about

[pukwight]

ABOUT

PERSONALITY

VANITY

Drividot is beautiful and he knows it, and on top of that he strongly believes that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. This means he devotes a lot of energy to his own appearance and surroundings—and will extend this to others around him, regardless of how welcome it might be. It’s also, for him, a creative force and an avenue of self-expression—he likes to design and make the clothes he wears, when possible. Same applies to the principles of interior design, to be honest. A good life is one surrounded by beauty.

MACHINISTRY

But as much as he cares about form, he does not sacrifice function. As a machinist after the mold of Stephanivien’s Skysteel Manufactory, Drividot cares about looking forward, and about understanding how and why things work. While this does include taking things apart to learn about how they work (sometimes with less-than-adequate permission), his curiosity extends beyond the mechanical to include most everything about the world he inhabits. This was the choice he made, when he forsook the path of the bard: to look forward and put his faith in a more equal future, made with his own hands.

RELENTLESS DO-GOODER

The purpose to which he sets this curiosity is the welfare of not only himself but others. He cannot walk past someone in need, no matter what else is troubling him and no matter their trouble. comes with the “hero of eorzea” territory. Helping people is what he does, and he is not ashamed of it. Despite the fact that duskwight elezen like he is are nigh-universally scorned in Eorzea, he likes people and is glad to devote himself to good ones, with caring and with...

PASSION

As Warrior of Light, passion animates him, ties together all of the above—passion for a better world, a world understood, a beautiful world, full of beautiful people. Drividot can become very dramatic and defensive about this ideal that has captured his passion, focus, and energy. But the dark side of this...

RAGE

...is fury at the state of the world as it is, at ugly injustice and cruelty rampant, at all he and others have suffered. Drividot is publicly unyielding on questions of right and wrong, and holds a deep grudge against the forces that perpetuate injustice (in canon, the Garlean Empire and shadowy Ascian forces). He is willing to use violence against those who drive human suffering, sometimes as a last resort... sometimes not.

CONFLICT

It is well and good to have ideals, and to be furious and passionate in their enactment. However, Drividot lives in a society, a complex world, and the nature of justice is not always an easy thing to describe. He has grappled with these to both productive and unproductive ends, as well as the relationships between justice and vengeance, justice and mercy. That the work of justice might demand his destruction for his own crimes and failures is a thought he has entertained before. As well, he lately contemplates whether might cannot make right, whether that is outside the capacity of his power altogether. These doubts and uncertainties are married to and in a sense manifest of his rage; his desire for a perfect justice in an imperfect world will forever be unattainable.

RUTHLESS

Put simply, Drividot has a ruthless streak that frightens him. By “ruthless” here I don’t mean cruel, only that he can identify “problem” and “solution” on levels that ethics don’t touch, wholly divorced from mercy, and unfamiliar to justice. It’s a cold and clear logic of winning and losing, that he knows will try and cloak itself in the rhetoric of necessity. He doesn’t like it, and tries never to give these thoughts voice. Nonetheless, this ruthless streak is a large part of what makes him a formidable battlefield presence. He owes his life to it.

SMARTASS DIALOGUE OPTIONS

Yes, as of 4.0 FFXIV sure has them, and while Drividot will pick the smartass options, he will not pick the cruel ones, the unnecessarily violent ones. He works hard to be kind, when he can, after all, he came here to help people, and barb-slinging sometimes just isn’t helpful.

ALTER-EGO

Drividot fled the far north of Coerthas when he realized that spring wouldn’t be coming, and to finance this abrupt journey he turned to smuggling, and to cope with being a good person forced to turn to crimes, he developed an alter-ego. See, Drividot wasn’t responsible for all this lawbreaking, Saint Sachevere was. Saint Sachevere was very romanticized—luxurious and dramatic, sensual and exciting—and so compelling that Drividot felt the need to formally “kill” him to sever his hold on him. It didn’t particularly work well, and like an inner dark side the pull, the temptation to abandon the endless work of justice and instead be this man again is always present.

ABILITIES

ECHO

A rare and miraculous ability that is in his canon considered a gift from the Mothercrystal, those who bear the Echo can understand all languages, hear the voice of the Mothercrystal, are immune to primal/deific "tempering" (mind-control), and periodically experience visions of the past of people they're in the presence of. The flashbacks are entirely involuntary for Drividot, and are not fun or comfortable to experience, sometimes accompanied by him losing consciousness.

