rambling asides

ffxiv: stormblood (naoki yoshida + natsuko ishikawa + banri oda + various for square-enix, 2017).

if all of us carried our load dull and young and bright and old but thieves and liars rule everything we know and thieves and liars rule everything that grows

all we want is what we're owed we've of us carried this load fucking high and awful low we've all of us carried this load all we want is what we're owed we've of us carried this load fucking high and awful low we've all of us carried this load

god we've tried how much we've tried drunk and high we've seen the sun rise many sleepless nights we've seen the sun collapsed on everything it's only love that's worth to sing these bells are broke but still they ring love and love's the only thing shut up a while the birds are singing god we've tried how much we've tried drunk and high we've seen the sun rise many sleepless nights we've seen the sun on top of everything love is all that's worth to sing we're deep in it and still we bring the bells are broke but still they ring the sun on top of everything

lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down (lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down)

mechanically, it introduced two vital quality of life improvements (a job gauge and role actions) and two beloved jobs (red mage and samurai); launching at the then-highest height of the game's popularity, it also took nigh-on months for its infrastructure to recover from the unexpected, staggering weight of an energized, eager playerbase ready to tear its servers apart doing everything, everywhere, everywhen. stb at launch thus often struggled to even allow the most enthusiastic players to interact with its narrative, much less progress it, without latency-induced glitches bringing the whole machine literally crashing down on their characters' heads. for months.

it was a hardening, learning experience for square-enix creative business unit 3 - but learn the lessons they did. the game would never again be brought to its knees by server stress and latency errors until the completely unanticipated and unpredictable explosion of new players arriving upon endwalker's release, amid a global pandemic of unprecedented impact and the extremely unexpected, public, and catastrophically implosion of its closest rival, world of warcraft, and the equally public sudden turn many of that game's largest streamers took towards actual genuine curiosity in what ffxiv had to offer.

but the arc of history curves without mercy, or consideration for the weight of events in the moment, and in the moment, stb's launch was a messy, misery-inducing, frustrating disaster. a recipe for a disgruntled, uncharitable player response to what they were about to find waiting for them - an equally potentially dispiriting, grimy, genuinely ugly story about compromise, vengeance, diaspora, empire, and revolution, where no one involved came off looking great, even when they came off to the people around them like heroes.

it was a hard about-face, and a dirty reversal, from the preceding expansion and its approach to its own themes - themes that were not ostensibly so different, but that were handled so opposite that the similarities were far less important to the experience overall. heavensward was a critical and commercial success; a reheated, simplified retread of the plot of final fantasy xii wrapped in a container of faux-european trappings and trad-fantasy cliches of elves and dragons, it was straightforward fare whose pulpy explicability and easy moral decisions left ample room for the dungeon and setting designers to run riot and steal the show, and steal the show they did. the imaginative heights of their ambition have yet to be matched in all the expansions since, and not for lack of trying or lack of success - but the journey the players took in heavensward mattered far more than the decisions that drove them onward along it, in the end, and what a journey it was. fighting their way from the snow-choked waste of the coerthas highlands upwards, ever up and up and upwards, through the dravanian mountains and the literal islands in the sky over abalathia's spine, deep into the churning mists above the great mountain of sohm al, and finally and most startlingly into the hidden floating city of allagan magitechnology azys lla itself, players who pushed themselves forward with an eager desire to see what happened next would never fail to find themselves greeted with one literally escalating surprise after another. the stakes, thus, carried an import as cosmic as they deliberately looked. never mind that the choices were easy (do you tell the dragons they need to make nice with the elves and learn to let go of their immortality-induced constantly-present grief and rage over the elves literally greedily devouring their flesh for power and stealing their eyes because "it was thousands of years ago, my dudes, the elves these days don't even know it happened anymore", and do you tell the elves they need to stop fighting the dragons because surprise, it's their fault, and they have to stop trying to Make Ishgard Great Again, and by the way they all have some small percent of dragon blood in them and are thus technically going to eventually one day just all be overrun from within by dragons anyway? we just don't know, everybody on both sides makes such great and difficult points); they felt world-altering, anyway, because the world was literally altering with every step they took along the way of making it. thus, to its thematic concerns of revenge, restitution, and social revolution - heavensward's primary patch answered the problem of how to resolve them satisfactorily by closing with a confrontation with a god. later, concluding patches complicated this picture some, but ultimately not by much. and it was, undeniably, really goddamned cool. players felt like they'd won something miraculous - literally so.

