Patented Overthinker(tm)

Abandon all hope for brevity, ye who enter here! ...Or, "I write a lot of really long lore dissections/theories/analyses" here, usually about Dragalia Lost. A dash of Tales of the Abyss or other video games I like also can and will pop up at random. I'm also on AO3 by the same name (https://archiveofourown.org/users/ValerieFauxNom/works), where I post any fic I've written. Including my little baby Scaling the Walls of a Mystery, a 340k post-game exploration that is currently being rewritten as its own separate fic (but shhhh). Please also check out my best friend WillofWinnie, also on tumblr and AO3 by the same name. She's the one behind all the art on my fics, and is a fantastic artist and friend! Check out her other works! Oh, and I'm always down for yapping about Dragalia or Tales of the Abyss!

[valeriefauxnom]

Scaling the Walls of a Mystery Masterpost!

When Scaling the Walls of a Mystery (or 'Scaling' as I shall refer to it from here on out, because I could not Scale the Walls of My Laziness) was starting to wind down, I decided to make this masterpost to compile some of the extraneous things for anyone who stumbled across this now, since goodness knows me (and my best friend) have had a lot of silliness go on in the meantime regarding it.

That being said, hopefully this is of some use or interest to someone looking back in the future, and/or if anyone decides to try Scaling because of this.

Since this thing was and is a lot to both my heart and just in general, though, there's a lot to cover and thus under this nice read more!

As for general info for 'what the heck even is that', Scaling the Walls of a Mystery is a really big fanfic for Dragalia Lost that I first posted a chapter on February 22nd, 2023! I'm just gonna merge the two summaries that are out on its corresponding fic/series AO3 pages for a description beyond that:

A post-canon exploration of Dragalia Lost, wherein Euden finds himself alive somehow, despite all odds... but with no one save his original pactwyrm Midgardsormr remembering him, he's left to look at the recreated world and those he knew in it plagued by shadows of relationships only he knows now. Unfortunately for him, he strays a bit too close, too often to the royal castle of Sol Alberia where he was raised as the 7th scion, and captures his family's attention as a strange outsider that resembles them uncannily well, and who knows far too much for an innocent 'commoner'. What's more, just because the world has been restored to a more harmonious state does not mean all is well for Euden, now trapped under the microscope of his siblings' pertinent questions. Though he might try to keep everything bottled up- the emotions, memories... an entire life's worth of feelings and thoughts is not something so easily dismissed. And while Euden is stubborn, all glass can shatter under pressure. ---

In truth, none of them were entirely sure how things ended up like this, a strange commoner waltzing ever-steadily into their house and hearts. They did not know this 'Euden' before, but he integrated like a crucial cog in their chaotic-and-yet-orderly machine. Meanwhile, Euden had expected to die with the last remnants of the previous worlds, erased from existence so others could live on. But he found himself made anew, as a nobody in some nameless field. Nobody else seemed to have heard of him. His was a free existence. And yet, when Zethia, now living happily alongside his family and Nedrick rightfully restored as her twin, keeps dragging him into the castle of Sol Alberia, he struggles to pull away. To not try to be there with his family, happy and so much more harmonious in this new world. Fate has other plans for his attempts at anonymity, though, despite his best efforts. The Royal Family of Alberia would not rest until this latest enigma was solved, after all. With all of them being as stubborn as they are, though, it may take a while to get there.

That being said, it's a 300k+ word monstrosity that I worked on for about a year and a half! T-rated, which for me means more mature subject matter can be on the table but nothing graphic, etc, and Scaling hardly touches much of that to begin with. It's more of a dram-com-suspense thing, honestly, than anything to warrant even that vague warning of Discussions of Mature Subject Matter. Just a bunch of siblings and their father struggling to figure out life and their relationship with this weirdo that they stuck in their admittedly big home! (Plus the slow mental whittling of being trapped with people you loved but no longer know you as you are burdened with knowledge you cannot furnish)

Ahem, anyways, now for the actual meat if you're either interested or looking for an easy return to a particular part!

Chapters with links to individual chapters (you can probably tell where naming chapters became hard and I threw in the towel of following that exact pattern!):

Scaling the Walls of a Castle:

Scaling the Stairs of a Tower:

Scanning the Shelves of a Bookstore:

Scrutinizing the Mind of a Mystery:

Scaling the Railing of a Balcony:

Signaling the Start of an Era:

Starting to Shape an Idea:

Surviving a Spiel of Speeches:

Scampering Away from a Savage:

Stealing the Scales of a Scion:

Supping With a Side of Discomfort:

Setting a Course to a New Path:

Starting to Narrow Down Some Ideas:

Writing the Epitaph of Some Enigmas:

The Walls Closing on a Mystery:

Scaling the Walls of a Mystery (I):

Scaling the Walls of a Mystery (II):

Scaling the Walls of a Mystery (III):

Seclusion:

Spent:

Scolding:

Scrying:

Space:

Sweets:

Stillness:

Settling:

Scaled (I):

Scaled (II) [FINAL]:

---

Illustrations:

WillofWinnie, for whom I will be forever and indescribably grateful, has produced quite a lot of things for Scaling, including the book cover thing at the top of this post! All (well, technically sans 1, but that's a split chapter anyways since it otherwise would've been massive!) chapters also all have their own illustrations, which I will assembled in this illustration masterpost since I have other things to show here!

Scaling the Walls Illustration Masterpost!

Since 17 pieces weren't enough for WillofWinnie, the resulting 28 have made the actual masterpost cramped and unwelcoming of memes and other

Video: That's right, WillofWinnie also produced a short animation for Scaling off of an event in the first chapter!

I also made a silly video myself, though with far less effort and personal creativity required, regarding Scaling!Euden's various bad lying/escape attempts.

Extras:

For anyone who is interested, "Lost Scales" is an adjacent fic that compiles some segments of Scaling that were discarded or otherwise not used for whatever reason. You can find it here!

As I say in the summary, while it may be 'non-canon' by default to the fic, but in segments there might be little headcanons or ideas that are passively maintained in my head in the fic even if they never saw the light of day. That being said, it wouldn't be very useful to anyone new, since most of the trimmings were from deeper in the plot where I actually had to, you know, make sure the plot made sense instead of going with the first instinct in my head.

For the brave, brave, patient soldiers who endured Scaling the Walls of a Mystery and somehow decided they want more, "Time's Scales" is a sort of historical epilogue thing I wrote here! It is a looser outline written in a vaguely retrospective manner of what historians have learned and catalogued about the fam's lives in the long-run.

A Spot of Tomfoolery:

Scaling also has had much joking about it between me and WillofWinnie, so here are just some of the silly little posts/memes about this thing since it's certainly not all doom and gloom in the fic either.

https://www.tumblr.com/valeriefauxnom/750144720418865152/a-certain-scene-in-ch21-scaling-framed-a

With all that being said, I would like to thank everyone who has chimed in with comments, critiques, questions, and more about Scaling!

They've really meant a lot, and I can't say I'd have been quite as gung-ho in pecking away at this thing without all the support! It's absolutely baffling to think that Scaling is now the most kudos-ed Dragalia fic in such short time, since it really did start as the mad, probably hyperspecific indulgences of myself imagining a potential post-canon for Dragalia's... unclear ending.

[valeriefauxnom]

In Tragedy, There Is Humor

Or, "Look, I find the way that Luke does a massive KICK to Asch's guts at the Tower of Rem for a split second very funny"

...Even though his model wasn't exactly looking wholly normally either. Abyss models were not built for the various crazy things we can do with our bodies, even when it comes to things like Guy slapping Luke...

His model's slight off look to it is probably a good reason they don't dwell on this shot at all. For context, this is that shot at 1/4 speed.

[valeriefauxnom]

Who is Your Favorite Scion of the Royal Family?

Or, "I asked this minus Euden a year ago and I'm really curious to see how including the Euden impacts percentages".

Last time, Chelle and Emile took the highest percents, but even with their combined results only managed to squiggle away 40% of the vote as most of the others could muster around 10%.

So...

Which one of Aurelius' kids is your fave?

Leonidas

Phares

Chelle

Valyx

Beren

Emile

Nedrick

Zethia

Euden

Remaining time: 4 days 7 hours

Please do vote, especially if you're a fan of one of the less-common family members (like those few poor Beren stans out there)!

[valeriefauxnom]

A Missed Opportunity/Theme In Abyss

We know it, we love it: Abyss has pretty strong themes, overall. It concerns itself with predestination, the meaning of life, and what atonement means. All compelling.

But, much as it is a fantastic game, it struck me the other day that feels like the writers were laying the groundwork for another strong theme/arc for Luke, and then just... completely drop it. Hear me out!

Spoilers for the entirety of the game ahead! Also, long post warning!

So, what is this possible theme?

Freedom. Independence.

First, I would like to turn to Act 1, before Akzeriuth, and what we see.

'What we see' is Luke being wholly trapped and controlled by others around him. In the manor, to start, taken in Jade's warship, in the location sense, but it's way beyond that.

Emotionally, he's beholden to Van and quite cleanly under his thumb. Socially/educationally, most all others are running rings around him and keeping him trapped in ignorance and a laughingstock for their amusement.

But beyond these more nebulous concepts, Luke is also incredibly trapped even in his own body's autonomy. No less than three entities take physical control over Luke in Act 1 - Asch, Van, and Lorelei.

