if you want him to be a compassionate man whose capacity for love has been twisted in service to militarized imperialism, then...make him stop, so that he understands that he can
give Valens's other child slaves actual names and desires and let him take care of them and be found at all the season events in various ridiculous costumes
--I mean, in my head this is at the end of a Weaponsquest involving Gaius being hit in the face (literally and metaphorically) with the already-in-canon children he fucked up
Fordola, last of the Black Wolf's Pups! Lucia, Livia's twin sister! Nero...Nero! they all have important things to say about whether he actually helped his children/mentees, and should get to say them!
I was wondering if he was going to have been injured while fighting blasphemies but surprise! those blasphemy fights we’ve been alluding to don’t matter in the slightest. why would you think they mattered, lmao
cid: hey gaius remember in praetorium how you talked about my dad regretting his actions at the end of his life? turns out that was objectively not true because he was tempered to fuck and back up to the very moment he annihilated himself and also a city. so uh. got anything to say about that.
like my presumption of the timeline is midas has this conversation with gaius->midas gets bad enough that gaius needs to basically take custody of cid->cid confronts midas->bozja explodes
the timeline is kind of weird towards the end because the field notes imply midas survived a little bit after bozja and died of his injuries while everything before that made me think he like. got vaporized
I think what makes the most sense is that what Gaius meant was, "Come on Cid we can't stop committing war crimes just because they suck and we hate it," which would at least be a consistent kind of wrong
Honestly I interpret it as like. In retrospect he was like "holy shit my best friend was tempered to shit and I had no idea what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck"
exactly. like there's "this character is bad at words that are actually emotionally driven rather than speeches" and then there's "what the fuck are you doing with this character arc bro"
hich is actually even more of a callback because Aodhan has poerfect auditory memory and a decent knack for imitating accents so he does the exact cadence
but warring triad has been my top you need to play this side material since Heavensward itself, which is a tall order considerring it's coming from I, Nael "plurk user starcrossedsky" van darnit
oh yeah i'm hoping that they'll be mandatory eventually because - next expac we should get a caster dps and that's the only one that you really have to griund still for shb role quests
I mean they did say they had plans for Gaia so I assume that side content purgatory is not something that means you are permanently doomed to irrelevance
I understand not wanting to make everything mandatory, but unfortunately or fortunately they ALSO are really good at making things connect because it's the same story
I really do think they should just be like “fuck it if you want to know who cylva and unukalhai are either read the codex entries we’re giving you or do their content”
1) god yeah one of my takes way back when was that this should have been an arc abt People Being Made Into Weapons with gaius recognizing how he was fucked up by seeing how his kids got fucked up, bc prae gaius is just so THOROUGHLY a Guy Who Knows Nothing But Military
I know I shouldn’t begrudge anyone for liking things but every time I see someone say Werlyt was good I want to gently shake them by the shoulders and say you deserve better. We deserve better.
I would not be nearly so angry about it if Werlyt was standard faire but like even the storyline that got its epilogue axed and reduced to field notes did better
much like Cid himself