Rising 2020

It's Not About Money Or Sending A Message
The arc about abolishing the monarchy in Ul'dah is a prime example of disingenuous drivel designed to appeal to an audience with progressive 21st century values that destroys the verisimilitude of the setting. A plotline about someone trying to put a more pliable puppet in place when it's becoming clear that Nanamo isn't such a gullible little girl anymore and has her own ideas on what policies to pursue doesn't need some hamfisted pro-democracy propaganda shoved into it. If you're writing a story about political intrigue in a fictional oligarchy then go about it without such diabetes inducing sugarcoating or don't bother at all.

Not Like In One Of Your Visual Novels
Venat as the head honcho of the anti-Zodiark faction makes a lot more sense now that I've finished the lacrosse match with the BETA. No wonder you were thinking that I had read the whole thing already.

So this one happened back when I was in kindergarten in the new capital. I took a seat that was already taken and one of the boys gave me an excessively forceful shove to get me off it. I fell off the chair and hit the floor right hand first in the kind of angle that made the first proximal phalanx or the metacarpal fracture, I forget which one. The boy got chewed out and I got a plaster. It's the oldest hands-on demonstration on how actions can have unintended consequences that I still remember. Sure, the kid should have asked me to move somewhere else before using physical force but it's not like he meant to break my bones on purpose, he was just annoyed about losing the spot he had picked.

Those Two Cities
Father's sister, the old capital aunt, used to live in London. I went to see her with the nurse and the postman in the autumn way, way before the blue whale replaced Dippy in the Hintze Hall. We visited the Natural History Museum and went to see the West End production of Beauty and the Beast. And mother's sister, the old capital aunt, used to live in Paris. Me, Mrs. Doctor and my aunt's mother-in-law paid her a visit in the summer way, way before the roof of Notre-Dame burned. We checked out all the usual Parisian landmarks, Disneyland and Claude Monet's gardens.