Ham Mage

whenever i talk about XIV around non-XIV players i ALWAYS bring up how they delayed an expansion so the most evil guy in the setting can beg you to stay subscribed

(i have to say his name funny bc i muted it + every variation of his family's names)

"surely you jest" don't call me shirley, also one of the first memories i have of XIVtwt phase 1 is uhhhh getting vaguetweeted by someone who was such a devout Emit Squelch kinnie that they dyed their fringe white because i said i didn't really care for the game's attempts to rehabilitate him.

back in my first foray in XIVtwt i got more shit for vocally disliking ShB/EW and many of the focal characters within than like. anything else i said or did back then lmao.

me constantly reiterating my dislike of ShB and EW might seem excessive but i'm not exaggerating when i say it's meant to deter people who've made liking XIV their entire personality and would otherwise worm their way into my life before splitting on me when the curtain drops

skitter

Sphene being a little ugly is part of the charm imo, it's cute that she looks like an inbred racing dog

saying that to an affiliate of the sphenewife nation is VERY funny i'll admit

there's an entire new Type Of Guy whose sole trait is bringing her up even in like, mid-StB dungeons

this isn't even a joke, i lived through StB postpatch-EW postpatch which is maybe the longest dark age i've ever seen in a game. i would like for DT and its postpatch to not be aberrants.

my hope for 8.0 is that it's good and not bad

(this is part of why, though i've yet to actually decide how her story ends, i can picture her living in a fairly nice house after All That, but also deeply alone and unfulfilled.)

that's basically just fanon at this point tbf, absolutely no allusions are made to how weird it is that Yotsuyu remains singularly herself within Tsukyuomi (to the point of seemingly dominating it?) and is still herself after and they don't even bring it up when ShB tackles tempering

something i've alluded to but never really addressed directly is that Jehanne is stuck between wanting the structures of nobility to be torn down entirely, and also *really* missing it.

ARR and HW establish that if you invoke a primal into yourself and somehow survive the subsequent thrashing, you're tempered. Ysayle is shown to be the exception because, if you have the echo, you can summon primals and not be tempered.

the before/during/after of Tsukuyomi void all of these.

Jehanne and co. infiltrating a fancy Ishgardian party held exclusively for the upper wrung of society but her peers become really suspicious when she not only blends in seamlessly but seems to actually enjoy doing so

and said son's blasphemy form is just the Therion model recoloured lmao

i think if you bumrush XIV's story a lot of the most obvious cracks and plot thread they built up but either nuked or folded into something made up in ShB are a looooooooooooooot less obvious to the point of being almost imperceptible.

when you've mostly experienced XIV via 6mo wait between MSQ...

like many ~live~ stories it's hard to talk about XIV online because, as time goes, more and more people join the conversation who didn't let any of the content sit and instead just bumrushed 12 years of MSQ in a month to be "caught up"

it's wild how they gave us really strict rules for tempering, highlighted Ysayle as an edge case because she had the echo, and then threw both of those out for Yotsuyu cause uh. idk it was x.3 and we needed a trial ig

it's less that Thavnair was meant to be their home and moreso that Thavnair as a ~lore~ entity was seemingly posited as "meritocracy Ul'dah but worse" and i guess got smoothed over so people would feel bad during the Final Days

you could say this for all the Scions; they keep passing the Twins between writers who think the best thing for them is to have their ideals challenged, be humbled and then have a heroic rebuttal later so they've now done that like. what. three times now?

i did the same (Tsukuyomi haunts her as both an actual incarnation of a manifested spirit and a manifestation of subconscious guilt over All That) but the easier answer for XIV actual is that the writers briefly forgot how primals work

there's too many cooks in XIV's kitchen for it to ever be entirely consistent, and this ranges from minor things like "lalafells used to be heavily associated with Thavnair but are absent in the actual region" to things like whoever wrote 4.3 forgetting how Primals are meant to work

once upon a time, oomf made a thread and included the phrase "i doubt the devs intended for this" which was met with an incredibly hostile response in the form of:

"do you seriously think the people working on this game don't know their own characters and lore?"

and like. yeah? obviously?

it's weird. everyone bails on that fight because they're terrified of being tempered even though they're around long enough for that to have already happened, and she's fully Herself during both the trial and the aftermath cutscene, so... i guess not?

"march of the white queen | march of the red queen" Camilla, a brunette midlander hyur dressed in an ornate white and gold dress with a feather mantle, looks across at appears to be a reflection of herself dressed in red. The "Camilla" dressed in red does not have a mole under her left eye.

march of the white queen|neeuq der eht fo hcram

when you dropped the "she's a manifestation of a trans woman's whimsy" thing i was like [doll emoji that doesn't exist but should]?

really? i thought it was intentional...

ellie :)