Tales under the New Moon #8- The First of Many Festivals

[Astrid_Stormborn]

The First of Many Festivals

Wuk Lamat recalls her 1st hunting festival and making a new friend.

[magitekwitch]

I'm baffled at the Dawntrail MSQ spoilers in the first part?? Calling Wuk Lamat the Vow of Resolve and Dawnservant, and that part about the Alexandrians wtf??? I thought Tales of the New Moon sidestories were about Endwalker! I wonder if this is a slip on their part?

[Iscah]

Kinda nice but very wooden, ticking boxes of lore delivery over story flow, and still conspicuously no mention of Zoraal Ja's mother when bringing up the significance of his birth.

Also kind of a weird detail that they say people unfamiliar with blessed siblings might be puzzled that the two heads think independently, when I feel like it's the opposite – it makes perfect sense for them to be separate, and the strange bit is them being treated as one person.

Plus, putting this in with the "Tales Under the New Moon" is just casually dropping fairly major Dawntrail spoilers into what is supposed to be the Endwalker cluster of side stories. It would be fine if they skipped the intro and adjusted the ending a bit.

[Cleretic]

Oh, I love this one. My guess given the pattern of the previous short stories being about Endwalker postgame forks was actually gonna be about Tataru or even the Mandervilles, but I will happily be wrong if it means a Wuk Lamat story.

Personally, I don't care that it has Dawntrail spoilers, and I don't think it actually matters. People in a position to play Dawntrail have had half a year to get to it at this point, and two months to do the 7.1 patch. And people before that point... I don't think actually read these stories, to be completely honest. Plus, previous short story batches released, like, one or two months after the expansion; if anything they're being plenty more cautious than they used to.

And there's a fair pile of lore here, too!

First of all, we now have a concrete age for Zoraal Ja; he's 27, being thirteen years old fourteen years ago. No similar age ranges for Wuk and Koana, save that Wuk's confirmably younger than the 25-year-old Erenville (and younger by by immediate sight, at that, which means at least a couple years), but still!

While we could've reasoned that blessed siblings have to talk to each other verbally (Molaal Ja Ja had to back in Wanderer's Palace Hard, but he's an idiot and a failure), it's good to have it explicitly confirmed, and it actually makes both Gulool and Bakool more impressive because of it; for a pair basically playing 'two players one controller' with an entire body, they have some impressive coordination.

I don't think we actually knew what Hunmu Rruk's role was in his community (or if we did it wasn't stated very loudly), so learning that he's a big-deal hunter, that sounds pretty right.

A bit of exploration of a thing we already knew about with Erenville, that a Viera/Shetona's androgynous until puberty. Wuk basically guessed 'girl' by reflex, which from my own experience with gender-neutral appearances and non-binary people is about right (I can't exactly say that's good or bad as a reflex, Wuk had absolutely zero way to know better), especially given it seems like she'd probably have met more female than male Shetona anyway going by the MIN/BTN story saying women are more common.

To a degree this explains Wuk's nervousness in 6.55, too; I kinda doubt that she and Erenville were off hunting very often in their youth, so this was probably the last time she'd fought in front of him, and that didn't go so great!

And finally, for the actual event itself... now we know that a semi-regular city event for Tuliyollal was literally 'let super dangerous wild animals loose in the streets and have people hunt them for sport', which... first of all, wow, and that does sound like a very 'Gulool Ja Ja' idea, and absolutely one that Wuk Lamat would've been a fan of. And honestly, I wouldn't hate that being a patch storyline, that sounds like a fun solo duty! It also makes Tuliyollal's actual street planning make more sense in a weird way; if this is a huge event for the city, it makes sense that all the thoroughfares are really wide, that all the businesses are either tents that can be easily packed up and moved out of the way or significantly away from those thoroughfares, that all the stairways are simple... I'm sure that wasn't the idea when designing it (more realistically it was probably intended to work for both MMO city hub traffic and framing the action for the attacks by Alexandria), but it works great as a backfill!