Over and over, we are presented with a Luke that has almost no control over his life. Even his body is at the whims of others. It's such a recurrent, consistent theme, so omnipresent, that in retrospect it feels like they want to set up something. Heck, even in that immediate post-Akzeriuth window, it feels like they're faintly still reaching for it.

Asch traps Luke's consciousness inside his own mind, helpless and separated from his own body until Asch deigns to let him go.

Then, Luke identifies a flaw of his in the garden.

Luke acknowledges that perhaps he's been basing too much of what he's thought on others, and seems like part of his goal is to start thinking on his own and acting independently.

Sounds great!

Problem is...

...This is the end of the line for where this idea and theme pops up.

In fact, in a sense, if you're really looking at it, Luke doesn't really succeed in this goal. He's becoming a better person in ways, but... He's mostly traded Van for the party for guidance because he no longer has any faith or confidence in himself to decide for himself. Take Aramis Springs, where Guy and Tear in a brief little itty-bitty conversation accidentally almost convince him that he can never be happy again. This is not the mentality of an independent, healthy thinker.

In his well-established pattern of self hatred, depression, and deprecation that follow Luke throughout the entire rest of the game, Luke tends to immediately internalize whatever the party says about him. They keep saying he's an idiot, so he believes it. They have become Luke's de facto moral compasses that he's using to try to keep himself in check and do a better job. Sure, they're a lot better than Van, but fundamentally Luke is not exactly forging his own way to his unique morality and the like with them. He (and the party) are often still at the mercy of listening to others' information and following that around.

So, if we don't really see Luke pushing for freedom of thought and independent decision-making, what about the broader freedom theme? Well, that goes unexplored, too!

I honestly wonder if the writers forgot just how much raw power they gave Asch in regards to his abilities over Luke.

We know that Asch:

-Can physically puppet Luke around (as seen above)

-Can tap into Luke's senses

-Unilaterally seems to be the one that opens/closes up the isophone (ha) to talk to Luke

-Divorce Luke's consciousness from his own body and keep it trapped in himself

-Read Luke's mind, possibly

This isn't a thing that Luke can return the favor with to make them even, either. He explicitly tries and tries hard after Akzeriuth, but Asch isn't bothered at all or threatened by Luke's best attempt.

By all indications, Asch casually has all this massive power over Luke that he can use at any time. But they just stop exploring it, stop using it entirely.

Even logically, I might expect that he would've used this power more, given Asch. He's petty, vindictive, angry at Luke, denies him his full personhood. These are not the traits of a person inclined to respect Luke's self-determination and bodily control. In fact, he more seems he's likely set up a pattern of violating it quite casually - his possessions of Luke before Akzeriuth are mostly childish things, testing the waters of his control and doing things like 'making Luke walk in the wrong direction and then mocking him for it'. The pinnacle of maturity, everyone.

But... he just drops it. After that last ride in Asch's head, Asch never once uses or abuses his incredible power over Luke.

To that, I ask WHY? It's all too easy to see any number of other incidents Asch could have had with Luke. Even if Asch didn't want to do anything too drastic or major with Luke, it'd be all too easy to see him to do something like forcing Luke to punch a brick wall in a fit of childish amusement to get back at him for sins real or imagined. "Why are you hitting yourself" mockery indeed.

Again: why? Why not use this to help carry this budding, nascent theme through the later portions of the game, when they spent so much effort trying to stress how little freedom and agency Luke has even over his body?

Well, there are parts of the game where I can maybe explain why he might not have. Maybe, for a bit post Akzeriuth, he's well and truly given up with Luke and is trying to ignore him as best he is able since Luke didn't live up to Asch's intended use of him in Akzeriuth. Maybe at the very end of the game he's not feeling well or so incredibly focused on Van that he just forgets/isn't able to anymore. Maybe it just takes quite a bit of concentration on his part, and after parting with the God Generals and the party he doesn't feel safe enough to try most of the time.

I don't know. There's any number of reasons, lore or otherwise, why you might be able to spin it for why Asch in a certain sense is breaking his previous character/pattern of abusing this power because many characters in this game are very complicated people with many different motivations and reasons for why they do or don't do things.

But one thing is for certain: it's not like he's had the character development to view Luke as his own human being by the end of the game, as their conversation late-game in Grand Chokmah demonstrates.

I've gone over a lot of the nuance here, but really all that's important is that Asch does not see Luke as a unique individual, but an extension of his will. He wants Luke to be a mini-him to use and eventually step in for Asch once he's gone.

All this is to say is that I feel that there is a big missing opportunity here. Even aside from the base idea itself, why not tie the grounds of this squabble further to the Score? It fits snugly - in fact, it's the only other place where notions of freedom and all that pop up. Tie it to Luke and Asch's struggles, with Luke straining to make Asch leave him alone and stop abusing his power over Luke as a replica. The Score is imposing its reality on Auldrant, and Asch is imposing his will on Luke. Both need to be broken and move forward, leaving Luke/the world free.

I'm not willing or able to rewrite Abyss in some grand sweeping plan, but imagine a slightly divergent Eldrant fight to incorporate this theme. It can start the same: Fall down, boom go the Fabres, 'very stupid genes' and all that, then...

Luke can start his usual speech, and that, of course angers Asch greatly. In a fit of rage, he effectively paralyzes Luke. For him, this is about showing who is real, who is in power, a last gasp for Asch to assert control over his life over the one thing he can anymore: his replica (and there we have another theme to explore in Asch if they wish). Luke is the fake, the copy, and he is not the real student who gets to kill Van.

He does not get to tell Asch what is best, what he should do and how. That is Asch's right. Luke is the replica, after all - his job, his existence, is solely to follow Asch's command.

However, Asch leaves just enough of Luke free that he can run his mouth and give a variation of his speech in canon. An argument about his own worth, that he lives his own life, and should be free just like the world. That he is not inherently less of a human just because he is a replica.

Asch does his usual 'well said', and releases him. Fine, if Luke's got that much bark, prove it. One last duel. Show him that his words aren't hollow and that he has the conviction enough to stand up for them and finish it.

Boom. I can't say it's perfect or anything, but I just intend it as a quick example about how they could have woven in this theme throughout the rest of the game.

So...

Yeah. I do think that they missed a possible goldmine of an additional theme they could have stressed with Luke and Asch.

Asch, desperate for control in his life after most all of his past and future has been taken away, and Luke, desperate to finally be free from the powers that always have strove to control him.

---

That's all I can think to say right now.

In summation: the plot strangely drops the ball after it spent a considerable amount of time trying to stress Luke's lack of agency and Asch's/others' ability to deny his autonomy even though it fits perfectly with the broader story being told about the Score and humanity and I wish it was explored more.

Hopefully something in here proved interesting or fresh to this 20+ year old game's fandom! Please let me know if you have any thoughts or anything you want to share, because I'm always down to chat about Abyss.

[valeriefauxnom]

Tales of the Abyss is funny because it dared to put the ability to unilaterally erase stuff from existence in a display of unmatched destructive potential in the hands of a seventeen-year-old very traumatized teenage boy.

And the bad guy bravely asked, But what if there were TWO traumatized teenage boys that could erase matter from existence? And made it so. Even better, he was the one who decided to help traumatize the both of them, because naturally very traumatized, abused, and/or neglected children are the most rational actors who will do exactly what you say all the time. And then he made a 2 year old the boss of the military and-

Yes, I'm sure this will go swimmingly.

Good luck, world.

[valeriefauxnom]

It will never not amuse me how Dragalia Lost and Tales of the Abyss decided to do 'copy vs. original' voices.

Some more minor spoilers for Tales of the Abyss (Dragalia fans if you're reading this PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT EXPERIENCE IT SOMEHOW PLEASE TRUST ME) and slightly more major spoilers for a dead mobile game within, if you're concerned about that.

Anyways.

Luke and Euden. Asch and Nedrick. Both are and are apart of games that had/have some truly uncanny similarities to them in theming. But that's for another day. I'm here for the funnies, and to me, it's as I said above:

The way they handled Asch and Luke's voice is completely different to Euden and Nedrick.

For Asch and Luke, they share a near-identical register. Asch, the 'evil original' of the pair (even if both Asch and Nedrick are a bit more complicated than just 'good' or 'evil'), more often goes a liiiittle bit lower, but you can very patently tell it's the same person behind the voice.

Here's a sample of them chattering.

For Euden and Nedrick, though... Well, let's just say that there's probably a good chance you'd be surprised they are even voiced by the same person!

This is Euden, our "Luke" of the pair for Abyss fans, and how he usually sounds:

.....Aaaaand this is Nedrick, the 'Asch' of the two. Mind you, again, these are the same VAs.

I dunno, something about it is just so funny to me that while both made the logical decision to have the protagonist voice their grumpy original, Tales of the Abyss has Asch sound near-identical to Luke to stress their similarities and ongoing conflict of identity and if they're truly separate, while Dragalia Lost instead has the original speak so much lower that I struggle to tell that it is the same voice actor, more stressing their conflict of ideals and their more opposing natures. Both have their merits.

Really, it's also just funny to think that Euden could, theoretically, go that low, or Nedrick that high. Or imagining if Asch and Luke had such disparity in their average voice. Somehow I know the Abyss party would have jumped on that to mock both of them.

[valeriefauxnom]

Nedrick: Vengeance and Yearning

(Or: "Look I wrote a really long post analyzing Nedrick, please read")

Ahem. You have been warned. Long post ahead!

