ne0dym

the second coming of harrow lévesque

13/04/2026

My Final Fantasy XIV OC, Harrow Lévesque, is without a doubt my biggest and longest-running creative project, having been in continuous development since mid-2020. Since around May 2025, I have been riding a wave of hyperfixation that has more than made up for the lull in OC thoughts from a while back, and in fact, the Harrow that currently dominates my brain might as well be a completely different character from the one that first came into existence 6 years ago. I meant to write out my thoughts regarding his recent development as the evolution unfolded, but while it's easy to post short snippets of lore and other brainworms on Bluesky, I hadn't actually managed to enshrine them in a more permanent manner on this site — until now! Here is some meta commentary on Harrow's newest iteration.

content warning for: nsfw text, suicide and self-harm mention, incest mention, age gap relationship

how did we get here

Although in all the years since Harrow's creation I never really stopped caring about him completely, the amount of OC thoughts did begin to dwindle as my playstyle increasingly shifted to high-end raiding and I started to neglect the story that I nevertheless so fervently championed. (I haven't kept up with MSQ since 6.0, despite my vague promises that I'd eventually go back and rewatch the cutscenes I skipped.) Losing my friend group didn't help: since some of those people were my audience for brainworms, no longer having anyone to read and comment on my lore and shippy thoughts really killed my enthusiasm for developing my character. My "raiding career" thus took priority and I became surrounded by players who mostly didn't care for the story, which only contributed to keeping my creative side on the back burner.

When people starting migrating from Twitter to Bluesky, however, the change of scenery was enough to somewhat rekindle my interest in OC lore and scenarios. In the later months of 2024 and early 2025, I posted enough Harrow tidbits to feel the need to collect them in a tag, so they wouldn't just get lost among all my posting: #harrowwol. But what really gave me inspiration to start thinking about Harrow again was, of all things, the movie Constantine, which spawned an entire article on this blog just for me to gush about it. I became so fixated on that character that some of his traits began to seep into my OC: I decided to have Harrow's "post-canon" era start at age 35, the same as the film's protagonist; I considered having him dye his hair black and even made a sketch of it (though I eventually abandoned the idea); and I thought it would be interesting to have retired-WoL-turned-priest Harrow find pleasure in "earthly vices", including smoking, which is Constantine's whole thing. Aiding the osmosis was the fact that it had always been my intention to have Harrow become a priest after retiring from his Warrior of Light activities, and that John is an exorcist, which isn't a priest but is priest-adjacent, so they already had that in common.

My obsession reached a point where I spent hours overanalysing Constantine in the film and finding ways in which he resembled my OC Harrow, especially in his early arc. I wrote a whole Google Doc laying out the parallels I could wrangle out of them, which is reproduced in the box below. This wasn't the first time I reinterpreted Harrow's character and story as a funky mirror of another IP's character; when I got into Devil May Cry 5 all those years ago, I did the same thing with Vergil, although that required more mental gymnastics than Constantine, whose arc surprisingly proved to map rather neatly onto the story I had already written for Harrow with minimal distortions.

The film was the first spark, but the explosion of brainwaves was still to come. At the end of May I travelled to my hometown to undergo a small surgery, and the recovery ended up stretching into a whole month of being mostly bed-bound at my grandma's house. I had my laptop and my iPad, and eventually I managed to have someone bring my PS5 from home, but I was still very bored and sleeping away most of the days, especially in the first couple of weeks of recovery. Having anticipated a need for entertainment, I had planned to watch a bunch of movies, a series, perhaps even read a book, but before I knew it all my existing plans fizzled away as my mind was completely taken over by Harrow in a way that I hadn't experienced since I first started working on him.

the second coming of harrow lévesque

So, in a previous blog post, I lamented that Harrow wasn't the best conduit for my obsession with religious tropes in a more toxic or eroticised context, and that "because I [was] afraid of portraying his religiousness in poor taste, he [had] a pretty wholesome character development". Something must have been in the water I was drinking with my meds, because I suddenly became extremely interested in exploring all aspects of Harrow's life (of which religion is a big part) and his relationships with other characters in FFXIV, often venturing into dark and kinky territories previously unheard of in his lore, while at the same time a massive aesthetic and thematic shift began to take form.

