Crimson Sunset

Suzu Tsukimi @ Siren || Chichiri Chiri @ Masamune

[glysreia]

"Zenos was too emotionally stunted to be a villain, that's why Emet is a well rounded well written villain"

THE FACT HE'S EMOTIONALLY STUNTED IS THE FLAVOUR!!!! YOU GUYS WILL ONLY LIKE VILLAINS IF THEY GO BY THE USUAL FORMULA OF SAD BACKSTORY LEADS TO EVIL DRAMATIC WORLD ENDING PLAN

I'm not here to bitch about Emet since I also like him and I like the way he was written and even how it makes you question yourself: if you too had to live while everyone you know and love had to die, would you not go to some great lengths of trying to bring them back IF YOU COULD? Would you not also be stuck in the past in some sort of melancholy and nostalgia and would you not also feel like every time you presently believe you're getting better, you're only proven wrong by your peers and find them lacking and imperfect, and then that plan of bringing everyone back starts ringing back into your ears?

Cool, cool, but Zenos having the also very human backstory of despite being born into the most privileged family and class of his country, ending up as an emotionless husk of a person because he was not even RAISED into an adult, he was merely allowed to exist only by Empire rules and FOR the Empire's goals, is apparently not enough and only gives him the "emotionally stunted" tag? That's the whole fucking point!!

The whole fucking point is nature vs nurture, the whole fucking point is showing that the Empire was so rotten from within it wouldn't even support its royal class, the whole fucking point is lack of any kind of human connection WILL bring you into this state. We've had this guy on and off for 2-3 expansions, reaching a boiling point in EW where he gets that one moment of epiphany, given to him by a teenage girl no less, where he turns around, thinks on it for a while, then COMES TO OUR RESCUE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE. He could very well let us die there since he himself talks about how much he doesn't like being alive. He even tells you you can walk away from him at the very end and that he won't force a fight on you anymore (not my fault that the game still pushes you to fight after cause duhh script).

But sure, he's emotionally stunted :( he doesn't qualify to be a villain. I guess only the guy who allowed 5000 years worth of nostalgia, melancholy and depression to make him attempt mass cross universe genocide gets to be a villain, oopsie.

[mostfuckableffvillain]

[entropic-introspection]

Sometimes I just want more things that are the WoL passing by Sharlyans deep in theoretical discussions about the limits of magic and reality and just casually dropping the most insane bits of knowledge

Like, “Oh, time travel isn’t really the best option for like, anything. It takes so much aether as to be pretty unfeasible, it’s hard to control, and in my experience most of the time you make a stable loop with the present you started from, so it’s not really worth it.”

Or, “I mean, the void between worlds is just that- a void. There’s some kinda weird like, crystallized memories I guess? But yeah nothing much.”

“As far as I know, wave-kin can fly because of a really weird ancient in-joke, so trying to figure out the taxonomy there isn’t great.”

“Hey, I know some Nymian scholars, I could run that by them for a better translation- no, not scholars of Nymia, I mean literally Nymian scholars. Well, uh, they were cursed. Um. Have you heard of tonberries?”

“Yes, the black mage Shantoto really was like that. How do I-? I’ve talked to her? I am literally her student?? Yes I practice the forbidden art of black magic, I’ve also got permission from the Padjali to practice white magic and I learned red magic anyways- yes, I know that one is a nearly dead art, no I am not looking for students.”

[frogginboggin]

Sharlyan Scholars: Is there life on other stars?

WOL: I can contact Hildibrand to see how he's doing with the pupus. I'm pretty sure they're aliens.

Sharlyan Scholars: EXCUSE ME?! THE WHAT?

[lifeisacorpseyoudrag]

[viiioca]

it has got to be so surreal being an average alexandrian citizen. imagine if king arthur's court showed up in present day america. guys who still call books "tomes." they have wizards with them. the president personally escorts them around washington DC. a fleet of journalists are taking pictures of them eating a costco hotdog for the first time. someone posts a candid 30 second clip of them on tiktok trying to figure out how a vending machine works. and then within a month they've killed the president, installed a new president who looks just like the old president, distributed the cure for cancer, blown up the national oil reserves, dropped in on WWE SmackDown, and then left. guys from a continent that still uses lantern light orchestrate a near total societal restructuring without ever learning what the internet is. the first time most of them had ever been on a train was when they strapped bombs to one and exploded a military checkpoint to enter the country. and everyone's just sort of fine with it

[elveny]

OH this is about ffxiv 🤦‍♀️

[lumei-xiv]

Researching FFXIV memes

So I need a little help from anyone that's been around a while. I'm currently doing research for a convention panel about FFXIV memes and weird glitches, inspired by the Lv 1 , squapes, and other community silliness. Organic memes that sorta evolved out of a random occurrence or glitch in the game that everyone kinda latched onto.

