/f/ - Fandom Generals

I'll start!

>Favourite characters?
1# spot goes to the trailer midlander/Meteor. He may not appear in the game at all but he has my heart; he became an essential role in my wol's story. Actual NPCs are Lahabrea/Hephaistos, Erichthonios, and Thancred!
>Favourite expansion?
Endwalker and Stormblood are tied for wol lore, Shadowbringers for msq.
>How long have you been playing?/Which expansion did you start?
I've been playing for 3 years and started around the final patch of SHB just before the release of EW.
>Are you a Wol Shipper or Canon Shipper?
Wol Shipper and OC/OC shipper! I ship my Wol/Meteor and make yaoi OCs in the background (i.e 2x Vieras/Midlander shared between them, Divorced Xaela/Vagrant Hrothgar)
>Thoughts on latest patch releases and content?
Enjoying Dawntrail a lot so far! Luckily I immediately switched to JP dub the moment Wuk Lamat stepped in and my experience has significantly improved pretending the troon VA never existed. (I pity those who stuck around for the ENG dub, the direction was abysmal, troon pandering aside welcome back ARR) MSQ is alright, however its the mechanics and actual gameplay that I enjoy the most. The scenery and zones are gorgeous even as my computer is fighting for it life trying to load the 3rd zone xD

>>2932
>Favourite characters?
G'raha Tia is in my number one spot but Erenville is now a strong second place.
>Favourite expansion?
If we're talking MSQ, Shadowbringers for sure. I've been planning to do a replay of it at some point. Probably if the unique NPCs get their graphics update.
>How long have you been playing?/Which expansion did you start?
I started in 2020 and caught up with the MSQ in 2021. In hindsight I wish I could've been current when 5.3 first dropped cause it sounds like it was a wild as hell time.
>Are you a Wol Shipper or Canon Shipper?
I used to ship my own WoL with G'raha tia but since I finished Dawntrail I switched over to WoL/Erenville. That being said I still love G'raha and follow tons of WoL/G'raha shippers who draw art of him with their own WoL or the trailer guy. Aside from that I've gotten into Vrtra/Estinien as well and the two male Viera NPCs from the Dawntrail Botanist/Miner delivery questline. I never imagined they'd be fujobait but then you do the questline and they canonically start living together and promise to go on a journey together one day.
>Thoughts on latest patch releases and content?
Honestly I found Dawntrail MSQ mid but the graphics look great and the battle content has been excellent so far.
>Everything else! (WoL Lore/Raiding progress/fanart.etc)
I wanna commission so much WoL/Ere art but I'm also curious where they will take his character in Dawntrail patches and feel like I should wait and see. Maybe he'll get a new outfit like Krile or some more interesting character writing moments. Also in regards to
>Glad to hear theres some XIV fujos on the site! I feel that the fandom is mostly overriden with het/yume shippers or general normie fans
I wonder if there's certain characters who draw more yumes to them than fujos. From my social media experience I feel like I've seen a pretty equal amount of yumes and fujos making G'raha Tia ship content but with Emet for instance I've never seen him shipped with a male OC.
>>2933
>my experience has significantly improved pretending the troon VA never existed.
I was blaming the questionable EN performances on having a bad voice director, which likely is what happened as well, but in this case a youtube comment pointed out to me that Wuk's VA probably has to work harder in the first place to actually sound female which is going to make emotional acting and yelling more difficult and then the weird issues immediately clicked into place for me.

I really hope that Erenville is going to get more doujins in the future cause right now I've found one single M/M doujin with him on pixiv and nothing else. Would be nice if he becomes another fandom bicycle like G'raha tia. I just remembered I bought a bunch of Suemitsu Dicca doujins I hadn't even taken out of the plastic yet so I flipped through one. The art is real nice and I love how pathetic G'raha is for the male miqo WoL.

