shadowbringers and the art of grief
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- Опубликовано: 11 июл 2024
- happy dawntrail release weekend everyone! what better way to celebrate the new expansion than by spilling my guts all over the one that came out five years ago
CHAPTER LIST
0:00 intro
5:44 a world full of grief
11:53 interlude- comrade alphinaud
16:29 a world full of grief (cont.)
18:26 the characters are (also) full of grief
36:35 interlude- girl so what
41:09 oh god we gotta talk about that guy
55:17 autovivisection for your entertainment
1:07:30 tomorrow and tomorrow
microphone on loan from my girlfriend❤️ which is why i was very mediocre at using it.
additional music from SHADOWBRINGERS: FINAL FANTASY XIV ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK composed by Masayoshi Soken
featured cosplay sewed by myself with 3D printing by Dangerous Ladies
A Friendly Letter to Everyone by Tim Rogers can be found at / a-friendly-letter-to-e...
(what is functionally a ffxiv) twitter: / daintyprotag 
Развлечения
Shadowbringers is, unsurprisingly, also my favourite because I, too, am a sucker for stories about grief. Now look at this scrunkly little man with 12,000 years of depression.
Alisaie acting appropriately like the one after whom she was named - STEALING THAT LIMIT BREAK
My jaw literally dropped when you made the point about the Ancients not seeing you as a child, so it's Emet-Selch who sees you that way. I had never put that together before and now I am yet again despondent over this skrunkly old man
GOD HE'S SO SKRUNKLY BUT I LOVED HIM SO MUCH BY THE END. I cannot explain why I became so attached to him or why his absence is so upsetting. Like I feel half as upset about him as I feel about Ardbert and my wife jokes that she doesn't stand a chance to him.
Did I make a self insert WoL that gradually gained a personality all his own because my boyfriend wanted to play the game? Yes. Did Heavensward sink its claws in me with its story of the horrors of war and every single expansion after make me feel feelings that I haven’t felt chewing on the story in years? Yes. Am I now one of those guys that spends 5 hours a night trying to get a boss to spawn so I can ride around on a capybara? YES MY GOD
SNEK
Just 5 more minutes.
Wow, same!!
snekk
54:16 This bit right here. MASTERFUL editing. I had never put the two and two together that Thancred is a scaled down scope Emmet. And him being the one to break though the barrier, to see though the layer of grief that Emmet has surrounded himself with because he KNOWS the answer to the questions he's asking is just SO poignant
THIS 💯 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
i genuinely started screaming there, because ive thought about shadowbringers nonstop since it released, and somehow, SOMEHOW, even being obsessed with the storytelling space of azemlore, i never once put that together. stunned and shocked at myself.
What amazes me still is the voice actor for Magnus not only did an amazing job for this relatively minor character but he also voices fucking Barnabas/Odin from FF16 which has a 180° turn on the energy.
shadowbringers was integral to helping me deal with my lingering grief in a both literal and figuretive transition period of my life, i played it at a certain "new beginning" stage. i lost my father at a young age and now and again i'd get into low points of "oh god just how am i supposed to live without this guy. why feel anything good if he isnt here" and this game was 'the' thing that got me out of that (Hopefully) last slump. the game hits just as hard as it did a year and a half or so later. this is, without exaggeration, my favorite piece on this game i've ever seen. not just shadowbringers, final fantasy 14 as a whole. immensely happy you got some enjoyment out of it. had a lump in my throat for pretty much the entire runtime, fantastic work
(also Real for the tim rogers mention)
(also keep drawing that little freak i oughta dub more of those comics)
I'm glad someone else loves Thancred here. Him constantly wrestling with the desire to have *his* Minfilia back knowing that sacrificing the young girl isn't fair to her & it wouldn't be something Minfilia-Prime would want him to force on her. He knows it's wrong but it doesn't quell how much he still wants the person he cared about most back.
Side note, between Magnus & Lyna they brought their absolute A game when it comes to voice acting for Shadowbringers
My take on is very close to Mads'. Thancred knew that it was not his place to choose young Minfilia's destiny, and I think he tried to emotionally distance himself from her so as not to place his thumb on the scale, as it were. In practice, however, that made it seem to everyone else that he did have a preference, and it was not for her life. I think by Shadowbringers, Thancred has grown to care for young Minfillia as her own person, and is struggling instead with the knowledge that regardless of the choice being made, he would lose someone he cares about as a result.
That scene with Magnus always makes me cry. You can just feel conflict between wanting to smash the thing he feels took his wife from him into tiny pieces and his desire hold onto it as a last, unexpected, cherished gift.
"The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it."
16:14 shoutout to the best example of cat naming I've ever seen. Truly an alisae move if I'd ever seen one
Thancred/Emet parallels aside, the side story for Ran'jit shows a similar mirror. Like Thancred, Ran'jit knew a "greater" Minfilia, and like Minfilia Warde, she is lost in sacrifice towards a greater good. Despite great inner turmoil, Thancred is ultimately able to separate his love for Minfilia with his love for Ryne.
