#estinien was bad enough now childe too? when will her suffering end

[haunted-xander]

Childe would unironically make a really good Warrior of Light

Like, okay, not only does he get to fight a bunch of ever increasingly powerful enemies (such as several angry deities, an extra powerful combo machine of said deities, dragons almost as old as the star itself, SEVERAL ACTUAL GODS and then some!) but he also gets to team up with a group of (mainly) strong warriors that you KNOW he'd be just dying to spar with (also you can't tell me he wouldn't take one look at the twins and go 'my siblings now').

He's also very loyal, so once he's in with the Scions he is IN ya know? Like he would kill and die for them no questions asked. They're also not really bound by law so he can do whatever he wants and what is the law gonna do? Arrest him? THE Warrior of Light? Don't think so.

(Also if he ever met Zenos all hell would break loose. The entire region is decimated and it's a miracle there even is a region left to begin with. They'd be the best worst rivals in existance and it would be everyones problem)

#morally speaking he doesnt care about doing the right thing hes only here for battle + he got attached to the scions #kinda like estinien. hes not here for the cause its just that the people he cares to follow do so he ends up tagging along #hed be an amazing WoL but also a super fucked up one #he likes killing things a bit too much #krile sees him return from a battle covered in blood and having a mad grin on his face and just goes oh god theres two of them #estinien was bad enough now childe too? when will her suffering end #at least childe doesnt go running off to god knows where everytime she turns his back on him for 5 seconds #childe #tartaglia #ajax #genshin impact #final fantasy #final fantasy 14 #final fantasy xiv #ff14 #ffxiv #xander rambles

[pudgy-puk]

What's your beef with Hraesvelgr? I'm not trying to call you out; I'm just curious.

oh boy this will probably get long (and as i said in the previous post, this is not prescriptive to anyone else, just descriptive of what i think about the character and why)

the thing with hraesvelgr is that he’s a Bad Elf.

by which i mean, hraesvelgr has all the traits of the kind of high fantasy elves that people utterly despise, presented in that same infuriating “they’re the Best and you can’t disagree with them” way. he is a character who is and who must be so perfect, perfectly tragic and perfectly beautiful, that he distorts the characterization of anyone and anything who gets too close to him in order to preserve how perfect, tragic, beautiful, noble and right he is.

he distorts other characters from his first mention, in fact—when ysayle explains that she will take the protagonist party (at that point consisting of the warrior of light, estinien, and alphinaud) to see hraesvelgr, to treat with hraesvelgr, and gives us the story of hraesvelgr and saint shiva as background. including the detail that hraesvelgr ate shiva, and this was regarded as an event that brought peace between discontented men and dragons before thordan et al. fucked it up again with ratatoskr. she says this at our literal first meeting on guardedly-friendly terms. there is no physical evidence, textual evidence, to support her claim. we are still in coerthas and have yet to see even dravania, let alone the churning mists. it has been established previously that militant heretics are willing to lie and lie quite well (cf. the one who killed and stole the identity of an inquisitor in order to kill people in 2.0 msq). the only reason to choose to believe her is to CHOOSE to. and alphinaud, who at the time recently had been badly burned by choosing to trust the wrong people (ilberd, lolorito), and who even through present content, through 4.0 and 4.1, continues to be deeply affected by that betrayal, chooses to believe her with little skepticism, even the part about dragon-eats-gf-is-a-moral-good. estinien chooses to accept her story with very little challenge—estinien, azure dragoon of ishgard, whose root motivation is “everything and everyone he ever knew was personally flambéed by nidhogg twenty-ish years ago,” expresses no skepticism or concern regarding nidhogg’s brood-brother assuring pretty elezen women that he is totally safe and noble by talking about how he ate his last pretty elezen girlfriend. to be fair, no one over the course of the entire goddamned xpac ever voices any sign that this troubles or even surprises them, but this is the starkest example: even when the reasons to be skeptical are highest, hraesvelgr’s version of himself as repeated by ysayle is considered to be the full truth and fully virtuous.

