Among the palace stable boys, she was known simply as The Queen

The Empire's beast-breaker gloated "I've never once been bitten For all your bluff and bluster, you're as helpless as a kitten!"

He lassoed her about the neck with a constricting clockwork chain That would choke and strangle all the more with every muscle's strain

He taunted "Should you try to maul me while this chain is in my grasp This collar will tighten round your neck until you've gasped your last!"

Ferociously he yanked the chain to bring her from her stall And she stumbled and bowed her head as if held within his thrall

But the Queen was crafty, her servility a lie She trailed behind obediently until she saw the open sky

And when at last she felt the touch of a zephyr's gentle hand She knew the time had come for her to make her final stand.

Suddenly her wings sliced the air with one single thunderous beat And her talons seized the breaker's flesh, gouging through the meat

You have sealed your doom this day, cried the soldier to the beast but the griffin did not relax her grip, and took wing toward the east

The chain now cutting off her breath, the Queen choked and coughed But the wounded man was helpless as she bore him high aloft

With her dying breath she carried him beyond the palace wall Though she could not kill him herself… he did not survive the fall

Some say that when she fell, a bolt of lightning struck the ground And indeed many believed it when her corpse was never found

In that moment, perhaps the Queen knew the great Destroyer's grace Raised up by holy levinbolt into his strong embrace

To this day many tell the Queen's tragic, noble tale To show all Ala Mhigans that their courage could prevail

And if any born of blood should give their life before their pride The Queen may come to guide their soul aloft to mighty Rhalgr's side.

[tialinffxiv]

🏳️‍🌈Happy Pride❣️🏳‍🌈 Pancakes and donuts, and all sort of fruits for everyone as well❣️

[rainofaugustsith]

On Emet-Selch, Golems and מת vs. אמת

Contemplating various things here and there has made me wonder if the writers of FFXIV considered Jewish history and lore when writing and naming Emet-Selch. 

If you translate Emet-Selch''s name, the 'Emet' part in Hebrew, אמת, means 'truth.' Selch doesn't directly equate to a word, but I've read things saying it could be 'shelkha' (your) or 'selach' (forgiveness). So you would either have "forgive the truth" or "your truth." 

That's telling enough for our erstwhile frenemy, but then you get to other places the word 'emet' appears in Jewish lore: golems.  There's a lot to be said about golems and I am not always particularly happy with the name being used in video games and fantasy, but the word means something different now than it originally did and stories change over time and all. So we're not going to get into that here. What we are going to talk about is how a mainstay in a lot of golem lore is that they have the word 'emet' inscribed on their foreheads or on their chests. What if you need to deactivate the golem, temporarily or permanently? You take away the first letter, the א (yes, remember in Hebrew one reads right to left, so that is the first letter of the world) and that gives you 'met', מת, Which means 'dead.' 

The golem in many stories, like the Golem of Prague, started out as a protector and defender, but eventually caused so much carnage he had to be stopped. So roll that over in your mind again: Emet-Selch is the Convocation member in charge of the underworld. He later has a 'third eye' on his forehead, sort of like a golem mark. In Shadowbringers he seems to vacillate between cruelty and protectiveness. And, we learn in Endwalker, he missing a very crucial part of his memories that were deliberately taken away. 

End result...the Hades/Emet-Selch in Elpis becomes an Ascian who commits countless acts of mass murder and other atrocities. Truth turns to death. At the end of Shadowbringers, the Warrior of Light and Scions have no choice but to stop him.

I don't know if it's deliberate on the part of the FFXIV writers, but given how deeply they seem to delve into lore, I wouldn't doubt it. 

[tinygameralec]

Given the English naming conventions of the smaller sin eaters as 'Forgiven X', I've always had the feeling that Emet-Selch was named that because it translates fairly well into 'Forgiven Truth' or 'Forgiving Truth'.

Which suits his role in the story down to the ground.

But this is a bloody good post and I encourage all my followers who have finished ShB and EW to read it!