Ran'jit cannot.
It's possible that Ran'jit spent more time in the company of the 'first' Minfilia than Thancred spent with Warde. He has, in all likelihood, the longest tenure in all of Norvrandt of combat against the sin eaters, and I doubt honeyed promise of luxury or bliss from Vauthry could tempt him. Ran'jit aligns himself with Vauthry not out of ideology or a means to an end, but as an end to his pain.
I’d say it’s not just the first “Minfillia” but all of them up to the rise of Vauthry that Ranjit connects himself too. When he passes he specifically calls out to his “precious girls”, plural, and as the commander of Eulmore’s armies, he would have raised and watched them all die. So it’s not hard to see why he might choose to follow a leader who would allow one of those precious girls to not suffer that same fate.
It's hard to criticize Shadowbringers because it did SO MUCH right, but I do think Ran'jit could have been a smidge more developed, his connections to the previous Minfilias showcased just a bit more.
If you're not paying close attention to his combat dialogue, and very few other points of dialogue, it's easy to read him as a pretty 2-D villain when he actually has a very compelling backstory
"this is alisaie! i named her after the elf girl-" and she's living up to it too!
As the yelling starts, I think to myself, "Yeah, that tracks."
There is something so uniquely powerful about a game painting the most utterly beautiful and real picture of grief and suffering, and then telling the player to "Yes and?" It. This world is dead, but there are still people here. My loved one is gone, but there are new people to love. My friend has changed, and is now my enemy, but they are stilll possesed of the things that made them your friend.
For me its the scene with Ardbert and Feo Ul on the watchtower, telling you to just take a moment to breath. They remind you that its not past, present, or future that matters, but all three at once, anf none of them at all. The offer to take the role of Titania amd lock yourself away in a depression nest, not because its healthy but because your loved ones would rather protect you in pain then let your suffering actually kill you.
This would have been a beautiful essay if only for the script, but your editing, cinematography, and cosplay were perfect. Even your damn thumbnail is Peek. Heres hoping you enjoy Dawn Trail.
slight spoiler allude to Endwalker, but what really left me speechless and had me sit in silence contemplating that same “Yes, and (what about the present)?” was when Jullus told Zero “Well you’re still alive aren’t you? As long as *you’re* alive, no matter how long or how many days it takes, there is always hope for you to pick yourself back up again.” Endwalker has a lot of mixed opinions but it masterfully built on this pillar that Shadowbringers so masterfully built, and you can see that it’s all built on the hope that regardless of what grief we may have experienced or what has happened in the past, we still have tomorrow and the people of today.
@@interstellar_xx EW, especially post EW gets a lot of hate, and for the life of me I cannot fathom it. The stuff with Zero and Jullus was all beautiful.
1:01:10 effectively perfectly describes how I felt when my own father died, almost word to word.
If I stopped grieving, then I simply wasn't broken enough over it. It was inherently wrong to stop.
Then, after that, I stopped crying one day, and never really cried since. It's a corruptive concept, but one shared by so many almost intuitively.
Dropping the best video essay I've seen on Shadowbringers is one thing.
Dropping the best video essay on Shadowbringers I've seen when your channel doesn't have dozens of other video essays of similar scope that allowed you to hone your craft slowly over time to build up to making this and instead this is by far the most ambitious and deep critical analysis you have done in video form (at least in the public)...that's on another level.
Like I get that this is a game whose themes you have a very personal connection with and, therefore, you have a lifetime of thoughts on them, but it is a testament to your skill, time, and effort that you can articulate those thoughts and filter them into a cohesive essay that isn't just personal catharsis, but actively elevates the source material.
Yes, as you say, Shadowbringers is not subtle with its themes. They are blunt instruments to be used to inflict maximum damage. But the readings, the connections you make are still your own and still require putting yourself in the art and articulating what you take from it. Way easier said than done given my many failed, unpublished attempts to do just that.
So, kudos to you. This is an excellent video essay. It sounds like the journey to making it was rough, but I am rooting for you to, as you put it, unshackle yourself from the past and live.
"the horrific unending tragedy of existence" really does sum up how I felt in the shadowbringers to endwalker period. it's really had a lasting impact on my outlook on nihilistic apathy vs aggressive hope and optimism that spirals into absurdism. Because of a VIDEO GAME, whenever I get in my feelings I'm torn between "life is meaningless and nothing matters" and "nothing really matters so just enjoy what you can and let go what you can't"
This is one of the best videos I've ever seen, and it's an accessible mirror to why Shadowbringers is one of my favourite pieces of fiction ever.
Truth is, even if I was spared the pain of physical abuse in my lifetime, the amount of emotional suffering I've endured for the sake of betterment of others is... hard to put into words. The most fucked up thing about grief, in my opinion, is that it's so distant from normality, that to be understood, you have to blow people's minds and hope, just hope, that they will not be too preoccupied with their own horror of realisation about how... much invisible pain is there in the world.
