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

[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.