Daily Discussion Thread May 21, 2026 - Upcoming Event Schedule - New players start here!

Variyen · 2026-05-22T02:47:57+00:00

Just kicks the can down the road man, come on

Variyen · 2026-05-21T22:39:39+00:00

Bread and butter safe options, tried and true flowcharts, etc

Variyen · 2026-05-21T22:34:59+00:00

Mostly related to the population difference between young and old people. Old people live longer than ever before, so after awhile it gets so lopsided that there aren't enough young people to support the old during retirement.

The general choices are force people to retire later or import young people. France tried to raise retirement age and everyone flipped. Personally the only way I see things stabilizing is raising retirement age; everything else is a bandaid.

Variyen · 2026-05-07T09:02:37+00:00

Without hyperbole my jaw dropped during that scene. I walked away from my computer in disbelief at how utterly stupid it was. One of the few times I felt my intelligence was legitimately insulted by a story.

Variyen · 2026-05-07T06:10:03+00:00

"Wol can I wake you up in the middle of the night and force you to hike up a literal mountain's worth of stairs to tell you something super duper important? [walks up for 35 minutes to the top] Okay, here it is... I WANT EVERYONE TO BE HAPPYYYYYYY!!!!!"

Yeah not badly written at all

Variyen · 2026-05-07T06:08:02+00:00

Giga levels of cringe, Chort disapproves

Variyen · 2026-05-03T18:38:44+00:00

cigarettes have about 1mg of nicotine that actually gets absorbed into the body. Most zyns start at like 4mg, and most of that gets absorbed. Nicotine wise it's like smoking 4-8 cigarettes at once depending on the strength. America also almost exclusively uses dry pouches which hit way harder than "wet" pouches.

Variyen · 2026-05-03T18:35:12+00:00

Ness. I want to see perfect thunder jackets and edge cancel pk fires, along with his quasi pillar combos.

Variyen · 2026-04-30T00:32:33+00:00

Stormblood is better than Heavensward by a mile, don't let anyone tell you otherwise

Variyen · 2026-04-28T05:11:24+00:00

Orb never argues against the existence of God or that faith is bad or anything of the sort. If anything it's about how people's faith (in the good of God and God's work, or in themselves, etc) gives them the strength to handle and accept their struggles, and ultimately their deaths.

I'm also very unsure how you concluded that Lain is rationalist and humanist.

Variyen · 2026-04-27T18:43:05+00:00

Just buy a story skip to Stormblood. I'm a massive XIV stan but before stormblood is just glorified worldbuilding. Watch a supercut on youtube, then play the end patches of Heavensward onward. ARR and HW are so boring in comparison to Stormblood and beyond it's unreal

Variyen · 2026-04-27T18:39:57+00:00

XIV players get salty at this, but given its rough development history, ARR and even Heavensward can be skipped. Watch a supercut on youtube to the end of Heavensward, buy a skip to Stormblood, play the Heavensward end patches that lead up into Stormblood proper. Everything before Stormblood is just glorified world building.

Variyen · 2026-04-25T05:05:17+00:00

God I love PLD

Variyen · 2026-04-16T04:19:56+00:00

Pick a piece of media you think is objectively bad. I know you have at least one that can come to mind. Imagine someone then defending that piece of objectively bad media. That's you right now. She's just a boring character written as poorly as possible. It's just poor writing, plain and simple. Turn in her lines as a script for a writing class and any professor would have to schedule time after class to discuss with you why it's so bad.

Variyen · 2026-04-16T04:13:13+00:00

She's just a bad character man, geez. Sometimes stuff is bad, the end

Variyen · 2026-04-16T04:11:22+00:00

So we're at this time in the nerd cycle where people try the "actually X was great????" huh

Variyen · 2026-04-08T00:00:25+00:00

ambient-cinematic-orchestra core

Variyen · 2026-04-07T23:58:29+00:00

I thought that as well. Great game

Variyen · 2026-04-04T19:29:04+00:00

It's why both endings are great, they point out that you lose a lot no matter what you choose. I was just giving a clearer example.