Just finished dawntrail and MAN the brainworms hit hard for Erenville, I loved the small moments of development where he begins to open up to the wol. Although he had a non-combatant background role for most of msq, I LOVE how he grew to have a bigger part in the last story arc.
There's so much wolship potential too! whether your wol is non-viera (the angst on lifespan differences) or Viera (long lifetime to adventure together!) it's nice to have a romance option outside of battle/high stakes and more on the exploration slice of life side of xiv lore. I hope we get to see him more in post-msq quests soon since he only began to shine near the end of the msq due to how wuk lamat centric the entire story was

>>2988
YES! My thoughts exactly. I'm pretty hopeful about the patch content cause there's some hints he could be relevant in them.

I didn't mention it in my first post but I've been enjoying art of the bard quest boys too. While I was playing through the quests I did feel like I was third wheeling sometimes, lmao.

Bless Ishikawa, my queen. Thanks for the BL rabbits.

>>3140
Ishikawa pushing through with more story bangers even when shes no longer the lead writer, bless her heart cause dawntrail msq is mid and it really needs her blessings!

that new gathering top instantly cancels out everything that went wrong with dawntrail hot damn

>>3290
Yeah it's been a big hit with the artists I follow on twitter. It also bears an uncanny resemblance to a modded top that I've seen around. I really need to get it for my own viera once I get in the mood for crafting and gathering again.

I've been trying not to be too negative about 7.1 and there was a moment in time when I told myself I may like dawntrail MSQ more after the patches like with stormblood but honestly that was just a cope. I'm not even going to say it's the game's fault, it's just that they completely lost me already at fanfest when they revealed solution 9 and in the patch as well I can't bring myself to give a shit about the alexandrians and their hideous city. I wanted just tural itself and its cool creatures and tural zones and seeing Erenville's home and family and the hideous cyberpunk shit feels like a cancerous growth ruining what I actually wanted to see and they literally cannot undo that. Also what they did to Erenville's mom feels like another Moenbryda and Ysalye situation and the more time that passes the more it annoys me. But I'm the type of person who doesn't want to divert from canon so I've been trying to deal with it. At the end of 7.0 I thought I had a grasp on Erenville's personality and situation but then in 7.1 it almost feels like everything that happened before is so inconsequential? His home got wrecked but oh well, he says it's still his home. No conflicted feelings about it? Is he trying to reconnect with his old friends who have been living in a dystopia for 30 years? Who cares. Again, I know that's just a case of me hyperfocusing and wanting one thing and the game not giving me what I want. Not their fault that in the end I give no fucks about Zoraal ja getting baby-trapped. Just needed to get that off my chest. I've been coping by imagining my WoL/Erenville ship post-canon where they're having adventures and being gay. I guess that's a dangerous thing to imagine for an MMO that is still in progress cause who knows that will happen. Not that I imagine they'll kill Erenville, though. Any honorary scions are probably as safe as the scions at this point. Still though I'd like to draw that when I get better at art.

>>3519
Right?? I completely agree and (third time reuploading this post and the spoiler wrap is still not working, read further text at your own discretion) loathe alexandria and all the horrific modern/cyberpunk-esque aesthetics it brought along with it. Inb4 previous final fantasy games had future elements in it, yeah it did indeed but it was kept to a minimum and the outfits still had a classic "final fantasy-esque" look to them that still kept them timeless and classy. I wish Alexandria had similar aesthetics to living memory, a technology enhanced kingdom that still retained old architecture to reflect their culture of perpetuality and clinging to the past. Imagine ishgard but more colorful and with LED lights kek. I know this will never happen because they cant outright remove an area in a game, but my megacope is that once the alexandria shard gets restored, the area goes back to their original world and heritage found ends up becoming a massive crater that once held the region.
Another thing, I just wish they actually let the scions behind in endwalker and maybe have them show up as a cameos in future expansions/side content only. They served absolutely no purpose in dawntrail that couldn't have been done by a new NPC. I dont even care if people call the new NPCs "bootleg scions" I just want them to lay down orbiting the wol for everything and focus on their own goals.
Ive been mega delulu regarding xiv MSQ these days and my biggest cope is that they keep the plot generic so players can flesh out the world building themselves while the devs focus more on gameplay/mechanics. Extremely lazy sure, but it makes me content as a writer since I dont have to worry about minor cultural lore getting retconned or character personalities/reactions not aligning to the wol's personality/canon. Dawntrail dialogue being generic as fuck? Alphinaud pointing to a mountain and saying "this looks like heavensward"? No problem, I can envision the filler conversation inbetween that and have it pull references from fleshed out segments in the story like the downtime during the travel to the churning mists from my personal lore.

