Dreamwidth Spamfighters

Folks! The last time I worked on this was April of 2024. I kept putting it off because I was too busy playing the game. But I've been toying around with my Neocities site again, and that made me want to get back to this.

This is incredibly long because I've faithfully transcribed ALL the dialogue that happens during this part of the game (with the exception of a mini-game and some dialogue choices; I only have the answer for one choice, not both. I'll fix that later.) Get a drink and something yummy, then get cozy because you'll be reading a while.

Previous posts in this series:

* A Realm Reborn recap
* Patches 2.1-2.55 reflection
* Heavensward Recap
* Post-HW Recap
* Stormblood Recap!
* The Crystal Tower synopsis
* Post-Stormblood Recap
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 1
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 2: Holminster Switch and the Aftermath.
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 3: Il Mheg, the Faerie Kingdom
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 4: Meeting Emet-Selch and the Night’s Blessed
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 5: Yx’Maja, in the Rak’tika Greatwood
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 6: Rak'tika Lightwarden & a History Lesson
* Shadowbringers Recap Part 7: Return to the Crystarium

Recap from last time! SPOILERS for Shadowbringers

During our last recap, Vauthry had sicced his sin eaters on Lakeland. The battle was fierce and there were quite a few casualties. The Scions regroup in the Crystarium’s Ocular to discuss future plans, all in agreement not to give up the fight.

Alphinaud has had no luck finding the Lightwarden of Kholusia, while Alisaie has heard a few rumors about Amh Araeng’s Lightwarden but dare not investigate on her own. Still, Alisaie’s information is not concrete, leading Minfilia to suggest traveling to Nabaath Araeng to call back the original Minfilia, as her powers would allow the Scions to easily find the remaining Lightwardens.

Thancred is dead set against this course of action, but Minfilia is persistent.

Sensing your concern, Minfilia reaffirms her commitment to her chosen course of action, and asks that you trust her judgment with an earnestness worthy of her namesake. She then departs—presumably to make her preparations before joining Thancred at the gates.

After a short wait, Minfilia arrives at the appointed place and declares her readiness to depart. But before proceeding, you give her one last opportunity to abandon her chosen course. Her emphatic reply leaves little room for argument, however, so the group turns its attention to the question of how best to pass through Amh Araeng unnoticed. At Alisaie’s suggestion, you decide to split up—sending her, Alphinaud, and Y’shtola to the east to distract the Eulmoran Army while the rest of you take the western route to Nabaath Araeng.

As you near the gate to Amh Araeng, you realize you are not the only one contemplating the ordeals that may lie ahead. Hearing Thancred’s quiet plea for assistance in protecting Minfilia, his trepidation could not be more obvious.

You speak with Hardyss, who grants you passage through the gate—perhaps against her better judgment.

( MORE SPOILERS WITHIN! )

Challenge #11

In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your own post with the wishes you granted if you feel comfortable doing so.

Okay, I actually granted wishes by commenting on folks' posts, but here's a round-up of the ones I did:

1. catness wanted recs for games featuring cats, so I recced Stray, Sudocats, and Cats Love Boxes, along with a mention of the kitties of Forspoken.

2. falena asked for book recs and voice recordings, so I recced Connie Willis and Courtney Milan, and also linked to my Twitch stream where they can watch videos of me chatting.

3. visualjyushi asked for FFVII icons and writing advice; I commented with both when Challenge 5 first went up.

That's enough for now--I might look through the list again later to see if there's more I can grant.

My own wishlist is here - I've already gotten some great comments but I'll link it again in case folks are feeling generous.

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

I wasn't quite comfortable doing a mood board, because I didn't know where to get images from for it! Look, I care about artists/photographers/graphic designers; I am not about to do a random web search and steal their art for a frivolous purpose. I did look at Pixabay briefly for free clipart but didn't see anything that was right for the first term I searched on, which was "crying", lol.

Anyway, I ended up making a word cloud of terms and feelings from Final Fantasy XIV. And yes, "sobbing" was one of the first words I put in. There is a certain zone in this game that I sobbed my way through. No really, it took me THREE HOURS to traverse the zone and I cried for every minute of it. That's how powerful the emotions are in this game.

I cannot say enough good things about FFXIV. The story is absolutely amazing and you WILL be affected by it. The gameplay is pretty darn fun, too! I love the game to pieces and thus there was no competition here; I +was+ going to create something related to it.

If you're interested in giving FFXIV a try, let me know! I'd be glad to give pointers to any sprouts (FFXIV term for "new player").

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Post your answer to today's challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Given that I've read a romance novella recently (Courtney Milan's "The Pursuit Of..."), I've got romance tropes on the brain.

I like a slow burn. I remember once borrowing a book from the library and the main characters were having sex by page 50 and I was like "...". Yeah, that completely turned me off. The desire, the wanting, the longing is FUN! Jumping into bed that early misses out on a lot of the fun for me.

