what else ought there be?

new house! 🏚️

thought about zenos recently. the "he doesn't know about sex he's exclusively fightsexual" takes are genuinely absurd and i'm still astounded to see it when endwalker should have buried those deep in the ground. in his final encounter with the wol he lays out in crystal clear terms that he wants more than anything to connect & "this is the sole pleasure i have to share". he needs to push the boundaries of his body and existence to their absolute limits to settle his psyche because his history and background are so deeply enmeshed with violence and he has little access to his own interiority (note his use of the language of performance in stormblood). he is also restricted by the game's mechanics to battle as his only means of connection with the wol who also has no interiority for mechanical reasons; the one time the narrative lets him slip out of that boundary by hijacking the wol's body (and arguably inviting reciprocal violation of his own body) it is swiftly resolved and never brought up again. but it's still there as a new and different attempt for him to seek connection, and while i think labeling it as a pure allegory for sexual assault is lazy and reductive, the intimacy of the act as an assault on the wol's physical agency opens the door even wider for a more complex read of his character.

anywayyyy. loons finished!