I, too, constructed temples in memory of the worst moments on my life, to prove the point to onlookers, that I'm not weak-willed, cowardly, hysterical. But the problem is, doing that has made me stuck emotionally. My care for others never went away, but it became a performance of genuine kindness without my ability to emotionally connect with it.
I think it's about time I stopped reciting age-old books for the sake of people that don't care about me, and pass on the torch of hope to yet another person, now in earnest
thank you for this video
As someone who also experienced shadowbringers in the wake of grieving i too felt the quite rudely outspoken portrayal of grief and the madness of focusing on it.
I also see the companion scene in endwalker of Emet-Selch going "you believe any of this? That mad with grief i would turn the world inside out to bring someone back?" And all the knowledge of Amurot and the moon thinking "that i know the guy at the table with you at all means i know how bad you regret his departure."
Just stunning poetry of story telling on display.
The whole bit where you came out in full blown cosplay and explained quite amusingly that you would not be able to be impersonal about Emet and everyone around you knew that before you even played the game was perhaps the finest cover for the deeply affecting bits to come. Thank you for this essay - I cannot imagine it was easy emotionally.
You spoke towards the end about retreading the same ground can't create the same experience. Sure you see more and the machinery reveals itself to you but our brains are boundless and incorporate especially impacting information quite well. I have always evaded replaying or rewatching or rereading whatever media because I felt that it would be better to preserve the memory of the original experience than gain insight into how it was made, but recently I have been going away from that, for reasons you've outlined here. Sometimes it is worth it just to reach the conclusion that yes, what you saw was a whole experience despite the pieces. I'll likely do the same with this very video.
Emet-Selch was such a fantastic character. He was genuinely the hero of his own story and that's what made it impossible for him to let go. Everything and everyone he ever cared about was wiped away in front of him and he was powerless to stop it. His entire being was the duty and responsibility to his people that came with his position on the convocation and he had to watch what he felt was his ultimate failure of those people with no ability to interfere.
Then fate dangled a single thread in front of him that, while horrible, he could tug to have the chance to bring them all back and return to the last time he had felt happiness. Completely ignoring the fact that if he were successful, he would never have been able to look any of them in the eye again. Who wouldn't pull that thread if it was all they had left?
How many stories have there been about the timeline is screwed up and the main character is the only one that knows it? They set out to set things right and put things back to where "they're supposed to be" but never give a single thought to all of the people that are surviving or even thriving in the new course of history. All of the people that would have never met, fallen in love, had children, and found fulfillment in a different sequence of events. All of that gone because the main character in the story acted in their self interests and not in anyone else's.
He was essentially Marty Mc'Fly in Back to the Future trying to get his parents to reappear in the photograph who was incapable of noticing the potential good changes that lie just outside of his periphery.
Then there is the feeling of absolute betrayal tinged with unconditional love he held for Azem. The rage and pain he felt at his best friend turning his back and refusing to be a part of sacrificing the majority of their own people. This was tinged, most likely, with a horrible envy. Wishing he could remove himself in the same way but his duty and obligation wouldn't let him.
Garlemald would have received a very large portion of its culture and language from Hades, as Solus, influencing them. When Zenos betrays the empire and causes its collapse through a complete uninterested disregard, they renamed his title to the one Garlemald reserved for the most vile traitors. Viator, the word for traveler.
Yet he still felt the pang of sad nostalgia enough to go on long sightseeing journeys with his friend long gone. "As the bearer of Azem's crystal, you should consider it your duty to see at least that much, I certainly did". In the final boss room of the Alzadaal's Legacy dungeon, the room with the stable portal to the void, you can find the symbol of Azem carved into a brick directly above the door you enter the room from. I would guess they are hidden in the other places he mentioned as well.
how does this only have 700 views. literally the best ffxiv video i’ve seen on this site
I MADE THIS COMMENT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE VIDEO AND THEN. THE EMET SELCH OUTFIT?!?!?!?!?!?!?! FAVORITE VIDEO EVER ACTUALLY
30 minutes in and i'm crying over how much you get ardbert. you've laid out every single reason why i adore him and his role in the story and as a mirror to the wol... also god i love how you've covered thancred's messy and difficult grief and i'm crying over minfilia and thancred and how grief has shaped them both (literally her whole existence is defined by ranjit's grief and then thancred's until she breaks out of her shell!) i'm not normal and i AM sobbing
The hours of gposing in Shadowbringers is so real. You are a lovely human being. I can't articulate words even half as well as you, but baring your soul to us strangers on the internet was really brave and heavily amplifies the overall message of your video essay. Thank you so much for the experience!
Hey thanks for stabbing me directly in the gut in the first 10 seconds and then spending about an hour wiggling the knife around, I loved every minute of it. Best piece of FFXIV-related media I've seen in literal years.
"An existential threat cannot be relied upon to unite the people, not so long as the powers that be can profit from annihilation in the short term."
"He has so much love inside him but with nowhere in the present to put it, so it rots within him."
damn
jesus CHRIST
I did not expect to be completely heartbroken by the end of this
oh fuck
thank you for all that
First of all: CAT!
