I'm getting back into writing. I might also draw once a decade or so. I'm on Ao3! Summaries of my fanfics live under the cut. I love love love comments and art and jabbering about them <3 Send me asks to get a way-too-verbose response!
I play and reblog FFXIV (My WoL is Fiona Blackthorne on Cactuar). I also usually reblog Legend of Zelda stuff. Both are tagged as #ffxiv and #legend of zelda respectively (all mainline games). I'm also currently really deep in Linked Universe (tagged as #linked universe).
If it makes me laugh, it gets a reblog under #laugh rule.
My three cats are Ismee, Emil (pictured), and Chai. Sorry everyone but Emil is the caretaker of the sole Orange Cat Braincell.
I'm ace-biromantic and polyamorous. Queer/LGBTQ+ folks of all stripes welcome here. Trans rights are human rights.
Writing Stuff (LoZ Fics)
Fics marked as "Unbroken AU" share a timeline/continuity.
Shards of the Hero - BotW/TotK (Finished, Unbroken AU)
Taking place after Tears of the Kingdom, Link and Zelda meet a new incarnation of the Hero, nicknamed Midori, wearing Majora's Mask. Midori's wish on the mask to undo the Calamity comes true (by making something much worse happen).
The Princess and the Spirit - Echoes of Wisdom (One Shot, Unbroken AU)
A little headcanon regarding the swordfighter form in Echoes of Wisdom, wrapped in fluff and friendship.
Captain Link meets a Skyloftian knight who is very interested in learning about this future Hero (and what Link's history might say about Skyloft's prophecies). Absolutely no one is happy to learn who the Chosen Hero will be.
A LU longfic adding Linkle and Midori (from SotH) to the Chain. When Null begins eating time itself, eleven Heroes of Courage are thrown out of their eras and scattered across history. But there's another Hero who should have joined them and he's stuck in his era, hounded by a cult that wants him sacrificed. If they want to save Hyrule, the Chain risks losing everything else.
Fallen Fae - Linked Universe (Standalone)
You've heard of Fairy Hyrule, but have you heard of Anti-Fairy Hyrule? After an incident with a corrupted Great Fairy, Hyrule's fae side turns a little vampiric. The Chain has to figure out how to turn him back to normal before he bites anyone else.
A Field Guide to Fairies - Linked Universe (One Shot, companion to Fallen Fae)
Vio writes a short nonfiction book about fairies. And mushrooms. And insects. That are all also fairies. The other Colors leave commentary. With pictures!
Thread of Fate - Cadence of Hyrule/Linked Universe (One Shot, standalone)
Based on this prompt. Legend raids the Local Yarn Shop (the LYS is run by Fate and also he's dead but what else is new for the Hero of Legend.)
Hic Svnt Leones - Linked Universe/FFXIV (One Shot, standalone)
A mechanical lifeform from another universe crash lands in Wild's era. When the Chain goes to investigate, they get caught in a stowaway's trap. Welcome to Pandaemonium, Heroes; here be lions!
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hey so, if for any unspecified reason you are in the market for a new xiv webcomic to follow, might i recommend @1driedpersimmon 's 4 unending journeys
im invested with where we are going next with the lizards :0
also a solid handful of panels that are so pretty and so full of detail and whoa, ynow?
Read 4 Unending Journeys and more premium Romance fantasy Community series now on Tapas!
Dropping in a rec for Our Unending Journey by Saba Sabaton! The art is so amazing, but also pulls its weight in its writing, Saba has shown a genuinely impressive skill at weaving in a unique story with the plot of the game. It will go places you aren't expecting. It's also only in heavensward currently, so It's perfect for new players who aren't fully caught up. I'd recommend anyone interested in ffxiv fancomics to give it a try
A party of adventurers makes their way in the world of Eorzea.
General spoilers for FFXIV throughout. Beware!
I've been seeing a lot of folks lately talking about their anxiety over joining content in FFXIV with other players, and that's so valid! I was definitely in that boat when I was younger. I used to look up all the mechanics on the wiki and watch Mizzteq's guides before jumping into any raid because I didn't want anyone to get Mad At Me for failing to play well.