When I was younger, I liked "damsel in distress" tropes in romance novels, but I don't really have the patience for that these days. Because in those kind of books, too often the hero doesn't realize his feelings for the heroine UNTIL she gets herself into trouble, and that's kind of boring.

Looking at this list of tropes: My own writing has had the "mutual pining" trope, and yeah, I really dig that in a romance novel. I'm not opposed to "Enemies to Lovers" but it's not something I normally read these days, nor write. "Friends to Lovers"? yes, I like that, and I'm working on some more fics revolving around that theme.

I feel like a lot of my own fic is "Missing Scene" stuff (not that I've written much fic yet! but still). I try hard to fit my fic into the canon, either in the midst of it (as with my FFXII & FFXIV fic) or after it (as with my FFV fic). The thing is, canon usually means SO MUCH to me that I want to extend it. I don't feel I'm trying to fix it, more like... taking a thing that canon made me feel/think and running with it.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the definition of "crack" but I think I've written some? Both Best-Laid Plans & if you like it, then you should've put an earring on it (fics by me) are what I consider to be crack. Ridiculous situations that surprise the reader and make them laugh or smile.

I very much strongly identify with the "Fluff" nomenclature. Most of my fics are short, sweet little things. I have written angst but I'd much rather write happy things.

I like there being some humor in what I read/write. If I can crack up over my own work? BONUS. I think there's room for humor in most longer works, because life is NOT always dreary. Sometimes the funny happens, and that should be included.

I don't do AUs, really. I haven't read much fanfic myself yet, but the idea of reading my favorite characters in alternate settings just doesn't appeal to me. Like I said above: I want to see canon extended, not transformed.

Given that I read so rarely these days, it's a wonder to me that I even have a sense of what I like and dislike. I'm hoping to read more this year, of both traditional published works and fanfic. But yeah, these are some things that draw me.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Okay, I can do this! But I'm creative in different sorts of ways, so I'm going to break it down by area.

Fiber Arts

I have 800 finished objects on Ravelry, so I've made a LOT of stuff. Most of the time, I see a pattern and go "OH THAT LOOKS FUN I WANT TO MAKE THAT!" and do. Sometimes I've made stuff for craft-alongs, like I used to be active in Dishcloth Weekly and Hat of the Month groups. And sometimes, I make stuff to fill a Nerdopolis theme (Nerdopolis is a crafting challenge on Ravelry where we get themes to craft to, like "Architecture" or "Cats vs. Dogs").

I do create my own patterns as well, and those have mostly come by because of fannish passion. The first time I recall making something from an mere idea is Olive, from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. She was a very strong unit and I was lucky enough to pull her AND get her geared pretty well, and I just loved her and so I made her. I hadn't done many dolls or toys at the time, and I was more confident with crochet, so I winged a design with separate pieces for her limbs. It worked out okay, but she was BIG and FLOPPY.

I eventually had ideas to create more FFBE dolls. I adored Lasswell, for instance, so made him... and Lasswell adores Rain, so I had to make a Rain for my Lasswell. This time, I found a doll pattern designed by someone else and altered it for my use - the limbs are attached as you make the doll so it's much more sturdy. But the clothes were designed by ME. I pretty much took other patterns I was familiar with and used them as a guide, shrinking down the pattern considerably.


[Image Description: Handmade dolls of Rain and Lasswell. Rain's on the left and has a shock of blond hair. He's smiling and wearing a green tunic with a red kilt on his waist. Lasswell is on the right. He has long black hair and a serious look on his face. He's wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a flowing purple coat.]

I made more FFBE dolls, too, but then wanted to branch out into other Final Fantasies. I was showing off my latest FFBE doll in the Final Fantasy group on Ravelry, and the moderator admired the dolls but lamented that she couldn't crochet... and well, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

So I designed my own knitted doll pattern, utilizing knowledge I had picked up over the course of my knitting career. I made Rinoa from FFVIII (which I seem not to have a good picture of here on DW, and I'm running out of time so can't upload one at the moment) and eventually made Aerith from FFVII:


[Image Description: A doll of Aerith from Final Fantasy VII. She's got brown hair pulled back in a braid, and is wearing a pink dress with a flounce of lace at the hem. The dress is accompanied by a cropped red jacket.]

I'm pretty fearless with my crafting. Yarn is forgiving, and many mistakes can be fixed with some patience and practice. I continue to get excited and make things. It's not all fun, though - I'm currently knitting a cardigan for myself and well, I am a fluffy lady which means a LOT of long rows and it's tedious and feels like I'll never finish. But I persevere, because I want the end result.

(and I wrote this section last. I need to post it and get ready for Stitch Club! feel free to ask questions about my creative process if you have them!)