Second... The algorithm gut punches. Giving me this as a suggestion to watch as i struggle with my own emotions and trauma in the last zone of Dawntrail, to a point where very few others will feel the same due to why i'm feeling the way i am - yes being vague as we have yet to even touch launch outside early access.
Grief and pain are some of the most difficult things to deal with, that heavy weight under your heart that persists for weeks on end that you just learn to live with, how quickly your emotions churn again when it's even vaguely prodded.
The writers did an amazing job. I love them for it. I hate them for it.
While "Getting Over It" isn't ever a game that appealed to me I really appreciated the high-level quotes it used while watching others play. One if them I heard once and it's stuck with me ever since:
"The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal." ~C.S. Lewis
39:00 “The poems and platitudes of wiser men. Musings on sadness and loss... Studied and memorized... and meaningless in the moment.”
Ironically, my favorite quote about grief is about the uselessness of quotes about grief when you’re in the midst of it
Shadowbringers, at least replaying it, unironically helped me grieve the loss of my cat whom I had for 12 years. Its still my favorite expansion to this day
Up until this expansion, I didn't fully appreciate the differences in the day and night overworld themes. That first moment you kill a lightwarden and the day clears out to bring the sky from punishing light to gentle darkness accompanied by a beautiful piano score... It changed something indescribable in me
i just finished this video essay and like many of the other people in the comments started crying or almost crying every 10-15 minutes or so, especially about ryne and thancred. thank you so much for making this video.
God I loved Lythes voice acting in that first scene. It’s just so well done you can feel, not just hear, feel the grief in her voice, and her desire to just cry
watched this as I near the end of Endwalker and MAN some of the connections you made here blew my mind. Mainly the connection between Thancred's and Emet's speeches and how Emet sees us as children.
Honestly one of the best FFXIV videos I've seen in a long while. And as per usual whenever anyone forces me to look too long or hard at Emet and his motivations (i.e., anything longer than about 3 seconds), my eyes are once again leaking. Something about his very specific circumstances resonates SO. HARD. with me, it's like it just unlocks everything I tend to keep bottled up inside of me all at once. It can be both good and bad, depending on circumstances... though I'm sitting alone at home right now, so that's okay. I'm glad you got to the part about Graha at the end as well. They're essentially both my WoL's husbando's, in game... one I know is bad for me and that I can and should never have, and the other one that makes me smile the second he walks in the room and that I know will support me unconditionally, no matter what. Two sides of the same coin, indeed.
I honestly don't know if anything will ever top my emotional connection to this particular expansion in terms of video game experiences, ever again. I don't know if I want it to... I don't know if I could handle it, tbqh. Shadowbringers connects with something so deep and visceral in me that I kind of actually don't WANT anything to go any harder than that... I don't think I could actually handle it.
Shadowbringes and Endwalker break me as a person. They shatter through that fourth wall constantly, as if the writers speak directly to you. To come to an understanding. There is this strange fine line that Final Fantasy 14 is able to straddle where even though our character is *not* us... but is us. And in so doing, is able to tell us poignant messages about grief, despair. Hope, and gallantry. To be brave isn't inherently staring into the face of a monster, but to stand at all in the face of it. It speaks to something so inherently human within any of us, that it's hard to out right dismiss what the story is saying.
They both break me. But then remade me into someone I didn't realize I could be. And that is powerful. And also why they are memorable. They are from the heart.
A fantastically stunning, and rightfully gut punching recount of shadowbringers. Its never been an easy thing for some people, myself notably to voice how a story like this effects everyone on their first, rather raw experience of it, but if I ever have a need for it, this video will be a cherished memory that I'll find one excuse after another to come back to.
Re-experiencing Shadowbringers through your eyes was not the same as my one time playing through it.
But I have something stuck in my throat.
Genuinely, thank you for that.
Phenomenal Essay in both your delivery and its contents. Even after all these years, Shadowbringers and my first experience with its story remains among the frequently remembered moments in my head. Shadowbringer's themes are relatable to anyone affected by the shadow of grief, and i cant help but feel a welling of emotions when viewing grief through a lens as grandiose as this expansion. The context endwalker provides to a lot of the story beats in Shadowbringers makes the two expansions feel so closely connected, on a much deeper level than "this is just the next expansion".
Thanks for putting this out there! It definitely brought back very fond memories.
53:38 "time can only move in one direction"
G'raha: well... about that...
It's kinda funny to think about how much G'raha has fucked around with the concept of the arrow of time while embodying it completely by, regardless of how many weird knots he spins around it, always living in the present. It's very Doctor Who of him.
After listening to this essay, I think I can put words to why Amaurot, the map zone, is one of my favorites. Especially the map theme "Neath Dark Waters"; that ticking clock. Emblematic of both the forward march of time and a man for whom time has not meaningfully moved forward for literal millenia. Amaurot is a tribute to the past and a monument to one man's descent into maddening grief and his refusal to accept his loss for what it is.
I don't play this game at all, or know much about it, but my friend kicked me this essay because I like this kind of long-form analysis content. Just want to say this was an excellent listen. Enjoyed this immensely.
