berrydoodleoo

[berrydoodleoo]

lord of house amicitia

#ffxv #my art #gladiolus amiticia #hbd gladio #IM LATE #meant to post this yesterday #finished this ages ago but never got around to posting it #since i put iggy in casual clothes i had to dress gladio up #his rank in the city is second only to noct's after all #sometimes he's a fancy lad #one of those rings is a wedding ring btw

[berrydoodleoo]

spring sneaks in~

#ffxv #i love the splash of pink #and the backlighting #you're so good at environments!!

[berrydoodleoo]

ICEHEART

#ffxiv #my girrrrrrl #i love the use of color #the background is beautiful

[berrydoodleoo]

to begin another end

When one of his oldest friends is killed during the events in the Whitemarch, Adaryc must travel back to the village where they grew up to bury his remains, and in the process is forced to confront the realities of loss, identity and his own complicated relationship with his roots and his faith.

Content Advisory: religious trauma, attempted suicide, references to self-harm

Keep reading

#poe #adaryc #ok this is Canon to me now #beautiful writing #oof #you've really brought readceras to life here

[berrydoodleoo]

before the announcement of pictomancer and viper, i was considering what other classes would be neat to see in ffxiv based on previous iterations from other games in the franchise or aspects of ffxiv.

feel free to add your own in comments or tags or smth. this is just a silly idea. and i was curious what appealed to people, just because.

please reblog for a larger pool :)

#ffxiv #shield knight is real thing??? #do you hit people with the shields??? #i kind of love it #although i voted for mystic knight

[berrydoodleoo]

a couple months ago in august, i helped out with Tiffany Lockheart in making companion images for her Ardbert Week on twitter. i was looking to do it for all the days but i was actively stopped actually from two more - nonetheless i wanted to compile for tumblr what all i worked on! these were all made in the span of the week that Ardbert Week was going on.

#ffxiv #these are all amazing #love the lighting in the last one #underwater lighting is so hard to do #the bubbles are beautiful! #also im happy to see someone else using blender! #we need to make a club or something

[berrydoodleoo]

so important to me that Y’shtola is a rude little beast who grew up in a cave. she just happens to look like a beautiful socialite but she did grow up with one old woman in a cave learning mildly illegal magic

#ffxiv #i love this about shtola #i love her relationship with matoya

[berrydoodleoo]

The Thancred Anthology is Live! Free PDF!

The Thancred Anthology, a free PDF zine celebrating everything Thancred Waters, is now LIVE! Featuring 60 talented artists and writers, we hope you'll enjoy this exciting collection.

READ FOR FREE HERE.

(Image and text by the zine mods, I am just spreading the word!)

#ffxiv #need to come back when ive got time #thancred waters

[berrydoodleoo]

Mirror

#ffxiv #in this house we love and support ryne #knife daughter is best daughter

[berrydoodleoo]

“the last dinosaur” by ocean vuong. obligatory the random catgirl is my warrior of light sorry.

#ffxiv #cylva

[berrydoodleoo]

Alisaie Leveilleur found dead in Baldesion Annex

#ffxiv #i absolutely loved this #we need more sarcastic assholes in the scions #shtola cant do everything around here #and esti is more grumpy than sarcastic to me #eren is fast tracked to being a new fave #i hope they do something interesting with him and keep him in the msq

[berrydoodleoo]

the hero, larger than life itself

#ffxiv #oh this is so well done! #and so cute #you've captured rynes worrying and self doubt really well #and your wol is so cool!

[berrydoodleoo]

FINAL FANTASY XIII (2009)

#ffxiii #my first ff game #is there a way to replay it on pc i wonder? #i feel like i would understand it a lot better these days #now that i know more about ff and its tropes

[berrydoodleoo]

A bit unrelated to the larger post (which I cosign wholeheartedly) this really highlights, to me, the limitations of writing for video games. Not just MMOs, but even single player games. It's something I've been thinking about since BG3, which managed to avoid some of the issues by having the longest Early Access known to man (I'm exaggerating, of course).

It seems to be the lack of drafting. So much of XIV and other games feels like early drafts, where the themes are mostly there, the characterization is fairly consistent, but the pacing is off and the messaging is hamfisted. They just need more time to sit, more time for the author to decompress and come back to their writing as something like a stranger. To hear how it sounds instead of how they envisioned it, and to do the work of bringing the two into alignment.

