your post about bladelore was really interesting, do you have any thoughts about the designs of the ferronises?

(message from future Van as I edit this -- Beware Ye Of The Unmarked Asspulls in this answer. Also SPOILERS THROUGH THE END OF CHAPTER 7) Yeah, like, I'm kind of two minds about them? I definitely think the way they take on similar features to a big source of cultural trauma (Faced Mechons for Keves, Sirens for Agnus) of the two kingdoms supports the idea that ether is still a kind of collective memory, the way it was presented in XC2. They're weapons of intimidation, first and foremost, built to bolster the forces and make them more comfortable taking risks and choosing fight over flight, to feel like they've got something dangerous backing them up, but I also feel like they're subtly designed to reinforce the sense of hopelessness that is instrumental to the war working as intended. Z wants everyone to give up, the goal is to make everyone into Moebius and arrive at a kind of heat death of the universe that way.

From a practical perspective, I don't think the Ferronises are a new development in the war.... but I do think the war was probably initially fought without them, with everyone just under the one Big Flame Clock at the Castle. But we now that people do figure the war out, and if everyone was concentrated together, they'd just figure it out quicker, so eventually the amount of people fighting in the war necessitated they get split up and scattered across Aionios to stop them from seeing too much of the big picture to work it out like Alexandria did. So, basically, I'm taking the long way around to say that I think Flame Clocks preceded Ferronises, and Ferronises were conceived as extensions of Levnises, and are probably historically represented as such.

I think there's also a certain amount of incentive for Z to keep growing the scale of the war as more people became Moebius and started requiring Things To Do in the Eternal Now -- a lot of the Consuls in the game are or at least appear to be pretty new to their jobs, or at least have enthusiasm for it, which could be a ramp effect to embracing the true Endless Now of Not Doing Anything Ever Again after they get their petty victory or revenge or whatever it is that drove them to become Moebius in the first place. Maybe Ferronises were initially built to allow the Consuls to spar amongst themselves, and then as they got bored of that, new Consuls would take over.

Which brings me back around to the actual designs of the Ferronises -- lots of animal motifs to go around, but off the top of my head nothing really seems to match up that strongly with its Consul, other than maybe the miko outfit on Mu paralleling I's design. One that really leaps out is R with her fox design placed alongside the very scorpion-y Colony 11. Since there's a limited amount of Consul Titles to go around, if the ramp theory is correct, the Ferronises may be designed to spec by their original Consuls, but as they are now they're more like.... tabletop RPG factions, they all come with their own "playstyle" so to speak. Hell, depending on how circular you want to see the timeloop as, maybe colonies tend to have the same commanders over and over in a cycle, which would bring some periodic consistency to the game of war.

During the events of the game, we may actually be in a lull between campaigns, with a lot of consuls electing to not play, leaving Z to having to pull up a bunch of new Moebius to fill the seats around the gameboard, because if the war cools off too much, the people of the Kingdoms are gonna start asking questions again.