How DARE you open on the scene with Lyna…that scene broke me when I first saw it and I still choke up and get watery eyes every time I hear that voice crack…amazing video 😤
this was so beautifully made and the part about your personal grief. god. that pain and heartache is second to none. I also lost my father at a young age, was forced to stand by a podium and announce my feelings of sorrow and loss when i hadn't fully comprehended them. Now life goes on and there's a big gaping hole in my life that i don't know what to do with. But if FFXIV has taught me anything it's to not let grief weigh you down and that you should keep on living. shadowbringers is such a painful and beautiful story of loss ( and fire and faith), and ardbert as a character will never fail to make me ugly cry.
This video might be. the video of all time. holy fucking shit its so very beautiful. i hope the algorithm spreads this video far and wide because this deserves tens of thousands of views. amazing video 11/10 would cry again, shoutout peakbringers i love found family !!!!!!!!
I think that this is why we all latch on to new players going through the story. It is that we all have our individual pain and experience in life, but the story here gives us all a shared reference for those feelings, be they high or low.
"The rains and have ceased and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it"
Above all the other lines in the story I think this one has stuck with me the most simply by how much grief it conveys. Sometimes in spite of how beautiful life can truly be our grief can blind us to the hope that tomorrow can promise. And yet it is for tomorrow we will have to learn to live for again and again.
Shadowbringers will always be special and I love that Endwalker serves as true continuance of its theme in the face of overwhelming despair.
Thank you for the video and the Emet-Selch fan club has another great member for sure.
Didn't expect to finish this video with tears in my eyes, jeez. Thank you for this, it was incredibly accurate and hit just right where it hurts (just like ShB did)
the entire time ive watched this retrospective, ive felt like ive wanted to say something-- but there are no words for what i am feeling. this is a beautiful essay on a beautiful game, and i didnt expect it to bring me to tears (much like shadowbringers itself, i suppose). thank you for making this.
I usually don’t comment on video but really felt like I should.
This was such a well crafted and raw video essay and I very much enjoyed it. I hope you’re doing better after your suffering.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
And to think there are XIV players who skip the story... I'll never understand it. Incredible video, really made me think about SHB and XIV in ways that I hadn't considered before. After having finished Dawntrail, I have a whole new perspective on certain parts of the story after watching this video. I already enjoyed DT a lot but now I appreciate it even more for how it introduces its own new themes while also providing new angles on the themes of loss and grief introduced in SHB & EW. I can't imagine how much effort and time was put into this video, but if you're willing to make more (perhaps about post-SHB, EW, HW, DT, other games, etc) then I'd absolutely love to watch them.
I've had to endure a lot of grief from the time ShB came out, to now. Hell, it hasn't even been 24 hours since we had to get our dear elderly cat put down, so the timing and poignancy of finding this video today is remarkable. Sometimes, with the rate of people and family pets lost, it feels like I'm drowning in a neverending sea of sorrow and loss. It's hard to talk about it when it's this raw. So instead, I'll talk about the game. I loved Emet-Selch from the first moment I saw him (much like I did with Ardyn from XV), and ShB as a whole expressed so much that resonated with me. Of course he wanted desperately to be with his loved ones. Of course you have to protect not just yours, but all of the shards. It's just a beautiful, gut-twisting story.
Spent a lot of this video thinking you write like Tim Rogers. Then you quote Tim Rogers. This video was excellent.
I kept avoiding this video because I just didn’t know if it could really capture what I loved about Shadowbringers. Now that I have watched it, it did more than that by far. This is one of the most wonderful essays on media I have seen in a long time. Maybe that is because of my connection to ff14. But it is what I needed at this exact moment. Thank you for sharing it and discussing these ideas and showing me the parallel character arcs that I completely missed even though it should have been obvious.
This essay allowed me to feel again after months of being absolutely numb. It is so strange to realize how much I needed to re-examine my situation. So again Thank you.
I only cried six times but hey cool Emet cosplay (thank you for this video. Your prose and effort is phenomenal)
Lyna's line delivery is too strong for me to not have an emotional reaction to.
This whole thesis on Shadowbringer's storytelling and themes is probably the best I've ever come across, and I've seen a few. Nobody I've seen has covered it with quite as much depth as you have, and you've made me realize things that I hadn't noticed after playing it myself and watching maybe 4-5 other people experience the same story.
The parallel between Thancred's grief and Emet's, for instance, was a connection I had never pieced together before, but seems obvious in retrospect. Punctuated by Thancred's "Enough, damn you!" it almost feels like the game is using him to say "you need to let go and move on."