Nedrick. The world's easiest character to give a pokemon solely because of his Gala outfit design and color scheme.

Nedrick is funny because he tries so hard to be a cool, calm supervillain revolutionary and all that... but is still predominately just an angsty teenager underneath all that.

Why do I say this? First, note how Nedrick speaks during his ch.15 introduction.

He is composed. Eloquent. Speaking with much the same royal cadence as many in the family do, with a rich vocabulary and flowing sentence structure.

Contrast this man who uses phrases like 'incontrovertible proof' instead of more common constructions like 'undeniable' with the Nedrick we see at the Sacred Tree:

Here, Nedrick tends much like Leonidas: curt. He speaks fairly plainly, and briefly when he can. He rarely will construct less common phrasing, but largely sticks to simple and direct words.

And I'll tell you why: This boy has probably been practicing for YEARS for ch.15. I'd bet on it.

Think about it: Nedrick has cultivated this elaborate idea and hatred of Euden. How useless and worthless he is and how much he is unfit to be apart of 'his' family. How he 'deserves' Zethia. And now, for the first time in his whole life, Nedrick has finally been presented the opportunity to reveal himself to Euden.

You better bet he wanted to make his not-so-sterling opinion known and utterly wipe the floor with Euden. So he prepares this elaborate speech with all the words he's hand-picked to represent just what he thinks and feels about Euden. He wants to break Euden's little mind and then kill him triumphantly and revel in the fact that now he can reclaim his status as Zethia's brother.

He's probably rehearsed this conversation in his head so many times. What if they bring up xyz point? Well, he'll need to bring the enchanted seal. So on and so forth.

But when Euden survives ch.15? Well... he's starting to be a bit unsure. The script has been broken. Neddy still wants to play at being an unflappable supervillain, though, so tries to accept the 'loss' with grace.

He's so committed to the principle that he is the cool calm logical one and Euden is the wild emotional one that he's even trying to pretend that he'd be okay if Euden 'accepted the truth' with enough magnanimity.

Problem is... he's not okay with it. Euden gives no real indication that he accepted the truth poorly once he hears it in ch.19. Nedrick seems to think that, -with some reason with his ch.15 reaction, - that Euden would just mentally shut down for good at hearing the full truth, but that obviously wasn't the case.

And yet Neddy still has this deep-running loathing for Euden. He's just shifted the goalpost from Euden's creation to Euden's personality/beliefs as a means of picking his fight with Euden. But somehow Euden is even more annoying to him, because even though Nedrick has tried to shatter him, he's still kicking about with most of his same opinions and beliefs.

So all that planning and gloating gets thrown out the window, and Nedrick is having to start speaking in the moment instead of punching the Euden-sockpuppet he was imagining in his head. He tries his best to reclaim his cool eloquence when Euden does make it up the tree, because we're entering 'the other speech he prepared' territory where he could go on about his master plan and why it's necessary...

But, at the end of the day... Nedrick is still a bit of a petty teenager.

Euden is trying to listen, yet he still tries to delay and shut off because he doesn't want to communicate and eventually foists part of the explanation on a literal tree as he has to gather his words to sound Cool and Eloquent again.

He also introduces little insults for Euden and joins up with Beren and call him 'hollow man'. ch.15 Nedrick really only ever calls Euden by name or by title. His 'above it all' air is slipping.

So. Yeah. Nedrick is very dedicated to appearing high-and-mighty, but I see through it!

That's all I had for his way of speaking, but there's more "Nedrick is just a dumb teenager" food in the form of his plan. How so?

Well, let me start off with a small little footnote: much like he painted Euden, Nedrick was a big fish in small waters and is now venturing out to the sea only to find himself massively outgunned, and he doesn't even know it.

Ch.15 Nedrick is convinced that he's so smart and cool that he knows the breadth of Phares'/Xenos' plots. Calls it 'pathetic', even.

Problem is...

Nedrick is playing Snakes and Ladders - maybe a shortcut or setback here and there, but a linear path. He needs Zethia -> goes to Tree -> gets Dawnshard -> forges full pact with Bahamut -> remakes world...

Phares/Xenos is playing much more abstractly. Because of Xenos' condition, his plans are less a step-by-step sequence game like Candyland and more a checklist he's secretly and idly ticking off. A chess or go trap forming in the background until he's ready to strike and ruin their opponent. Most any goal of his can be done at any time, he's just looking to meet a certain amount of them for Xenos to return. We're talking plans that span centuries and millennia, like the priming of Grams for his return.

Yet Neddy boy there is convinced that just because he knew PharesXenos there was going to have Beren munch on Morsayati that he had it all figured out. No. No he didn't! He doesn't even know that Phares was possessed by the Progenitor, the big thing he wanted to defeat in the end!

Relatedly, PharesXenos also knows exactly how to ragebait him. This is a skill of Phares by himself, but Xenos surely has only augmented it with his additional knowledge:

So yes, for starters, Nedrick has Severely Misjudged who and what he is up against, for starters.

Secondly, his actual plan borders on a logical fallacy so obvious that even the most average of the main cast can instantly clock it.

He's also not even good at communicating it. I know I've seen a few people think that Nedrick is just another Leonidas - that he hates the weak and wants to be rid of them. The opposite is true. Leo at the start was of the 'strong eat the weak' philosophy, while Nedrick believes he will champion the weak.

His argument is that people are kinda forced into bad fates with no choice. A solid start. Poverty, illness, all that unfortunately wreck too many lives even in our world, merely because of the circumstances of your birth. Your appearance, gender, and so many more factors have determined the hand you got. He wants to do away with that. Good job, Nedrick.

How? Well, he's decided that everyone needs to be given the ability to shapeshift, and that that will somehow allow people stuck in their stations and 'rise up'.

This posits.... many glaring issues. First, why shapeshifting? What inherently would allow that for anyone to escape the misfortune of their circumstances? Power certainly lets people do more things, but it doesn't solve everything. What's your plan if you need money? Take it with that extra power? Well, now there's a good chance that the people with the money have more power than you, so good luck taking it.

If everyone could shift, too, there's not enough dragons in the world for people to turn into. If it's separate from standard pacting, we then run into the next issue, that most people's bodies in Dragalia Lost weren't Built For That.

But let's say that Nedrick somehow wishes so that everyone can handle a shift. Well...

Then the 'milk' of the populace is still going to naturally separate. Everyone will not miraculously have equal power just because they can shift. So even among the shifted, in and out there will be disparate power to separate the strong and weak.

Factor in again the fact that only a small percentage will be able to rise to the top and not curdle, and we have a double whammy: the strong of the weak are going to prosper, and only them. The actual weak are just going to suffer and die as usual.

He writes this off as a 'necessary sacrifice', a one-time payment, but it's still a bit of a halfhearted defense for someone that's trying to champion the weak. This is where people get confused and lump him in with Leo: functionally, his plan mostly just favors the already-strong or those who can be strong.

His dream mostly amounts to a bit of a childish vengeance mixed with some very poorly thought-out social justice attempt with a hint of anarchy seasoning. I'll tell you what's really up: he wants to get back at his family. He yearns to be like them, that he was among them. But since he wasn't allowed to be, he's then decided he needs to take away their special toy of shapeshifting. The 'if everyone's special, no one will be'.

Heck, maybe this is just some super far out plan to try to free up the family to be normal people that he could be with. Unlikely, but hey. I'll throw it out there. In the end, Nedrick's main motivation seems to revolve about

One last loosely related sidenote to this is:

Finlorda is a Jerk

That's right, I said it: Finlorda is by far the one of the good old king trio with the shadiest morals.

Aurelius/Audric make the statement that he did not know Nedrick had survived until recently. That was the impetus for Aurelius going crazy and going to the ruins at the start, trying to find a way to help Neddy (in part), by messing about with some very evil powers. So we have a clear statement on his priority: the minute he finds out his OG son is still alive and kicking, Aurelius almost immediately goes into 'get him back get him back get him back keep him safe keep him safe' mode, with his only hesitancy being what it would do to Euden.

But what about all that time before? Finlorda had years. A decade and a half to let one of his oldest friends know that there was a whoopsie daisy and turns out your son's soul didn't even make it in the new box and he's still alive and now struggling with a godlike entity. But he didn't!!!

And the only notion for why he didn't is that he looked at the free dragonblood and wanted it for experiments. We see repeated stress on the fact that Finlorda was obsessed with cracking the secret of dragonblood - he admits it himself, even. It makes far too much sense as it is that he would see his new human baby that's unexpectedly alive again as free real estate, now that he's sent his friend home with a son.

And oh boy do we get some stress that he followed through on his free baby blood bank:

Finlorda's little experiment resulting in Euden doesn't seem to be the only thing little Nedrick got, based on the phrasing. This wasn't just a one-time thing. While I really don't think it was anything like or equivalent to the Syndicate or anything like that, we've got some really ugly ethics going on here. Nedrick doesn't seem to be all that pleased about Finlorda even as a child - Jinlorda wonders if he wants to take revenge on him for it as well as the Euden thing, and he barks at Finlorda for using him.

To be fair, Finlorda does seem generally invested in trying to make things not cruel and keep Neddy fed and clothed and all that (perhaps an ardent task for people who spend most their lives very tiny). If he's concerned about the impact a court testimony will have on a child, I don't think he was tearing out organs while Nedrick's still awake or something. But, again, he was still using a young child for experiments for an unknown amount of time, enough that civilians of the faerie kingdom seem to recognize and identify Neddy as Finlorda's lab rat, all the while not telling his own friend, the kid's real father and family, that he was alive.