Many video games (I don't know about XIV for sure) are written directly in the engine, due to the interactive nature of the script. They're written without the animations, the soundtrack, the environment, the gameplay, and of course, without the voice acting. This is a huge component of the game experience! For a game like XIV that has an established base, where the writers are able to get a feel for how things will end up based on past expansions, they're able to work around the gaps. But my little bit of writing experience with fan fiction and fan games suggests this is like writing with half your language missing. It will be there eventually! But you don't know how it will pan out! This is where the long EA for BG3 helped it -- they not only re-wrote huge sections of the script, they also recorded it and implemented it and then threw much of it out again. But most games don't do that kind of thing.

I think we need to incorporate this understanding of the limitations of the medium (at least as it's currently pursued) into our critical lens when reflecting on the writing in video games. Rather than lambasting the writers or the dev team for a lack of perfection, it would be more productive to think about the story that was told, what we can surmise about the story that was intended, and then what we can learn from the gap between the two.

Anyway, I agree with what @autumnslance said, there were elements of a really thought-provoking, emotional, and complicated story in the Werlyt sidequests, that was combining elements of Greek/Shakespearean tragedy with anime tropes and MMO gameplay. But we are not seeing the story in its most polished form. My take on Gaius is that he's a retelling of a specific type of tragic character, who is doomed both by hubris and the strength of his own virtues. In many ways, he's a warning message about the belief in your own uncomplicated rightness, and of the allure of an unenlightened and monstrous enemy who cannot be negotiated with. I think Gaius' story and the Garlemald sections of EW represent a kind of grappling with Japan's role as perpetrators and victims of imperialism, with an eye to the U.S./European audience and their own histories and current issues. All of it is imperfect, but shutting out the pieces of truth because they are clumsily delivered is reactive and reductionist.

they announced one of the main writers for FFXIV: Dawntrail is the one who wrote the Shadowbringers trial series, "Sorrow of Werlyt", and the amount of people going "ew no that's the one that redeems Gaius" drives me kind of insane

That storyline takes Gaius and says "Behold this idiot, watch and be stunned as everything he ever said to anyone turned out to be fucking obviously wrong. Watch as the fascist imperialist philosophy he ingrained into his beloved children makes them run to their deaths, even as he pleads them not to, and they tell him to fuck himself and do it anyway. Marvel as he watches them die by your hand, you, who destroyed Gaius himself at the peak of his life, and he can do nothing to stop it", and that's a redemption arc to people

The only surviving kid only makes it because her brother acts to protect her, she doesn't make it because of any act of Gaius'

The entire story is literally "In case you somehow missed it in ARR and most of Stormblood, everything Gaius believed in was horseshit and there's no such thing as a 'noble general in the evil empire'". All his meritocracy bullshit vanished the second he was gone, no-one but his own children believed it or held onto it, and the empire put someone directly opposed to that belief into his old seat when he vanished. No-one cared, no-one else "believed", the Empire was never about that, it was only propped up in his own singular legion by him being there and the second he was gone the legion dumped it and moved on and only Gaius was too naive and stupid to see it.

I mean for fuck sake, the Empire digs up the chemical gas weapon he explicitly had sealed away and destroyed all record of after he's gone and if it wasn't for a particularly dedicated and enterprising catboy and his comedy crew of hardcore engineers, it would have caused the eighth apocalypse

Even the follow-up in patch 6.4, of the family portrait, isn't some "aw he good now" thing. The family portrait you help organise for him has to have four of its six members be projected onto the scene via a machine's reconstruction of them as normal people because they're dead, they threw their lives away because the ideology Gaius taught them meant they could only think to die fighting and nothing else. That's his loving family portrait: four ghosts stood at his back as his last living child smiles through her pain.

"well the people of Werlyt didn't kill him for conquering them" they let him clean up the mess he made (which meant watching his children be killed) and as "thanks" they're letting him stay there to live out the last third of his life or so attempting to atone by fixing the damage he did.