apologies for the unprompted text dump, i get really excited when the XIV threads get bumped up from time to time and I love to read other player's writing and thoughts about the lore

>>3542
>Inb4 previous final fantasy games had future elements in it
I've argued so hard with people who just refuse to read what I have to say. I never played 13 or 15 so I can't say anything about that but I feel like all the older FF tech stuff has been stylized steampunk or mystical tech that fits in better with the fantasy elements and not just Cyberpunk 2077. You didn't see Celes end up in GPU city encountering a vending machine.
>I know this will never happen because they cant outright remove an area in a game, but my megacope is that once the alexandria shard gets restored, the area goes back to their original world and heritage found ends up becoming a massive crater that once held the region.
Yeah sadly I can't imagine they would either, especially after all that writing about coexistence. I've been hoping that at the very least they will let us remove that dome. One of the plot points they brought up is the levin sickness and it sounded like they could never permanently fix it unless these people no longer live inside of a plasma globe.
>Another thing, I just wish they actually let the scions behind in endwalker
Yeah same. Admittedly before DT launched I was part of the problem as a G'raha simp who wanted him to stick around cause he's my precious catboy but by now I also wish they had just retired the scions. Would've been an interesting parallel if we assembled new party members of each tural race just like Gulool jaja did on his journey.
>Ive been mega delulu regarding xiv MSQ these days and my biggest cope is that they keep the plot generic so players can flesh out the world building themselves while the devs focus more on gameplay/mechanics.
I've seen someone in the recent /a/ homo thread joke that since ishikawa's departure it shows we needed to have a fujo in charge of the writing and not waifufags but I guess we have no idea what mandates go on behind the scenes. Maybe I should just think of it more from a writing perspective too, that I didn't necessarily misunderstood Erenville but that the game simply left stuff blank that I wanted to see and I should imagine it myself. Oh btw to spoiler something you have to wrap the spoiler with ** on each side, not the way it works on 4chan.
>apologies for the unprompted text dump, i get really excited when the XIV threads get bumped up from time to time and I love to read other player's writing and thoughts about the lore
No problem. I'm interested in it. I don't really want to bitch about dawntrail in other XIV communities I'm on anymore cause I'm sure most people are tired of hearing it but here I can just get it off my chest.

>>3544
> I don't really want to bitch about dawntrail in other XIV communities I'm on anymore cause I'm sure most people are tired of hearing it but here I can just get it off my chest.
Oh i completely get that. Im mostly tired of people expressing disdain on the expansion except they dont actually have a critical reason for hating it and only dislike it because fetch quests, scrote streamer said it was boring, or vendetta against wuk's VA (not that I care my voices are on JP)
There are so many glaring flaws to easily pick from but people tend to stick to the lowest hanging branch and repeat it over and over it starts to get redundant. That aside, I love reading people's deep critique regarding the lore, and their interpretations on how they could've changed it to be better or less two dimensional.

And even if I have a lot of criticism regarding dawntrail and openly make fun of its shallowness sometimes, I still had a lot of fun going through the MSQ on my own pace and personally enjoyed that the wol had a backseat role while a new character sort of filled the slot as a primary character (though my character is a non-wol so its probably easier to think of it this way lol) though theres no fixing alexandria and I personally retconned it in my head to look more like 9/13/15 which had a more steampunk/medieval style as you said with futuristic elements incorporated in it.