while I'm sure it's unlikely we'll get any new housing wards anytime soon (though I can certainly hope one day), I'm curious what people think
I also included end game hubs despite them being more unlikely, I just wanted to see what people are wanting! 人´∀｀)
Final Fantasy XIV Collector’s Edition Box Art (2010)
Pixel birds and novelty drinking cups aren't worth funding and active and ongoing genocide. Consider donating the money you would have spent on those 40 bottles to a GoFundMe from Operation Olive Branch or to the UNRWA.
Screenshots of the FFXIV x PUMA merchandise from the second link for those outside of the US
The thing they don’t tell you about FFXIV is that it does irreparable harm to your speech
Not just the Ye Olde English pronouns, not just thinking “malm” and “onze” are perfectly acceptable terms
It’s the very real and present desire to just go “Piss off, kupo” in the absolute worst moments
the people have spoken. they like fantasy swearing
Captain Carvallain de Gorgagne 🏴☠️
FFXIV has spoiled me with /gpose because I'm just sitting here like. What do you Mean I can't just open up a game and have gods most perfect photo mode known to man. What do you mean I don't have three free range light sources that I can position however I feel like and adjust the color on a whim??? What do you Mean I can't endlessly repeat the last combat animation and go frame by frame for that specific pose that I want?
i'm suffering.
i think one of the things i love most about ffxiv is that the game genuinely feels like it wants you to be insane over it. When you load up that character creation screen for the first time you're like "oh um ok so what looks good...?" then 500 hours later you're like "ok so this is my wol they're called Jean End'Dream and here's the 500 page lore document i created for them detaling their whole life the exact meanings behind their chosen class and how they feel about every person they've ever met. Game is designed for an blank-slate overpowered mc and yet you eat it up every time i truly love this video game.
I think Gridania is the funniest of the starter city-states in FFXIV, at least for the duration of ARR, because they seem so completely oblivious to their own societal problems. Starting in Ul'dah was really like "yeah so uhhh watch out for The Mafia" so you go "okay yeah i get the gist", then you get to Limsa and someone comes sprinting up to you screaming "THERE ARE NO PIRATES HERE" unprompted so you go "hmm. weird and telling thing to say but i appreciate your candor", then you get to Gridania and it's like "hello! you have entered Paradise City, population 'however many Elezen are here and NOBODY ELSE'" and you're like "hang on do you actually not know what racism is or are you fucking with me?"
Like you'll be talking to Raubahn and Nanamo and they'll be like "oh woe we need to fix the dire income inequality in Ul'dah but we need to wield that very power to enact our plans" and Merlwyb will say "Yeah I'm a military dictator shove it up your ass" and the Kan-E will be like "all i wish for is peace in the Black Shroud... we believe all life has value" and then have the Adders send you out to murder one hundred oppressed miqo'te poachers because she thinks they smell funny
of course these things develop as ARR goes on but this is really silly at the start
FUCK GRIDANIA ALL MY HOMIES HATE GRIDANIA
I was gonna throw this in tags but it's lengthy and an interesting social point in the story. My favorite example of Gridanian racism is the dude sitting right next to the aetheryte plaza, who will comment to anyone that passes by 'just what we needed, another outsider'. And if you go around the city, you'll catch a few other instances of citizens or guards harassing or insulting miqo'te or Duskwight elezen. In various conversations and quests, the Adders in particular do not hesitate to express their hate of these minority groups, preferring a brutal 'hang 'em now and let the gods sort 'em out' approach. Yet it seems so senseless. Aside from attacks by the Ixal, the Shroud appears to be a fairly peaceful and abundant realm with a banditry problem. While they comment on it somewhat, a key part of lore that is missing for Gridania and not expressed enough in the modern story is their intense fear of the Elementals. Since the end of the War of the Magi some 1,500 years ago, the Black Shroud had been controlled with an iron fist not by men but by the Elementals. Both elezen and hyur had been driven underground and lived in the city of Gelmorra for centuries before conjurers finally developed the means to communicate with the Elementals, who allowed gradual settlement of the Shroud. But the Elementals had rules. Strict rules. Failing to follow the Elementals' rules would result in Greenwrath, which could manifest in a few ways but was more or less an instant death sentence by the forest. No one was exempt. Even the dragon gets in trouble. The Elementals could also punish communities or humankind as a whole if they misbehaved in the Shroud, influencing food yields, health or sickness, and the behavior of monsters. So the Gridanians, with the Padjal as speakers for the Elementals, quickly learned: the Elementals will must be followed, regardless of mortal needs or wants, and anything that threatens the balance must be eliminated. In this regard, I feel SE doesn't really do a great job in 2.0+ at conveying how absolutely terrified the Gridanians are of the Greenwrath and how the Elementals' decisions shaped their entire society for hundreds of years. Yes, there are NPC comments and side details that you can use to piece things together, but it is tricky, and often doesn't provide great context. After 2.0, the Elementals are almost completely gone, and the threat of Greenwrath with it, but society doesn't change overnight. Once, if you had low crop yields, you simply had to tighten your belt and accept that you were going to be hungry. Trying to poach or forage for more food could piss off the Elementals. You were part of a marginalized group, like miqo'te or Duskwights? You either had to suck it up or leave the Shroud completely. No housing opportunities? Sorry, we've already hit our logging quota for the year and have none to allocate to you, shit sucks. But post-Calamity? The inequality and sorta-authoritarianism forced upon mortals by the Elementals no longer exists. The poor, the downtrodden, the minorities, the bold and the desperate can all seek their own salvation out in the Shroud once they figured out that Greenwrath wasn't being enforced. Gridania didn't help them before, and the Calamity only worsened conditions, so they must help themselves. But to the Gridanians, conditioned by centuries of following the Elemental's edicts, these are not fellow citizens, clearly suffering and in need of aid. These are lawbreakers, criminals, threats not only to society but to the very lives of everyone in the Shroud. The way the Gridanians see it, 'oh the Elementals might not have smote you on the spot but they're keeping count, and they'll kill us all if you don't stop defiling the Shroud. So instead we'll kill you first'. And unlike Limsa or Ul'dah? They don't really seem to be moving away from it either. Does it justify the racism and various social woes, especially post-Calamity? Nope. Does it at least explain why Gridania is almost comically racist and authoritarian? Yeah.