MACHINIST

A machinist, in Ishgardian parlance, is not just someone with the skill and knowhow to work and repair machines. Oh no. It refers to a modern warrior, skilled with guns and various advanced weapons of war—the flying drill, the bioblaster, the air anchor, the flamethrower, and the Automaton Queen, all of which Drividot can use well. It is, to put it frankly, cool as shit.

CRAFTING/GATHERING

Drividot-the-video-game-character is an accomplished omnicrafter because his player is a mad person who loves suffering. Drividot-the-RP-character is less so--he can cook excellently, he can make furniture, he can make clothes and jewelry of cloth, leather, and precious metal. He also can gather the materials needed to make all of these pretty things himself, being a skilled botanist. That's all.

MISCELLANEOUS

Drividot has good wilderness survival skills, plus hunting, gardening, animal husbandry from his upbringing in the remote Coerthan mountains. Machinistry demands he be mechanically inclined, and he is. Very athletic in general from the demands of his jobs, and also very flexible with an excellent singing voice, due to being an ex-bard. Finally, as a duskwight, Drividot has exceptionally good hearing, better not only than human hearing but most other races.

EXTRA

EX-BARD

He arrived in Gridania an archer, and, as is the custom in Gridania, trained to become a bard, a singer whose magical voice empowers others on the battlefield. But the more he saw of war, the less his heart could bear to sing of battle and glory, and the culmination of the Dragonsong War put the final end to it. While he’ll still sing other songs, and he retains his lovely singing talent, he won’t take up the bardic combat arts again. After the events of Endwalker, however, he is reconsidering this stance: The Endsinger taught him the power of choosing to raise his voice in song again, instead of ceding that power to the songs of others. Still conflicted, at least he is open to once more employing the bardic arts.

NSFW

Yes, this is about his dick. Color-wise, the shaft is the same color as the rest of his skin, but the head is significantly reddish when erect. He’s uncut. In terms of size, without putting a number on it, he is “above-average” by the standards of Elezen and “big” by the standards of hyur/humans. Also he has no body hair beyond pubes (he shaves his pits); and would have a very sparse beard if he ever tried to grow one. Said body hair is one shade of red darker than that on his head.

TASTE

Drividot is a simple man with complex, contradictory tastes. Between the allure of what he learned as St. S and garden-variety homesickness, he has tastes for both the plain and the luxurious. Because, however, of his vanity, he only lets people he trusts deeply see the longing for the "rustic" that he still possesses, and overall presents to the world his refined tastes rather than the ones he grew up with.

FANTASY RACISM

In Eorzea, the world of FFXIV, duskwights are a ethnic minority, displaced from their ancestral home of Gelmorra and widely viewed as thieves, bandits, and other sorts of criminals. This is most pronounced in the city-state of Gridania, but is evidenced in other regions as well. Strangely, there's little sign of intolerance of duskwights in Coerthas and Ishgard, and as such I have headcanoned that Drividot endured more marginalization outside of his home region than within it, even before the events of Heavensward made him the hero of the land.

SEXUAL HISTORY

The thing about Drividot’s sexual history... is that for most of it, he wasn’t himself. The majority of his sexual encounters he had as Saint Sachevere, as part of developing that sensual, romantic alter-ego’s mystique. However, because Saint Sachevere was pale, and Drividot assuredly is not, he had to do this while protecting his real identity, and he succeeded in giving himself a Complex: he serviced and brought pleasure to lovers while remaining untouched himself, never removing his clothes or even his gloves. As a result, he’s very not used to permitting any kind of vulnerability in a sexual situation, to put it mildly. He’ll have to learn how to relax enough to allow himself to receive pleasure, in any game context.

SCAR

On his face there is a massive scar in two parts, starting from under his hairline above the right corner of his forehead, swooping towards his nose and terminating just above the bridge of his nose, then resuming on his left cheek, running diagonally to the corner of his jaw. It is a fearsome thing to consider, but Drividot is remarkably tightlipped about the circumstances in which he was so injured. All that’s known for sure is that it must have been before he arrived in Eorzea, but after he came of age (for it disrupts the clan tattoos). In the absence of a definitive answer, rumors about its origins circulate wildly.

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