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Admiral Joeslop posted:Credits are rolling, what a ride. Have I got some good news for you! Talk to them after the MSQ. The implications are...intriguing.
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Dec 14, 2021 21:41
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Dark Knight, even with its nerfs, is honestly pretty satisfying because it feels great to Blackest Night an incoming tankbuster and just go "No." Rotation is steady and straightforward, too.
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Dec 14, 2021 21:56
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Lord_Magmar posted:Also true born Garleans can wield magic, they just need external sources of Aether because they’re like Thancred. He also had the even more deranged tactic as a youngster of stabbing his palm with an aether crystal while wielding a sword to cast sword beams.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:31
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Professor Beetus posted:Discussing the 87 spoilers above, I really was floored that the universe was apparently just that bleak. Like fuuuuuck, everywhere else in the galaxy/universe just dead except for Etheryis? jfc It's not clear if the universe is empty or just the areas Meteion observed. A sample size of 108 worlds is still pretty small.
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Dec 20, 2021 02:34
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sexpig by night posted:continued spoilers from this. In any case, the conclusion of the MSQ has life restarting, potentially on a grand scale, across the cosmos.
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Dec 20, 2021 04:16
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Hey, so, just gonna AsAJew this one: "The Ascians are Jews" is some absolute fuckin' nonsense. The closest one can say is that the longing of the Ascians for their Unsundered World renewed resonates - but very much is NOT THE SAME AS, and is explicitly their most sympathetic quality - tragically with any disapora people's historical reckoning with their lost homeland. A sympathetic quality in common is just...a sympathetic quality in common. Goblins, with their wandering diasporic existence, social ostracism, ingenuity and focus on intellectualism, are closer to a positive resonance with the Jewish experience.
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Dec 22, 2021 20:54
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Endorph posted:my political hot take is that garlemald isnt a metaphor for nazi germany but a metaphor for modern day israel. scared? Well. That sure is an opinion somebody has!
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Dec 22, 2021 21:13
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Captain Oblivious posted:That should not be a hot take because it matches much much better and I said as much in the other thread Yeah no. Even just in sheer scope of atrocities, no. Garlemald's position as a world-spanning empire of vast atrocities and unstoppable military expansion up until it was destroyed from within makes it a grotesquely bad fit for the analogy of Israel even if we discount recent Jewish history. Oh and let's not talk about "the manifestation of a timeless conspiracy of evil wizard ghosts." It's Britain. It's extremely Britain. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 21:16
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Valentin posted:wait, but Garlemald isn't the country full of annoying aristocrats who have zero good cuisine and take the world's cultural treasures for their own. Sharlayan is one Britain! Garlemald is another Britain! (I think it'd probably be "Sharlayan is Britain as it saw itself in the Victorian era - Sharlayan is extremely Victorian intelligentsia and Gospel of Rational Enlightenment - and Garlemald is Britain as it behaved towards its colonies.") Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 21:22
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Hellioning posted:Garlemald is Rome? Like they even use Latin. This is also true! But...yeah, the Israel thing is loving absurd. Israel isn't even an empire, let alone a world-spanning military power - it's a particular state whose dominant political parties are relatively expansionist within its highly restricted sphere and mostly continues to be allowed to do because almost every other regional and national power currently considers them more useful than the subjugated occupied peoples within conquered territories. To say Garlemald is an Israel analogy is genuinely offensive even before we hit the parts where Garlemald's atrocities are grotesquely bad fits for Israel's atrocities or the part where Garlemald is in-universe the product of a secretive conspiracy of evil bodysnatcher wizard ghosts manipulating history to their own ends. Just, goddamn, that's offensive. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 21:27
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cheetah7071 posted:it's almost like the circumstances of the nations of Etheirys don't map one-to-one in all ways with any specific real-world nation, by design Obviously, I just found that conflation really offensive.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:30
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Honestly if you were looking for Israel Analogies (TM) in Etheirys Ul'dah is right there with its dysfunctional pseudoparliament, mixture of stereotypically European and Middle Eastern cultural trappings, awkward origins and burgeoning mercantile capitalism. Or Ala Mhigo with its bellicose history and recent occupation, militarily suppressed religion and central trade location, combined with a diaspora that nonetheless are grappling with their nation's uglier bits of history.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:36
