like, i don't want her to be A Bad Person or the altar-priest to the elementals as eldritch gods. but i do want her to be kind of a miserable asshole at her worst, and i want her worst to be way closer to the surface than in canon (where it's nonexistent)

it hurts her capacity as a leader in critical ways--she's so absorbed by swaths of fire she doesn't pay any attention to how the city creates its own rot by fostering paranoid xenophobia.

when she finally does turn to look at it, she has no idea how to deal with it.

she has lived long enough to know that the elementals make promises, not threats. her link to natural disaster necessarily reaches backwards as well, due to her long life and the hearer's sensitivity to patterns repeating. the shroud's topsoil is thick with young corpses and they squelch at her step

also venat was afraid of death, a-towa-cant was assassinated by the twin adder at a peace summit in xelphatol, dezul qualan crash landed in the churning mists and had a retirement home romance with hraesvelgr, and kan-e-senna is a century older than canon and is profoundly mentally unwell

and somehow gets embroiled in Still Further War despite trusting muriel to Avoid Further War. she ends up finding a lot of meaning in midgardsormr's pact to protect the star, and finding the courage to get personally invested in the world again--relationships, a home.

i keep coming back to mewithoutYou with this stupid game www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxBR...

WHO THE FRESH FUCK

break from incoherent analysis of incomplete and inconsistent translations of deleted scenes to appreciate the wacky character designs and classic ps2 soft comfy environments

chosing the human side means being the sword of the oppressor, keeping the dwarves enslaved, keeping the forests felled, etc. each side lets you give the lie to one dominating order while maintaining the other. there's no option for coexistence. if you "break the cycle" you unleash empire.

it also looks like the human/nonhuman conflict also represents a split between interrupting/preserving a larger status quo. the fairy side is abt preserving tottaus/worldbalance, despite the parallels drawn between the human superiority myth & the draconic/"natural order" one, but

lucian dares to question that but he's the villain no matter what side you choose. the rank and file npcs question that by being a variety of people but they have no agency in the larger conflict, which is maybe the tragedy of it?

like the game accepts that humans collectively Are a certain way. it takes an imperial expansionist enslaving politics and makes it The Entire Human Race That Is Inherently Biologically Like That. what could a story like that possibly have to say that is worth a second of your time

i'd hate this to be a story that gives the different fantasy races immutable tendencies like Cruelty and Greed and ~Purity~ bc then it traps itself in meaninglessness. but it Feels like human nature is kind of the fulcrum of a debate over whether to let ppl build stuff and that kinda makes it empty

it's incoherent man. zane wants humanity eliminated, then claims the world's options are total obliteration of fairies or a "temporary reset" of human civilization. what is meant by "end of the world" is unclear. what are the stakes exactly

also lucian/aphelion being one of the Council of Cyclical Apocalypses but defecting to "let humanity decide its own fate" reminds me of someone. stories came out a year before ffxii. it's curious

humanity trying to control the world bc they think it will go to shit otherwise vs the dragons who already control the world and want to destroy humanity bc they think the world will go to shit otherwise...ok this is something