When the Fantasy Is Final, XIVth Edition

You are invited to meddle in the affairs of a major political power. These events with extremely serious ramifications for global politics include gardening, animal herding, mountain climbing, and a bake-off.

Night City travels diagonally through time and fuses with a small town in Arizona.

An uplifting Hollywood movie pop-gospel song about unity plays over a montage of you and your friends building a bomb.

You down a suspiciously beaver-themed energy drink and briefly go super saiyan.

The temporally anomalous catboy dad deepthroats two scoops of nothing-flavored ice cream in an attempt to ease the tension at his work friend's family reunion. Somehow, this actually achieves the desired effect.

An AI-generated ghost attempts to burn all of the world's people and resources to extend the life of their metaverse Disneyland for other AI-generated ghosts. In response, you proceed to fight a robotic biblically-accurate angel inside their mind palace.

Step 1 - Have a character that can access the Malestrom Barracks in Limsa Lominsa. If you are using CRIMES it can be any character then you may load in the one you need. I have Durafein enlisted in Malestrom for this reason! Step 2 - stand here.

Note: If your squad is meandering around just make sure you hide them with the gpose character display settings. Sometimes one of them will take your precious real estate!

Step 3 - Ensure it's daytime so the light is shining through. The best light imho is around 6am Eorzean time. But any daytime works well for this. If you're not using CRIMES you may have to stand around and wait. It's worth it though! Step 4 - When the light is right strike a pose and get into gpose!

Note: If you're in vanilla make SURE you have "stop time/weather" checked or you may have a bad time! You can do that by hitting the 5th icon on the right at the top of your gpose window. It should have an image of a clock and a sun with a lock beneath them.

Step 5 - Zoom in and rotate 90 degrees or so! Sometimes I do 120 but you get the idea. I usually refine this a bit with the CRIMES camera.

Ta-da! You have a super fast portrait! Notes: You can get your character to look at the camera by selecting the "Track Camera" (second eyeball icon) under "Motion Settings" (which is the walking icon just beneath lighting settings) I literally don't touch the gpose lighting settings for these because they're meant to be fast.

I feel like anything but a full Zenos return is really out-of-character poor writing on the writers part, and I’m not even a huge Zenos fan. Like it’s not copium just using my eyes and reading what has been given to us as players.

The amount of set up for Zenos to return again, not as our rival but as an ally (maybe atleast to WoL), honestly makes me put no stock into even thinking of him not coming back. Like to not follow through on three (3) (at minimum!!) expansions repeatedly showing us this depth to his character as not just a villain but a similar adventurer archetype as us, to give us repeated twisted parallels of our notoriety (see WoL being awed by Eorzeans - Zenos being awed by Garleans, both renowned for achievements and prowess), to build up how he too is experiencing an odd past soup fusion in some capacity (echo - whatever is going on with Zenos’ visions), and then to mount it with him coming to a realization of how his mirror (us) deal with our similar drive in a way that is fulfilling because it is impactful would be so disappointing and honestly jarring. It also follows the general pattern of their writing to build up an “evil” character until they can provide a fulfilling “redemption” (Emet the obvious one, but also Gaius, Ysayle/all the dravanians, Yotsuyu, Ilberd, Hermes/Fandaniel AND Asahi, Lahabrea, Jullus, etc etc etc). The only fulfilling redemption with the way Zenos has been built is him discovering a cause that brings meaning to the longing he and us share, which very well could end in him sacrificing himself for it but regardless it does have to be there.

Not to mention the sheer merchandizing of him. Respectfully to the teams general fan service, they don’t produce merch (or THAT AMOUNT) for characters who are just beloved but no longer story relevant + the amount of art featuring him for seemingly no reason. It’s giving a Zuko level of prep in which they foresee fans wanting to look back at “evil pre redemption” Zenos in angst nostalgia while knowing he will go on to be main cast.

Another 2021 repaint

he was TOTALLY duskwight?!?!?

c'mon there are now four wildwood scions (all with white hair!) and no duskwight main characters and unrealistic skin tones are COOL and SEXY

We were ROBBED

and yeah i know ishgardian elezen are technically like a separate clan that migrated before the split, but the game uses wildwood models for most of ishgard. but ysayle has a duskwight model. how interesting would it have been if a big part of ishgard's class division and closed borders was also cause of duskwight leaving gridania over time because racism and settling in rural coerthas.