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sexpig by night posted:these are really dumb comparisons too, the Ala Mhigo one is downright offensive and the Ul'dah one makes zero sense and is way more in line with actual insane antisemetic imagery if you're trying to say the country run by a syndicate of merchants in the shadows is 'more like Israel' than another... It's considerably less antisemitic than "the country literally run from the shadows by a monstrous cult of evil bodysnatching wizards who are basically The Reason For All The World's Problems & driven by a fairly thin victimization narrative that's centuries old is totally Modern Israel You Guys." And no, actually, Ala Mhigo's got a lot in common with how modern Israel sees itself - it's a bellicose nation with a history of conflict with its neighbors, literally founded as a new diasporic homeland, and with a metric fuckton of ugly poo poo about its old regime (much as Israel has a bunch of ugly poo poo about the founding of Israel and the Nakba). Ul'dah, too. The Syndicate in particular - not in form but in its sheer dysfunction - has a lot in common with how badly run the Knesset is. Venuz Patrol posted:i propose that neocons be prohibited from the final fantasy 14 thread News to me that "doesn't buy an immensely antisemitic conflation" = neocon, but go off. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 21:48
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sexpig by night posted:Israel is not an occupied nation, I mean it is but not in the sense you're saying, I don't even think the insane Likud crowd genuinely 'sees themselves' as an occupied people, I'm truly begging you to shut up I'm not going to argue with you, but I agree this should stop.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:54
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Worst duties: Expert: Honestly they're all fine, usually. Numbers: Copperbell Hard is not pleasant, honestly. The gimmick bosses just don't really work well and the dungeon itself isn't especially interesting. Ldr: Copperbell normal, no question. Adr: LoTA is just boring, but you can do it on autopilot. I actually kinda thing Mhach or Ridorana are the worst because they're the nastiest examples of the mid-raid-tier slump. There's just nothing especially memorable about them and they take a surprisingly long time. Ozma's nice? But every other boss in Mhach is tedious. Trials: Steps of Faith. Vishap's fortunately almost never a thing. NRR: I honestly don't care much of any of the Alexander raids. MSQ: Castrum. Long enough to be annoying, not long enough to turn your brain off and watch something in the background. And Livia's a weird gimmick boss.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:14
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cheetah7071 posted:Lota atomos is still the best content in the game LOTA's a weird one because it's so obviously taking holdovers from EARLY WoW and even EQ2 style raiding encounter design? Infidel Castro posted:Honestly if there are any real life comparables, I'd say they closer to the Byzantine Empire trying to reconquer the western Roman Empire under Justinian. Wow, that's a deep cut.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:20
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Valentin posted:pretty surprised by this opinion because 1) famfrit and belias are at least notable I think and require you to be awake, and construct 7 and yiazmat are imo actively fun and have their own unique distinctions (math and AND I AM THE BARBER'S BLADE, respectively), and 2) rabanastre feels much more obviously like the forgettable bit from that series. i don't think I even know a mechanic from any of those bosses except hashmal. rofocale has a figure 8 AOE and argath (ugh, one of those retranslations I think just sounds bad) has a proto-pyretic/absolute blizzard, but that's all I can think of. Hm. Maybe? I guess it just compares very negatively for me with the sheer awesomeness that is every Orbonne boss? Construct 7 is at least kinda funny. Yiazmat just feels WAAAAAY too durable and kinda random with his instakill mechanics unless I'm just too dumb to grasp them. The best thing about Yiazmat is that he and Argath both had their VAs really get into it and it was good foreshadowing for how satisfying content with voice acting in combat could be when they spent the money. The thing about Rabanastre is that being the first raid of that tier means your ilevel can significantly outstrip it so it at least goes fast?
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Dec 22, 2021 22:32
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Alexander's problem might just be that the actual bosses lack a lot of narrative context almost all of the time? Like mostly they're just interchangeable robots without a good set of cohesive framing devices that give each encounter a theme? Alexander himself is great, and Brute Justice is at least fun?
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Dec 22, 2021 22:37
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sexpig by night posted:yea the setpieces just kinda...run together. Brute Justice owns and obviously Alexander Himself is cool, but yea aside from them, Cruise Chaser, and that big nasty slag monster, everyone else is just 'big bipedal robot or a goblin who makes themself big' that don't seem to have much to do with things. Alexander was also, like Coils, the era where there wasn't the now-common practice of a hub area between each raid, right? So even though narratively each tier of Alexander is supposed to be a super lengthy dungeon crawl across Alexander's ludicrously bigger-on-the-inside body, it doesn't really feel like it?