He seems very regretful and is trying to do his best, but oof. This man definitely has a very complicated and messy moral system.

This all ties back into Nedrick having an interesting view on Aurelius. For all he seems inclined to rage at Aurelius, by projecting that Euden should curse him as he intends to kill him...

Or with his insistence that he feels nothing for Aurelius because 'he had no expectations'...

...Nedrick nevertheless seems to put Aurelius on a pedestal. Amid all the fighting, the childish hatred, ideological differences, and more with Euden, the appeal that finally wins him over is Audric saying this:

An oath from 'Aurelius', imploring him not to take the same path. Letting him know that Aurelius' absence in Nedrick's childhood was not a voluntary decision. Accepting the hate from Nedrick despite his lacking intent. All these and more proved the exact cocktail to get to Nedrick's head and convince him to work with Euden. And I think that if Neddy truly didn't feel anything about Aurelius or his past, that wouldn't have worked.

Nedrick is just a boy, at the end, who wants to be with his family. He's cloaked it in misplaced rage and poorly-designed plans to get back at them, but fundamentally he yearned for home.

[valeriefauxnom]

Non- Dragalia Lost Fans, Please Guess:

Which option was NOT a plot premise for an event? (see description below)

1

2

3

4

5

6

I know dragalia/just want to see the results

Voting ended onJul 19

Options, since they were just too long. Please, only participate if you aren't familiar with Dragalia Lost (or maybe just have a very bad memory about its events...?)

1: "My brother is being nice. He must be possessed by evil spirits. We should do a wellness check and utilize the super secret powerful art of butler-jutsu. You need to be high level in butler jutsu to use the technique 'Adorbs Devotion Beam' without shouting it"

2: "A royal family decides to board the luxury ship Titan on its maiden voyage. It sinks, unexpectedly. The crown prince falls off a cliff but survives, possibly because his sister made curry for supper in mourning which inexplicably summons him regardless of location or logic"

3: Danganronpa but what if people's souls get trapped in big stuffed animals instead when they die. The otherwise all-loving protagonist is the first killer and kills the class clown, also a main character, on the very first day they are trapped.

4: "Our leader, who is known to have nightmares, had a strange, scary dream so now we're going cross-country to investigate just in case this one is real"

5: What's powering that super strong demon in this choir town? Puberty angst, duh.

6: "Oops, I said the wrong thing at a dinner party and now we're in three wars. Naturally, the only solution is to throw a really, really big party to say sorry. Somehow the cake we made is so magical it turns back time before things went wrong"

---

Good luck, any people of tumblr who decide to humor me and my curiosity. I'm curious how many can find my fabrication among the sea of truth. Believe me, I'm only scratching the surface of crack this game churned out in between its Serious Main Story Updates.

If you want proof, here's a post compiling things its characters have said, completely unaltered:

Post by @valeriefauxnom · 30 images

💬 1  🔁 98  ❤️ 140 · Dragalia Lost With A Distinct Lack of Context: · (Honestly all of Chitose's lines in this story qualify but I digress)

[valeriefauxnom]

And the answer is....

Number 6!

Of the 8 people who took a stab, 2 people saw through my fabrication. As for the rest of them, here's the 'proof' and the corresponding event:

No.1:

Yes, everyone is convinced that Emile, the brother in question, is possessed, and they send three people to infiltrate. It turned out in the actual event that he was not possessed.

In fact, Emile is so insensitive to spirit-based things that he can't even tell he's in a room surrounded by ghosts. However, he's been reading self-help books about how to be a good leader and thinking that just mindlessly repeating their sentiments would make people adore him. The head butler is possessed though.

No.2:

Four members of the Alberian Royal Family are indeed stranded after they took a trip on the Titan. Leonidas would end up falling off a cliff and is presumed dead...

The last part is more of a fandom observation than canon fact, but Leonidas does have a very strong tendency to show up whenever 'curry' (his favorite food) is mentioned, in much the same way a cryptid often has 'rules'. I can think of only one time in any Dragalia media where curry is mentioned and Leonidas does not manifest nearby soon. It's that strong.

Sometimes he even breaks narrative sense to be there, like this comic. Canonically, he is most likely in a volcanic hellhole of a city as he tries to run two countries at once (he's country-sitting for another brother. Long story), not randomly in a snowy mountainside canon to play house husband. Even if he is vacationing, implications are he tends to enjoy spots like the beach so he can do things like surfing.

There's plenty of other examples, but back to the actual event, Chelle makes curry...

...And, quite inexplicably, Leonidas shows up the very next day, completely unharmed. Honestly, knowing Chelle, I would not be surprised if she has somehow deduced his reality breaking powers about curry and deliberately invoked it.

No.3:

That's right, we've got a danganronpa-esque summer event!

The people who die do indeed have their souls stuck in stuffed animals, though this itself is a twist...

...But I will admit to being tricky in phrasing. Euden (aka 'the Prince') does indeed technically score the first 'kill'. However, this is not the exact 'danganronpa' style where you need to physically murder someone; the 'rules' for this 'game' change each time on the whims of the master. For the canon variety's game, death would occur if someone echoed back the words 'I trust you' to someone else, as a means to spread paranoia and maybe more genuine bloodsport.

As such, Euden, as a very good boy who is inclined to trust, said those words to Luca the class clown the first night, who echoed them back. Luca as the one to echo it back then died, making it Euden's fault.

Don't worry, they find a way to save their friends so nobody permanently dies, which is quite good or else like 3/5ths of the main cast would have gone bye-bye there.

Also listen to the music for the event, 99.99% of all Dragalia tracks are the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh46w7AvBAU

4: This one's pretty cut and dry. It was a Lunar New Year event.

They turned out lucky that this bad dream was in fact an augury when going to this seemingly-far town.

Fun fact: dream or otherwise, Euden's room there has been infiltrated by at least three different entities... at least. This is one of them that spoils so many late-game plot points that hadn't even been released yet, but does it so vaguely that nobody even realized:

He Is Not Safe. Save Him.

5: Last but not least on the string of real events...

There is a demon in this town that has lurked on the 'darkness of childrens' hearts to grow stronger. The seemingly biggest feeder of it right now is Elias, who is the most specialist star in the children's choir, and he wants that upcoming special solo. Problem is that he's not living in a world known to have castradi and puberty is ruining his soprano voice. This Causes Great Angst.

So yeah, that's right, puberty angst is indeed a plot point in one of the first events this game had!

Hopefully you enjoyed this brief glimpse into the many things of Dragalia craziness. Just think, there's even more out there too, but that's for another day. For now, enjoy this other selection of crazy things its characters have said:

Post by @valeriefauxnom · 27 images

💬 0  🔁 10  ❤️ 23 · Yet Another Batch of Out-Of-Context Dragalia-Flavored Nonsense Since the Previous Ones Here and Here For Some Reason Seem

Post by @valeriefauxnom · 29 images

💬 0  🔁 35  ❤️ 40 · Dragalia With A Definite Deficiency in Description · Part 2 to this: The entire collection of adventurer's stories, as s

[valeriefauxnom]

I've gone over various questionable elements or decisions in Dragalia before, but this is less a pure 'mistake' and more just me going 'did the writers or translators get confused about their characters?' regarding Beren and Nedrick in one teenie tiny way.

What way?

Mana.

I feel like a decent portion of the fandom could tell you about Nedrick's mana-draining self. How he, if he's lacking in Human Resources like food and water, tends to start absorbing mana like a vacuum around him to compensate.

After all, they even made a comic revolving about it:, no.442:

But what if I told you that Beren was also seemingly mana-hungry, dependent on draining things around him for a little bit? Yup.

Oh, but don't worry, they fixed that in ch.14 for him.

...And they just kinda left it at that. I don't even recall them establishing that Beren was also dependent on external mana. So, let's get this straight:

-They introduce a problem Beren apparently had at the exact time it is solved for him

-Never bring it up before or after

-And introduce another royal family member with black hair who also has that same problem the very next chapter

...Yeaaah, like I said, technically it's not an official 'error' that I can point to, some outright contradiction in the plot, but it is a very big 'hmmm' moment where I seriously wonder if something got lost in the character notes.

[valeriefauxnom]

Non- Dragalia Lost Fans, Please Guess:

Which option was NOT a plot premise for an event? (see description below)

1

2

3

4

5

6

I know dragalia/just want to see the results

Voting ended onJul 19

Options, since they were just too long. Please, only participate if you aren't familiar with Dragalia Lost (or maybe just have a very bad memory about its events...?)

1: "My brother is being nice. He must be possessed by evil spirits. We should do a wellness check and utilize the super secret powerful art of butler-jutsu. You need to be high level in butler jutsu to use the technique 'Adorbs Devotion Beam' without shouting it"

2: "A royal family decides to board the luxury ship Titan on its maiden voyage. It sinks, unexpectedly. The crown prince falls off a cliff but survives, possibly because his sister made curry for supper in mourning which inexplicably summons him regardless of location or logic"

3: Danganronpa but what if people's souls get trapped in big stuffed animals instead when they die. The otherwise all-loving protagonist is the first killer and kills the class clown, also a main character, on the very first day they are trapped.