even though it’s true that hraesvelgr is not honest. when he tells the protagonist party what he presents as the truth about the origins of the dragonsong war in ratatoskr’s murder by thordan and his knights, he leaves out the role he played in it. we find out via the echo that the dragonsong war would not have happened without his consent—nidhogg, who laid dying, asked hraesvelgr for the strength of one of his eyes, to save his life and empower him to wipe ishgard off the face of the planet, every man, woman, and child, even if it takes him a thousand years. hraesvelgr granted that request. he is not challenged for being nidhogg’s accomplice, willing and knowing, in this—he’s never even acknowledged as having been dishonest. because we have to consider hraesvelgr to be the good, tragic, noble dragon, his misery and anger over his sister’s foul and most unnatural murder must justify his complicity and inaction.

never mind that his other sister, tiamat, is also suffering horribly, tortured and torturing herself in azys lla, for millennia without cease, without comfort, and he apparently doesn’t care about that. it is very difficult to see hraesvelgr as some kind of moral arbiter based on his actions in the game, but the story tries very hard to still present him as such, to the detriment of pretty much every character even associated with him. for example—a great deal was made of how team protagonist of ishgard must, in 3.3, trek to the churning mists and beg and plead for hraesvelgr’s aid and approval, must prove ourselves Worthy in his trials in sohr khai in order for him to consent to move against nidhogg. the trouble with this is that for it to work as intended, it requires the players to forget 3.2—to not think about the end of 3.2, about how nidhogg almost succeeded in murdering hraesvelgr’s daughter vidofnir—to not realize that if hraesvelgr still has to be arduously persuaded into stopping nidhogg after that, then he didn’t value his own daughter now and her welfare now as much as he does a thousand-year-old grudge. but he is the moral arbiter to whom the people who have been actually trying to change things and working to save lives must submit for judgment and be grateful for his approval.

narratively, hraesvelgr is presented as Good and Noble, but his actions do not at all back that up. The story, though, is completely unwilling to grapple with this; it makes excuses for him in order to present his strong preference for brooding inaction as at worst neutral. he is still furious/grieving even though the events were a thousand years ago, but it’s okay because dragons are immortal godlike beings who don’t experience time the way mortals do! fine, so what happens the next time some limited mortal being manages to hurt him or betray him deeply again? do we do something like this again and subject thousands and thousands of people to possible death and misery because it takes at least a thousand years for great wyrms to process grief?

and it doesn’t end with nidhogg’s death, even—the harm caused by hraesvelgr’s inaction regarding nidhogg. the 4.0 dragoon questline has established that nidhogg used the power of his great wyrm voice, his dragon’s song, to override the free will of the dragons of his brood and force them to wage war on ishgard even if they don’t want to—and that this power is almost completely irresistible, and it hasn’t stopped even with nidhogg’s death. the dragon we rescue as part of this quest was still lost to the song and the hatred even as far away as the azim steppe, and the only thing that was able to drive out nidhogg’s lingering song was the voices of dragons of hraesvelgr’s brood. this suggests that among the surviving dragons of nidhogg’s brood, populating the forelands and the mists, there are those who never wished to fight or straight up never had a choice (remember all those hostile dragonets? the baby dragons? y e a h), but none of the allegedly “good” dragons can lift their voices to help them (they can’t. then all the mobs in these zones would be gone. and then there wouldn’t be a game). but they’re still the good dragons because they said they are. (remember, this whole genocidal war business started because one dragon was murdered. just one. one dragon was murdered, therefore all of nidhogg’s brood—encompassing who knows how many dragons by this point—must be compelled to go to war against ishgard and if they die, then they die. god, the only way this makes sense is if nidhogg is totally off his rocker, consumed by monomaniacal hatred to complete irrationality for a thousand years. which hraesvelgr didn’t fucking care enough about to actually do anything meaningful, despite being an immortal great wyrm of demigod-like power himself. what a noble creature).

it’s not that hraesvelgr is highly fucked up that makes me hate him so much, it’s that he is so fucked up and is still treated as the Great Good Angelic Dragon. he’s not. he’s really, really not. like—fine, maybe his motivation for complete inaction is because the last time he ever did anything, everything went horrifically wrong, that’s what he thinks—that could be a good way to have such a character. but it’s not what we have, which is a story demanding the deference and respect due to a moral authority actually be given to a self-serving, indifferent, indolent liar.

and that, briefly put, is my beef with hraesvelgr.

#ffxiv #spoilers #negative taggy thing #fey-caress