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Dec 22, 2021 22:45
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Blueberry Pancakes posted:Something I found kind of odd about the final zone of Endwalker. Or, perhaps not odd, but a little unusual, I suppose? Alphinaud explicitly says at the Dead Ends that they're not here to judge the failings of the various civilizations, only to offer sympathy and hope. The game in general takes a very consistent line here; individuals can be judged if they show no desire to change, but in general, it assumes people want to be good people and given the chance to do so. And notably, the dragons actually do improve a bit after the MSQ is over. More show hope for the future and a desire to reclaim it - and there's FATEs about some surviving (for a given value thereof) dragonets who very much want to survive, who you have to protect.
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Dec 27, 2021 07:00
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Kongming posted:Diablos is fought at least three times across three different expansions, making him one of the most recurring villains while still not being that important in the grand scheme of things. It's great, we just keep dunking on the jerk and he deserves every single time.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:06
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Saint Freak posted:(new raid spoilers) There's at least one Ancient walking around with eyeglasses. Why? Apparently just so he can dramatically ditch them, but why would they even know what glasses are? Aesthetic.
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Dec 29, 2021 18:35
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ImpAtom posted:I kind of like it on mine because it makes the shift to EdgeMode feel more distinct whereas when someone is already black rags it doesn't really show as well. You know EdgeMode is sinister because it puts you in crocs.
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Dec 30, 2021 02:09
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sirtommygunn posted:Very funny though that they try to fix paladin quests in StB by just pretending you're a gladiator again. What's even funnier is that the Gladiator questline feels more paladin-y than the actual paladin ones do - big focus on defending the weak, etc.
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Jan 21, 2022 06:51
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HackensackBackpack posted:Doing the Level 80 SMN quest in Endwalker. To be fair, a lot of folks who use wheelchairs can get out of them to walk (often painfully) for short stints.
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Jan 25, 2022 20:25
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Firebert posted:
Aglaia sets are great but I'm kinda frustrated the Fending set is visibly and obviously metal over bare skin. It makes it harder to use in most armored looks. The Maiming and Striking sets look so good though.
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Jun 14, 2022 17:21
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Hogama posted:Sorry, I've gotta go do more research again. New solo roleplay duty: Y'shtola does research in the depths of the Sharlayan archives.
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May 26, 2023 05:06
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Wow, they keep delaying that crossover with 16. I wonder if it's going to be a big thing, or if they're just trying to maintain the hype/player content cycle. Either would be sensible.
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Jan 7, 2024 03:56
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They did a really good job blending catlike features and humanlike expression with their faces.
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Jan 7, 2024 03:59
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A friend of mine described the Scions as "a bunch of grad students on a pub crawl across the world."
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Jan 12, 2024 03:16
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Cleretic posted:Yeah. I've said before, but that response basically only rings true if you actually are there for the challenge. The argument I would make for it is that one thing we can absolutely with certainty say about the Warrior of Light is they never want to settle down and get an ordinary 9-5. We are a thrill seeker, that's why we keep being a glorified sellsword adrenaline junkie. We may not be only satisfied by lethal violence, but because we have made a trade of periodic very dangerous violence we are implicitly ok with the idea of risking either our or someone else's death for our idea of a fulfilling life. That doesn't mean that's all we have to us, but by the same token if we weren't in this on some level for the thrill we'd have settled down and gotten a real job. But we can't. It is not in our nature to be contented with an ordinary life. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jan 18, 2024 |
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Jan 18, 2024 06:38
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YoshiOfYellow posted:I do think it's still important to note that Emet had a very deliberate and pointed attitude of "why should I care about any of you y'all aren't even *real* people" which is a pretty hosed up take regardless of how sympathetic his motivations are. He's also lying about it, and the game doubles down on reminding the player "the claim that the Sundered are fundamentally lesser beings whom Emet doesn't care about is a gigantic bit of self delusional cope to deal with the fact that to bring back the people he loves who deserved better he's going to have to have them all killed."