Because I was already churning some thoughts about Harrow's post-canon priest life, and because I watched another film with a religious thematic (The Name of the Rose), that was the first thing I felt inspired to further develop. I thought about his changing relationship with faith, with the institution of the Church, and with his own past as the Warrior of Light. It occurred to me that, given that his (rather front-loaded) arc in the canon was anchored on breaking away from the Church's absolute influence and having his own interpretation of the faith, he seemed to be inching closer to a Protestant than a Catholic (though calling him a Catholic is much funnier, so I started researching all about Catholicism in order to bring him back into line with that notion). And crucially, I took an existing idea — that his combat role as a tank served as a form of self-inflicted penance — and cranked it up to the extreme by making him a huge masochist, whose self-destructive impulses were intimately linked with an addiction to the sense of awe at overwhelming divinity. If in the past I'd been trying to handle Harrow's religious life in a safe, sanitised way, now I had finally realised the potential for eroticism and horror in zealotry.

This revolution in Harrow's psychology introduced some new elements to the picture, rehashed existing ideas with a new twist, and removed any inhibitions I had about being edgy with his characterisation. Originally, I might've talked about Harrow gladly tanking an enemy to protect his allies, but now he's not only doing it to save people but also because he loves the pain, because it gives him purpose and brings him close to the gods, because he secretly loves the praise it gets him. I might've mentioned that Harrow's meeting with Venat/Hydaelyn, the Goddess who was truly guiding him all along, had lots of potential for a romance with a knight/lady flavour, but now I'm also thinking about the vaguely Freudian aspect of God's specialest boy having a carnal encounter with the Mother, how such an intimate, cosmically-ordained union would be like "returning to the womb" for him. (I'll come back to "vaguely Freudian" later). Harrow and Elidibus's relationship, the only surviving ship from the old days of lore, already had elements of violence, religion and bittersweet tragedy — see the two major story beats: Harrow getting consensually impaled and nearly brainwashed by Elidibus, who is a kind of God; and Harrow's later doomed-yaoi bootstrap-paradox meeting with Themis, Elidibus's original self — but now I'm also deeply interested in how Harrow gets off on this forbidden sexual/romantic relationship with his nemesis.

Indeed, perhaps the most impactful development of this OC renaissance is that Harrow Fucks Again. The friend-breakup of several years ago had ruined my capacity for brainworms, especially of the shippy kind, and I thought I'd never seriously think about Harrow ships again. I can't remember if he was always asexual in my head, but after that incident, I made it a definite character trait partly to protect myself from having another OCxOC ship. (Being ace of course doesn't preclude someone from having sex, but as an ace myself, I wanted to make it clear that sex was not a priority for his relationships.) Well, it turned out that being bored, in bed most of the time, and getting baked every evening triggered a wave of horny energy that was promptly channeled into my character, and actually facilitated the creation of another OC: Deimos, Harrow's Ancient self, but we'll get into that later. Harrow is still asexual (or perhaps more accurately "grey-asexual"), he just feels aroused as a result of intense and often a little abstract emotions such as awe, surrender and devotion. The compass of Harrow's sexuality was pointing to "submissive" at this moment, but over time I came to see him as a switch (both dom and sub) and generally a service top, (though he can bottom sometimes too). Finding that I was willing to ship Harrow with other characters again (in all forms, including hateships) and rediscovering the joys of shipping was a major factor in keeping the brainworms alive to this day as I write this.

