Joshua: *uses his abilities* *coughs up a lung* "Okay let me do that again"

torgawl🐺

eikonic Maybe we'll get some outfits in the crossover event if Yoshida (XVI) and Yoshida (XIV)'s talks go well...

mannerisms

I'm at this part! how can the game get more intense after this??

KILL THE MONSTER

Never quite good enough for his lil bro... (but Joshua handles The Burning Thorn well anyway, Clive just wasn't there to see him grow into it 😔)

ACCEPTANCE, REUNION, FAREWELL

Clive's a very sweet man, but that doesn't stop him from being a nightmare customer

I think one of the most fascinating aspects of Joshua's character is that he was raised by a cult that worships him and it shows.

The game is very unsubtle in depicting the Undying as a cult, if a benign one whose goals are largely aligned with Clive's: the way it recruits from the disenfranchised dredges of society, the way it isolates it's members from the outside world, and associates devotion to their deity with worth as a person, even glorifying self sacrifice even past the point of reason- something Clive and Cyril butt heads on repeatedly.

And you can see the way that both being raised by them and being their messiah has impacted Joshua: the way Joshua feels that he can and should be able to do everything on his own (rebuffing Jote's efforts to help him even with small matters, avoiding Clive in order to 'protect' him), the way he's feels a right to order the lives of others around his own wishes (his meddling in the politics of each Kingdom, especially Sanbreque), even the subtle hint that he's given up on trying to persuade the Undying not to sacrifice their lives for his gain (and the even more subtle implication that he's maybe accepted that self sacrifice is a good thing, given his own self-sacrificial tendencies for Clive).

Their's this big gap after the reveal Joshua is alive where you wonder: how did he get from where he was Phoenix Gate (the shy innocent boy who wanted to do his duty more to make his brother proud then for it's own sake) to where he is at Drake's Spine (confident, mysterious, cold blooded in his pursuit of his goals), and the game answers that so effectively in the introduction of the Undying. This is where he learned it, this is what shaped him after everything fell apart and he went into hiding: a cult that all at once was trying to parent and worship and aid a 10 year old messiah whose only real desire was to save his brother from the monster that tore them apart.

'Keep your gift until I have fulfilled my duty to the realm. For only then shall I be deserving of it.'

Family reunited

Normal FF16 fanart

Final Fantasy 16: where even the dragons are gay