6.5 will have Ryne & Gaia in an explicit date only for SE to announce their relationship is open to interpretation, and Kana Ichinose will have to strangle someone.
If I had a nickel for every time Kana Ichinose played a red haired teenage girl who falls in love with another girl and the finale of their arc culminates in rainbow imagery, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
y'shtola and urianger are suuuuch effective foils for each other, whenever i want to think abiut one i compare the other and i go Ohhhh and then i become The Comprehender. like for example, in shadowbringers, y'shtola goes to the nights blessed, far from more industrial society - a culture with deep and intricate spiritual beliefs that arose after the flood (an interpretation of light and dark that is a folk belief rather than the establishment’s), along with a proximity to distantly ancient ruins for her explore. meanwhile urianger goes to the bookman’s shelves, full of books from just before the flood from the established civilizations of the first, seeking to learn more from those more recent establishment scholars. which falls in line with y'shtola being a field agent while urianger stayed in the waking sands basement
y'shtola left behind established sources of knowledge to seek out her own - master matoya, distrustful and disdainful of the state authority that will not tell her the whole truth, goes to live in a far off cave. urianger does not - he tends to bend more easily to others’ will (minfilia, the exarch, etc) (enabler! enabler!!). urianger has a character arc where he grows out of that, fully shrugging it off after the exarch’s plans fail. in endwalker he’s basically always out in the field instead of in sharlayan or at the rising stones - the most similar he is to his early self is electing to stay on the moon, which really reveals more about how he has learned to reach out and connect with others and extend compassion + understanding.
and it is really brought out in ultima thule, where y'shtola stands in defiance to an “authority” on truth and knowledge, declaring that she wants to discover knowledge on her own and for herself, and urianger’s sacrifice is all about how supportive he is of his friends. i cry.
yshtola doesn’t have (/hasn’t yet had…?) a character arc where she has to grow and change - she’s extremely secure in herself. i think dawntrail, which seems to be all about forging ahead to new things, has potential for more stuff for her - here’s hoping!
tl;dr the secret to understanding them is that they are caster dps vs healer
one of my fav things about new cg and trailer reveals for ffxiv is how all the meteor fuckers suddenly come out of the wood works to say that, yes, sometimes you do need to need to risk it all for a piece of white bread
EXTREMELY funny to find out that the new motorcycle is a multi-seater mount not because another player sits in the sidecar, but because they have to cling onto the back of it WHILE ALPHA SITS IN IT HELP
More of these: Ancient edition! This is the first time I get to look at all of them together and I really like it. It’s like they’re looking out their windows and doing their little things.
(For those wondering where Lahabrea’s birds are, look behind him, there’s a big one there)