If anyone has any stories and or screenshots, please add them to this post. I have plenty of Lv 1 , squapes, twinning, and La Hee stuff, looking for other things like Skybear, smoothrock, Raubahn EX or any others. I didn't take a lot of screenshots back in the day so I don't really have anything pre SHB.

Please reblog this for reach, especially if you have stories or screenshots to add. Also let me know if and how you'd like to be credited.

Thanks everyone!

[spotofmummery]

PSA: You can exchange for a limited time holiday orchestrion roll in Lower Jeuno right now. Seems like it's only active during the Starlight Celebration (?) Haven't seen this spread around much, so just a heads up in case you didn't know about it!

[lno408]

FFXIV

[lycheesnake]

Break the Limit

[lycheesnake]

To see a brighter tomorrow.

[twelveswoodharmonies]

FFXIV 7.4 Glamour Changes

Job and level restrictions are finally removed for glamours!! I can't wait!

[link to the livestream]

[athena-ishnuala]

When you are lazy to work, look at our hard-working Aymeric!

[going1582]

ALWAYS REBLOG

[mmariesr]

[ageha-sds]

Shadowbringers Week - Dulia Chai & Chai-Nuzz

honestly god bless these two

[terramythos]

LMFAOOOOO

[chryza]

FFXIV resources I take for granted but apparently a lot of people don’t know exist

The Balance: Community of math wizards who calculate your optimal openers and gear melds, then publish the information for everyone.

Lulus Tools for Ocean Voyage: Detailed information about upcoming ocean fishing voyages including baits, int procs, weather conditions, and more

Garland Tools | Database: Allows you to look up anything in the game, where you get it, and how to use it. Additionally allows you to make interactive crafting checklists that show materials needed. Best for simple solo crafting.

Garland Tools | Bell: Lists all special gathering nodes, where to find them, what time they’re up, what level you need to be at, with customizable notifications

Teamcraft: hub for various crafting tools including rotation planner, crafting checklists, crafting commissions, and more. Best for social crafting.

Eorzea Collection: Glamour hub, lists armor sets and has a gallery of user submitted glams

FFXIV Gardening: Database of seeds, cross breeding pairs, and a planner for your garden.

FFXIV Collect: create an account and manage your collections of mounts, orchestrion rolls, minions, and more.

MogTalk: Official host for world first races for Savage and Ultimates.

Gillionaire Girls: Crafting Levelling guides and Macro resources for DoH

Lulus Chocobo Color Calculator: creates a list of feeds to dye your chocobo new colors.

Sightseeing Log Helper: simple tracker to complete the early sightseeing logs, which are kind of bullshit.

[twelveswoodharmonies]

More useful sites:

Cat became hungry: a site dedicated to fishing, with information on fish, their fishing holes, activity patterns, what bait to use etc.

MIRAPRISNAP: another website to share your glamours on, though it's in Japanese.

Housing Snap: a Japanese website where you can share housing builds.

FFXIV Housing: a website which shows you what furniture items look like without having to log onto the game.

HGXIV: a housing site with many useful guides.

Some official sites:

FFXIV Play Guide: site for official guides.

Eorzea Database: The official database. It has information on practically everything, from items, crafting log, to text commands.

FFXIV Job Guide: Information on actions for combat jobs, if you've ever wanted to look it up without logging onto the game.

FFXIV Crafting and Gathering Guide: same as the above, but for crafters and gatherers.

