my wol best wol

I’ve always had a soft spot for WoLs and WoL-adjacent characters, and I love to see how different people interpret the role of WoL and fine-tune it to fit their characters. So, I’d like to offer my fellow writers some specific questions that I’ve asked myself about my own WoL in the form of an ask game!

January’s ko-fi sketch batch! Characters belong to these kind tippers:

@whenarrowssing, @euphies-corner, @shroudblessings, @fashion-noodle, @erin, @walfs, @evirstar, @dantertf,  @princemarxfucker, @ahlis-xiv, @ithums, @zurri-xiv, @empyreal-minuet, @tiramisuki

I’m happy to colour your sketches for a few coffees too, just hit me up ;3

I’m planning to open up a ko-fi valentines day couple sketch batch exclusively for my patrons in the coming days, and I’ll be announcing the next public sketch batch sometime after.

Thanks for your trialling this with me everyone, it was so fun, let’s do another soon!!

Any diaspora person of color can see that there are racist elements in Stormblood (from a perspective outside the meta) and even if SE was going to implement a playable Garlean race it just wouldn’t be realistic without a ton of effort on their part to alter the story for garlean PCs compared to othe PCs (which, as we know, is not something they like to do) so I really don’t see the point in arguing for one.

And look - playing a Garlean defector could be fun. Having a game explore how a character unlearns racist and imperialistic ideologies for the sake of the greater good would be interesting. That being said, if you’re going to RP as a Garlean, and especially if you’re RPing as a Garlean who hasn’t defected, don’t expect players of color to do the emotional labor of dealing with you and your character. Incase you forgot, like you, we play videogames to have fun away from the stress of life, and unlike you, that includes the major and microaggressive racism we have to deal with on the daily. Especially when you consider that people of color are actually to this day still called ‘savages’ by racists. If you’re going to play a Garlean character, it’s your responsibility to make the effort to do so in a way that doesn’t cause harm to players of color you may interact with. And if that includes these players of color not wanting to be anywhere near your character, you’re just going to have to accept it.

things that are NOT okay: diminishing what the story is trying to convey, and ignoring the very obvious parallel of garlemald/fascism in effort to diminish the ramifications of the very clearly Bad Ideals of people like Varis. Stories are a way to explore real life- and often are way to explore real events in a fictional matter where ‘nobody is really getting hurt’ But that doesn’t diminish the fact that other rpers are real people that may find such things difficult to deal with due to the fact they actively deal with this shit in real life. that doesn’t give people the excuse to shit on garlean roleplayers but that does not mean people should stick their fingers in their ears and ignore other PEOPLE exploring the story and what it means to them. 

you can like Garlemald. You can like playing Garlean characters. that doesn’t make you a nazi or otherwise (unless you are using that as a way to shit on people oocly, and or using it icly to shit on people in an effort/excuse to be racist icly to get off oocly. that’s not cool. but i think we all should know that by now? that those people are not good and if you do that you’re not a good person.) but it also doesn’t make the story any less than what it is trying to convey just because you don’t want it too.