bitwise exclusive and@wolfwalks@app.wafrn.net asked
Please yap about one of your favorite pieces, written by you or someone else, that you feel deserves way more attention and love than it gets, & why, in as much detail as you like. Assume I know nothing about the subject matter and take it from the top. Spoilers ok but tag appropriately for others.Hey so even if you don't know anything about Final Fantasy XIV, do you like doomed yaoi and/or Greek myth pastiches?
To Be Spared the Wheel by fivebrights is about this bitch named Emet-Selch:
Except it was 10,000 years ago before he became a genocidal maniac, so he looked like this:
And the general premise of his character is that he lived in a utopian paradise where everyone always wore the same clothes and covered their faces, but everything changed when the Final Days attacked. The Convocation of Fourteen, the ruling body of civilization at the time, sacrificed half the population (consensually) to summon a god named Zodiark who would stop the apocalypse. Emet-Selch was one of the Convocation, and one of the civilians who volunteered for this sacrifice was his boyfriend Hythlodaeus, the most beautiful man in existence:
I mean… it's not exactly canon, but it's pretty damn canon. A crossover event with Nier Reincarnation confirmed that Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, and their other spouse Azem would go out all night partying, and the recent Magic: The Gathering crossover set includes this card:
Anyway, back to the tragic backstory: Azem was another member of the Convocation, and they were so pissed off by the whole Zodiark thing that they defected and never came back. (Azem doesn't have a canon gender because spoilers, the player character is their reincarnation so whenever anyone talks about Azem they use the same pronouns as the player.) Hythlodaeus meanwhile had this whole complex about how the entire purpose of his life was to uplift Emet-Selch and Azem, so he volunteered to sacrifice himself for Zodiark because hey, what else is he going to be good for?
(There's a whole time travel thing in this game where you go back and meet them before the apocalypse, and you run a dungeon with them, and Hythlodaeus has voice lines like "I'm not entirely useless" and, if he dies and you rez him, "You shouldn't have… no, really.")
A few other small notes that relate to the fic I recced at the top of this post and then didn't mention again at all until now:
"Emet-Selch" and "Azem" aren't really names, they're titles held by their current occupants on the Convocation. Emet-Selch's real name is Hades. Azem's real name is unknown (barely anything about them is set in stone and they never appear on-screen). A previous holder of the seat of Azem was named Venat, and when she stepped down, for example, she went back to just being called Venat.
This whole civilization serves as basically a creation mythos for the world of Final Fantasy XIV. Their whole thing is manifesting things from raw concepts. Nothing seems to have actually evolved naturally??? They made birds, and then they made migratory birds. Someone made a shark and then everyone loved sharks so much that there was an influx of shark concepts and Hythlodaeus, whose job it was to oversee and approve or deny concepts, was so exasperated by it all that he just approved them all without even looking at them because he wanted them out of his hair.
There's also a creepy concept jail called Pandaemonium where they keep monsters that are too dangerous to set free but too valuable to destroy. There's a whole sidequest series about it.
Emet-Selch's job is to oversee what they call the Underworld (and what people in the modern day call the Aetherial Sea), which is this sort of magical void deep under the surface of the planet. (The "star", in this game's insistent fancy terminology.) Hades was chosen for the seat of Emet-Selch for his keen sense of aether-sight, which allows him to discern a person simply by the color of their soul, but actually Hythlodaeus was pegged for the job before him because he's much better at it, despite his protestations.
The only other super-relevant member of the Convocation is Elidibus, who's just a little guy:
He's a sort of mediator type, and when they summoned Zodiark, he became its core.
Azem has no real canonical characterization, since you never meet them, but they were basically a proto-adventurer whose job it was to travel the world and help people with their problems and be the one member of the Convocation who wasn't stuck in ivory tower acadaemia. Most people in-universe talk about them like some kind of rabid chaos gremlin. One time they "borrowed" a dangerous monster concept to fight an erupting volcano. They also had a signature incantation where they could summon their friends to their side to help them out, which the player character eventually gets access to as an in-universe explanation of the whole MMORPG duties-with-random-strangers thing.
I've written nearly 6000 characters in this post without mentioning that after the apocalypse, Venat destroys the world, and it then becomes the goal of Emet-Selch, Elidibus, and the one other surviving Convocation member Lahabrea, to re-destroy the new world that came out of its ashes so they can get back their glorious lost paradise. Yikes on bikes.
Wait what about the fanfic
It's a pastiche of Orpheus and Eurydice! You know, the one where the girl dies and her boyfriend goes into the underworld to retrieve her and Hades (the Greek one, not the FFXIV one) is like "yeah sure you can take her back, but you can't look at her until you reach the surface", and…
To Be Spared the Wheel was written for a mini-Big Bang and so it's a collab work between the author, fivebrights, and an artist, ryuucae. The images unfortunately are broken in this fic, and though the artist moved over to Bluesky, they haven't uploaded them there… so I must reluctantly link to their Twitter post where they shared them.
Also the fic has excellent characterization, some cool worldbuilding for the Underworld, some gut-punches I wasn't expecting, and I think it's even technically canon-compliant? Not that I really care if it is or isn't, but I just think that's kind of funny.
Thank you for letting me ramble about my fandom and this fic that ruined my life.
#my-posts #askbox #ffxiv #hythades
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Nicky
november 🀄 in my mahjong era