Your comment on art and its impact on us really resonated strongly with me. Having to justify why something makes us emotional does feel like a defensive response to prove our emotional maturity. But this game has made me cry several times, and I refuse to apologize for it or feel lessened by it, because regardless of what form it takes, great storytelling and performances are just that, and they deserve every ounce of emotion that they squeeze from me because I can damn well tell that emotion was squeezed into it in order to garner that response in the first place. Lyna's delivery, Ardbert's delivery, Emet's delivery, all are dripping with emotions that the actors MUST have felt in the moment to deliver their performance, not to mention the tragedies and grief laid bare in the writing of the story itself. I feel like withholding emotion under such circumstances would be lying to myself as well as insulting the raw meaningfulness that this story has for me. I can't claim that it resonates with any personal grief of my real life, other than the grief I felt when the story was over and I couldn't experience it for the first time again, but dammit, storytelling is the most uniquely human thing I can think of and it resonates with me. I refuse to belittle it.
It took me until nearly the end of the video to realize that the reason your character looks so familiar to me is because I follow you on Twitter, holy jesus
Also did NOT get that Thancred/Emet parallel and before and I teared up all over again even though I beat this years ago, those emotional beats just hit SO HARD. Thank you for the video!
Shadowbringers came out 2 years after my mother had quite suddenly passed away. I hadn't allowed myself to let go of the grief, because like you said; if I'm not grieving, was it all that important? I cried so many times playing through the MSQ, having to stop in the middle of cutscenes to process the unstoppable surge of emotions I was feeling. Another questline that made me cry at the end was the DRK job quests, written by the same team that wrote Shadowbringers. I have come a long way in my grieving, and I like to think Shadowbringers helped me in some aspects through that. Allowed me to see that holding on to the past is futile, that the future will arrive no matter how much I try, and that that is ultimately for the best.
I admit that I cried throughout this video essay, as it brought back memories of my playthrough. One such memory is of playing through the 5.3 patch, with the quote: “The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it.” - I had to step away from my computer for several minutes with those words burning through my screen. Now I see that I haven't let go as much as I had hoped to, all these years later. I hope to find the strength to live in the present, to remove the mantle of a daughter in mourning; to hang it up in my closet for me to wear when I feel ready to process the loss of someone so important to me.
Thank you for this essay, and well done!
Amazing Essay, once of the best i've seen on the topic of shadowbringers. Your ability to write about grief and allude to a greater personal sorrow is where I felt the inspirations from Tim Rogers and when you name dropped him I flipped my shit! Great work, hope u enjoyed Dawntrail!!
I actually started tearing up multiple times watching this. Thank you for making this.
I don't think I could overstate how wonderful this essay is if I tried.
I've been playing this game since I was arguably too young for it, and it's narratives have in no small way shaped my taste in media ever since ARR. When HW first dropped, it was unlike anything I'd experienced in a story up until that point.
Imagine my shock when ShB came about and turned that on its head. I'm not very in touch with my emotions, and its rare for any media to make me cry, but I bawled throughout the entirety of ShB.
Beautifully written and edited, I cried. :,) There's more to say about G'raha, though it might have added another hour onto the video's length. He may not have personally experienced the loss but he still grieved, particularly he grieved for 'you', the WoL, and went to great lengths to get you back after waking up to a world where you had met a sad, unjust end to Black Rose. He didn't orchestrate calamities in order to undo the sundering of the world like Emet-Selch, but he was down and ready to sacrifice everything to see you restored--specifically himself.
idk i liek catboy
I rejoice at someone that knows and understands Cylva! There are dozens of us players that know and care about her.
Blows my mind that she and the reconstruction of the 13th is locked behind the role quests.
But God I love it. Comparatively, I was just a touch disappointed with how Endwalkers ended up. Love the actual role quests, but felt something was missing from the cumulative quest.
So I just made it past Interlude 2, paused it right when the ticking of Amaurot's theme began, and I only include that to give the next sentence some weight:
This is one of the best essays I've had the pleasure of experiencing. You've nailed it, everything I enjoyed about Shadowbringers and its themes is included as well as details I hadn't thought critically about. I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on Emet Selch and to watch your other videos once this is over. You've more than earned this sub.
Also Alisae, the cat (and please pardon my likely misspelling of her name), is ADORABLE.
11:00 living memory......... Hahahahahahahahahah.......
I hope we get a Dawntrail essay update :)
Absolutely fantastic essay. I don't know if I really have quite the words to explain why, but this piece of writing got to me like few others have. Thinking about some of the parallels that I'd missed has me looking forward to a second play of Shadowbringers on a second character I've been leveling on the side. I'll probably be back to write something more when I've had more time to marinate on this (and probably watch it again). Thank you so much for making this ❤
Had to stop watching this video every like 15 minutes, because I'd start crying, as I thought back to the story, and then would hit play again to listen to your amazing analysis, this expansion is so wonderful and thank you for wonderfully dissecting its narrative.
the part at 1:02:00 about being scared about becoming a stranger to yourself hit so hard. i think about this all the time, but your perspective was really enlightening. thank you.
Disappears for 2 years
Comes back and cooks about an expansion to tell the story about the Second most fucked world in FF14
(the first goes to the 13th. If you know you know).
Truly one of the videos of all time
Yknow what, keep cooking
i was fulling expecting you to do the hand wave at the very end. excellent essay
I first encountered ShB at a point where I had healed… as much as I probably ever will, from crippling grief that froze me in place for a decade and defined my adult life even beyond turning the corner and fully healing.