A few things:
First of all, as someone who players healer/tank frequently: I am not AT ALL bothered by someone failing mechanics. You are, in fact, making my job Interesting (/positive). As a longtime player on a server known for being a Raid Server with mostly veteran players, new players messing up is enrichment for me. My friends and I will jump into the NieR raids as healers specifically because people (sprouts and veterans alike) die a lot in those, which makes them fun and interesting for us. It's something to do besides Glare Glare Glare Glare Dia Glare for ten minutes.
At worst what will happen is a healer puts a focus target on you (which is invisible to everyone but the healer themselves) so they know to keep an eye on you for possible Rescue usage or additional healing. That's it.
The above applies mostly for casual content (which includes dungeons, normal raids, alliance raids, etc). For extreme+ difficulty content, you don't have to know the fight prior to going in (see the later paragraph on blind prog), but you should know how to play your job. Wesk Alber is the GOAT for guides on how each job works and a basic rotation for each capstone level:
The leveling skills guides of a new dawn!
Don't forget about the Stone, Sky, Sea training grounds as well! They have training dummies with HP commensurate for each extreme/savage fight to make sure you're keeping up appropriate DPS for your job.
And if you aren't playing your job well? All I ask then is that you be open to suggestions and feedback. A willingness to learn will take you a long way.
I was in an M9S party finder group where the Samurai (a job that traditionally tops the charts for personal DPS) was getting outdamaged by the healers. After some gentle indirect poking, it was evident that the Samurai didn't know their rotation at all. No one yelled at them. The party disbanded and we went back into the party finder trenches.
The actual problem there was that, once the party and I figured out that the Samurai didn't know their job, we were hesitant to directly bring it up with them because some players react poorly when told they need to adjust their playstyle for more difficult content. There's a meme phrase "you don't pay my sub!" which is true, but we are paying our subscriptions and I would rather not spend 15 hours in m10s at a 3% enrage again thank you.
If another player has a suggestion for your play style in higher level content, it is not a condemnation of you personally. Try their suggestion out on a training dummy and see if it works.
I picked up Dancer for the first time this tier and pretty much right off the bat I had another player in M9S suggest I move Devilment earlier in my rotation. It took a bit of fighting with muscle memory, but it was a valid suggestion and helped our DPS a lot!
Long story short, the majority of other players are nice actually, and we LOVE when people are open to learning and suggestion.
And if someone does genuinely give you shit for doing poorly? Report them. See "Offensive expression" under "Nuisance behavior" in the Prohibited Activities list. You can report it under "Harrassment" in the in-game "Contact Us" menu. Just fill out the form and copy in the chatlog. Very rarely a GM will contact you after via Tell to ask for more details.
You can also mute or block players. I muted a guy for the first time the other week and it was glorious.
As for the actual fight itself, the first time you jump into an extreme or savage fight, try for a fresh blind party. The dirty secret is that even if it is "blind", you can watch a guide before going in. I like blind fights because there's a greater expectation of people messing up (on account of not knowing the mechs going in). And I will mess up a lot. Progging difficult content is about failing forward.
LASTLY, consider third party tools. Yes they are technically against the terms of service, but let's be honest—a lot of raiders are running ACT (a DPS logger/tracker) at minimum. Just don't use it in like, world-first races or whatever. The actual problem that gets people suspended or banned is when the parsed DPS data is used to denigrate other players for their performance.
I consider plugins like Cactbot to be a disability aid for my ADHD ass. I will NOT remember the mechanic tell that was shown on screen three seconds ago. Object permanence? Never heard of her. Cactbot does not move your character or do the fight for you; it shows text pop-ups for most mechanics telling you what to do and when.