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Jan 18, 2024 17:52
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ImpAtom posted:I think the interesting there is that he's not entirely wrong from his perspective. If the context was different "My friends have all been broken into pieces that may resemble them but are not them, I have to fix them" would be an entirely reasonable RPG plot hook to have. But he's also obviously wrong because he's disgusted by the idea when presented to him before the tragedy and it's clear from his behavior and actions that he is doing everything he can to disprove that to himself, up to and including taking a mortal body and having children. His entire stated reason for following the WoL around was in a hope they could disprove his assertation and that is why the Lightwarden thing makes him freak out so hard he makes the world's biggest underwater cope to deal with it. Yeah, it's really important that to Emet he's still on his Save The World plot in his own head. If he'd finished it within a mortal lifetime it wouldn't have even been that outside of what a standard JRPG hero did. "Put someone back together mentally/emotionally" isn't that unusual a fantasy beat, and it wasn't unusual in his culture to literally see and track souls between incarnations. It's just that from the mortal perspective that's alien and monstrous. Of course one could argue that this is a sign of his fundamentally unenlightened perspective, that he is unable to see that his friends' new incarnations are just as valid as their past ones in the golden time now lost. Compare with Venat's monologue in Flow where she explicitly both accepts change and takes comfort in continuity. Emet is trapped in a prison of desperate attachment and he just needs to let go a little. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jan 18, 2024 |
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Jan 18, 2024 20:37
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It's ironic and sad the Ancient most associated with death and the transition between lives is so traumatized he can no longer accept it, because he's so haunted by the Final Days that he can only see it as a dissolution and not a transition. It reinforces the idea imo that you're less dealing with a living man than the ghost of him, and it adds a really sweet note that he finally accepts death with grace and hope in Ultima Thule. He can see the truths of his culture's spirituality again.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:51
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Firebert posted:I can't even imagine how they are going to do it, but they will implement a skip to Dawntrail when they do the level squish in 8.0. They really fumbled what could have been a clean break from the first 10 years of story in 6.1, but it is what it is. Not only will they not do that, they should not do that. FF14's aggressive callbacks and continuity are a huge part of what makes its story work.
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Mar 28, 2024 01:27
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Thundarr posted:It did kind of suck that the GoT-y elements kind of get dropped about 2/3 of the way through in favor of a more typical JRPG conflict. Felt like a lot of world building that ultimately went to waste. The game was fun otherwise, though. The problem with FF16's world and those GoT-esque elements, in my opinion, is that Valisthea is such an utterly cruel, unjust, evil place that nothing about its existing cultures or polities are worth preserving, given as they are all wholly founded upon slavery and murder. FF16 has a really good cast, but its setting needs to be killed with fire, which is why, well, you set out to do exactly that. (Although all the backstory they've since revealed makes me wonder if we aren't set in like, Valisthea's least interesting era, by design, in conventional fantasy terms.) That said, I would disagree with the earlier take that FF14 says magic is evil. FF14 says magic is a resource, and that resource can be employed in safe and unsafe ways, ecologically sustainable ways and non-ecologically sustainable ways. The same is true in FF7, where the Cetra (especially in the Remake) explicitly employed mako and materia in a sustainable fashion as opposed to Shinra's rapacious mako reactors. Final Fantasy says magic is dangerous, because magic is power and power is dangerous. I wouldn't say as a series it says that magic is bad, although some of the beloved entries do say that magic is so dangerous or bad that it's not worth using. (It is worth noting I don't particularly like FF6 compared to 7, X, or 12, for example, but that's a me thing!) FF16 is arguably on the extreme edge of "magic is solely a tool for domination and exploitation, expending human lives to do things that you could honestly do better and safer with mundane technological solutions, and a desire for magic is ultimately shown as explicitly childish." It's fine to not vibe with that, I'm not really vibing with it that much! but it is the logical negative extrapolation of certain themes. I am looking forward to seeing Clive either lose his poo poo or wonder at a world where magic isn't inherently portrayed as unsustainable and life-destroying, though. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 29, 2024 19:18
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Maximum Tomfoolery posted:All I'm saying is the character writing felt flat and the story failed to get an emotional response from me. I'm not bothered by a particular technical issue, or the quantitative amount of suffering present in the story. Maybe I just don't like grimdark stories in general, but I didn't care for this one. I wanted to like Dion but I felt like he didn't get enough time in the story. I mean that's totally valid! Also I do think the problem with Dion is writing-wise the story arguably doesn't really reckon with how Dion was the top enforcer and paragon for Sanbreque when everything we see about Sanbreque is so founded upon slavery and human misery that it makes his Superman-esque coding (to supposedly contrast with Clive's Grim Antihero coding) fall a bit flat. It feels a bit like he was from a slightly older draft of the game and not wholly updated to fit the prominence of the Bearer world element. He's a great character but it's a little detail that rankled at me.