4: "Our leader, who is known to have nightmares, had a strange, scary dream so now we're going cross-country to investigate just in case this one is real"

5: What's powering that super strong demon in this choir town? Puberty angst, duh.

6: "Oops, I said the wrong thing at a dinner party and now we're in three wars. Naturally, the only solution is to throw a really, really big party to say sorry. Somehow the cake we made is so magical it turns back time before things went wrong"

---

Good luck, any people of tumblr who decide to humor me and my curiosity. I'm curious how many can find my fabrication among the sea of truth. Believe me, I'm only scratching the surface of crack this game churned out in between its Serious Main Story Updates.

If you want proof, here's a post compiling things its characters have said, completely unaltered:

Post by @valeriefauxnom · 30 images

💬 1  🔁 98  ❤️ 140 · Dragalia Lost With A Distinct Lack of Context: · (Honestly all of Chitose's lines in this story qualify but I digress)

[glaucophane]

The Auldrantine Calendar, Seasons, and Dates

Hi. I’m Grace. I occasionally post my wild-ass worldbuilding/lorecrafting hypotheses here. I’ve tapered off ever since I quit WoW, but Azeroth was not my first love. It’s probably not even my third or fourth. My first love – by which I mean the kind of strained love of someone you care deeply about even though they have got to get their personal life together – is Auldrant. This fuckin’ planet. I won’t blame it for how or why I pursued geosciences as my field of study, but my fascination with it grew as I learned more about earth sciences. I say “fascination” rather than “appreciation” because whenever I chase some detail around I find something that looks pretty dang accurate at a glance and horrifyingly wrong at the second and third.

And there’s quite a lot of detail to chase! Out of all of the settings of the Tales games, Auldrant has the most comprehensively-documented facts and figures. I’m drawing primarily from the Famitsu Perfect guide for this, but there’s still a ton of ingame lore that a dedicated fan can document. It’s not quite on the same level as The Elder Scrolls, but it’s much more detailed in its worldbuilding than pretty much any game in its series. The history of the world gets tied very heavily into the story, such that understanding at least the broad strokes is essential to understanding the plot of the game. I don’t disagree that it creates a bit of a barrier to a new player, but for anyone who wants to really immerse themselves into a constructed setting it’s got a lot to offer. And it’s all very consistent! I’m not going to get into it here, but the setting’s magic system is one of the hardest and most unforgiving in its internal consistencies.

One area that’s caused no small amount of consternation over the years is Auldrant’s calendar. We know exactly how long it is (765 days per year), how many months there are (13), the number and names of the days of the week (7, and they have a naming convention following modern Japanese day names), and the current year (ND 2018). We also know from the game’s opening narration that it has an axial tilt, because Yulia’s Score specifies that the Hod War lasts “for a full cycle of the seasons.” It’s also definitely a solar calendar, as the number of days on the calendar is the same as Auldrant’s orbital period. The planet’s orbital period is a cheeky pun on the publisher’s name (765 can be read as “na-mu-ko”, and Namco uses it in other places). Most of the time, it’s relegated to the little bit of trivia that one Auldrantine year is more than two Earth years long. If you do the math, Jade is a little over 73 Earth years old – something he’d probably use to bolster his Old Man shtick if he knew about it.

What we don’t get, however, is any context for seasonality or even important holidays. The new year just… starts. When the game opens up on ND2018 Rem-Decan 23, Remday, there’s no sense that it’s been a little over three weeks since New Year’s Day. There’s no leftover party decorations. I can’t recall any NPC dialogue about starting a new year, though TBF it can be really easy to miss talking to one NPC. And the location of Baticul itself is not very helpful if we want to gather environmental context clues. The city’s latitude is either just inside the tropics or just outside of it, and we don’t get a great map projection to make that determination. The only, and most important, context clue we have from Baticul is that it’s located south of the equator.

Fortunately, Luke gets yeeted into Auldrant’s northern hemisphere about 15 minutes into a new game. And that’s where our context clues start to get interesting!

Over the course of the next couple of hours, we learn 3 things that help us peg the month of Rem-Decan to a season. 1, the forest north of the Cheagle Woods burned down. 2, that the Fubras River – a continent-spanning river that would make our modern Nile look like a drainage ditch if it was real – is at its lowest point for the year. And finally 3, that apples are in season. Stick a pin in that last one, because it’s actually the most important data point.

The other two support that the northern half of Rugnica – the largest of the continents – is experiencing a dry season. Forests aren’t usually tinderboxes unless there hasn’t been any rain in a while. A river, and especially a giant one like the Fubras, being at its low point means that its tributaries aren’t being fed with either rainwater or meltwater. Dry seasons aren’t exclusive to summers, though low water levels might point to a lack of snowpack at the far edges of the Fubras’ watershed. Without a watershed map, though, that’s just speculation on my part.

What isn’t speculative is that apples are in season in this part of the world. Luke falls ass-over-teakettle into the game’s plot when he steals one by accident from a fruit seller. It’s specifically an apple, and specifically one that’s freshly-picked from a local orchard. And that’s how we know that Auldrant’s northern hemisphere is experiencing summer.

If you don’t follow, here’s the implications: apples require something called “chill hours” in order to bear fruit. Chill hours are however many hours that a particular cultivar of apple tree needs to spend between 0-7ºC (32-45ºF) in order to get the hormonal signals necessary to bloom. Without experiencing these chill hours, apples (and several other fruit) don’t produce blossoms and, therefore, fruit. Once the bloom starts and the apple blossoms are pollinated, it takes several months to grow new apples. Assuming that they grow fruit at a speed proportional to apple trees on Earth, the earliest apples will ripen around the equivalent of late June or early July. Which means that in Auldrant’s northern hemisphere, the start of the new year is somewhere between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox.

I’m now going to take a sharp turn into lorecrafting. If this is where you want to hop off, hop off. I’m going to show my work, but I don’t have any more facts to share. This is speculation, albeit evidence-supported speculation.

I think that the Auldrantine year is synced up to the seasons of the northern hemisphere, but inverted from Earth’s year in our northern hemisphere. I think that the start of the new year is on or around the summer solstice. And I think that because we know that the months at the start and end of the year are named after Rem/Lorelei. While the final month of the year, Lorelei-Decan, breaks the scheme a little, it’s preceded by Rem-Redecan. The first month of the year is Rem-Decan. And the very middle of the year is Shadow-Redecan.

I think

I think

that the order of the months is representative of the cycle of summer and winter in the north. The new year starts on the longest day of the year in the month named for the aggregate fonic sentience of Light. The months cycle through to Shadow-Decan and Shadow-Redecan, representing the loss of daylight and long nights of winter. If the summer solstice in the north is the first day of Rem-Decan, the winter solstice is Shadow-Redecan 35. The rest of the year cycles back to longer days, finally ending on the day before the summer solstice. For anyone wanting to keep track of them, the equinoxes are on Gnome-Decan 18 and Undine-Redecan 52. Whichever season it is in the north, remember that it’s the opposite one in the south. Baticul, Sheridan, and Belkend have seasons that are inverted from Daath, Grand Chokmah, and Yulia City.

There is. one. small problem with this, though. Since we have a detailed calendar, we also have canon birthdays for the playable characters. And there’s a lot of symbolism in choosing a day to assign to a character. I haven’t run all of the party through the paces, but I can say straight away that the 11th month of the year, at least in the north, is not a time in which the days grow shorter and the veil between life and death seems thin. It would be in the south! But in the north, the days would be longer than the nights and life would rapidly return to the land. It’s a time when early flowers bloom and the last vestiges of winter are withering in the sun.

What I’m saying is that our favorite asshole Necromancer wouldn’t have his birthday in the spooky time before the end of the year as shadows grow long and the chill of winter creeps in. He’d have been born in his springtime. Instead of being associated with autumnal gloom and the first frosts, he probably has to sit through Peony handing him a newly-weaned rappiglet on his birthday every year after shoving a flower crown on his head. He might be running out of ways to politely say that he doesn't want a pet. He certainly would have to consider ways to impolitely say that he doesn't want a pet, and how much trouble he would be in if he said them to his emperor's face. The closest he'd get to being spooky on his birthday is joking with the other army officers about being the harbinger of Allergy Season. He's seen more springtimes than Professor Nebilim ever did. There's always fresh flowers at the sanctuary when he gets his Score read. She would probably appreciate that more than he ever does.

[valeriefauxnom]

As someone else who usually is writing the sort of random deep lore dives that nobody cares about, it's always a treat to see someone else doing the same thing!!

Speaking of volcanoes though, you're probably already aware but for everyone else out there, even the Abyss cast lampshades that little nonsensical bit of their world in skit 145...

Best Jade can do is go 'IDK the ~Sephiroth~' and that's funny. Even the writers were like 'shhh don't think about it, I already did and I don't have an answer'.

Ah, Abyss. Compared to most fictional worlds I've encountered out there, it truly does have a baffling degree of 'the writers were thinking about xyz beyond just the surface level' and other minute details in characters, huh? Whether it's politics or their magic system it's got a chunk of random facts, tidbits, and logic.

[glaucophane]

As part of my due diligence, I feel obligated to check in with a few other geologists that I know about the absolutely fucked state of plate tectonics on Auldrant. But I'm reasonably confident in saying that other volcanoes absolutely do exist. They have to. They may be dormant but they would have existed before Yulia and other Dawn Age people decided to float the planet's crust on a magic barrier. You can't have plate tectonics without volcanism goddamnit-

[valeriefauxnom]

I've kinda decided to just imagine the Sephiroth as a giant complicated straw network that can funnel things (be they matter or fonon crud) from above and below and the Mt. Zaleho volcano was just the one that was properly hooked up to the straw outflow for where the magma in the mantle goes and the other connections kinda got messed up and the other volcanoes don't have their magma straw.

