My perennial frustration with final fantasy 14 fandom, once you get past missing stairs and bad actors and queer 101 discourse, all of which infest pretty much everywhere along with other background noise...

Lemme try that one again.

A perennial frustration of mine (think "pet peeve" only without the affectionate implication of "pet" in the mix) within the Final Fantasy XIV fandom is the tendency, especially since Shadowbringers, to conflate "LIKE" with "LITERALLY". Prior to Shadowbringers you'd see this pop up now and again in lore discussions: were the old white mage / black mage traditions LIKE the jobs we have now (using modern language to describe older practices) or were they LITERALLY the jobs we have now (no everyone in the old city was just a White Mage lmao) but in Shadowbringers, a major plot element revolves around the fact that not only are there different worlds out there which were initially all one world until a cosmic pangaea event was initiated after a war in the heavens, but also, we, our character, we are a fragment of one of the Twelve Most Important Godbeings In The Universe's Past Perfect Days, reincarnated over and over (though usually not back to back to back) and that's what makes Us Important To The Story and that opened up some fucking FLOODGATES of supposition which didn't just surround our character¹ but rippled to others: is this character who looks just like the merchant whose cart we ride on in the intro to A Realm Reborn as our intro to the world, is he LIKE that merchant as a bookend to the new story in a new place isekai, or is he LITERALLY that merchant's reflection across worlds? Is the shirtless blacksmith who makes your end of story class gear LIKE the shirtless blacksmith who does the artifact questline, as a joke and symbolism, or is he LITERALLY. Is the Rowena of the First LIKE, because haha they're everywhere isn't that weird, or is she LITERALLY?

This got worse in Endwalker, where first we go back into a Fermilab-sized-and-shaped part of the past (and in so doing, witness a lot of characters whose personalities are at least vaguely LIKE many of the NPCs we've met, some of which are dear to us, as well as having a Very Important Set Of NPCs acknowledge oh hey, your soul looks/feels/tastes/smells like our good buddy Azem who isn't here for some strange reason) and then into another shard/reflection, where we meet a couple more characters, including one who feels a lot like a narrative reflection of us² and then in Dawntrail there's even MORE planar shenaniganry but the thing is, they're not being treated as "different planes of existence" by this very loud, very certain-of-themselves segment of the fanbase: there's this Where's Waldo of "ok so who's the Azem shard of this reflection, who's this reflection's Haurchefant, is CHARACTERNAME a reflection of This Character or That Character", this has also rolled backwards to other content like

OK, so back in Stormblood, the optional dungeon/trial content revolved around the Sacred Beasts of Yanxia and their relation to a mythical figure called Tenzen (who is also an important character from Final Fantasy XI, quite probably why the name was chosen in the first place), and it's legitimately a very good story, but now, the story's text of "oh, you're LIKE Tenzen in many ways" isn't being taken as "oh, Tenzen may have been a "warrior of light" from a previous era" and isn't being taken as "oh, you are a noble person, like Tenzen" but is being taken as "YOU. ARE. TENZEN. TENZEN WAS YOU." by a group of chatterers. Maybe only like, 10 of them, but I can't get away. Their takes hound me, their comments are echoed by other people who take their authoritative tone as proof that they're right about it and they just don't... inquire. Of the text. AT ALL.

God I hate lorebucketers and wiki-fetishists (for clarity: fanwikis are great, I'm happy when people not only care deeply enough to document the lore for others, but when there IS enough information to actually justify a wiki³, this is about people whose fandom-expression is primarily "our gratification comes from reducing it to entries you can plug into the wiki and put into the Lore Bucket, and once it's there, it's Enshrined, how dare you question The Lore")

Anyway I'm encountering more of these takes now that Dawntrail is coming out of community spoiler embargo and I just... GOD, I hope that the post-expansion patch quests deal with the HERE AND NOW of this world, and the friends WE have made, and we can finally decouple from the echoes of the past and the long-dead ghosts of...

Look, I know there's some people who miss the point of the Defunctland Trolley Problem of Living Memory with "they're just data ghosts, what's the problem, unplug that shit" but happily froth and lust over their Ancient Pals who have been DEAD, GONE AND IRRELEVANT FOR LONGER THAN HUMAN HISTORY EXISTS.

Anyhow thank you for coming with me on this self-indulgent painsomnia vent.

1. Let me be transparent here. I believe that taking time to deal with the weight of expectations around "who is azem", "why are we expected to carry their millenia-gone weight", "what expectations does this saddle us with", "are we in fact affected by their soul", "who am I, really" and confront all of that is FUCKING GOOD SHIT. That's TOOTHSOME. That's MEATY. That's something that Exalted dropped the ball on bigtime. And Final Fantasy 14 does significantly worse than Exalted, partly due to the nature of the game. It is not the subject that is the problem, it is the treatment and the aftershocks.

2. This is Zero. I like Zero. Zero is good. Zero haters teleport to the woods now.

3. One of my favorite things to see from an indie or small-press TTRPG is when a game comes out with an expansion which is like, a gratuitous gear-porn or monster-manual or vehicle book, full of all of this shit which could be expressed easily as "Heavy Pistol. Close Range. Accurate. 9 Damage, Piercing. Some makes may have accessories" but they expand into minutiae subvariants, because A: I eat that kind of loving NERPS up like a fiend and also B: that is a sign that the game has MADE IT, that the company feels comfortable enough to do something GRATUITOUS and UNNECCESSARY. A well maintained reference wiki full of meaningful entries is kinda like that, when curated for reference's sake instead of enshrinement and checklist-fetishization.