[tritoch]

i have seen people be like "if you think what the dawntrail protagonists do in zone six is valid you have to conceded emet's approach/perspective was valid, what you do is basically what he does" and it's like...nah. it's obviously intentionally very similar ("it's like poetry, it rhymes") but there's some key differences:

emet is disgusted by sundered life, which he sees as inhuman, and longs to return to the unrecoverable past. so he does seven(ish) planet-wide genocides. the endless aren't new life, their ability to grow and learn is specifically in question (at the very least they are fundamentally incapable of taking in new sensory experience of certain forms), they're shades from the unrecoverable past, and you are destroying them in favor of those still alive.

also, we aren't disgusted by them nor do we think anything is fundamentally justified if done to them (everyone pretty much no-sells cahciua "we aren't alive so it doesn't matter if you kill us :)," in fact). we don't have like 12,000 years and the most advanced magic known to anyone alive. we are forced by serious exigency to destroy them due to a political impasse with their leadership's policy re: resource extraction. this tonal difference is in fact extremely important.

the endless themselves seem pretty ambivalent about the whole deal. they're bored or they're wary of the way their world keeps shrinking, and it's very explicitly neither a functioning society by any recognizable human terms nor a paradise.

related to the above, basically every named endless turns to the person most relevant to them (cahciua to erenville, krile's parents to her, namikka to wuk lamat, otis to you) and is like, huh, i really appreciate having this moment of grace at the end of my journey to see that it was all worthwhile and to resolve my lasting regrets, but i understand what you're here to do and yeah, it's probably time for us to go. (does the writing put a finger on the scale by doing this? sure, but the writers also designed and built the scales and everything they're weighing on them, so i find it hard to discredit any one aspect for being the writers' invention.)

finally uh no one in the party has kids with the endless or lives a full human lifetime as one of them lol.

it's important to remember that emet was definitely at least somewhat lying about not seeing the sundered as real people. the fact that he has "lived a thousand thousand of your lives . . . broken bread with you, fought with you, grown ill, grown old, sired children and yes, welcomed death’s sweet embrace" makes everything he did soooooo much crazier than what you do. if i managed to convince an endless to fall in love with me and i had a kid with them and i loved that kid so much that their death threw me into a permanent grief spiral then like. yeah i guess i would have to be like "well hats off to emet, folks." but luckily the game doesn't make you do that.

even if you insist everyone in living memory was a full living person that we killed, you're still weighing like a city of people versus 7+ planet-wide mass murders. you do not under any circumstances got to hand it to him.

living memory absolutely is evocative of everything that happens in shadowbringers. but rather than placing us in emet's shoes, it forces us to relive what we already did, to really fully face up to what we have done by promising to remember emet's culture after destroying any chance of its return. after two games going hard on the hope part of the game's central theme of hope arising from grief, now we're doing grief. we are forced to see the past of our memories not as a cold, ghostly art deco cubus-plagued socratic method hellscape but as the most beautiful technicolor theme park where everyone's happy and no one's sad and there's parades every day and your parents are alive and they love you so much. and then the game's conclusion is, yeah, you were still right to let go. in fact, you were and are morally obliged to let go. the living were and are worth more than the dead. our grief in letting go of them may be immense and turns our world to bleak nothingness for a time, and that is important to recognize, but at the end of the day our most pressing duty is to those we can yet save, not those we have lost.

[siderealcity]

Sphene's directive to keep the Endless alive is simply yet another variation on the Ascian plan we have already seen so many times. It is no different from their plan to restore Zodiark, or their plan to resurrect their people by sacrificing everyone else. It's fairly obvious that the Ascians on her reflection were involved in "Preservation."

Just because her version of death and stagnation is pretty and shiny and has a carousel doesn't make it ultimately any less poisonous.

[rincewitch]

comparing sphene and emet-selch in this respect is so interesting

i've always found living memory to just be really kind of... sad. sphene (and the alexandrians who remade her as endless) are willing to burn down the world for this extremely childish vision of paradise-- what if there was a big themepark where everyone could live forever and nothing ever changed

it pretty obviously evokes emet-selch's conjured-up amaurot down in the tempest-- an illusory paradise peopled by the shades of the dead, a pervasive sense of nostalgia-- but both also obviously work in very different ways because they're created for different purposes. emet-selch's amaurot is polemical-- it is a monument to and a vision of what was lost meant to persuade (the warrior of light? azem? maybe himself, frankly) that what he's doing is worth it. it's the city basically rolls out the red carpet for the scions, it's why the shades are disposed to see the scions as precocious children, who they patiently instruct and whose questions they answer.

