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worldformula · 7 months

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Ok you mentioned utushama having a complicated relationship with aymeric and now im curious. Also how does he feel about characters like fraye (how did the whole drk questline affect him), or emet-selch/venat?

Aymeric answer here!

I often draw Utushama as a dark knight in Shadowbringers related works but truthfully it’s more for function than “canon” to me. During ShB, he was some unique job mashup that might’ve been distracting from the theme of things I was trying to convey, so I defaulted to drawing him as DRK. He never actually learns it in his canon (though he’d benefit GREATLY from it) — Inanna is the one who mains DRK, his main tank job is PLD. So he doesn’t actually go through that story or meet Fray, which is a shame because it’s got the best job quests for a reason :( I fear he might be allergic to things that are good for him; he’s attracted to things that make him look good like the PLD’s knight-in-shining armor visual. It’s a fun bit of meta though, that his sister has the strongest shield of all the tanks (one that’s invoked with the power of love, no less) but he’d rather Cover and take damage on someone else’s behalf.

And as for the others…

Spoilers for Shadowbringers and Endwalker, as per usual!

As for Emet-Selch, I really love his character, but he served a greater function in the overall theme/narrative/whatever you’d call it rather than having any particularly unique one-on-one relationship with Utushama, often as a sort of foil or stand-in for the father who Utushama resented. He’d never really known said father but he had an image of him based on Echoes he experienced from dragons who remembered him, and said Echoes often recalled him as a two-faced, manipulative, sarcastic, and deeply cruel person who would justify any act for his own gains. And Emet-Selch in Shadowbringers came across this way to him, which is why it was so alarming and disorienting for him whenever Emet praised him or spoke with sympathy / understanding. Utushama had had most of his black-and-white moral worldviews validated thus far by unrepentantly evil people and he did not like that the new villain in his story kept comparing himself to him or being genuinely vulnerable with him. Utushama himself isn’t fully conscious of the way Emet-Selch reminds him of his father and Emet-Selch doesn’t consider that to be any more important to him than what Utushama already represents to him (Azem’s mangled form, a pesky Warrior of Light, etc). There was also an extra bit where Emet mocks Utushama for ending up in the same position as said father (as in, a naive hero tricked by an Ascian into becoming something that would destroy the Shard). And Emet-Selch was one of many stepping stones that eventually lead to Utushama sympathizing with the dad he was really intent on making out to be a pure villain, so he’s a heavyweight as a symbol but not much more on a personal level beyond what the WoL has with him in the text. They have that layer, but I don’t think it’s more interesting than what canon already gives me so it doesn’t change or enhance it in any way, thereby making it just a fun lenses for me to read the characters’ relationship. In Endwalker, Utushama is almost baffled by how strangely “normal wife guy with a desk job” he is and it’s brilliant and hilarious to me because Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus are so much like his parents but he has no way of knowing that and neither do Hyth/Hades.

Venat is also a fascinating character and I revel in gazing upon her from different angles. Which is why it’s so funny to me that Emet-Selch was Utushama’s shithead dad stand-in on a meta level because Venat is his very nice other parental figure stand-in. So again, there’s nothing that changes the canon relationship between Venat and the WoL despite this extra layer, but it’s just a fun fact for me. That being said, they meet just as Utushama’s starting to realize that his well-meaning parent is someone he actually resents more on a personal level (he was in denial about this this entire time). It’s difficult for him to differentiate between her and Hydaelyn and the Elpis arc comes right on the heels of the lowest of his lows. So he’s feeling very frustrated and miserable and pained and he’s also coming to realize that the parent he had idolized had actually disappointed him greatly in his unintentional absence and now here comes the woman who would become Hydaelyn, who despite choosing him as Her champion, appears to never come to his aid in his hour of need. And she makes it even more difficult by making it hard to be mad at her! She’s considerate and kindly and genuinely wants to know about his journey, just as his parent would ask if he could be there. Overall he has very mixed feelings because he is slightly projecting and doesn’t realize, but he’s able to let it go by the Aitiascope dungeon. And on Venat’s end, she regards him like a child of her own because Azem was someone she had a very complicated but deeply personal relationship with, and therefore sees him (both on Elpis as a “familiar” and on Etheirys as a “shard”) as something like a child / product of Azem to be cherished.