Speaking of, then there's the question of ' if they floated the whole thing in the air didn't the 'diameter' of the planet just get larger and if so how was it completely covered by that smaller sphere's land? Also, are there records that left scientists very confused about this ancient record says the diameter of the planet is x but our records say y, was it just a miscalculation despite their tech generally being more advanced???

We know that Auldrant is, take some, around 300 million square kilometers (presumably in surface area?)

The Earth from my little googling says it's 510 million sq.km in surface area. So is the Earth is about 50% bigger than Auldrant, then, in surface area?

Abyss things. They get specific about the most random stuff. They were not afraid to say numbers, for better or worse.

[glaucophane]

He - or rather, the writers - are off by about 10 million square kilometers. I'm approximating using a sphere and not a proper oblate spheroid (gasp!) to calculate surface area, but the Famitsu guide gives us a planetary diameter of 11,470 kilometers. Divide by half, plug that number into good ol' A = 4πr^2, and you get 413,311,000 square kilometers. Auldrant is smaller than Earth, but not that much smaller.

Also according to the Famitsu guide, the Outer Lands were raised up by about 30 kilometers. That's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but unless the Sephiroth dividing line is actively pushing up the planet's atmosphere, the air is going to get thin. Really, really, lethally thin.

[valeriefauxnom]

Not me taking notes for how high the ground was raised because writing the part where they lower it was scary to me in a fic of mine and is totally not causing me to delay anything as I deliberated both how high it was raised and how fast it would be safe to lower... (thank you for that info).

Ahem. Anyways. I'm just glad you know this stuff because I, as a layman, do not.

But the scientists were really like a 'let's take the planet's crust and PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE', huh? Plus the atmosphere. Unless the humans of Auldrant are superhumanly good at breathing thin air like how some humans are in those high areas.

Just remember: when in doubt, blame ~fonons~. That's it, the third fonon supplements the naturally thin air to make it more palatable to the average human lungs!!! Uh-huh, cracked the code there.

Auldrant, Auldrant, Auldrant. Why are you like this?

[glaucophane]

The Auldrantine Calendar, Seasons, and Dates

Hi. I’m Grace. I occasionally post my wild-ass worldbuilding/lorecrafting hypotheses here. I’ve tapered off ever since I quit WoW, but Azeroth was not my first love. It’s probably not even my third or fourth. My first love – by which I mean the kind of strained love of someone you care deeply about even though they have got to get their personal life together – is Auldrant. This fuckin’ planet. I won’t blame it for how or why I pursued geosciences as my field of study, but my fascination with it grew as I learned more about earth sciences. I say “fascination” rather than “appreciation” because whenever I chase some detail around I find something that looks pretty dang accurate at a glance and horrifyingly wrong at the second and third.

And there’s quite a lot of detail to chase! Out of all of the settings of the Tales games, Auldrant has the most comprehensively-documented facts and figures. I’m drawing primarily from the Famitsu Perfect guide for this, but there’s still a ton of ingame lore that a dedicated fan can document. It’s not quite on the same level as The Elder Scrolls, but it’s much more detailed in its worldbuilding than pretty much any game in its series. The history of the world gets tied very heavily into the story, such that understanding at least the broad strokes is essential to understanding the plot of the game. I don’t disagree that it creates a bit of a barrier to a new player, but for anyone who wants to really immerse themselves into a constructed setting it’s got a lot to offer. And it’s all very consistent! I’m not going to get into it here, but the setting’s magic system is one of the hardest and most unforgiving in its internal consistencies.

One area that’s caused no small amount of consternation over the years is Auldrant’s calendar. We know exactly how long it is (765 days per year), how many months there are (13), the number and names of the days of the week (7, and they have a naming convention following modern Japanese day names), and the current year (ND 2018). We also know from the game’s opening narration that it has an axial tilt, because Yulia’s Score specifies that the Hod War lasts “for a full cycle of the seasons.” It’s also definitely a solar calendar, as the number of days on the calendar is the same as Auldrant’s orbital period. The planet’s orbital period is a cheeky pun on the publisher’s name (765 can be read as “na-mu-ko”, and Namco uses it in other places). Most of the time, it’s relegated to the little bit of trivia that one Auldrantine year is more than two Earth years long. If you do the math, Jade is a little over 73 Earth years old – something he’d probably use to bolster his Old Man shtick if he knew about it.

What we don’t get, however, is any context for seasonality or even important holidays. The new year just… starts. When the game opens up on ND2018 Rem-Decan 23, Remday, there’s no sense that it’s been a little over three weeks since New Year’s Day. There’s no leftover party decorations. I can’t recall any NPC dialogue about starting a new year, though TBF it can be really easy to miss talking to one NPC. And the location of Baticul itself is not very helpful if we want to gather environmental context clues. The city’s latitude is either just inside the tropics or just outside of it, and we don’t get a great map projection to make that determination. The only, and most important, context clue we have from Baticul is that it’s located south of the equator.

Fortunately, Luke gets yeeted into Auldrant’s northern hemisphere about 15 minutes into a new game. And that’s where our context clues start to get interesting!

Over the course of the next couple of hours, we learn 3 things that help us peg the month of Rem-Decan to a season. 1, the forest north of the Cheagle Woods burned down. 2, that the Fubras River – a continent-spanning river that would make our modern Nile look like a drainage ditch if it was real – is at its lowest point for the year. And finally 3, that apples are in season. Stick a pin in that last one, because it’s actually the most important data point.

The other two support that the northern half of Rugnica – the largest of the continents – is experiencing a dry season. Forests aren’t usually tinderboxes unless there hasn’t been any rain in a while. A river, and especially a giant one like the Fubras, being at its low point means that its tributaries aren’t being fed with either rainwater or meltwater. Dry seasons aren’t exclusive to summers, though low water levels might point to a lack of snowpack at the far edges of the Fubras’ watershed. Without a watershed map, though, that’s just speculation on my part.

What isn’t speculative is that apples are in season in this part of the world. Luke falls ass-over-teakettle into the game’s plot when he steals one by accident from a fruit seller. It’s specifically an apple, and specifically one that’s freshly-picked from a local orchard. And that’s how we know that Auldrant’s northern hemisphere is experiencing summer.

If you don’t follow, here’s the implications: apples require something called “chill hours” in order to bear fruit. Chill hours are however many hours that a particular cultivar of apple tree needs to spend between 0-7ºC (32-45ºF) in order to get the hormonal signals necessary to bloom. Without experiencing these chill hours, apples (and several other fruit) don’t produce blossoms and, therefore, fruit. Once the bloom starts and the apple blossoms are pollinated, it takes several months to grow new apples. Assuming that they grow fruit at a speed proportional to apple trees on Earth, the earliest apples will ripen around the equivalent of late June or early July. Which means that in Auldrant’s northern hemisphere, the start of the new year is somewhere between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox.

I’m now going to take a sharp turn into lorecrafting. If this is where you want to hop off, hop off. I’m going to show my work, but I don’t have any more facts to share. This is speculation, albeit evidence-supported speculation.

I think that the Auldrantine year is synced up to the seasons of the northern hemisphere, but inverted from Earth’s year in our northern hemisphere. I think that the start of the new year is on or around the summer solstice. And I think that because we know that the months at the start and end of the year are named after Rem/Lorelei. While the final month of the year, Lorelei-Decan, breaks the scheme a little, it’s preceded by Rem-Redecan. The first month of the year is Rem-Decan. And the very middle of the year is Shadow-Redecan.

I think

I think

that the order of the months is representative of the cycle of summer and winter in the north. The new year starts on the longest day of the year in the month named for the aggregate fonic sentience of Light. The months cycle through to Shadow-Decan and Shadow-Redecan, representing the loss of daylight and long nights of winter. If the summer solstice in the north is the first day of Rem-Decan, the winter solstice is Shadow-Redecan 35. The rest of the year cycles back to longer days, finally ending on the day before the summer solstice. For anyone wanting to keep track of them, the equinoxes are on Gnome-Decan 18 and Undine-Redecan 52. Whichever season it is in the north, remember that it’s the opposite one in the south. Baticul, Sheridan, and Belkend have seasons that are inverted from Daath, Grand Chokmah, and Yulia City.

There is. one. small problem with this, though. Since we have a detailed calendar, we also have canon birthdays for the playable characters. And there’s a lot of symbolism in choosing a day to assign to a character. I haven’t run all of the party through the paces, but I can say straight away that the 11th month of the year, at least in the north, is not a time in which the days grow shorter and the veil between life and death seems thin. It would be in the south! But in the north, the days would be longer than the nights and life would rapidly return to the land. It’s a time when early flowers bloom and the last vestiges of winter are withering in the sun.