(As a note, ACT and Cactbot do not work in the first day or so after a patch, at which point you get to see if you can do the fight without its guidance :'D)
Lastly lasty, if you're on Aether, hmu! I'd be happy to accompany sprouts through content! (/tell Fiona Blackthorne@Cactuar)
i think my favorite ff14 narrative gimmick is that the savage raid unlocks are explicitly just the WOL having adhd daydreams about the cool shit they've done. the omega raids are even explicitly about cid trying to put on an ASMR tibetan meditation spotify playlist to calm them down but the WOL is unmedicated so it really only makes the problem worse
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The Fourth Astral Era lasted nearly 1500 years. Religious leaders weaponized reading and writing as a way to control the masses with churches continuing a silent war against widespread knowledge. Knowledge about this era is only thanks to an abandoned node in Azys Lla
Slightly misleading. I was wondering how a node in Azys Lla would have information about events that happened after the fall of Allag (which was of the Third Era). The Encyclopedia says:
[...] Stories of the Allagan Empire survived now only in scripture, where the fallen civilization was reduced to a simple device used to teach lessons on the sin of hubris.
For approximately fifteen hundred years—a number long speculated, but only recently confirmed with the discovery of an operating expulsion node in Azys Lla placing the abandonment of the facility at five thousand years ago—the silent war against knowledge continued [...]
So the only bit of info we got from that node was that Allag fell 5k years ago, from which we can extrapolate the duration of the Fourth Era.
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I need the FF14 players desperately to understand how important setup is.
Shadowbringers wouldn't nearly have hit that hard without ARR laying down all the groundwork and the world building. Would Haurchefant's death have been as impactful if he never was in the ARR Coerthas storyline? It would have made no sense that WoL flees to Ishgard without their deeds in Coerthas before, it was majorly important to set Heavensward and Stormblood up. Who else remembers the Doman refugees and that they started in ARR?
The void storyline of post Endwalker and Dawntrail are MASSIVE setup for the next storyline to come that has now dropped with 7.5. The void has been a thing since ARR and we learned more and more about it over the expansions and it NEEDS its conclusion and that is why Endwalker post patches decided to give it a spot in the limelight. It was 100 % preparing an expansion centered around the void.
And Dawntrail? Look at it as an A and a B plot. The A plot is the direct Dawntrail storyline, the rite of succession which in return prepares the Alexandria storyline (the Golden City was the MacGuffin) and the Alexandria storyline is about life and death and the fear of death. And then the B plot is the overarching storyline of Ethos and shard travel.
This was all MASSIVELY IMPORTANT.
If anything of this would be missed, Evercold and beyond wouldn't make much sense.
In the timeline post about the Circle of Knowing I put a lot of emphasis on Thancred having Archon marks at 17 but in hindsight I maybe should have dwelled more on Y'shtola who not only was also an Archon at 17, but also after graduating from ten years of study in Matoya's cave, immediately left to become an active disciple of her mentor's bitterest rival, and I think that is an aspect of their relationship that perhaps doesn't get enough attention. Both the fact that Y'shtola Did That, and the fact that fifteen years later they are on speaking terms.
Imagine. You're Matoya. You've had this catgirl apprentice for like ten years that you didn't actually want but your culture considers it your responsibility as an Archon to mentor the Youths so you couldn't just kick her out, so instead you were a hardass on purpose hoping she'd quit. But it turns out she was as stubborn as you were strict and she stayed and completed her whole education in your cave and now she's an Archon at 17 and damn it, you're proud of her in spite of it all. Meanwhile the whole colony is planning an exodus back to the motherland. You don't give a shit. You like your cave. You hate the Forum. Put your thesis in the Forbidden section, will they? Fine, you'll seal it away from even them, and go live in a cave. And now that Leveilleur asshole with his prophecies and his doomsaying and his godsdamned seventh verse of Mezaya seven waning moons who gives a fuck is sniffing around your apprentice for some secret society he's forming. Hah! She would never. Except she comes back to the cave to pack up all her stuff and says, Farewell, Master. I'm joining the Circle of Knowing. Master Louisoix wants to send me to Vylbrand. And you're like what the fuck. What the absolute fuck. You're doing what. You're joining whomst. You're what. Farewell, she says, and she leaves and what are you going to do about it. You're not leaving your cave. Everyone packs up and leaves and the colony lies abandoned. You stay in your cave. The Forum says, well, so long as you're staying, can you keep an eye on the Antitower for us. You flip them off. Thanks, they say, and they leave. You don't see your apprentice again for fifteen years.