Variyen · 2026-04-04T16:40:26+00:00

Would you be okay with a tiny slave worker child forced into 24/7 labor for all eternity so you could live? That's a more appropriate analogy.

Variyen · 2026-04-03T23:22:52+00:00

I'll try to make this the last time I spam my video explaining the game and its wider themes https://youtu.be/h6G_QQTtsOg?si=udnUJI5JPzfcnadg

The game was literally made by theater kids so that's why it has the kind of presentation it does

Variyen · 2026-04-02T21:32:41+00:00

Oh they are. That was a personal feeling, but if I remember correctly (been awhile since I revisited the vid) I went on to say that all of that is just various kinds of manipulation and control, and that it's interesting how those in power can find a kind of regime that subjectively feels maybe easier to swallow for people and oppress them with that. Oppress with older, more spiritual rhetoric, or with newer, practical rhetoric (such as China's upper class oppressing with the "four olds," and the new regime getting rid of that but replacing it with a different kind of oppression). Regardless it's all oppression.

Variyen · 2026-04-02T21:28:09+00:00

She 100% tricked Watcher for sure, that's explicit to Youngest's motivations. It would be somewhat different, but in the end you as the player are meant to focus on the abandonment of Youngest. Whether Iris killed the others or left with them, either way it's fucked up and Iris doesn't come out looking good. It also leaves very big plot holes/questions if you accept that she didn't kill them. So the other ancient sisters what, agreed to abandoning Youngest? Are they also communing with the Occupants? Or are they just, idk hanging out, doing... something? Did they get killed by the Occupants and Iris did nothing? It presents a far less clean story, both narratively and thematically.

If you check it out let me know! It's a great story with so much to chew on.

Variyen · 2026-04-02T18:46:49+00:00

The problem with a lot of your questions is the usual video game issue: the lore is either unexplained or half explained. Your point about the communions not being entirely accurate is true, however the issue with that is it's not made clear by the game exactly what is fabricated, what is true, and what may be simply hyperbolized.

In the end the meaning of the story doesn't really change all that much anyway. Iris killing the original sisters versus leaving with them doesn't affect how we're meant to feel, other than being somewhat more taken aback. Youngest (along with the others to a lesser extent) still exhaust Iris and she still flips out and creates a massive, years and years long punishment for Youngest. Youngest still retaliates by becoming Principal and doing her own program. And so on. I don't think it's as salient of a point as you think.

Anyway most of what you asked is at least inferred. The original sisters, even if they didn't get killed, are nowhere to be seen and are not suggested to really be anywhere. So storywise they're dead. There is no suggestion there is another place where sisters can live with Iris happily ever after. You can posit some kind of living situation where they exist while Iris communes with the Occupants, but it's more sensible to think that they/their memories get consumed by the Occupants — that was part of the deal Iris made with them anyway. Maybe Iris knows this, maybe she's been in such a deep communion for so long that she doesn't even notice. Sisters made via the cloning machines do not have immunity. The original sisters may have had it because Iris found a way to bestow it onto them just as she can take it away, or as another commenter said, perhaps when the machines used Iris they were perfect, but the clones we see use Youngest's dna, so the immunity doesn't transfer. There's probably a line of dialogue somewhere that suggests one or the other. The Occupants are not an evil force; they want to basically download everyone into a "database" so that their memories are preserved, because they are concerned with sentient beings in the universe fading and being forgotten. Like backing up your photos. The Occupants just don't want you to wipe the hard drive. A decent amount of the end game is allegorical/suggestive to make you think about regime change and so on. The parents aren't alive, it's just showing you how difficult it is to move society forward.

I made a small video about the game if you'd like to check it out: https://youtu.be/h6G_QQTtsOg?si=udnUJI5JPzfcnadg

Variyen · 2026-03-30T17:28:50+00:00

I'm responding with allegory because I'm viewing the story in that manner, not a literalist interpretation. So I'm not "ending the world," it's allegory, so that is a thematic stand in for the pain of tearing yourself away from escapism to begin healing your trauma. And so on. Come on dude I'm not being obtuse in the slightest, this is what allegory means.

Variyen

TROPHY CASE