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Mar 29, 2024 19:25
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Rand Brittain posted:The main distinction is that Misija betrayed, enslaved, mutilated, and murdered people who were supposedly her comrades in arms, as opposed to strangers or enemies, which is the really dirty bit. Yeah, that. I think Misija gets more of a visceral response because of how much her crimes rely on abusing the trust and goodwill of others. Hell, she jacks Mikoto's Echo in a process highly implied to be very, very spiritually invasive and possibly having a significant cost in lives. She even corrupts and gaslights her own beloved ancestor. Misija's circumstances are tragic, but she is just... an extremely vicious, spiteful, venal person. She cultivates trust and friendship only to exploit it later and then gloats about how stupid and deserving her marks were, then leads her victims to - under Tempering - horrifically mutilate themselves in service to her Primal. Her only real gesture of actual virtue is sacrificing herself for innocent Bozjans.
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Mar 31, 2024 08:04
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ImpAtom posted:Misija probably isn't even in the top 10 worst people to get sympathy or redemption in FFXIV TBH. She is a bad person but she did bad things for a specific goal that makes sense for her as a person and character using the tools she had available and eventually sacrificed herself, but to get into the top 5 in general you probably need to be an Ancient just on the sheer scale of horrifying crimes you were party to. It's not that her crimes are the worst, it's that she as a person is among the most lacking in positive interpersonal qualities. Misija isn't the most evil, in any utilitarian sense, but she's probably among the most toxic personalities. Nobody likes being betrayed! That's all. It's a perfectly reasonable reason to go "gently caress this lady in particular," especially since a lot of her fans like her most because she's a Mean FemRoe. People have silly emotional responses!
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Mar 31, 2024 19:21
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Personally I see a hatred of caste systems and an unwillingness to let the sins of the old world be reborn as positive, but then again I don't have reading comprehension of a child. There's a difference between "this person is the most evil person ever" and "this person is an rear end in a top hat." Misija may not be the worst person in the cast by a long shot! She is, however, one of the most personally venomous. She is a gigantic rear end in a top hat, repeatedly abusing the trust of not only the actual regressives in Bozja but her comrades who genuinely put trust and faith in her. (Hell, most of the regressives in the Bozjan plotline are basically an offscreen threat; none of our allies are explicitly among them. I don't recall any of the Gunnhildr's Blades types being called out as regressive figures, but it's been a while; her onscreen victims are mostly essentially decent people. And Mikoto. I mean, yeah, some of them are suspicious of her, but it turns out that they were totally right to be so.) It's not "mean woman," that sort of underwrites just how many of Misija's actions are driven by cruelty and petty spite. She's just also got a point that pre-conquest Bozja was a horribly unequal place, but all of our main allies already want to build a more just future, so she basically just makes things unnecessarily worse. Antivehicular posted:Vauthry is at least (5.0 MSQ spoilers, tagging for safety) someone who also had no choice in his situation, since he got merged with a Lightwarden in utero and then grew up in an environment of being indulged in his every whim and told he's an incarnate god while also being stuck in a body-horror hell. I mean, he's still a total poo poo, but you can argue he's in the Zenos situation of being hosed from moment one and the inevitable product of his lovely circumstances. Encyclopedia Eorzea vol 3 made me have a rather nastier view of Vaulthry, since it describes things like him beating a Minfilia to death after a bad dream where she killed him. Guy was spoiled and the product of unwholesome experiments, yeah, but we've seen multiple spoiled people in the setting who are either spoiled or experience horrible body horror stuff. Alphinaud is spoiled, it's actually kind of core to his generosity that he's a spoiled rich kid who's wanted for nothing and thus assumes comfort and plenty are everyone's due. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 20:58
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