👀

In retrospect she's probably going to be really mad that Calyx was able to somehow 'do the research' on her without encountering any indication of her 20+ years worth of primal/tempering related academic paper trail.

In the next scene, there's some serious meditation on the politics of expressing anger, who's 'allowed' to do it in what circumstance, who holds their peace, for what benefit, etc.
I'm torn between "I should pick that back up" and "I would have to concede that Sorrows of Werlyt exists, so nah."

I have an outline and years old drafts of "it's the first time Strix has seen Raubahn since 4.55, and they're spending it with him physically restraining her from pulling the ceiling down on Gaius's head."

Every meaningful opportunity for personal conflict turns into one of:
- Let's agree to be friends
- The only way to resolve the problem is This One Villain Dies And Everyone Moves On
- Fordola

XIV as a story loves discarding friction the moment doing so serves the pacing (see Y'shtola suddenly being okay with the Exarch after three years despite having JUST FOUND OUT HIS PLAN IS TURNING YOU INTO A LIGHTWARDEN) so the fact that she stays in that real and messy grey area is astonishing

"Let's wave goodbye to all the actually fun things about this expansion so that we can concentrate on the real shit, It Is Always Ascians."

A handful of people have independently come to the conclusion that “your attraction to much larger partners entails some amount of ‘They look like they could keep me warm.’”

Putting together their appearance with a few asides in EE, I think Lalas are built to shed waste heat extremely efficiently, and lifetime THM/BLM practice warps your internal thermostat in that direction too, so Strix gets triply thunderfucked by prevailing conditions in, eg, Coerthas.

We had a near-wipe to Scathac in the Year of our Lord 2025 because people still get tempted to ignore Connla when Scathac is at <10% HP. Dun Scaith is still Dun Scaithing.

I forced 23 other people to run Dun Scaith specifically so that I could get these shots lmao