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.