That doesn’t change how deeply affected I was and am by it the first time through nor in going through again on multiple alts and an NG+ run during a personal project to record the entire MSQ in the wake of Endwalker as a refresher prior to starting Dawntrail, when I no longer had any jobs below 90 and had flight everywhere and all the aetherytes and so on. Trivializing the difficulty of the fights didn’t lessen the power and catharsis of the story. Familiarity didn’t render the raw powerful emotion of the writing and character portrayals meaningless. Even the snippets included in an essay video like this still affect me, and I treasure that.
ShB and EW are my favorite expansions and while I am enjoying DT even more than I expected, it doesn’t have the incredible weight of buildup that lent so much meaning to these segments of the story. It inherently can’t, because it’s the beginning of a new arc rather than the culmination of a decade of plot.
ShB flipped what we thought we knew about the calamities, the ascians, the sundering, and pretty much everything else on its head in the space of a couple of cutscenes. I absolutely adore when a writer can do that and make it actually work.
Thank you for expressing this intrinsic aspect of the story in such relatable fashion.
Excellent video. Really strung together some seemingly disparate themes that weren't so disparate after all. Loved this! Enjoy Dawntrail
Another great word for the Shadowbringers/Endwalker duology is *Legacy*.
The Ancients, Ardbert, the failed timeline. What mark do we leave on the world? How do our actions inform the actions of those that follow?
Woah, shouldn't it be illegal to produce a video of this quality ?
You made me cry and made me remember what it was like to experience Shadowbringers for the first time,. You put into words what I felt, the same words I used back then to describe what a perfect story this game was. I hate you and love you at the same time.
You said you didn't know if Shadowbringers were, in truth, that good. Back then, I had the same interrogations in my mind.
But seeing that this story still touches people's heart more than four years later, and still touches mine when I watch your video, I think it's safe to say SHB is indeed a great story.
(Side note: I'm glad this kind of glosses over the Crystal Exarch and only really adds him at the end because, yeah, he is super important, but I still feel like thematically having the Crystal Exarch be G'raha Tia undercuts the themes of the expansion a little bit.
While the Crystal Exarch's story of being the envoy of generations of people inspired by you and your comrades' heroism and their unwavering dedication to make the world a better place despite the doomed world around them obviously has parallels to Norvrandt, G'raha Tia's... isn't that. He is more connected to the other characters feeling loss than this hopeful band of future generations.
He is your friend, someone who saw you as a living embodiment of the heroes he idolized as a child. While he represents a people's unwavering ability to better the world and prevent tragedy, his motivations are personal: to return to life that which had died. Same as Thancred's. Same as Emet-Selch's.
But he succeeds.
Of course, it's not quite the same. Sure, he wants his friend not to be dead, but his plan is to die (implied to be along with the future generations championing this cause as their past is unwritten) to make that happen.
You can make the argument that dying to bring back a friend, while not quite as selfish as what Emet-Selch and Thancred want, is still selfish. Both methods remove the grief from yourself and passes it on to others. It is just you who pays the price willingly instead of another unwillingly/semiwillingly.
Not saying that I don't love the cat boy. His 100 years of unselfish dedication to Norvrandt's betterment and his sacrifice at the end of 5.3 (and subsequent merging with his present day self, forever removing his ability to see his beloved granddaughter), on top of the fact that the story of the game would just end without us.... kinda allows him to have little an Undo A Death... as a treat.
But it still would have been far more in line with the themes of Shadowbringers if the Crystal Exarch was someone else from the future, someone without the personal investment in your survival.)
shadowbringers will always be my favorite expansion in any mmo because it was one of the first games that made me realize I shouldn't punish myself for feeling miserable nor should I stew in it and instead I should focus on bettering my self and the people around me, and I've played many games that touch on mental health and other serious subject matters but shadowbringers was like staring into a new horizon, I still love heavensward because of its emotional strengths but my respect will always be focused on shadowbringers and how amazingly written it was.
I'm generally not the most emotional person, at least outwardly (and fwiw I don't consider that a good thing), but to this day I always find myself on the edge of an honest cry at just the final words of Emet. It's a profound moment in a way that I don't know if I can ever articulate. In my attempts to do so, and, woe, have I tried, I find that I only tarnish the pure memory of what that moment means for me.
To this day I feel as if this fictional man has defined me. I remember, and I make a point to remember those who in our reality have lived.
Edit: ALSO, I forgot to say, YES. FINALLY. Maybe I'm watching the wrong videos because you are the first person to really acknowledge how Emet's first appearance felt like a sudden shift. For me I describe it as the first moment in FFXIV where I sat up and forward in my seat, something had changed. And from that moment forward the story because to boil, bubble, and build in a way unlike before. The story felt alive and driven as if by the force of an inhuman passion. I did not know where it would lead, or how much it would change me.
Thank you for reminding me of why Shadowbringers is my favorite expansion and the most important arc for my Warrior of Light as a character.