What I’m saying is that our favorite asshole Necromancer wouldn’t have his birthday in the spooky time before the end of the year as shadows grow long and the chill of winter creeps in. He’d have been born in his springtime. Instead of being associated with autumnal gloom and the first frosts, he probably has to sit through Peony handing him a newly-weaned rappiglet on his birthday every year after shoving a flower crown on his head. He might be running out of ways to politely say that he doesn't want a pet. He certainly would have to consider ways to impolitely say that he doesn't want a pet, and how much trouble he would be in if he said them to his emperor's face. The closest he'd get to being spooky on his birthday is joking with the other army officers about being the harbinger of Allergy Season. He's seen more springtimes than Professor Nebilim ever did. There's always fresh flowers at the sanctuary when he gets his Score read. She would probably appreciate that more than he ever does.

[valeriefauxnom]

As someone else who usually is writing the sort of random deep lore dives that nobody cares about, it's always a treat to see someone else doing the same thing!!

Speaking of volcanoes though, you're probably already aware but for everyone else out there, even the Abyss cast lampshades that little nonsensical bit of their world in skit 145...

Best Jade can do is go 'IDK the ~Sephiroth~' and that's funny. Even the writers were like 'shhh don't think about it, I already did and I don't have an answer'.

Ah, Abyss. Compared to most fictional worlds I've encountered out there, it truly does have a baffling degree of 'the writers were thinking about xyz beyond just the surface level' and other minute details in characters, huh? Whether it's politics or their magic system it's got a chunk of random facts, tidbits, and logic.

[glaucophane]

As part of my due diligence, I feel obligated to check in with a few other geologists that I know about the absolutely fucked state of plate tectonics on Auldrant. But I'm reasonably confident in saying that other volcanoes absolutely do exist. They have to. They may be dormant but they would have existed before Yulia and other Dawn Age people decided to float the planet's crust on a magic barrier. You can't have plate tectonics without volcanism goddamnit-

[valeriefauxnom]

I've kinda decided to just imagine the Sephiroth as a giant complicated straw network that can funnel things (be they matter or fonon crud) from above and below and the Mt. Zaleho volcano was just the one that was properly hooked up to the straw outflow for where the magma in the mantle goes and the other connections kinda got messed up and the other volcanoes don't have their magma straw.

Speaking of, then there's the question of ' if they floated the whole thing in the air didn't the 'diameter' of the planet just get larger and if so how was it completely covered by that smaller sphere's land? Also, are there records that left scientists very confused about this ancient record says the diameter of the planet is x but our records say y, was it just a miscalculation despite their tech generally being more advanced???

We know that Auldrant is, take some, around 300 million square kilometers (presumably in surface area?)

The Earth from my little googling says it's 510 million sq.km in surface area. So is the Earth is about 50% bigger than Auldrant, then, in surface area?

Abyss things. They get specific about the most random stuff. They were not afraid to say numbers, for better or worse.

[glaucophane]

The Auldrantine Calendar, Seasons, and Dates

Hi. I’m Grace. I occasionally post my wild-ass worldbuilding/lorecrafting hypotheses here. I’ve tapered off ever since I quit WoW, but Azeroth was not my first love. It’s probably not even my third or fourth. My first love – by which I mean the kind of strained love of someone you care deeply about even though they have got to get their personal life together – is Auldrant. This fuckin’ planet. I won’t blame it for how or why I pursued geosciences as my field of study, but my fascination with it grew as I learned more about earth sciences. I say “fascination” rather than “appreciation” because whenever I chase some detail around I find something that looks pretty dang accurate at a glance and horrifyingly wrong at the second and third.

And there’s quite a lot of detail to chase! Out of all of the settings of the Tales games, Auldrant has the most comprehensively-documented facts and figures. I’m drawing primarily from the Famitsu Perfect guide for this, but there’s still a ton of ingame lore that a dedicated fan can document. It’s not quite on the same level as The Elder Scrolls, but it’s much more detailed in its worldbuilding than pretty much any game in its series. The history of the world gets tied very heavily into the story, such that understanding at least the broad strokes is essential to understanding the plot of the game. I don’t disagree that it creates a bit of a barrier to a new player, but for anyone who wants to really immerse themselves into a constructed setting it’s got a lot to offer. And it’s all very consistent! I’m not going to get into it here, but the setting’s magic system is one of the hardest and most unforgiving in its internal consistencies.

One area that’s caused no small amount of consternation over the years is Auldrant’s calendar. We know exactly how long it is (765 days per year), how many months there are (13), the number and names of the days of the week (7, and they have a naming convention following modern Japanese day names), and the current year (ND 2018). We also know from the game’s opening narration that it has an axial tilt, because Yulia’s Score specifies that the Hod War lasts “for a full cycle of the seasons.” It’s also definitely a solar calendar, as the number of days on the calendar is the same as Auldrant’s orbital period. The planet’s orbital period is a cheeky pun on the publisher’s name (765 can be read as “na-mu-ko”, and Namco uses it in other places). Most of the time, it’s relegated to the little bit of trivia that one Auldrantine year is more than two Earth years long. If you do the math, Jade is a little over 73 Earth years old – something he’d probably use to bolster his Old Man shtick if he knew about it.

What we don’t get, however, is any context for seasonality or even important holidays. The new year just… starts. When the game opens up on ND2018 Rem-Decan 23, Remday, there’s no sense that it’s been a little over three weeks since New Year’s Day. There’s no leftover party decorations. I can’t recall any NPC dialogue about starting a new year, though TBF it can be really easy to miss talking to one NPC. And the location of Baticul itself is not very helpful if we want to gather environmental context clues. The city’s latitude is either just inside the tropics or just outside of it, and we don’t get a great map projection to make that determination. The only, and most important, context clue we have from Baticul is that it’s located south of the equator.

Fortunately, Luke gets yeeted into Auldrant’s northern hemisphere about 15 minutes into a new game. And that’s where our context clues start to get interesting!

Over the course of the next couple of hours, we learn 3 things that help us peg the month of Rem-Decan to a season. 1, the forest north of the Cheagle Woods burned down. 2, that the Fubras River – a continent-spanning river that would make our modern Nile look like a drainage ditch if it was real – is at its lowest point for the year. And finally 3, that apples are in season. Stick a pin in that last one, because it’s actually the most important data point.

The other two support that the northern half of Rugnica – the largest of the continents – is experiencing a dry season. Forests aren’t usually tinderboxes unless there hasn’t been any rain in a while. A river, and especially a giant one like the Fubras, being at its low point means that its tributaries aren’t being fed with either rainwater or meltwater. Dry seasons aren’t exclusive to summers, though low water levels might point to a lack of snowpack at the far edges of the Fubras’ watershed. Without a watershed map, though, that’s just speculation on my part.

What isn’t speculative is that apples are in season in this part of the world. Luke falls ass-over-teakettle into the game’s plot when he steals one by accident from a fruit seller. It’s specifically an apple, and specifically one that’s freshly-picked from a local orchard. And that’s how we know that Auldrant’s northern hemisphere is experiencing summer.

If you don’t follow, here’s the implications: apples require something called “chill hours” in order to bear fruit. Chill hours are however many hours that a particular cultivar of apple tree needs to spend between 0-7ºC (32-45ºF) in order to get the hormonal signals necessary to bloom. Without experiencing these chill hours, apples (and several other fruit) don’t produce blossoms and, therefore, fruit. Once the bloom starts and the apple blossoms are pollinated, it takes several months to grow new apples. Assuming that they grow fruit at a speed proportional to apple trees on Earth, the earliest apples will ripen around the equivalent of late June or early July. Which means that in Auldrant’s northern hemisphere, the start of the new year is somewhere between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox.

I’m now going to take a sharp turn into lorecrafting. If this is where you want to hop off, hop off. I’m going to show my work, but I don’t have any more facts to share. This is speculation, albeit evidence-supported speculation.

I think that the Auldrantine year is synced up to the seasons of the northern hemisphere, but inverted from Earth’s year in our northern hemisphere. I think that the start of the new year is on or around the summer solstice. And I think that because we know that the months at the start and end of the year are named after Rem/Lorelei. While the final month of the year, Lorelei-Decan, breaks the scheme a little, it’s preceded by Rem-Redecan. The first month of the year is Rem-Decan. And the very middle of the year is Shadow-Redecan.

I think

I think

that the order of the months is representative of the cycle of summer and winter in the north. The new year starts on the longest day of the year in the month named for the aggregate fonic sentience of Light. The months cycle through to Shadow-Decan and Shadow-Redecan, representing the loss of daylight and long nights of winter. If the summer solstice in the north is the first day of Rem-Decan, the winter solstice is Shadow-Redecan 35. The rest of the year cycles back to longer days, finally ending on the day before the summer solstice. For anyone wanting to keep track of them, the equinoxes are on Gnome-Decan 18 and Undine-Redecan 52. Whichever season it is in the north, remember that it’s the opposite one in the south. Baticul, Sheridan, and Belkend have seasons that are inverted from Daath, Grand Chokmah, and Yulia City.

There is. one. small problem with this, though. Since we have a detailed calendar, we also have canon birthdays for the playable characters. And there’s a lot of symbolism in choosing a day to assign to a character. I haven’t run all of the party through the paces, but I can say straight away that the 11th month of the year, at least in the north, is not a time in which the days grow shorter and the veil between life and death seems thin. It would be in the south! But in the north, the days would be longer than the nights and life would rapidly return to the land. It’s a time when early flowers bloom and the last vestiges of winter are withering in the sun.

