wark!

been a while since i tried my hand at one of these. just an easy way to see my posts on a given subject.

by character: usually sorted by first and last name: alphinaud leveilleur, alisaie leveilleur, y'shtola rhul, thancred waters, urianger augurelt, estinien varlineau (well actually this tag empty at time of writing), g'raha tia, wuk lamat for example. zenos stands alone because i didn't care to figure out the yae/viator issue. convocation members under their titles (emet-selch, elidibus) except of course for venat. the in-game warrior of light, who i write about a fair amount, has a slightly different tag (warrior of light ffxiv) since, y'know, common title.

by game: just whatever the relevant subtitle is: a realm reborn, heavensward, stormblood, shadowbringers, endwalker, dawntrail. if you want to blacklist the relevant spoiler tag, it's all just the above + "spoilers," so "dawntrail spoilers."

by post subject: more serious/longer posts get meta: durai report, while shorter/jokier ones get shitpost: i got a good feeling. posts about my specific wol wolund are under wol: zodiac brave story.

like, stormblood is in part a story about the gendered impacts of imperialism, which is why two of its leads include a woman sold into marriage at a young age and later forced into sex work and a woman whose unflinching loyalty to empire explicitly does not shield her from misogyny. the scene where zenos grabs yotsuyu by the hair is just straightforwardly a scene of gendered violence to the greatest extent the animations and the mores of the writers allow. depending on your wol's gender stormblood is either the story of how zenos exploits and abuses three women (two of them textually colonial subjects) on his way to do the thing that really matters, fight a man or The Woman He Has Decided Is Exceptional. and the third of the women violently exploited in this way is krile!

like the violence zenos does to yotsuyu and fordola is desexualized to the extent images of gender-based violence can be desexualized under current conditions (and I think it could easily be argued that square-enix's decision to be like And It Wasn't Sexual in the stormblood side stories is kind of a cowardly ass-covering move), which imo is why it matters that the violence done to krile is explicitly to violate her bodily autonomy! human experimentation, particularly performed in the service of empire, is very obviously meant to be a vile and horrifying thing to contemplate! zenos in the text deploys the metaphor of animal butchery: "[S]ilence that mewling little piglet. I would not hear another sound pass her lips...until I strip the fat from her." we are very explicitly invoking ideas of dehumanization, of women as objects of consumption, etc. and this pretty shocking culmination of this theme in the stormblood main quest...doesn't really get paid off and 100% just turns into a genre power up for the endgame, and stormblood's themes about gendered violence don't get any payoff in the text until fordola and yotsuyu's patch stories.

even just in writing this I can actually sort of immediately see why they couldn't explore it. it's gonna be pretty important that krile not be read by the audience as a victim in relation to zenos if endwalker's finale hinges on her having the ultimate say-so on the mothercrystal-shinryu situation. If it's at all about krile as a victim of his violence, it can read really horrendously to have her deciding "yeah I believe in zenos enough for this" as a factor of the finale. and it's conceptually cool for her to have the decisionmaking power here at all, zenos involvement or no. I like the idea that she specifically gets to make a dramatic gamble here at the end. but the idea that it only works because they pretty explicitly overlook what he does to her is....pretty bad! and it's not like it removes these implications from the text! they don't get undone by ignoring them! there are perhaps drawbacks to trying to have a character pull double duty as the Existentialism Understander and the Avatar Of Imperial Violence And You Better Believe That Includes Gender And Race-based Violence

* * *

The slightest impression registered at the edge of the Watcher's awareness, as the presence of some small silent familiar can be felt when it lands upon the bed. Someone newly arrived through the aetheryte, he presumed, Hydaelyn's chosen or one of their compatriots, and he waited patiently in case they arrived seeking knowledge. It had been some few weeks since their victory over Meteion, he believed. Such measurements held little meaning to him, but the Loporrits were quite enamored of schedules and deadlines, and the chatter on their occasional visits (less occasional, now that they were seemingly permanently awake) had done much to bring him back into Etheirys's time.

The moments passed, and more followed, until they flowed around and over him, dreamlike, as they often had in the last twelve thousand years. He was moved from his reverie after some uncertain time by an awareness of patterns in movement, eddies on the tide. Nearby lunar beings had left a great lacuna in the local aether, their usual wanderings distorted as they gave a wide berth to—ah—the sundered visitor, whoever they were. Though his curiosity could no longer be piqued, it could at least be roused from its slumber, and he made his way up the stairs to the balcony outside to survey the pale dust below.

