About this-
Well when the communities experience with "mature, complex gritty, nuanced writing with political intrigue" comes from little more than anime/manga you don't exactly get an informed opinion.
There's a few times the embodiment of a complex emotion or concept is sometimes in a weird blob or testicle monster instead.
Well funny that because the entire post-ARR story was written the way it was because the writer got inspired by Game of Thrones (specifically the Red Wedding, which aired not very long before) so they wanted to turn FFXIV into dark and edgy politics (which is why it went from childish whimsical good vs evil fantasy to GoT from 2.0 to 2.1). Than Yoshi-P got mad and made them undo everything so that's why in HW we find out (acktually everyone is still alive, even Nanamo, it was actually just a sleeping potion, anyway we're all good now) so absolutely nothing in that entire 100+ quests of post-MSQ actually mattered and was a complete and utter waste of time. (Seriously they need to just delete everything in post-ARR related to the Nanamo bullshit and just focus on the Iceheart and the dragons which is the only part of post-ARR that's actually relevant to HW).
Are there images of her on Rule34 as well?
I remember seeing the trailer for HW when it was revealed and I recall there was a scene with Lolorito looking menacingly at the camera and it seemed that they were setting him up to have a bigger role in HW than he actually got. Which was one of the reasons why the actual conclusion to the Sultana plot felt weird.
Yes. Way less than Y'shtola people can't stop spanking it to the cat. Never seen one super coomer devote somewhere in the range of a couple thousand dollars to commissions for porn of their character and Lyse though. That's true for Y'shtola though.
Honestly, I just assume that a lot of brown-skinned characters with white hair in anime and games like Y'shtola, Cia, Xehanort, etc. are all some stylized hybrid form of Iberian/Italian/Egyptian, they don't really have sub-Saharan nigger features.
The major thing, is that I think it's acceptable for what it is and enjoyable enough up until EW/DT and the major reason people hype it up is because it's an okay story.
I think it's important to distinguish between hyping ARR up for a good story, and using it as the absolute bottom floor of XIV MSQ, prior to Dawntrail. ARR (and to a lesser extent, Stormblood) feels like it's currently undergoing the Star Wars prequel treatment, where it just looks good in comparison to the utter dogshit that was DT. I won't defend how poorly paced the MSQ of the story was, but it felt like they were actually trying then, rather than serving up slop and expecting you to treat it like gold.
I don't think the writing of any FFXIV expansion is particularly mature and I don't think its really trying to be, it's visually pleasing fantasy locales with some wars sprinkled in. Dawntrail is just so bland that characters saying "shite" is fiery in comparison.