Fanfic Writing

I'm still fairly new to fanfic writing. Oh, I had thoughts of writing fanfic way back in the Sliders and seaQuest era but as far as I can recall, it was just thoughts and I didn't follow through. I did briefly play a character in an RPG on LiveJournal, and that was mostly fun except for when it was not (drama behind the scenes).

Back when I was playing that character, I was still able to daydream. So I'd be sitting on the train going to work, giggling because I was imaging my character doing silly things (we were a comedy RPG) and it was FUN. These days, it's hard to daydream, and so well, I didn't write fanfic for about ten years because I had no ideas.

Then came the Final Fantasy Kiss Battle in 2021. I remember asking if it was okay if I left prompts even though I doubt I'd write anything, because I do NOT write, and they said "sure!". But then I was reading prompts, and lassarina prompted "FFV, Bartz/Gilgamesh, duel" and well, my brain exploded: I had an idea!

So I opened up a Notepad++ tab and started writing. I shocked myself by not only completing that fic, but being the first that year TO post a fic. Here it is:

A Long-Sought Duel (676 words) by AltheaValara
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy V
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gilgamesh/Bartz Klauser
Characters: Bartz Klauser, Gilgamesh (Final Fantasy V)
Summary:

Bartz finally finds what he's been searching for.

For Snowflake Challenge 5, visualjyushi asked how to start a story and that led to some really good conversations. This is what I wrote:

I got my start for A Long-Sought Duel partially based on the Kiss Battle prompt (FFV, Bartz/Gilgamesh, duel) but also by thinking about what a duel would be like. Duels are passionate, and it just so happens that Bartz is associated with the Wind Crystal, which is the crystal of passion. So I started with him feeling lackluster and missing passion in his life, and at the end of the short story, he finds it again.

I'm still having problems daydreaming, so I can't come up with ideas without some sort of prompt. But I am currently delighted by my Ladies Bingo card because I have ideas for SO MANY of the prompts, and have 5 WIPs already. I haven't worked on them in a while, so it might be time to do so tonight.

But yeah, most of my writing IS from prompts now. I have self-prompted a few times, like for this fic:

if you like it, then you should've put an earring on it (243 words) by AltheaValara
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Additional Tags: Fluff and Crack
Summary:

The Warrior of Light's luck comes through once more in Eureka.

So I guess I *am* capable of coming up with ideas on my own. But yeah, I love a good prompt.

Neocities (Fanscripts)

Last year during Snowflake, I built the bones of my Neocities site and launched it live. It's a repository for my Final Fantasy story summaries and fanscripts.

I can tell you how I first got into writing fanscripts. I was heavily playing Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a mobile game, and I felt its story was on par with the stories of the main 16 games in the series. And I realized: it's a mobile game, so someday it will be shut down and I will never ever get to experience the story again. That made me all kinds of sad, so one day I wandered down to our kitchen with my tablet, some paper, and a pencil. I made myself a cup of hot cocoa, then started replaying the story from the Room of Recollection, hand-writing down the story.

I finished writing down season 1 four years and four months later. It took 434 sheets of paper. But by gods, I did it.

I originally posted the story in a Dreamwidth journal, which was fine but not always the best for navigation (all my navigation links broke when I renamed the journal). I had name squatted on Neocities a few years back, and I thought well, let's put them there.

Working on Neocities is a delight for me. My degree is in math and computer science (I double majored), so I have programming in my background and it's been really fun to stretch that muscle. When I first started working on transferring the files over from Dreamwidth to Neocities, I was hand-coding the HTML because there wasn't much HTML in my original entries. That was tedious and time-consuming, though. Well, I know a bit of Python, so I wrote a Python script to process my files and automatically put in the HTML. The script doesn't make the prettiest HTML file and there's some tweaking by name I need to do, but it took a process that could take hours and made it less than a second to run the script, plus about 15 minutes to tweak by hand.

When I started working on the FFBE script, I did not have a computer of my own, hence handwriting the script. I'm so glad I was able to document Season 1, because I do adore the story. Unfortunately, the game did shut down about two years ago. When they announced End of Service, I valiantly tried to extract the Season 2 story from the game files, but I was not knowledgeable enough to do it. If I had been able to, it would have saved me a LOT of time and effort.

The game is gone, but it lives on at YouTube. So I've started going through the Season 2 videos and making a script for them. Some might argue it is wasted effort since the YouTube videos exist, but I think there's value in having a written script. For one, it may help fanfic writers because it'll be searchable--and that thought delights me.

I've expanded my efforts on Neocities and am now writing fanscripts for Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XI as well. FFXI, at least, is not so bad because Windower (a popular third party tool) can make logs of the game text as you play. Alas, it triplicates lines, but I have a handy Python script to clean that up.

Final Fantasy XIV, I started by writing summaries of the story as I played through each expansion and patch, but as I went on, those 'summaries' got longer and longer and now I'm pretty much writing a real fanscript for Shadowbringers. I might go back and do fanscripts for the prior expansions, too, if I have time.