I Feel Like This Poor Dude Took A Fireball To The Head, This Is Concerning

I feel like this poor dude took a fireball to the head, this is concerning

I miss drawing like this…

Yes. This is the pain every tank suffer through. And the worse? It goes on cooldown. Taunting you as you lay dead on the ground.

THIS IS A LIE

Raven doesn't really do romance. But his partner is Y'sthola,who is as uninterested in romance. They both enjoy the occasional bedroom fun, but are focused on their own goals, be it research or adventuring.

He deeply respect the sorceress, and enjoy her dry wit, sharp tongue and calm demeanor. Y'sthola herself enjoy Raven insight. While not a great scholar of magic, his intuitive understanding of the worlds and the peoples around him make for an helpful point of view. For as fierce a warrior he's, Raven is an excellent listener who grasp new concept easily.

It's common for Raven to pry Y'sthola from her research, remind her to eat, or even carry her to bed. He try to come by at least once a week, and force her to take a day off. She sometimes protest, but she know well that the enforced day off is helpful, and often what she need to become unstuck, coming back to her research with fresh eyes.

Raven seek her out, staying around as she research. People aren't bold enough to brave the sorceress, so he's left in peace. It's also soothe him on the bad day, to have a scions in reach. She keep spare blankets in her rooms for when he need it.

Who is your WoL's love interest(s), if any? (aka, tell us all about your WoLships!)

Breaking my own post chronology to go back in time to my first week or so in the game, when I encountered Witchdrop for the first time and...... (predictably) died.

I honestly do NOT understand why the Ancients are constantly called fascists? A few similarities doesn't equal a 1x1 correlation. You can have a deeply flawed society without using a modern buzzword.

To be absolutely clear, this is not a post supporting fascism. I don't support facism. I don't support oppression. It is only a post pointing out that the Ancients, while seriously troubled, weren't fascists and it doesn't even make sense to call them that.

(definition from the Brittanica)

They're not militaristic. Did they even have an army? I would have expected to see that mentioned during the Final Days.

They don't have a contempt for democracy. Just because they aren't a pure democracy does not mean they have hate for it - the Convocation are chosen in part based on the good word of the community.

Moreover the debate hall was a place where people could argue over all manner of topics, agree and disagree, examine alternative ways of thinking. Oppressed fascist societies don't get to play devil's advocate or disagree with the majority so openly.

Hermes seriously pushed the envelope and committed MANY social taboos during the Elpis arc to where a fascist state would probably want him being punished or disappeared, not given authority, and they were STILL willing to consider him for the position of leadership. Azem had a reputation for breaking the rules and causing trouble and was still one of Emet Selch's best friends. Venat, also with a reputation for causing trouble, who broke tradition by not Returning to the Star when she left her seat, still wore the white robes of an honored teacher.

The Convocation are considered to be in a position of service, not ownership (and are expected to die when they step down), and Convocation members are not "legacies." They don't inherit positions from their parents. In Pandaemonium it's even implied that having too much an attachment to your biological family over the society as a whole is considered abnormal.

And they are explicitly insistent about not having an elite class. Everyone wears the same clothes, ideas and creations are meant to be shared for the benefit of all society. There's not much evidence of rich elites hoarding the best concepts. When you can literally just think an apple or a piece of gold into existence starvation and money hoarding isn't really a concern.

Hot take: the Ancients actually have more in common with Socialism. But I wouldn't call them Socialist, either, because the entire nature of their existence and the resources at their disposal are so vastly different from what we, in real life, have to work with.

They cannot die of old age. They can create animals and plants and at will. They were gods in their time. Literally. Their entire context was different, and their system of government and culture was an attempt to address their own unique situation.

The simple truth is no system of government is perfect and we can't just accuse every flawed society of being fascist. We can examine the failings of the Ancients without trying to shove them into a modern box based on a modern world.

And while I think a strong argument could be made that there is some criticism of real life society in the game, which is absolutely worth discussing, diminishing the story of Emet Selch and the Ancients to "fascism evil" dismisses an incredible amount of nuance built into the storyline. And also dangerously oversimplifies the real life complexities of oppression and the way those systems can manifest in human societies.

It's also important to note that the oppressive cultures Emet Selch built after the Sundering were designed to be destructive. He wasn't modelling Garlemald and Allag after the Ancient way of life. He was doing the opposite. He was creating these violent empires to bring in Calamities, because he could justify doing anything to fulfill his duty and bring back his loved ones.

He essentially claims to the WoL that humanity's willingness to embrace these violent regimes is proof that they were INFERIOR to the Ancients, because Emet did not believe his true people would have succumbed to such evils. (And yeah, there's a great discussion about hypocrisy, there! It's said the burden weighed heavy on him, and I'd argue you can see him wrestling with his own morality through most of Shadowbringers)

It's worth considering how vastly Zodiark's tempering affected the Ancients - and how this doubling down to a singular idea and solution when faced with a world-ending threat, excommunicating people like Azem who disagreed, ultimately only contributed to the destruction of their way of life rather than saving it. Zodiark was arguably a betrayal of the Ancient's actual ideals. And unfortunately, once he was created, and the masses were Tempered, there was no going back.

Zodiark was created in a time when their very existence, the entire world, was at risk, and it's not fair to claim that actions they chose while terrified, faced with otherwise certain doom, reflect the way their society was as a whole for the vast majority of their existence. It doesn't mean the Ancients were perfect. But context matters.

Azem had existed as a seat for a very, very long time as a mediating voice and it took the world ending for that division to become so extreme their seat was expelled (and not replaced.) This was presumably the first time in the Convocation's history that the voice of the Counselor to the People was silenced. In order to create Zodiark, they had to compromise their own longstanding traditions.

In the modern era, the Warrior of Light was betrayed by other people over far less serious conflicts of interest. It's wild to me that the Ancients are frequently maligned when the game points out, over and over, that problems run rampant in most, if not all of the societies you run into. Not just the ones Emet Selch created.

Races are massacred and disenfranchised by one another (and commit massacres in kind.) Refugees are treated like slave labor. Mixed-race children are abandoned. Wealth disparity leads to extreme poverty. Religious fervor leads to bigotry. Hoarding of knowledge leads to censorship and assassinations. All of those are serious Eorzean problems that the Ancients, so far at least, have not appeared to face.

Moreover the only reason the Warrior of Light is strong enough to face the Endsinger and the Scions are able to survive is... because of both Hydaelyn and Zodiark. The amount of rejoinings that have taken place are one of the main reasons the WoL is so powerful. Plus Emet Selch, Elidibus, and Venat all play crucial roles throughout the narrative in guiding the WoL and protecting them.

Azem was the counselor. The bridge between. The WoL is the balance between Light and Dark. Not the enemy of either.

Someone who could look back at the past and honor it, and also look forward to the future and pursue it.

When you really look at the story, it doesn't make sense to present the narrative as if it's "evil fascists" vs... what, exactly? The Ancients are not narratively presented as an enemy any more than Ul'dah or Sharlayan are. I'd argue the latter two are actually worse.

Ultimately this is still a fantasy game. These are fantasy people. The story challenges us to question our biases against others who are different from us, and to humanize our enemies. Trying to pigeonhole the Ancients into a real world political system of oppression kind of misses that entire point.

Finished leveling my Reaper tonight and so.... Every battle class to 90! No more roulettes for me :D