He's 56 at the time of ARR; the Empire he gave 3-4 decades of his life to is gone, it's a smouldering ruin, all but one of the people he loved is dead, his surviving daughter is scarred by the path he led her down, and what few friends he had are also dead. He learned that his beliefs were all horseshit and pretty much everyone around him except for himself knew it, he must live knowing that those beliefs got his children killed, all that he achieved that he once considered "good" was for nothing, he learned that the cool old emperor he idolised who had no magic but built an empire by pulling up his bootstraps and who told him that magic and gods were bad was actually an ancient incredibly magical sorceror attempting to resurrect his own god.

That's not a redemption arc, he's the most owned man still alive in XIV

[berrydoodleoo]

54 seikecred

Father, would you be my guidance Would you look for sails Until my ship comes in

I.

"I heard you buried the victims of the massacre," Thancred says to Seike's back ─ aiming for jovial and wincing when it falls flat, wondering why the fuck he'd choose to go with that tone to begin with.

He's been off balance as of late, ever since being dragged back to the surface of his own mind to find his hands stained in blood that everyone else insisted wasn't on his conscience. The first nights after he was off bedrest he'd been up to his elbows in soapy water, hot enough to hurt and he'd spent hours scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing.

Seike doesn't even turn to look at him and so doesn't see the way his shoulders sag in relief when she asks nothing of his motivations and simply says:

"I'll take you there."

II.

Yda ─ Lyse ─ takes a chunk out of his shoulder and leaves bruises black as night all over his back. There's a Papalymo-shaped hole in their formation that he doesn't want to dwell on and yet can't seem to escape, like a tongue runs over a missing tooth.

Over and over he returns to it, feels for the gap. Mourns, tries to pick himself back up and repeat ad infinitum.

"You did the right thing," Seike says and while he barely manages a 'please don't talk about it' through gritted teeth, the words nonetheless warm him.

III.

He hears of the battle in Rhalgr's Reach with a several hour delay, Lyse trying her damndest not to let her voice waver as she recounts the event. Thancred feels a surge of pride at how much she's grown ever since taking the mask off but it's quickly swallowed by the shadow Zenos casts over the conversation.

A monster. A beast. A man who no words could capture and he'd cut Seike down like she was nothing more than fodder.

"Is she alright," he asks mechanically, forcing the calm.

A hitch in Lyse's breath has him clenching his fists, the only concession he allows himself.

"She asked for you," Lyse says, so quiet it can barely be heard. "But don't tell her I told you that. She was feverish."

He can't go. He can't go to her.

Thancred feels rotten and hollowed out, dumbstruck by how much he wants to.

IV.

Urianger tries to get him to talk about her. Y'shtola as well. Alphinaud and Alisaie join the choir when they arrive on the First, missing Seike loudly and openly, lamenting her absence so easily that it has his jaw tick with envy on bad days.

He ─ he doesn't want to delve into it. Unfair, perhaps, but there is a practical aspect to it.

Thancred tells himself it's practical.

After all, they don't know if she will ever arrive, if the Exarch will manage a miracle and bring her over before time falls out of sync and either they or she grows old.

So he hisses at Urianger to forget about Seike, tells Y'shtola to leave him be and easily ducks any attempt at conversation from the twins until their hands are full enough that they forget to ask.

And then from one day to the next, she exists in the same world as he does again and it's with mounting horror that he realizes that he doesn't know what to do with it.

V.

On the ship to Sharlayan Thancred finds Seike on deck, watching the sea with a smile so soft and private it feels like intruding to simply see it.

He might be a great many things but he doesn't fashion himself a coward and so he approaches anyway, leaning over the railing with her and casting his gaze to the waves.

After a while she shifts and presses her arms against his, a point of warmth in the biting wind.

spotify wrapped drabbles

#ffxiv #lovely!!!!!! #i love them

[berrydoodleoo]

FFXIV - DAWNTRAIL

New areas

#ffxiv #dawntrail spoilers #am i the only one SUPER PERPLEXED by the merry go round #its so out of place #feels menacing #is it a metaphor? #how many horses are there? #SO PERPLEXED

[berrydoodleoo]

The history of the events after The Flood of Light on The First, from Encyclopedia Eorzea Volume III. I recommend opening in a new tab for the full size.

#ffxiv #very interesting #lots of cool stuff about the oracles #ooof at the fate of the last minfilia before ryne #i wonder if she knew