#itmade

What better time to show off the BJD I've made than now, huh?

Happy Birthday Ardyn!!

But for the platforms that have already done that I firmly believe we should Benedict Cumberbatch him.

Hey, I made a fic out of that post I made over on IT about the scene where Nyx and Libertus almost meet in Kingsglaive but don’t. 

If you’re interested, the post is here.

Anyway, a gen, teen rated (for cussing only) what-if with more incoming, but it will be a short fic overall. Well under 10k total I think. It’s rapidly becoming a fix-it thanks to the fact that Petra Fortis is Actually Competent. Go figure.

Ardyn BJD made by me (head created in blender and 3D printed. also made the eyes, clothes, wig and painted the doll... it's due for a repaint tho)

Ardyn BJD again~

Hey chat I actually published a fic again after half a decade.

Wholesome PromDyn yay!!

There was this AU me and @dragongirl218 were working on where Ardyn kept accidentally making it look like he was secretly Noct's dad even though he was, in fact, a two thousand year old not wholly corporeal Being. Which led to me coming up with a whole other AU where he actually IS Noct's dad.

So now there's this whole new AU where Ardyn is Regis's brother that got screwed over and dropped the royal life and disappeared for two decades. It wouldn't leave my brain, probably due to recently re-reading the foundational text of PromDyn, @higharollakockamamie's Temptation Of Saint Anthony. (Seriously if you haven't read that, DO IT NOW, you WILL be converted)

Anyway that isn't even really relevant to the fic because none of the backstory comes up in it. Just Prom being young and dumb as a brick and in love with Ardyn. But the Noct thing is why Ardyn started hanging out with the boys and why he became friends with them in this fic.

Thought I'd write up a post about this, mainly because I want to put this information out there but I don't want it to be in a reply where it'd come off like I'm descending on any specific person.

To clarify ahead of time: You're perfectly free to accept whatever parts of official XV-related content you want! You can enjoy them and be excited about them and I'm happy for you. I just also think there's a lot of context that some people might be missing on this that they might want to know.

So, Terada. For those who don't know, Terada took over game director duties as Tabata was forced to focus on the next project (Agni/Forspoken, at the time it was still closer to Agni). That was about when EpP was being developed, though that was mid transition and not fully him. Which is why you start to notice contradictions around that point.

Terada is a fucking sexist, there's no putting it mildly. He's done such delightful things as: arrive at a fan gathering, notice it was mostly women, and open his panel with "wow that's a lot of females". Another time he talked about how it's guys that play video games, don't you know? Women don't do that. And said that there's no point in the game having more costume options for the characters because "nobody wants to dress up men".

He's also a liar, loves to take credit for other people's accomplishments, and everything he makes is just really badly written, but those are kind of tangential to what I'm trying to say here.

The main issue is that then, after no previous mention of Ardyn ever having had a love interest or family, we suddenly are told "actually, ALL of his motivation was about a dead woman". We had been already given plenty of reasons for the way he was: He'd been in the process of healing the Scourge, he was accused and "ostracized and daemonized" in his own words. We know he was imprisoned for some time, (again: I am treating pre-Terada stuff as canon here, so it wasn't necessarily all the time up to when he entered the Niflheim political scene) and we know he's unable to die! That's plenty!! That's a great reason to be upset!!!

And suddenly Aera gets introduced and none of what I just said is given *any* more attention. In fact it's actively stated (by him being perfectly docile at the start of EpA) that none of that mattered! He's fine! Totally not broken by betrayal and imprisonment!! Instead we're given a new character that has no reason to be there and no agency at all. She's just an accessory for Ardyn to be sad about.

Time to bring up another anectode about Terada. They did a livestream when the EpA anime dropped. They did a Q&A there. It wasn't live questions. These had been gathered, vetted, and pre-approved. He had EVERY OPPORTUNITY to prepare for it. He gets asked something along the lines (paraphrasing but I remember it very well): "I'm very interested in Aera! What can you tell us about her? What is she like?" What followed was a solid minute of the guy going "uhhh... ummm... well... uuuhhhhh.... she likes.... uhhh.... tea.... and uhhh... a-archaeology?" You know, like she has a shot in the anime where she's drinking tea, and another where her and Ardyn are in some old ruins for 5 seconds.