I just finished the main Shadowbringers MSQ this week. Thanks for spending so much time digging into its themes :)
What a brilliant and heartbreaking and tear rendering video on Shadowbringers. Im so glad that i was alone and listening to this as i cleaned a room that we need for my work. Because the number of times that i was crying is embarrassing. 😂 Thank you so much for this video.
I am always down to listen to praise about shadowbringers, especially when it helps me nail down WHY EXACTLY I love this expansion so much,
- thank you for putting words to my feelings
👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 VERY well done! It looks like you don't post much, but you still got my sub. This video was phenomenal, and I'll be here for any more you do!
never watched anything of yours before, but this video is unbelievably beautiful
1:06:04 Honestly, it's a great moment, so don't ever feel like you can't get excited about it. It's the perfect culmination of the thesis of the entire expansion: It's okay to grieve and live with that grief with others. Having an ear and shoulder in your corner is infinitely more valuable than trying to go at it alone. It's okay to ask for help, and it's okay to find support to help you with what grief you have.
It's also a really awesome synchronized moment with all the motifs coming together and considering Soken wrote Shadowbringers while fighting his own fight with Cancer, like...the shit goes hard in so many ways and levels and honestly it's just great.
This was a really well thought out, well researched, well spoken essay about thoughts that have lingered in my head for years about this expansion that you've somehow been able to make organized and coherent. Thank you for such a wonderful essay, and one that I've adored watching dearly.
Love the ending scene for this video; it fits Emet perfectly. XD
Wow. I've never seen or heard anyone explain the themes of this story so well. I never even realized half of these things until you pointed them all out. So now I love this expansion more than I already did. So thank you very much for this video!
This was AWESOME. I watched it in one sitting and absorbed practically every word. You know how to explain and analyze narrative as well as express your own connection to it without talking down or turning the whole video into an anecdote. Nicely done ❤
Really fantastic essay, nothing much more to say other than you did an amazing job portraying why Shadowbringers is such a touching narrative.
Absolutely amazing work. Thank you for making this.
Just like Shadowbringers itself, I wish I could experience this video for the first time again. Great work!
This video really spoke to me. I thank you for it.
Thank you for a finely crafted essay, it was a good look back at those aspects that really did enable that narrative to pull my heartstrings so intensely
Thank you for this Shadowbringers, along with Endwalker, themes resonated deeply with me. And while I'm not articulate enough to sort my thoughts on it into a proper form of any way, you've done an amazing job with it
For grief is all-consuming. And yet, we live on. Stumbling and grasping, in rage or complete stillness. We learn to pick ourselves up. Or don't.
(And I have found another person who was completely blindsided by Magnus and his quest. One of my favourite moments up to date)
Thank you
❤❤❤
This was such an amazing video. Thank you.
this video 7 days after release appears in my life exactly when i am both relapsing into magnus archive and find a cool video essay on it (thanks btw) and when i just got into final fantasy and i think the timing is cool and the world is weird
7:30
This. This is my relationship with my WoL since the vault, and I have been figuring out who she is ever since. And my time with this game has been richer for it.
Also FEM ROE REPRESENT!
Great video. Shadowbringers helped me get passed a very difficult loss in my life. The addition of new game plus is honestly wonderful, I might not have re experienced that story after the fact without it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I hope to see more of your work soon.
You deserve the notification bell young lady! I’ll be waiting for your next movie
A fellow femroe! This made watching the video at least 10% more enjoyable. Welcome to our tiny but fierce little slice of the community! As a note, I view my WoL in a way very similar to yours: someone I think is cool but who is her own person. Has a lot of my moral compass but isn't beholden to it. This video was fantastic and I linked it to my FC.
I went to Amh Araeng first and the moment Alisaie started talking about the accepted cultural practice of euthanasia to prevent people becoming sin eaters was the moment I knew this story was going to get to me in ways I was so excited to discover. Between them, the Night's Blessed, and even the ritualism of the sahagin in the Tempest, I wasn't disappointed.
One interesting internal Shadowbringers companion piece, which has sort of been lost as a side-effect of it being a limited, iterative event, was the Ishgardian Restoration. There were so many little vignettes of dealing with grief, from the sidequests you can still do to the text bubbles from NPCs talking about their loss and the will to rebuild. Maelie's story in particular - she's the little Ishgardian girl who watches you entering Ishgard and who gets kidnapped by the fanatic priest in 3.1 - was just beautiful.
I think this content is absolutely amazing, when you brought out the Emet Selch drip I was impressed. The entire essay was well written, please do more.
The only problem that I can say I felt in the video was the microphone, maybe a pop filter would suit you a lot! That way the sounds of S, C, K, H, and some more noises that cause sound to sort of make a pop sound when recorded like wind going through the mic. Luckily they're cheap. And I don't wanna sound like weird about this but most of your mouth and face looks to be behind the mic. You're not ugly at all, in fact I'd say you are easy on the eyes, so I noticed my focus was more attentive than when there's only an avatar on screen, and your choice to use your character gameplay intertwined with your real content is a nice editing choice.
You've earned my sub!