With such a hyperspecific, highly self-indulgent reanalysis of Harrow's psychology and sexuality, my OC was beginning to feel like a completely new character. To further reshape his characterisation, it happened that I became fascinated by knights and the Middle Ages, through observing people on my socials (namely my friend Cat, whom I've mentioned on this blog before!) reading and discussing Arthuriana stories. It honestly puzzles me how this didn't happen sooner, given that Ishgard (the nation in FFXIV where Harrow originates) is mostly based on Medieval Europe and that knights are ubiquitous in its areas and storylines. So I decided to learn more about knights, both of the historical violent warrior kind and the romanticised valorous heroes of chivalric romances, and incorporate such elements into my character. Due to the rule of cool, I am allowing myself a level of anachronism for what constitutes a "knight" and drawing inspiration from knights of the 12th century, when they became a distinct social class in the wake of the Crusades, all the way until the beginning of the 16th century, when knights were basically just nobles joining a club, as the elite warrior force had basically become obsolete.

While I, regrettably, never did finish reading Yvain or Lancelot, those works nonetheless contributed to my quickly growing interest in chivalry, and even more importantly, in what an authentically Medieval character should look, sound and feel like. (One day I hope to revisit some Medieval literature with a highlighter to finally figure out Harrow's "voice"). One thing that particularly scratched my brain was learning about armour — from the early Medieval era of maille and tabards, to the late Medieval and early Renaissance era of full plate. In August I visited a museum in Montréal that was running an exhibition on knights and I was so chuffed to see plate armour and chainmail in real life; they even had some pieces you could try out on yourself! Unfortunately, with this new knowledge and fixation I've become very aware of how outlandish a lot of fantasy armour is, and noticed a distressing shortage of realistic-looking armour in FFXIV. Now that Harrow is a Knight, the range of outfits in-game that make sense for him is greatly narrowed. His most iconic drip, which you can see on the sidebar of this site, has an awesome silhouette but is sadly not even fully a "knight" armour; the top, which is called "Troian Lorica of Fending", has these sculpted abs that don't fit the aesthetic at all, but I still use it because I love the cloth bits, the cape, the belts, and the fur collar which in my artwork has grown much fluffier.

In hindsight, it's clear that as I played through the game for the first time in 2020, my focus was on creating a character that would be the protagonist of that story, building on a basis of my choosing but ultimately shaping him around what the MSQ presented as fact, and not really reaching much further beyond that. Harrow was simply a "catboy raised by elves", a "devout Ishgardian", and "the Warrior of Light". But years later, with some distance from FFXIV and a whole new world of inspirations to draw from, I feel that Harrow is now a much more well-rounded character, with a deeper and more complex psychology, a more specific visual identity, a more thought-out backstory, and a clearer vision for his post-canon life. Now, when I think of Harrow, I don't just think of him as the WoL; to me, the foremost description of Harrow is "a Knight", and I think that already sets him apart from other characters and indeed from his original iteration. The story and characters of FFXIV are still at the core of Harrow's development, yet he now feels like a true passion project, the fruit of months of creative labour that I increasingly believe needs a wholly original setting under my control in which he can live and thrive (but I'm getting ahead of myself).

My already well-established obsession with religion, my newfound curiosity about the Middle Ages, and a new willingness to explore dark, taboo and edgy themes, all these factors combined to make Harrow, at long last, the perfect blorbo for me. I've never felt so fulfilled as a creative, as exploring all these different facets of my character has taken me down numerous rabbit holes that have enriched my knowledge in various fields: religion (particularly Catholicism); knights and orders of chivalry; Medieval society; historical linguistics; historical fashion; psychiatry and psychoanalysis; even, believe it or not, BDSM. The hyperfixation even managed to somewhat break a years-long art slump, and in the months since it began Harrow's design has changed rather dramatically, as can be seen in my own drawings and in the commissions I've ordered!