What I’m saying is that our favorite asshole Necromancer wouldn’t have his birthday in the spooky time before the end of the year as shadows grow long and the chill of winter creeps in. He’d have been born in his springtime. Instead of being associated with autumnal gloom and the first frosts, he probably has to sit through Peony handing him a newly-weaned rappiglet on his birthday every year after shoving a flower crown on his head. He might be running out of ways to politely say that he doesn't want a pet. He certainly would have to consider ways to impolitely say that he doesn't want a pet, and how much trouble he would be in if he said them to his emperor's face. The closest he'd get to being spooky on his birthday is joking with the other army officers about being the harbinger of Allergy Season. He's seen more springtimes than Professor Nebilim ever did. There's always fresh flowers at the sanctuary when he gets his Score read. She would probably appreciate that more than he ever does.

[valeriefauxnom]

As someone else who usually is writing the sort of random deep lore dives that nobody cares about, it's always a treat to see someone else doing the same thing!!

Speaking of volcanoes though, you're probably already aware but for everyone else out there, even the Abyss cast lampshades that little nonsensical bit of their world in skit 145...

Best Jade can do is go 'IDK the ~Sephiroth~' and that's funny. Even the writers were like 'shhh don't think about it, I already did and I don't have an answer'.

Ah, Abyss. Compared to most fictional worlds I've encountered out there, it truly does have a baffling degree of 'the writers were thinking about xyz beyond just the surface level' and other minute details in characters, huh? Whether it's politics or their magic system it's got a chunk of random facts, tidbits, and logic.

[valeriefauxnom]

I have never encountered a character that so defied any attempt to categorize him into a DnD style alignment. Yes, Dungeons and Dragons' alignment chart has already been well-explored to have its flaws, but many characters still are able to be classed relatively easy. Even when there are major questions, it's usually only on one axis people have questions about (ex, 'is Guy lawful or chaotic?'). Jade personally runs rings around the alignment chart, depending on how you view him, what time period you look at him, and how inherently you believe some of his traits are intrinsic to him no matter how he behaves.

While I personally might discard some alignments here, there are a startling number of alignments one could argue for Jade. Do you stress the fact that he has a title called "Lawman" and is a member of a military to say he is lawful? Do you look at his unrepentant desire to spread chaos for the lolz as indicative of a chaotic bent? Do you think he merely has put a rein on his evil tendencies to act better even if it still is his 'natural' inclination? Has he transcended to neutral or good as he has aged and has regrets?

So, I turn to you, the Tales of the Abyss community:

If you had to give Jade Curtiss an alignment, what would you choose?

(For those unaware of DnD alignments and still wanting to partake, the wikipedia page here provides a brief overview, starting at 'axes')

What alignment is Jade Curtiss?

Lawful Good

Neutral Good

Chaotic Good

Lawful Neutral

True Neutral

Chaotic Neutral

Lawful Evil

Neutral Evil

Chaotic Evil

No opinion/no clue/'it's too complicated'/Results

Voting ended onJun 21

[valeriefauxnom]

These results are both interesting and not surprising to me.

Overall, 'chaotic' took a strong lead here in general, with chaotic options taking the biggest portion of their category. True Neutral took a surprisingly large share, as well!

Personally, I think I've decided to roughly categorize Jade like this throughout his life:

-Neutral Evil for childhood (blatant disregard of others, their lives, but generally without a particular code or desire for mindless destruction behind it. He just wanted his teacher back)

and, when it comes to the actual game...

Lawful Neutral was my vote.

Why? I think, overall, my impression of Jade is someone who, in his regret, has tried to ground himself with 'rules'. "Fomicry is bad, because I forbid it". He's anchored his morality to sentiments like that, plus other people he has determined are 'better' than he is. Peony, as a big one, is sort of a living chain to keep Jade in line. He's put his trust in that, and is generally trying to tie himself to service of the Empire through the military to further ground himself in standards and rules. And orders so that he is inherently limited for what he can do and how. I think he fears that if he's completely left to his own devices, he naturally tends to stray to 'bad' decisions.

As for why not chaos, I think ultimately I put more weight on things like the above than his means of entertainment. He jokes around and trolls, to be sure, as we all know and love, but ultimately that is just a funny little trolling to him instead of his moral outlook on whether he should ultimately follow a creed.

As for the neutral part, I'm with the most of you. Jade has graduated from his questionably moral childhood, but he's not actually crossed the barrier to 'good'.

That being said, I can definitely see the arguments for true neutral or even chaotic neutral!

As a rapid fire last thought, I think I'd sort the party like this:

LG - Natalia (loves her law and order as a princess, seeks to better the lives of her people)

NG- Luke (not particularly concerned about order or chaos, but just trying his best to save and protect.)

(Really the party reactions here are telling overall to where I'm coming from, I think:)

Luke wanted to continue to talk it out and feels like they did wrong, Guy dismisses it as a 'pressing need' thing, Natalia/Ion also don't like it, Tear/Jade/Anise are with Guy)

LN - Jade (as described above), Tear(??)

TN - Guy, Asch (the Very Morally Complicated. Guy tends good and maybe slightly lawful as a general person, but he still shows shades of darker colors when it comes to making the actual hard moral decisions, even later game. His willingness to, say, possibly assassinate multiple heads of state despite this being a Very Important Peace Meeting or encourage Luke to run for the hills and prioritize his own life at the possible cost of literally everything else on Auldrant makes me wonder. I think he generally tries to be a 'good person', but when it comes to his outlook on life, it's mostly a case-by-case basis with a strong lens of 'how does this affect me or the people I care about?' coloring his decisions.

Asch is also pretty muddy morally and is mostly just following the rhythm of what his heart says is right come game time for good or evil.)

CN - Anise (Anise and Guy are actually fairly similar in principle, since their main concern is protecting those they care about and little else even if they aren't personally malicious to the average person, but Anise goes a bit further when it comes to her willingness to break Da Rulez that be in pursuit of her aims. Guy mostly chills with the law whenever he's not decided to do something, Anise can go out of her way to break the rules to make money as a tourist guide in Daath during the timeskip)

So, yeah. Abyss party is also playing alignment darts and are pretty different people.

[valeriefauxnom]

Not me on my playthrough of Tales of the Abyss years ago playing so crudely and so brute-forcing it (seldom using FoFs, never really touching overlimit or mystic artes) that I never realized that Asch is programmed to apparently counter with a mystic arte before you and thus instakill Luke if you try to use one while he's not like up in the air or something.

The one time where playing dumbly actually makes fights easier? Or, at least, stops a wipe?

Succeeding through sheer incompetence. I've done it!

[valeriefauxnom]

I have never encountered a character that so defied any attempt to categorize him into a DnD style alignment. Yes, Dungeons and Dragons' alignment chart has already been well-explored to have its flaws, but many characters still are able to be classed relatively easy. Even when there are major questions, it's usually only on one axis people have questions about (ex, 'is Guy lawful or chaotic?'). Jade personally runs rings around the alignment chart, depending on how you view him, what time period you look at him, and how inherently you believe some of his traits are intrinsic to him no matter how he behaves.

While I personally might discard some alignments here, there are a startling number of alignments one could argue for Jade. Do you stress the fact that he has a title called "Lawman" and is a member of a military to say he is lawful? Do you look at his unrepentant desire to spread chaos for the lolz as indicative of a chaotic bent? Do you think he merely has put a rein on his evil tendencies to act better even if it still is his 'natural' inclination? Has he transcended to neutral or good as he has aged and has regrets?

So, I turn to you, the Tales of the Abyss community:

If you had to give Jade Curtiss an alignment, what would you choose?

(For those unaware of DnD alignments and still wanting to partake, the wikipedia page here provides a brief overview, starting at 'axes')

What alignment is Jade Curtiss?

Lawful Good

Neutral Good

Chaotic Good

Lawful Neutral

True Neutral

Chaotic Neutral

Lawful Evil

Neutral Evil

Chaotic Evil

No opinion/no clue/'it's too complicated'/Results

Voting ended onJun 21

[valeriefauxnom]

Never Forget What They Took From Us

I'll be honest, I've never really liked Gala Chelle's design.

The plum-like purple is aleady not a very favored shade of my favorite color, and the scarlet red does not mesh well with it my opinion. The partial curls are also kinda off about it. The outfit is also shockingly revealing - she has literally no back on the 'dress' and still has perhaps the most egregious sideboobs in Dragalia. Then we have the half leggings and all that, which really just feels like the designers were more just designing her for sex appeal over anything else.

In fact, it's almost like having an apron on and almost nothing else-

NO LEONIDAS, GET OUT OF HERE-

Ahem.

So when I see that instead of that, we could have had this A design to the left:

It's almost maddening how much better it fits.

Chelle's whole 'argument' regarding why she's wearing these clothes is this:

She argues that this is purely 'function' and style, while her actual dress isn't functional at all, much less for travel. Even her disguise as a rich merchant is at odds with its design. I wonder if they were wanting to use her massive skirt as like the means by which she smuggles her gun, because that would at least be something functional about it... but even that doesn't seem to be the case.

She was keeping it in a bag.

Really, its only function is enraging Leif, which, to be fair, is a Chelle thing to do, but I imagine there are other ways to do this and in better style.

This is where the A design checks all boxes. That is 'rich merchant' look, classy and more fit for travel as she (pretends to) carries on the business of the family. It's easy to add additional layers to help herself against upcoming frigid climate, and is warmer to start with. The color scheme is a coherent purple-white.

Also the hat is cute.

This has been me raging against the much better design we could have gotten for Chelle that actually works. Thank you for tuning in to this message.