living memory is the end goal in and of itself. in some ways it's more "real" than amaurot-of-the-tempest. the shades of amaurot are set-dressing, the endless of living memory are preserved memories in a setting where memory is an intrinsic piece of a soul; the maintenance of living memory requires the ruthless extraction and pillage, whereas tempest-amaurot just quietly ticks away even after its creator's demise-- a memorial to those who lived but now do not and never will again

but in other ways living memory is much less real. it's not a stand-in for a real place, its artificial nature is clear to its inhabitants, and even before we start shutting down terminals, even aside from the consequences of the aether shortage, it's easy to see the seams around the edges (occasionally literally-- you can get behind the lit buildings in canal town and see that they're just facades over unadorned electrope.) you can just imagine a bunch of disney-esque alexandrian imagineers designing the place ilm-by-ilm. (does alexandria use "ilms"? well, whatever)

the use of nostalgia is also illuminating, since both amaurot and living memory are meant to evoke nostalgia in the player, by referring to real-world touchstones-- art deco and 20th century cityscapes, theme parks and their facades-- in ways that don't necessarily apply to our characters, who presumably do not know what the 1920s or disneyland or whatever are. (although of course this depends on your particular WoL and headcanons about the setting-- with the way i think of and write about garlemald, i wouldn't put it past them to just bulldoze a bunch of ala mhigan villages to make an amusement park for the pureblood garlean children of pureblood garlean functionaries or whatever)

but they also represent different kinds of nostalgia in their creators. emet-selch's is all solemnity and grandeur, a fascist's retvrn-with-a-v-look-what-they-took-from-you mythmaking, and sphene's evokes a kind of childlike innocence of when the world seemed simple, where no one dies and no one suffers and everyone gets to have icecream for dinner and someone is always there to tell you that everything is going to be okay

but that sort of nostalgia is as reactionary as emet-selch's imperial splendor; there's a reason why spene's paradise was also one underpinned by colonialism and genocide-- the price of the endless's carefree eternal childhood was inconceivable misery and death kept carefully out of view

which i guess points to a thematic throughline in ff14 more broadly-- remembering the past is important, but living in it is poisonous to the soul

[siderealcity]

ALL OF THIS, YES!

Both Amaurot and Living Memory are depictions of nostalgia, and the danger of over-indulging in it.

Amaurot is the past both literally and figuratively drowning in grief. It's dark and subdued. A paradise lost, fading from memory.

Living Memory is the beautiful, idealized past that never truly existed. A bunch of isolated, shiny, happy fragments stitched together into a paradise, removed from their contexts.

Neither place is evil, but they are both incapable of supporting life. There's nothing wrong with remembering the past, or even dreaming of a happier time. You can't live there. Nobody can.

Oh, also... on this point:

with the way i think of and write about garlemald, i wouldn't put it past them to just bulldoze a bunch of ala mhigan villages to make an amusement park for the pureblood garlean children of pureblood garlean functionaries or whatever)

THEY KINDA DID. In the Peaks, Specula Imperatoris is clearly built on top of the ruin of an Ala Mhigan mountain hold. All throughout the region you can see what's left of the Highroad, the elevated highway that spans the whole of Gyr Abania. Following the broken road leads up to the watch towers. There's a smashed-up ramp from the valley going there as well, and chunks of building just lying all over the cliff.

[ofstarstuff]

Living Memory is a stand-in for a real place. It's not just a collection of unrelated real-world 20th century cityscapes, it's a specific one.

It's the Las Vegas Strip.

If you've been there, it's incredibly recognizable. It has the Venetian's canals, the Bellagio fountains and conservatory, the Mirage volcano... It's all there, in its glitz and glam. It's deeply unsettling to see that rendered into this world, but the homage is evident: it's not trying to be the places these casino hotels are based on, it's the same facsimile the Strip is. Much like it, it's only skin-deep: the moment we peel away the effect, what remains is the same shape but barren.

And I think being aware of this inspiration matters when looking at Living Memory and the Endless, that this whole thing is a tourist attraction that isn't meant to serve people, it's meant to be for show.

It's not subtle and it's not meant to be, it just happens that there might not be a huge overlap of Vegas tourists and FFXIV players. My spouse and I joked that the Vegas FanFest was research, because look at these photos of the Strip:

Remember how Living Memory's "life" was unsustainable in its current design? Well, about that...