Enzel.txt (art/mmo screenshots/babbling)

FUCK IF I KNOW

 

honestly maybe hes like a chocobo with their fruits. he's a cat so he probably eats a lot of salmon and on the days he eats it his hair gets slightly pinker. lhenai youre sneaky.

 

Lucia is like the epitome of "life goals or wife goals" for me lmao

(mostly life goals tho)

(I also hc her and Estinien both as some form of NB but that's neither here nor there)

But man...i think i first saw her bc i was looking for info on Livia and the wiki mentioned she had a sister and i googled her and was like

*GAAAASP WHO IS THAT*

Idk the game has a lot of flaws but the fact that it just. Casually has various women with various levels of femininity in positions of power and doesn't fuss about it is great

Also she has a sword so like. What's not to love.

 

some arts

"Sir, that's my emotional support DPS."


"If it fits, he sits, yes yes"

(this is a thing Aki actually does in game lmaoooo)

Spoiler: bunch of doodles

Spoiler: Keten stuff

Keten & Arua (Akiv'a's version of Esteem)


(the outfit i designed for fun)


various Keten forms


a dumb comic abt hair

 

Stormblood spoilers, Akiv'a is pissed @ Fordola

Spoiler: a comic

 

trying to get my tablet pen pressure to work on GIMP >O

i don't get the dynamics settings...

i updated the driver and restarted and all, and it's acknowledging the stylus but the only setting that works is "basic dynamics"

i just want the brush size to change w pressure, i don't need this fancy changing opacity shit :S

 

sort of...got it to work...could be more precise but i don't feel like fiddling more rn



Template is by necrodilus on twitter

 

You know when someone goes on a rant about "bad writing" and how their headcanon should be the real canon instead

And like

I get it. But in this case it's clear they didn't really...pay attention to what actually happened or think about why certain story decisions are made

So all the stuff they're upset about is stuff that they're kinda just projecting on to the story

Me @ myself: don't engage, don't engage, don't engage....

 

(Some context: i was poking around twitter and someone else made a thread asking people what their character's inner darkness would be like [re: FFXIV dark knight quests] --good! It was nice and fun to read thru different people's interpretations

Different person/thread i stumbled across:

Spoiler

Paraphrased: "i refuse to believe the thing we can summon in SHB is 'Esteem' because if its not Fray why does it look like Fray and not the player? Also they act MEAN and tell you to MURDER, the Warrior of Light is a good person and wouldn't have a dark side, therefore it must be Fray's ghost and not the player's inner darkness."

Me: did...did we play the same quests. Also it's literally called "Esteem".

 

(whispers) people you are allowed to be thirsty for Fray and write fanfics without saying the writing is bad to justify it. It's ok.

 

By the way, Aki's Jenna Marbles impression is uncanny.

 

HELL YEA high praise

 

Spoiler: sorry I'm stuck on this but i had another thought and wanted to get it down

OG Fray is a Dark Knight for a reason & that reason is that he grew up poor and in the worst parts of Ishgardian society. And he wanted to strike back against everyone who treated him and people like him like shit. To dispense justice, protect the innocent, etc.

Everything Esteem!Fray does contradicts that code. Like...the entire POINT of the DRK code is that you're more likely to be vilified for taking down the privileged than having your deeds gratefully acknowledged anyway. You're a vigilante. Esteem keeps demanding that people acknowledge you and they're not worth your effort. Because Esteem is *you*. They're the resentment underneath everything, because you *know* that you're the only one that can do the Warrior of Light's job, so you're stuck with it. Because even if you wanted to stop...you probably wouldn't be able to live with the guilt of abandoning your duty.

In a way, defeating Esteem is you upholding and accepting the actual DRK code: do what's right even if it comes at cost to yourself. Edit: but even then they don't disappear, and even come out to help you sometimes, which i feel says that you have found a balance.

Idk how anyone took away from the quests that Esteem wants you to just...go on a murder spree or something? They literally just want you to stop running yourself into the ground for other people. But because they're basically all Id they end up lashing out destructively.

It's worth noting that in the JP version of the quests...no one actually tries to arrest you. (Aside from the guy in the very first HW quest that Sid kills) What happens is that you agree to meet "Fray" outside the gates...and then the two knights come along asking for help and you go with them instead. "Fray" gets pissed and starts attacking the knights at Whitebrim literally in retaliation for taking you away from them--its kind of uhh....abusive ex vibes. Then after you finish helping another knight is like "shit this guy went crazy and tried to kill people!! And he's yelling your name!! Please come quickly!"