and then the leadup to stormblood began, and things went off-piste almost immediately. the easy answers went very rapidly out the window. past decisions - past heroics - the player may or may not have even remembered participating in, as part of the plot of a realm reborn, came back as jarring, atonal echoes. old allies showed up in uncertain allegiances, hiding dubious secrets. and then -

stormblood is a story drenched in corpse-runoff, a story whose destiny is written in the entrails of bitter, irreconcilable, but confrontational, rage. there is no escaping facing the moral of the story that rips open the gates of the patch to follow - it may be that the pile of innocent dead that serve as a new, horrifying god's birth caul didn't have to happen, but - despite the arguments that many comfort themselves with, both in and out of the game - it is not so easy to say that the blame lies on the actions of the man whose despair and desire for, finally - as the saying goes - liberty or death drove him to orchestrate it occurring, in front of literally everyone whose decisions in all the years prior could have made it unnecessary. they could have taken action. they could have done what his actions ultimately spurred them to do at any time before then. they didn't. it wasn't important enough to try.

and the result: two ancient forces of vengeance and destruction, driven by their creators' pure, desperate desire to end an existential threat clash in the skies - for to stop such a god, something that can wrestle it to a standstill must be unleashed, and so, beneath the wreckage of a warzone, an ancient weapon is unearthed - older than even the allagans themselves, a weapon that chased the very dragons (from the last expansion, remember them?) themselves across the stars before falling dormant beneath the earth, a machine of such horrible strength and indestructibility it could sleep through even the scourging of the world above it that narratively bridged the time between the original ffxiv's 1.0 release and a realm reborn - and, whether intentionally or not, in that same gesture, the entire weight of the last expansion is reframed in this "omega" weapon's scuttling shape, and flung into conversation with this new embodiment of the cycle of violence and vengeance.

and these literal representations of hate and destruction, unleashed, bleed each other and burn the earth, and brawl some more - and when they are done, the world left behind is an irreparable wound, scarred and pierced by the glaring precision of their bright, bright rage.

and through these holes is where the players found themselves told to go - into old grudges, into secret scars, into promises broken and dreams perverted, into the wounds of the world, into dirt and blood and hell.

what followed in the wake of that staggering prologue was a story pitched at grindhouse cinema-inspired levels of bloody frenzy and hysteria and also deeply ironic comedy in amongst its confrontation with the grisly particulars of what it means to be at war with an occupying oppressive government - whether it could ever more than laughingly call itself a "war" at all.

in keeping with the grindhouse and pink film inspirations at its core, the focal characters on both sides of the conflict were mostly women, too. the mixed-race white-passing diaspora activist pseudo-protagonist who'd spent her entire life hiding in someone else's identity and life to protect herself and overcompensating in the face of her homeland's oppression out of guilt that she'd run away and that she wasn't even sure who she was supposed to be to the world or herself to begin with; the wandering elf adventurer girl along for the ride out of friendship and her own burning desire to right wrongs wherever she found them, driven by the memory of her grandfather's death saving the world at the end of ffxiv 1.0 and a simmering dissatisfaction that for all her best efforts people kept saving her when she needed to save them; the woman whose own family sold her into sexual service, searching for something, anything, to satisfy the gnawing disgust in her belly when she tried to imagine having desires of her own, and who found it in the chance to turn that mistreatment around on those who'd never even considered her as their own to begin with, by working for the very empire that ruled over them all; the woman who was once the child of collaborators, who watched them die in front of her and swore that one day she'd redeem their deaths and vindicate their choices to those who'd scorned them, and found herself unable to turn back from the path she'd taken once she'd pledged herself to change the system from the inside; the princess beneath the sea who hid her true self even from her subjects, and whose cowardice led her own body double to become twisted by malevolent influence into a monster in her stead, and now found herself forced to perform in truth a role she only meant to use as an escape; the gentle, but sweetly murderous young leader of a foraging tribe of nomads, and the two serenely combative tribe leaders, one male and one female, that stood in contrasting enthusiastic competition to her, convinced that their internecine conflict was more interesting than the trials and potential annihilation of their nearby neighbors - these were the central figures of the expansion, refracting its themes in a kaleidoscopic throb.