[rainofaugustsith]

...!!!!!

Thank you so much for bringing up this amazing observation. Translating his name to Forgiven Truth makes so much sense in the context of Shadowbringers. Also, the whole deal with the sin eaters is that they have been distorted into something extremely different than the people or animals they once were. They may have been kind and peaceful when alive, but when infected by that much light, they become very dangerous entities who kill others and take their aether to survive. Given what happens to Emet-Selch, it's an apt comparison. The grouchy but well meaning man in Elpis who tends to the underworld becomes a fearsome Ascian who commits atrocities and tries to kill others and rejoin entire planets to survive. He also tries to recruit the Warrior of Light/Darkness to his cause as a monstrous light warden, in the same way the sin eaters infect others to essentially 'recruit' them. ooh, this is good. Thank you again for reblogging with these thoughts!

[the-wardens-torch]

I expected I'd eventually be defeated and give up on my FSH progression due to RNGesus forsaking me, but I thought it'd be while I was angling for a worthy and notorious foe like Problematicus or Cinder Surprise or the Ruby Dragon or some fishing boat spectral bullshit, but this... this fucker is what made my head collapse like a rotten jack-o-lantern, apparently. A Heavensward fish with 23 minute long windows and daily uptimes. The dishonor of it all.

I cast for this thing over 300 times before I lost count. I was beginning to wonder if it even existed until it bit and immediately slipped me around cast #175.

My white whale is a Sharknado reference that's a decade old.

[the-wardens-torch]

A bit late, but I made an in-character pride glamour for Fal.

Fal is an out and proud pansexual poc man with blue eyes. And, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I am a closeted asexual white woman with brown eyes, I absolutely adore him.

Happy pride to the alls, the nothings, and everyone in between.

[the-wardens-torch]

I uploaded 7 more of my Fal stories on Ao3 (I'm up to 46k total words and am 6 stories into a new chapter) but going through them all and ordering them is (still) really painful and difficult from a practicality standpoint. The fact that its 10 years worth of material that jumps all over the place chronologically is (and always has been) a huge problem. 

A couple of years ago I renamed every story for its exact subject matter/happenings and made a .txt file with all of them listed in their in-universe chronological order.  For the most part its accurate and its helped a lot, but I'm still finding inconsistencies and omissions and plot holes that feel like popcorn shells lodged in my gums.  I knew that sort of thing would be inevitable since I wrote an (still) incomplete story out of order. I can't help being annoyed at myself. 

But, I have to remind myself that I wouldn't have written anything at all if I'd tried to go in order. As far as creative endeavors go, its better to churn out a bunch of jumbled nonsense than nothing at all. Writing about Fal has helped me a lot on my journey to unlearn my gifted kid burnout perfectionism, and its been very healing.

Anyway, further complicating things is the fact that the stories were originally written mostly in .wps format, which is not supported by the thoroughly enshittified Windows 11 PC I currently have. I have to run every file through a .wps ->  .txt converter before I can even look at/read it, and I have to do a lot of back and forth with several files open at once to verify where in the Fal timeline each story falls to sort out ambiguities. 

And as if operating with the sole aim of getting things in order wasn't infuriating enough on its own, I keep questioning the validity of each piece because so many of them are just fluff pieces. They vary greatly in quality and very little happens in them.   This has me asking myself if I should just leave them out. But... I told myself I was doing all of this uploading FOR ME and it would include every story and it didn't matter if it wasn't interesting to other people.  But if even I don't like them, why upload them?

And on the topic of "I'm doing this for myself," I also can't help but be fixated on the idea that I might be alienating people, even though I know that I shouldn't expect much.  My kind of writing just isn't what the average Ao3 reader is looking for and I know it. Just the same, I just can't help but look at those hits and kudos and wonder what could be if I just made everything more presentable and consistent. 

I'm not blaming anyone but myself on this, but I just had to get these thoughts out somewhere. Again.

[kukurubean]

HAPPY PRIDE. I made a BETTER Ala Mhigan flag vector! 