I think overall within the canon, we get very few opportunities to interact with these characters so I’ve got a limited set of time and subject matter for the three of them to be dealing with. Which is a shame because I fully believe Emet-Selch is like an old queen who is very unimpressed by this fresh new young gay man but in my perfect sitcom universe he’d be disgusted and entranced by the sort of absurd shenanigans Utushama gets up to, if not for the fact that, y’know, the First is about to explode and take the Source out with it. And y’know, he and Venat have to deal with the Song of Oblivion or whatever instead of getting into a cartoonish argument about fatherless behavior. But ultimately he just accepts them entirely in the end and regards their memories with a strange fondness/somberness despite them (inadvertently or purposefully) psychologically pulling him apart like a twizzler for the last two expansions.

#ask #anonymous #ffxiv #the ancients in general I feel are a very powerful ingredient #and Utushama is a strong flavor in his own right outside of them so I have trouble mixing them without ruining the soup #but tldr they’re like his parents (derogatory)#YIPPEE!!!!!!!! hooray!!!!!!!

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elfyourmother · 4 years

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Does Gisele have/slash utilise Dark Knight?

Yes! It’s her canon tank Job. And it’s something really unexpected tbh...it’s the last FF Job I would have picked for her, given they’ve always had the spiky armor/big ass sword/metal thing going on that totally isn’t her at all, and my continued ambivalence about playing a Black lady tank in a game where the overwhelming majority of female PCs are tiny, pale, hyperfeminine white women (and I still feel that way tbh, even though I’ve always enjoyed tanking in various games it really puts a damper on it to the point where sometimes I just can’t). But then I did the quests and the themes just resonated so hard with me, for her story and also on a meta level, especially the ARR portion where WoL is struggling with secret resentments about the responsibilities they’ve taken on (or had put on them), the burdens of being viewed as a capital-H Hero. As a Black woman playing a Black woman character who is constantly doing for others and pushing herself beyond her limits to save everyone all the time...oof. I Felt That.

But it specifically got cemented for me in the HW quests where we learn the key to DRK’s power is love. And the lore fits her so well it hurts. I just stay away from spiky armor and trend more shoujo with her outfits, which also helps a lot with the optics thing. (All of the Neo-Ishgardian gear looks amazing on Gisele but the Tank set is specifically a godsend for this reason)

The thing is, the way she experiences the story necessarily has to be different because of how different her story goes--especially the SB quests, because the grief Gisele is carrying necessarily has to come from a different place than the canon story, but it still works just as well if not more so because of her backstory in Thedas. She has plenty of pain to draw from, it just comes from a much different place. I love Sidurgu and Rielle to death so I don’t want to throw it out completely but I still need to suss a lot of things out. Cause my one criticism of the canon story is that trying to reconcile the 50s portion with the HW MSQ really makes no sense at all to me given WoL’s friendship with Aymeric, and that’s a problem AST doesn’t have. The whole time I was like “why tf don’t we get the Lord Commander involved”. And it makes even less sense to me specifically with Gisele, given her particular closeness to Aymeric (during HW MSQ they’re in love with each other but stuck on pining for stupid but noble reasons, they don’t actually become a Thing until near the end of Dragonsong). So there’s reworking I need to do.

Also balance wise it’s great because it means all but 1 tank Jobs are repped on the First (Haurche is a Paladin in my hc and all his Holy/Light powers come from lingering aetheric weirdness from his old injury). And from a thematic standpoint the fact that DRK is the iconic Job for ShB makes so much sense if you’ve done all the quests, not just because of the Warrior of Darkness thing, it actually goes way deeper than that. DRK is such an incredible narrative foil for the Ascians, with their inability to cope with the pain of what they lost and move on from it (particularly Emet). It feels very intentional considering the same writer was responsible for both stories. When you take away the edgelord-y trappings, the whole DRK storyline is really just about doing Shadow work in the spiritual sense, hard and ugly as it sometimes can be. And that’s something that was previously lacking in Gisele’s narrative that really needs to be there given her specific journey as Warrior of Varying Luminosity.

#gisele surana #this reminds me that i really need to make a master post for her in this verse #i keep forgetting to #but at this point it would be really useful #commander kulan #ask bisho #also ngl drk is just really fun to play #i love laughing at tankbusters

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