[Iscah]

Personally, I don't care that it has Dawntrail spoilers, and I don't think it actually matters. People in a position to play Dawntrail have had half a year to get to it at this point, and two months to do the 7.1 patch.

It's not about time elapsed since the expansion, but that up until now, those story categories are precisely for grouping the stories by which expansion they fall under, allowing new players to safely read (and veterans to safely recommend that newbies should read) stories connected to the expansion they have completed without risk of encountering spoilers for the following expansions. It's why it made sense for the other stories from this newest batch to be grouped under New Moon – they are Endwalker stories despite their late publishing.

Placing this Dawntrail story in the Endwalker cluster is breaking that "safe to read these stories if you're up to this point in the game" system.

for a pair basically playing 'two players one controller' with an entire body, they have some impressive coordination.

We still don't know that for sure, and Gulool Ja Ja's ability to keep functioning with one head "unavailable" suggests that it's not as simple as one half each. Unless we are told otherwise, I'm figuring that they each can take full control but probably have dominance on what their half of the body is doing, but overall it's more like two players with two controllers both hooked up to the same character and with a sense of what the other is doing.

[SannaR]

Was definitely not expecting a DT tale as the last one and definitely not a Wuk Lamat one. Though to be honest I'm not sure who a DT one would focus on.

It is nice to know that Zoraal Ja didn't see Koana and Wuk Lamat as family or at least not as siblings wasn't just something new. That it had at least been going on for fourteen years. Even more ties to IX with the hunt being held right inside the city just like how it was held right inside Lindblum where the zaghnol is the toughest beast to fight and causes both Zidane and Freya to join forces to save two kids.

[Vyrerus]

This story was basically just an FFIX reference (borders on being plagiary even), and it lacked any and all tension, since it's a flashback. Some attempted looping of Wuk Lamat's first fight being with a colibri and our first big fight with her being against a giant colibri. Uninteresting though because it's lazy and over done/retreaded from the Zoraal Ja / Pkuucha hunt storyline that plays off of their FFXI progenitors. Also seemingly a retcon to Wuk Lamat's characterization. As this story says she was truly heroic and noble all along, whereas how she was first portrayed as someone faking it til she made it. Full of bravado and bluster and having to have a Scion campfire talk to "grow" past that.

Also kinda just feels like something they should have given us in game, perhaps as a spoken reference with Echo flashback.

Also I agree with Iscah that it's out of place, but I also think that it's par for the course, since it's clear they really don't care about how they're presenting the game or its content anymore.

Kind of a nothingburger with Erenville's inclusion, too. No mention of who his dad is. Reinforces the feeling that most characters only get 1 parent in FF14 and are basically parthenogenic clones of that 1 parent. The characters who do get two parents shown are few and brief, for the most part.

[Zero-ELEC]

Fantastic little story. Cute to see a story addressing directly the shetona's androgynous childhood. Interesting that Elene'shpya is depicted as having a "Yyasulani drawl" when his voice in modern day still maintains the affectation of a.... Golmoran??? accent. Partly because his voice actor is Icelandic, but it's interesting that they never directed him to sound "American" during the story.

The Final Fantasy IX reference with the hunting festival is cute too. All in all, a nice story.

[Cleretic]

Fantastic little story. Cute to see a story addressing directly the shetona's androgynous childhood. Interesting that Elene'shpya is depicted as having a "Yyasulani drawl" when his voice in modern day still maintains the affectation of a.... Golmoran??? accent. Partly because his voice actor is Icelandic, but it's interesting that they never directed him to sound "American" during the story.

I've always suspected the explanation, if there was one, to be that Erenville adopted the 'viera accent' so hard that he just talks in it now. After all, he was trying to hide where he was from in Sharlayan, a 'Yyasulani drawl' would've given it away.

But of course, we're in a situation here where this is only a plot hole to the English audience; no other language gave him that meaningfully different an accent.

[Aneshda]

I read Wuk Lamat in the first sentence and left the page immediately. SE obviously had to rub a hated NPC in our faces... how could it be otherwise, since Yoshi is sooooo convinced of Wuk Lamat. I was so looking forward to the last story but now I will never read it.