This one is built from the ground up thanks to them adding a sticker in gpose. I’ve uploaded all of these (AND MORE) in a zip file here for people to use! Feel free to send me a message if you’d like me to put together another flag BG.

[berrybooze]

Doujinshi

[elektroyu]

Aaaaaand Rhaya's ref sheet. Her outfit is mostly like in-game, just some minor tweaks on the back.

It's not like I chose her pose so that they could hands or something, naahhh. I'm not that obsessed, not meee noooooo

[chryza]

The Blessing of Light is something that is intentionally left pretty vague by the story, probably as another way to let the player fill in the gaps with whatever they want, and while sometimes this manifests in the story treating the blessing like a bodysuit of kevlar, I think the much more interesting interpretation is to go full whump with it and establish that the only rule is that the warrior of light cannot die. Aside from the subplot in post-ARR/HW being more interesting with the real threat of death now upon them, it just adds so much sauce. We can magick away the possibility of their head getting chopped off with the superhuman reflexes Hydaelyn hath granted, and so it is very delicious to imagine someone who, rather than being unable to be meaningfully injured, is instead able to just keep going despite catastrophic bodily harm. The warrior of light just keeps fucking going, no matter how much they may wish they were dead. More blood than humanly possible spilling out onto the ground, face pale, hands shaking, still moving with eerie grace and agility, screaming with pain every time they bring another desperate strike down? Thats the good shit.

[saanphoenix2]

I recall the devs saying that party wipes in a dungeon are just the WoL having Echo visions on what Not to fucking do, implying that they hallucinate their death repeatedly before triumphing.

Which is equally, "That's rough buddy."

[the-wardens-torch]

A young WoL preemptively seeing themself get incinerated by Ifrit.

[manincaffeine]

The romanticism of undressing someone and seeing their curves and edges and birthmarks and scars and moles and freckles and kissing every single one of them like you’re thanking their body for existing, for choosing to be seen by you.

[captainbasch]

The Scions of the Seventh Dawn -almost all of them lol Here is what they look like almost completely finished! They will be this circle for the stickers anyway, but there will be more for the print version c:

The main border is a play on the frame around Tupsimati, found in the Waking Sands, and the tile patterns are the eye symbol some scions have as tattoos, and tiny mother crystals for the interior circle. The tile/rocks motif hearkens back to the Rising Stones base of operations.

\ o /

[the-wardens-torch]

Finally made him a new BRD glam because I missed his bare arms and belly. And got the Shantotto emote while farming the top.

Fal naturally has an unexpectedly deep, loud, hearty laugh that tends to startle people because they don't expect a sound that big to come from a Midlander... Being a singer, he also knows a lot about breath control and voice projection. Sooo... his cackle would be a strident, shrieking falsetto that would spook chocobos and cause dogs to howl and little children to cry. Absolutely vile.

[sad-sehna]

For one of the sweetest duos, a Valentine’s piece.

[sunnythanalan]

How much gil do you have?

I have 740k and I've been playing for nearly 13 years :')

[the-wardens-torch]

I haven't changed his glam in over a year and most of the pics I post of him are just his head and shoulders during cutscenes but I just never get tired of looking at him. And the graphics update makes it look like he's wearing eyeliner so I like looking at him even more now.

Anyway, I caught every fish in ARR. I have about 250 unique fish to go to get the Of The Irresistible Lure title and also about 250 large fish to Master Fisher. However, the neck injury that drove me to the pole is mostly healed now so I think I'd rather lay face-down in the dirt under my porch. Ask me about fish again around 8.5.

I know of the code, Koji Fox... I was there when it was written.

And is it VIP Viper or is it a reference to the MC of of the tooth-chippingly hard Konami space shooter series Gradius?

[whymaige]

📢 Tag team of extreme proportions!

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🔥 THE XTREMES 💧

-Daring Devils-

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🥊 "It's only fair!" "The Xtremes fight as one!"