into the depths of harrow's mind

There were a few songs that served as soundtrack to my weeks of post-op recovery and hence influenced the OC brainwaves in some way, but I want to give special credit to Deftones's Knife Prty. I already knew this song from months earlier when I first discovered the band and some of their discography (it wasn't until a little while later that they finally secured their spot as my number 2 favourite band), but hearing it again while zooted, horny and brimming with new OC thoughts, it was truly brain chemistry changing. As I'd find out later on with more exposure to the band's work, Deftones have a lot of sexy songs and a good portion of those either blend seductive lyrics with aggressive instrumentals and vocals, or violent themes with ethereal sounds. "Knife Prty" was inspired by drunken parties on the tour bus where the band would dance while holding knives from one of the members' knife collection, which became a recurring joke for the band and led the frontman Chino Moreno to imagine a "fake scenario of some kind of underworld society of knives, people who just get off on these erotic fantasies". The track has this atmosphere I've described as "dissociative"; there is just something about its production that genuinely transports me to a different plane and, as the lyrics go, makes me feel like "I could float here forever, anaemic and sweet...". The amazing guest vocals by Rodleen Getsic are a huge part of what makes this song so special to me; her resonant screams, reminiscent of moans of ecstasy, gradually turning into haunting, shrieking wails of agony, really evoke the idea of pain and pleasure mixing into a single, transcendental sensation. To bring this topic back to my dear Harrow, I would say this song is greatly responsible for him becoming a huge masochist — the fact that it lacks any religious motifs is irrelevant, because pain is, in itself, a religious experience for Harrow. He isn't (to my knowledge) part of a secret society of knife fetishists, but I foresee a lot of knifeplay in his future.

So, with a thirst for the overlap of violence and temptation, the first wave of (hate)shippy brainwaves that hit me involved Elidibus, who's at this point a well-known pairing for Harrow, and Fandaniel, to whom I'd previously given thought as a "crackship" situation but ended up serving as a rather compelling contrast with the other Ascian. As I said on Bluesky, Harrow/Elidibus has a dynamic of twisted worship and divine revelation, while Harrow/Fandaniel's is just pure, unrestrained violence. For the longest time I vehemently denied the possibility of Harrow having some kind of "true hidden animalistic nature", because I think it's a bioessentialist notion considering he is a cat-man. Despite my reservations though, the thought of Fandaniel taunting Harrow and urging him to attack, as the Warrior of Light slams him against a wall and pins him down with sheer brute force, choking him and tearing him apart as the Ascian laughs in ecstatic glee... well, it was pretty damn hot, and it led me to finally embrace Harrow's "panther" side, as I call it, certainly one of the most dramatic shifts in his characterisation.

Although he is canonically a Miqo'te (the cat-people in FFXIV, commonly referred to as "catboys and catgirls"), I've never liked the way this race is portrayed, with weirdly shaped ears that look more like a horse's, the male models having a hunched pose and hands stuck in an arthritic claw shape, and cat-like mannerisms that are a bit too silly for my taste (to be fair, that might be more of a fanon issue than canon). Hence the idea that Harrow was raised from infancy by an Elezen (elves in FFXIV) family, allowing me to bypass his Miqo'teness and focus on making him a character that could be, on all levels except physical, an elf: he speaks their language, practises their religion, eats their typical cuisine, carries himself with the same elegance, adheres to their social norms. This principle still informs how I broadly imagine him, but now I see a way to make Harrow a little feral sometimes that doesn't feel biologically deterministic or undermine his core identity: by acknowledging that a Knight such as he is capable of courtesy, service and restraint just as much as he is built to be a war machine of incredible brutality and destruction, and there is a seductive tension in that duality. Thus, Harrow's "panther" side, as I call it, isn't a return to base instinct or a hidden beast unleashed; it represents a deliberate, measured capacity for violence and domination that is a product of his upbringing within a culture anchored in war.