This is hella interesting, largely because elementals and padjal are BARELY mentioned in ARR'S msq and the Greenwrath was, at best, paid lip service to. Kinda supports your point that Gridaniana don't really even know they're being bigoted; why mention the Greenwrath? Why invoke the Elementals? Everyone knows what these are, and everyone is appropriately afraid of them. Everyone knows their place, except outsiders, who should be shunned specifically because they don't. I guess it's just a very high-context society that doesn't know it's high-context and is highly derisive of anyone who can't meet that context.
Exactly. It's high-contextual, but it's a detail that characters are well aware of but players are not. And that's the big issue. Ingame, almost everyone knows about the Elementals and the Greenwrath. It was very much a 'those woods are cursed' lore point, and again, it was this way for centuries. Other nations rarely entered the Shroud due to the threat of the Greenwrath (prior to the Calamity, only the Ala Mhigans and Garleans even attempted it). The Ixal only really began their clearcutting campaign once they knew they weren't gonna get turbo-nuked. Dragons didn't mess around in the Shroud either, the last time a dragon did it got turned into amber. Yet even then, Gridanians still treat outsiders poorly, likely expecting them to either be idiots or interlopers. It influences a massive amount of the plots within the Shroud in one way or another But the players are largely in the dark about it. While Ul'dah and Limsa's problems are clear as day, you have to dig to understand why things are fucked up in the Shroud. And even then, a large part of that lore is from 1.0 and never got carried over. So to the players, it just makes the Gridanians look mustache-twirlingly oppressive, racist towards their minorities, and xenophobic towards outsiders. And as others commented, its even worse because they haven't done much to change that since the Calamity either!! Oh yes, Gridania is much more open to trade with outsiders and cooperate with other nations now. But their internal problems haven't changed in the slightest. Which gets worse/more ironic each expansion, esp if your WoL is a Keeper of the Moon or Duskwight. Saved the world several times, still gonna get hatecrime'd by the cops.
and all this considered, i once went rooting around on the timelines and as far as i can tell miqo'te migrated into eorzea during the 5th calamity, and they survived until the ice melted because they were great hunters
the only thing we know about keepers specifically is "During the Sixth Astral Era, the Keepers of the Moon came to reside in the Black Shroud, where they came into conflict with the people of Gridania, who saw them as little more than poachers."
however, this leaves a thousand years of unknown! gelmorra itself is founded after like 200 years of elzen-hyur conflict in 740. the ixal get exiled on 1020, and gridania itself only begins constructing overground in 1077. as reference, coinach confirmed the existence of allag before that happened. gridania is barely 500 years old as a country
what i mean to say is 1) the ixal clearly could live overground while the elezen and hyurs hid in caves and 2) between the statements 'came to reside in the black shroud in the sixth astral era' and 'where they came into conflict with the people of Gridania' are a fuckload of possible years we don't know about
i do not know how Absolutely True the enciclopedia eorzea is meant to be, really, but i feel there's... something, here
maybe they arrived in the shroud in the year 300 and just minded their business staying our of the hyur vs elezen spats, and the gridanians only just met them when they resurfaced. insert bearwhowasalwayshere.jpg
even if keepers indeed arrived 50 years after gridanians surfaced (but then where the FUCK where they those thousand years, seriously), that still means they have been hunting, 'poaching', and trucking for 500 hundred years and not actually gotten evaporated to a cat yet, even while the greewrath reigned supreme
speaking of which! this is the only mention of it i've found in the timeline
1451 (ARR year is 1572+5 of the seventh) The citizens of Gridania incur the ire of the elementals of the Black Shroud, awakening the greenwrath. A numer of their elderly offer themselves in sacrifice to expunge the woodsin, sparing the people expulsion from the forest.
if the greenwrath has been actually summoned more than once or not in gridania's history i am not sure since i did not play 1.0, (i am assuming it has, if the amber dragon mentione above counts) but considering the expulsion detail i imagine either it or something similar happened to the ixal, except they did not go to the human sacrifice option and left instead, only to start coming back once they realized they could no longer get nuked
Quick, there's no time! //smashes my two obsessions together
Anyway here's Gale of Sharlyan, a Summoner, inventor of a winged topaz carbuncle affectionately named Tara (never mind about the void gate in his chest, he got a little too into the secrets of Mhach)
new ship dynamic called schrodinger’s divorce where characters are simultaneously bitterly divorced and fondly married for twenty years
This has been on my mind for long but I’m gonna do this - please reblog this if you’re comfortable with pre-establishing relationships. I do not mean “met at the grocery store two weeks ago” or “have a common friend”, but rather stuff like “have been best friends since kindergrden”, “go for a beer every friday”, “friends with benefits”, “dated in highschool”, “hate each other’s guts because -insert reason-” etc. Something meaningful (but not necessarily shippy) and I mean with muns/characters you have not interacted with, because I cannot believe I am the only one who prefers jumping right into the heart of the human interaction.
normal sentence of the day
can't argue with that.