Fifteen years later, she walks in without knocking and says, It's been too long, Master Matoya. Is that fucking Louisoix's granddaughter you have in tow, you say. Grandson, she says. Whatever, you say. You manage to say something halfway nice about his grandfather.
I need access to your forbidden research, your apprentice says.
You look at her. All grown up and saving the world and not even holding a grudge about all those things you said when she left.
okay so you got me to actually go look up that one side quest I usually only vaguely remember that you can get from Saro Roggo inside Matoya's cave - as I recall the poroggo is concerned that since Matoya has not bestowed upon him any specific duty, she might find his service unnecessary and return him to regular frogendom and thus asks for your help in trying to learn what Matoya wants so that he might find a suitable means of service. Specifically this involves speaking to a number of Matoya's enchanted brooms to see if they know anything in particular.
I'm going to paste some of the most relevant excerpts below, but if you want to look up the full quest consolegameswiki has stuff here.
First we have this particular dialogue with one of the brooms...
Self-possessed Broom: Em ot semoc eh/ehs, yllanif dna, swish-swish-aroo! So, you wish to know what is dearest to our mistress. That is a difficult question. From her research into aether to her herb garden, much and more is dear to her.
Self-possessed Broom: What she loves most, I cannot say, but I know for a fact what she hates above all else: Y'shtola.
Self-possessed Broom: How do I know this? Because she never, ever talks about Y'shtola. Why, she goes to great pains to avoid the subject. She wouldn't do that for something she likes, now, would she?
(Optional)Self-possessed Broom: What my mistress loves most, I cannot say, but I know for a fact what she hated above all else: her last pupil, Y'shtola.
...which, after briefly reporting back to Saro Roggo, is followed up by this part with a different broom.
Serendipitous Broom: You are he/she who summoned me?
Serendipitous Broom: I desire nothing of you, save that you desire nothing of me. I possess no knowledge that could possibly be of use to you.
Serendipitous Broom: For my mistress has imparted unto me naught but memories—the memories of a young Y'shtola.
Serendipitous Broom: The warmth of her hands. Her determined countenance. Her blossoming into a woman grown. Every mundane conversation they shared. Her sudden departure. The painful farewell.
Serendipitous Broom: My mistress cannot bear to have these memories near, but neither does she wish to forget them. So it was that she entrusted them to my safekeeping and bade me to remain hidden.
Serendipitous Broom: I can tell you naught more. Pray leave me to my sweeping."
So... yeah. Imagine. You're Matoya. And you have spent the last ten years of your life mentoring what was once this spitting little fireball of a kitten who had absolutely no qualms telling you just what a complete and utter mess your cave is in. And for all the disagreements you've had, all the arguments you've gone through, all the challenges and mistakes and failures and successes... this one ungrateful little coeurl somehow had the sheer godsdamned audacity to dare worm her little way into your heart and become the one most precious souls you have ever known.
And then she decides to just leave.
You're angry - worse, you're somehow feeling... lonely. You. The implacable Master Matoya - someone whom even the dolts at the Forum know not to argue with. You. Are heartbroken.
And so you shut those memories away, stuff them into one of your familiars and send it off somewhere else. Somewhere where it won't remind you of how much it hurts. Somewhere it will be safe.
Because despite sitting on a virtual treasure trove of all manner of mysterious artefacts and magical knick-knacks... those godsdamned memories are somehow the most precious thing you own.
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God Lumull is so fucking amazing as a character because he has, like, ZERO context for how outrageous the WoL is.
He complains about the demon possessed evil train that causes local settlements seasonal trouble and the WoL is like "Say no more it'll be dead within the hour"
And Lumull is thinking he's dealing with a mad person and not someone who fought the personification of the Fermi Paradox and won.