In effect, while refreshing my memory on Ishgard's lore, I was struck by how deeply violence is integrated in its culture, particularly in the military and religious practices. The massive Google Doc that I call my "Ishgard Lore Bible" preserves valuable information contained in flavour texts that has been toned down or outright removed from the game, presumably to make Ishgard seem less extreme: a quest that originally said "the Church is looking to enact self-flagellation as part of the training" was softened into "additional readings of the scripture"; another lost the mention that "objects for use in the worship of the Goddess must be crafted with drops of Her humble servant's blood"; and in yet another, the idea that "one must never consume dragon flesh, for it amounts to both treason and madness, with both a just cause for beheading" was quietly excised. I am saddened by the removal of such details that, in my opinion, only enrich the worldbuilding, but thankfully, the core of Ishgard's ethos remains intact: in a nation that's been waging war for a thousand years, knights who die in the Crusade against dragons are believed to ascend straight to Heaven, joining the Goddess Halone the Fury in her Halls, while regular folk who will never see the battlefield are left to seek passage into Heaven only through a lifetime of devotion. In other words, to the pious Ishgardian, suffering is the surest path to salvation. And once I understood that, the pieces of Harrow's psyche began to fall into place.

Harrow was raised to become a Knight in service of Ishgard, and a knight's raison d'être is to die. He understood from a young age that the highest form of devotion is to give one's life for a greater cause: perhaps it was instilled in his mind by his parents, who intuited that if the family name was to go out with their son, then his becoming one of the "glorious dead" would be a fitting legacy; or perhaps he arrived at such a morbid conclusion himself, driven by an innate, inexplicable pull towards annihilation that was only cultivated by the death cult that is Ishgard's society. Such suicidal aspirations would coalesce into something like a martyr complex, in a rather literal sense: believing that his life's purpose is to be spent, Harrow isn't just eager to die, he also needs his eventual death to be meaningful — whether he perishes while serving his nation's cause, or bearing the brunt of an enemy's attack in place of an ally. (Here, you can see his shift into becoming a tank, to speak in MMORPG terms; his starting class was actually Lancer/Dragoon, a DPS, responsible for inflicting great amounts of damage, though he would later pick up the Dark Knight arts and rapidly find a vocation for serving as the party's meat shield.) However, as Harrow takes up the mantle of the Warrior of Light and grows in power, responsibility and notoriety, the martyrdom aspirations become entangled with a saviour impulse: he is needed, indispensable; there are people who need help and problems that need fixing, and it falls to him to set things right, to take their suffering upon himself, to endure for the sake of others, to carry burdens that no one else can handle — it is not only his solemn duty, but his divinely-ordained mission. This mindset is validated at every turn as the stakes of each mission grow higher and higher, and in Harrow's mind, which operates under the logic of faith, martyr and saviour combine to create a secret third thing, a messianic complex.

If I had to pick a cardinal sin to best describe Harrow, it would be pride. He is not a duplicitous man by any measure; his devotion, his self-sacrificing tendencies, his impulse to serve are entirely sincere, he doesn't perform modesty or heroism for recognition; to give of himself is simply what he, as a Knight, must do. And yet, whether he realises it or not, he gets a thrill from being the one to do those things better than anyone else — to pray harder, fight longer, endure more pain. Every word of praise and mark of gratitude affirms a deep-seated feeling of self-righteousness, and in his sanctified suffering, he feels quite literally "holier than thou". It's vanity disguised as humility, and I find this paradox of absolute selflessness that loops back into a kind of arrogance, even narcissism, extremely attractive. Harrow is undoubtedly a good man, but he's also a little awful: his abnegation and self-destructive habits can be unintentionally cruel and manipulative; his empathy, though genuine, is selective, and he can be quick to pass judgement and slow to reconsider; his devotion is absolute, placing loved ones on a pedestal to be protected, exalted, revered — and the weight of his servility can be smothering. Harrow has gone way too long without any complicated flaws to balance his virtues, so it was high time to make him kind of horrible in ways that are hard to defend, and I love him even more now that he is.

At some point, when I felt sufficiently pleased with these reworked, hyperspecific character traits, I had the idea of taking account of Harrow's psyche on a broader level and framing it in the context of a mental illness. It was already established that Harrow goes through periods of hyperreligious, obsessive seeking of purpose, and periods of withdrawal, resignation and self-destruction, coinciding with each story beat as appropriate. I figured that this pattern of highs and lows could be interpreted as bipolar disorder, and I thought it could offer a fun new way to recontextualise existing scenarios and build new ones.