In the middle of the lunar plain, Hydaelyn's chosen slumped, doubled-over, clinging to Her old familiar.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One of the great advantages of being the savior of Etheirys is that when you need to have a breakdown and grapple with your guilt, you can do so alone on the moon, if you like.

Well, not quite alone.

like on the list of things that make FFXIV insanely good to play is "most content except seasonal events should be evergreen and always playable, and there should be incentives for endgame players to go back and do it." you would think this is the most basic player retention and growth thing ever and yet the other mega-successful mmos don't actually do it (which is not to say it's totally unique, waving to my eso friends here). class dps balance issues which make people frustrated here wouldn't even register as issues in most games, which have significantly higher deltas in damage output between the best and worst performers.

but we're past embargo so i'm done with readmores

so since dawntrail i've been associating the song "long promised road" by the beach boys with the warrior of light, for reasons that will become immediately obvious if you hit the bridge in the above or read the lyrics below.

but with the setup that's been done in 7.5 and in particular the adoption of the season motif it's now got so many associations in that little bridge i can't help but post it. the bridge is the boxed section below but i include the preceding verse and chorus just so you can get a sense of the song. the verses are about the difficulty of rising above the pains and fears of the present moment and current concerns to self-actualize as the person you want to be, with an upbeat chorus about fighting to overcome that. but the BRIDGE.

Trail starts at dawn was plenty, for the obvious reasons. But now we're thinking about the season's (or seasons?) ending too! Flows to the SOURCE i mean COME ON. Are we not about to struggle to overcome the pressing concerns of immediate apocalypse to seek a higher solution that honors our goal of protecting all life on all the shards? Are we not now about to walk a long promised road to unite the stars, one envisioned by the creator of Ethos???

(*and other selected songs because beat the champ doesn't have quite enough songs that are on point)

black cat: the ballad of chavo guerrero.

Before a black-and-white TV in the middle of the night / I'm lying on the floor, I'm bathed in blue light / The telecast's in Spanish, I can understand some / And I need justice in my life, here it comes / Look high! / It's my last hope / Chavo Guerrero / Coming off the top rope

honey b. lovely: song for sasha banks (stand-alone release).

Everybody's got their own spot / Find mine / In sixty-four-point type atop the top line

brute bomber: foreign object

I'm gonna jab you in the eye with a foreign object / I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object

wicked thunder: heel turn 2

Let all the trash rain down / From way up in the rafters / I'm walking out of here in one piece / Don't care what comes after / Drive the wedge, torch the bridge / I don't want to die in here / I don't want to die in here

dancing green: southwestern territory

Work like a dog all day / Born to chase cars away / Die on the road someday / I try to remember what life was like long ago / But it's gone, you know

sugar riot: animal mask

Some things you will remember / Some things stay sweet forever

brute abombinator: choked out

No brakes down an endless dark incline / Most of the boys won't ever cross this line / If they all want to die dead broke that's fine, that's fine / Everybody's got their limits; nobody's found mine

howling blade: werewolf gimmick

Half the city sound asleep and safe inside their beds / Get lost inside my thoughts and nearly tear his face to shreds / Blood pooling on the canvas as the atmosphere gets hushed / Bring your heroes to the wolf’s den, watch them all get crushed

vamp fatale: rain in soho (off of "goths")

No promise sweeter than a blood pact / Nothing harder to go through with than a vanishing act / No morning colder than the first frost / No friends closer than the ones we’ve lost

the extremes: fire editorial

Who will stand before the flood? / Who will mop up all the blood? / Who alone? / Skin, bone, steel, stone / Swim or drown / Save this town, save everything not nailed down

the tyrant: unmasked!

Crowd's half-gone, just a few hangers-on / Come to see me finally tear through the stitching at last / And you don't care, you look almost relieved down there / Like you're free, like you can breathe now / Like they've sawn off your cast / Just one more sleeper to see through / And by way of honoring / The things we once both held dear / I will reveal you / I will reveal you

lindwurm: hair match

We'll stipulate that there will be no cameras filming / But of course, there will be several in the building / And if by chance somebody hits "record" / And stands real still somewhere back behind the soundboard

like this tiny slice of the sound panel alone is better than 99.99% of computer games. absolute gamechanger that nothing else even comes close to matching.