alex playing FFXIV

sir. sir please. come back sir. sir, i was dpsing those...

i feel like there's a corollary to "you pull you tank" and it's "if you, the tank, insist on collecting up all the mobs but then move them four literal separate times because it's not really a wall pull until you've mashed yourself facefirst into the barrier, then you can DPS them until i get there"

yeah it's absolutely emet/wol for this one because no one could possibly comprehend how desperately i keep trying to get summer into a narrative position to fuck that old man and it KEEPS NOT HAPPENING the aesthetic is so GOOD and the themes are so CHOICE and it KEEPS. NOT. HAPPENING.

bend him 60 degrees backwards and imagine he's dio

honestly i'd love to see an ffxiv version of the police station scene where like. thancred is interrogating g'raha who is insisting that he's from the Bad Future and everyone is watching through the viewscreen trying to decide whether or not to believe him and the wol can't decide what to think

I have no proof that Natsuko Ishikawa likes the Terminator franchise but then I think about the Terminator movies and am like:

Terminator: what if I loved you across time and sacrificed my future to defend you in the past

T2: ok but what if the badass stoic killing machine was also a dad

KYLE REESE LIMPED ON BROKEN BONES SO G'RAHA TIA COULD GET VORED BY CRYSTAL

which, i suppose, would follow in offering an explanation for why he never tried to talk to venat - if it turns out that for lack of a belief that he'd ever get a satisfying answer to why life is worth living, he decided to settle for manufacturing a righteous justification for why he was suffering.

so i think, ultimately, that's where hermes loses me - because for all his (potentially valid!) portrayal of systemic flaws and the horrors they propagate, his ultimate decision was to further perpetuate the cycle and just change the target. he didn't actually change anything, he was just vindictive

(does that make venat objectively morally righteous, particularly when it comes to the sundering? not at all, but i do think there's a distinction between venat's motives and decision-making, which are largely externalized, and hermes's, which are largely self-centric and internalized.)

and yet, the whole time, there is venat - wearing robes that visibly announce her own rejection of the notion that she has to return to the star on retirement, embracing the possibility of time travel without hesitation because it's the explanation that fits the criteria in front of her.

it reads that, to hermes, it was never actually about the suffering or the horror of being mindwiped and reeducated or the wrongness of the killing or the societal problems. he's not advocating that those problems stop. he just wants to turn them on the previous enactors to give them a taste of it.

his actions at the top of ktisis are abhorrent to me. he's so high on lashing out in a petty, juvenile way under the optics of poetic justice that he doesn't seem to care that his actions are going to cause exponentially more suffering than the overseers killing the lykaones.

and when his story is read that way (i'm not saying it has to be read that way!), he comes off extremely unlikeable. he becomes a person who would rather actively self-sabotage than to consider options that don't fit an us-or-them dichotomy. and in his case, his choices result in a body count.

to me it came off as, that's why he internalizes emet-selch trying to take meteion into custody as an attack against himself, and then later rejects her offer of "salvation" to stay behind and identify with the ancients. he's abandoned feeling good so the next best is being righteously tormented

and i think to me, next to the ktisis behavior, that reads as an aspect of hermes's behavior being that he doesn't actually want to be understood, he just wants to have a valid excuse for the fact that he feels bad, and since "it's okay to feel bad" doesn't exist in his culture, he needs persecution

it's odd to me how the story juxtaposes venat's literal introduction to the WOL with "have you traveled through time because that's the Occam's Razor explanation for why these facts are true" with hermes insisting that no one could possibly understand the things that grieve him about ancient society

hermes's breakdown in the ktisis interval sits badly with me because he keeps doubling down on his own fixation regardless of the mounting evidence of what's happening around him. (that's also an interesting contrast to venat, who embraces evidence even when it leads her to batshit conclusions.)

i, personally as a viewer, can't get past the level of self-centeredness that hermes displays, particularly when cast against the backdrop of communalism that ancient society showcases - and that's again where i think venat makes a curious middle ground to the extremes

a thing that bothers me a lot about hermes's story in endwalker is not the validity of his depression (it is valid) or the critique of ancient society (pandaemonium exists), but the fact that there were so many stopping points between him and "cause the final days" and he didn't pause at any of them

something that always sticks with me when i think about hermes and elpis in endwalker is: why didn't he talk to venat

like. your government has an established position for "be different than the norm". venat accepts the possibility of time travel with zero hesitation. she's RIGHT THERE in elpis.

people need to embrace that thancred waters would suck a dick for the cause and call it tanking

Surprisingly similar personalities, yet vast differences in method of presentation.

Marcel's habit of understatement at last defeated by the unstoppable power of a four-year-old girl with a vivid imagination demanding elaboration at every turn and NOT permitting the story to continue until she gets it.

"average wol remembers feo ul 3 times per day” factoid actualy just statistical error. average wol remembers feo ul 0 times per day. Spiders Chesca, who lives in country with real actual king & mistakes him for feo ul 10,000 times each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

immortalized forever as it should be

Straight up I was hoping someone would be like "Hey, aren't you Gaius van Baelsar? Like the wall?" and Gaius had to uncomfortably be like "yes. Like the...wall. The big one to the east that you can see all the way from here. The towering monument to imperial tyranny wall. Baelsar's...wall."

It's weird because usually I love a good grind - I do ARR and HW relics for fun every so often, for heaven's sake - but the two I'm faced with now are just...I dunno. Not holding my attention the way I would've expected? There's just something vaguely disappointing that I can't put my finger on.

Objectively the relics are going to be the best possible weapons going into 8.0, but there's no real hurry to advance that when 8.0 is at its earliest an entire year in the future, and the relic tools aren't really necessary when I'm pretty sure I can already craft everything there is to craft.