In the Eng quests they have it that you go help the knights and then the third guy comes along and says you've been accused of heresy, and *then* 'Fray' goes berserk while you're on your way back to Whitebrim. So they straight up changed the entire motivation *and* the timeline there. Honestly the Eng version always kind of confused me and that's partially why i ended up writing such an elaborate change to figure out how it would work for Imry, because i went "well if this IS your inner darkness, it would be different for each person, they wrote 'Fray' assuming a specific kind of WoL so...its fine I'll just do my own thing."

I jokingly said to Aki that people are just thirsty for Fray and got mad when the lvl 50 quest revealed that it was selfcest all along :p

Honestly i feel like "I'm upset that this guy is dead so I'm going to have a mental breakdown and have my subconscious magically puppeteer his corpse" is way more fascinatingly creepy than the idea that you resurrected Fray somehow...i also don't get how Esteem's behavior matches up with what we hear about Fray from the people who knew him. Like what would he have to lose telling Sid and Rielle he was still around? And why the fuck would he care about the first rando who picked up his soul crystal enough to try to convince you to run away with him??? It makes zero sense.

I'm also still scratching my head over "the Warrior of Light is good therefore no darkness". Darkness isn't evil. Everyone has it. That's...that's the point. It's not just anger, it can be depression, guilt, etc...anything really.

I literally just watched the scene with the Warriors of Darkness again on and alt and

POINTS TO ARBERT SAYING "light, dark, it doesnt matter. What matters is how you use it."

 

Anyway my Inner Darkness tells me to yell at people on Twitter over video game story meta and i have to tell it to sit down and shut up

 

In one of the recent interviews with Yoshi P he talks about the shape the PC's inner darkness takes in the capstone skill, and says not to link the shadow to Fray too much, as "Fray" is the personification of the PC's inner darkness. I was glad to see that - a lot of people make way too much of appearances and surface-level interpretations, which is... pretty funny for a job with a psychologically deep questline, where the PC (and the player) is has to ask themself some hard questions.

 

I think that interview must have been what the original tweet was in response to, and then the thread just rambled about *stuff that they didn't like that didnt actually happen* and i was just like ??????? What is going on here.

Spoiler: I'm just gonna paste the thread text here

When i first saw the trailer i just...assumed that it was a resource issue that the shadow looks like Fray. Like imitating your character's appearance so everyone else in the same area can see it seems a lot more difficult than just having everyone's have the same model. (And a lot more difficult than having it in a private instance where it's probably client side?) Idk I'm just wondering aloud, i dont know for a fact since i dont make games for a living, but.

Yoshi P: don't read too much into this btw. Job mechanics =/= lore

This person: *reads entirely too much into it* you're saying the player character is the same no matter who plays them!! Summoning their darkness means they secretly want to go nuts and murder!

Me: ????????????????

 

Anyway, twitter is ok and there's a LOT more korean/jp fanart there to browse which is neat. The clickbait promoted posts are annoying, tho. And the lack of queue. (I am at work during the supposed "best times" to post art for promotion and i dont really trust a third party site for queued posts...)

 

Oof, that whole thread is a big


I guess the whole 60-70 questline story was a big whoooosh right over their head...

 

They went on another ramble after that about how the questline supposedly pushes that "anger is the source of the player's inner darkness" and how it would have made more sense if they explored other emotions instead which really reinforces "wow this person has no reading comprehension at all huh"

I mean i partially blame the localization for the weird impressions people seem to have of the whole thing because of how much more...caustic Esteem is, but.

(They didn't like the 60-70 quests either despite the fact that those literally...do what they were asking for...by exploring the WoL's guilt/regret...like i personally thought the inclusion of the Heaven's Ward was a bit odd but i figured it was more guilt for what happened to the people they left behind. And also specifically i think Myste making Zephirin was like...psychological self harm.)

But nowhere can i remember the quests saying that anger is the only source of (your) darkness? A component, obviously, but...not all of it??

(Also if Esteem were actually Fray, why do their pronouns switch to she/her when you play a female character...lol)

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here im just. *So* baffled by this

Like its not new that the game is not a choose your own adventure despite having a customizable protag. Dialogue choices (that don't affect the plot anyway) aside, they have to make the narrative happen and therefore sometimes the WoL is doing to do stuff that not every person's WoL would actually do. That's what imagination is for. And Fanfiction.