mostly women, of course - there was of course the erstwhile heir to the lordship of one of the countries overrun by the empire, a thoughtfully impish but unsteady leader of men with a tactical mien and a pensive bearing to him straight out of the romance of the three kingdoms or water margin; the aforementioned leader of a nomadic tribe of the steppe, an arrogant, broad-shouldered mountain of a man ruthless in his ambition but pathetically lonely and yearning for love beneath his sharp-eyed maneuvers; and lastly the ultimate antagonist, the depressed, lonely, sociopathic heir to said empire's throne, deprived of basically any meaningful relationships save those he'd constructed through homicidal violence, who was alive for a worthy fight and a worthy fight alone and upon finally finding it in the player character would propose marriage and friendship and a fight to the certain death more or less in the same breath.

climbing his way to the end of the expansion upon a throne of corpses, waiting there with anticipation in a field of incongruously beautiful flowers, he stood finally in the player's way as a living test of whether the player understood all that came before - all the true implications of what it meant to choose violence as an answer to a problem. of whether they understood why to choose violence. when to choose it. and when not to, by contrast - but most importantly, when to forget their concerns about if they should and put aside whether it's time to ask that question anymore, to fight because the fight is here, the fight is now, and the fight is the only answer left.

there was no innocence in the decision - no point where it felt like the game had vindicated his death at the player's hand save by his own actions. there was no voice of wisdom centuries old encouraging this, saying this would set things finally right. and in the end he took his own life, his satisfaction his own. there was no moment where the decisions were easily made for the player to feel like they were the pure will of the universe, righting a cosmic wrong. just whether they needed to strike the final blow to make the victory everyone else had fought for, bled for, died for, real to themselves - or real enough, such as these things go, in the violent delight that comprises the appeal of mainstream video games.

and as his corpse cooled in a bed of flowers, the expansion ended, and it sank in - that they had won. that whatever it felt like, this was victory, today. no wounds healed, no scars sealed. just something terrible put in a shallow grave.

does that sound like something the people who'd "beaten" heavensward wanted to play? you're more contrarian than i if you think they'd take to that conclusion well, under the circumstances of its release especially. it's no wonder that they hated it - hate it still, many of them.

i, on the other hand, playing it as i did in 2020, hunched in a room to myself as i tried vainly to keep to quarantine procedures even my own government refused to vindicate, living in a world riddled by plague and ruled by monstrosities who promised nothing and provided less -

i needed it, to remind me that faltering is human, and fighting sublime. that dreams left to fade down to embers are not yet ash, even as the choices made without them taste like it on the tongue, and even blood that feels like it runs only cold may, still, one day burn once more.

Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.

But then I got sicker.  And it turned out I had cancer.

Burkitt’s lymphoma, stage 4a. It had spread into my brain and spinal column. 90% cure rate, but I needed nine months of chemo - and not the outpatient chemo, nope, talking multiple week stays per round of the magrath protocol.  Drugs were about 10k an IV bag.  I was unemployed.  And there were complications.

Thankfully I live in a country with universal healthcare.   And it didn’t cost me a goddamn cent to save my life.  I’m now officially past the five year mark to move me from “remission” to “Cured”.

I’ve lived in a universal healthcare country my entire life. And I’ve seen the US system in action.  Your system is fucked. Straight up fucked. You’ve got fucking Dickensian shit going on there, people dying on streets from preventable causes or ending up broke for breaking a hip.   Your health insurance companies have you by the balls and people like you are begging them to squeeze harder.  What the actual fuck is wrong with you? 

“But but but TAXESSSSSSSSS”

woke: thor is so strong and cheerful that he believes he can just steamroller over all the awkward and make it go away

When men want to fuck monsters:

because it’s fantastic. When I notice

The name for the infamous lobster tank scene track