There's regular ol' Harrow, with an air of dignity and gravitas, who clings to rituals and duty, longs for transcendence and needs a sense of purpose to live, who's highly principled, cares for others more than for himself, listens more than he speaks. Sometimes, he seems like he's burning with purpose and divine fervour, more charismatic and radiant but also reckless, rushing into impossible missions with the conviction that he will prevail because he is uniquely blessed; this is rather like mania. And sometimes he seems more distant, dislocated, overwhelmed by the sense of duty, he avoids taking the lead, neglects his needs and doubts his worth, becoming self-destructive; this resembles depression. And other times still, zeal and despair intertwine, pushing him to chase his own obliteration and lose himself in the ecstasy of pain, whether on the battlefield or self-inflicted. In summary, Harrow's normal, "baseline" traits get modulated to different intensities and nuances in episodes of mania, depression or mixed mood, which can be triggered by events or simply occur at random (and Harrow, always in need of meaning, comes up with post-hoc symbolic interpretations for those shifts, like a surge of divine calling or punishment for a perceived failure). The bipolar-Harrow idea also introduces some fun variety in his character design: when he is manic, he neglects his limping leg and fights with helmet off, wielding a huge battle axe instead of his normal greatsword, shouting, laughing, inviting enemies to hit him before cleaving them in half; and when he is depressed, he moves as if he were an animated suit of armour, relying on his cane more than usual and keeping the helmet on at all times, feeling so disgraced that he needs to hide from the world and from himself.

With this new concept floating in my head, I've tried my best to handle the subject matter with care; I didn't want to reduce his important character traits to a diagnosis, make a mental illness the entire cause of his actions and emotions, or romanticise his suffering (that being said, I do enjoy putting him in the meat grinder, and have come up with numerous deliciously distressing scenarios for him). But it does create some interesting tension, as it would most likely never be given a name in-universe or even be identified as disorder, and as such, Harrow is just always going to be caught in the current of his shifting moods.

Another aspect of Harrow's characterisation that his newfound diagnosis has touched on is, of course, his sexuality (we still have much to cover about this topic). A part of me might've felt a little bad about pivoting so abruptly to making Harrow fuck again, but the condition actually works in favour of the horny brainworms: mania is known to increase sex drive while depression can make it disappear completely, which seems fitting for Harrow, who doesn't experience arousal through typical means — the apotheotic feelings that arise when he is manic are the very same ones that trigger his boner. In mania, his thoughts start racing and his focus sharpens, as he's overcome with a desire that isn't so much lust as it is hunger: the panther within him stirs, fangs bared, the longing for overwhelming closeness indistinguishable from the urge to devour.

Okay, so now that we know that Harrow knows what sex is, I thought I should explore how his sexual awakening happened in the first place. Sure, it was funny back in the day to laugh at him for having grown up so repressed that he didn't learn about sex until adulthood, but this kind of comical writing has no place in my vision of Harrow's story anymore. Inspired by the film The Lighthouse, where the characters have an erotic fixation on a scrimshaw of a mermaid and the lantern itself, I had the idea that a young Harrow, living in the small hamlet of Voile Rouge, might have found a particular statuette of the Goddess Halone that depicted her rather more voluptuous than was officially sanctioned, in a pose that drew attention her figure. Perhaps it got passed around the kids in the village until it reached the pious little lordling Harrow, who found himself struck by deep admiration and also something new... the sensual icon of the Fury would eventually have been discovered and confiscated, and the young ones would have been sternly scolded by the village priest, leading Harrow to suppress such impure thoughts. But he would still touch himself at the thought of the Goddess (following it with many prayers and acts of penance), haunted by dreams of being pierced by Halone's spear (a phallic object, obviously), the weapon rocking and pulsing inside him... now you see why religious ecstasy, pleasure, and agony are all the same thing to Harrow.

The idea that Harrow's sexuality is inextricably linked to his faith, which has a Goddess as its central figure, happened to completely reshape my ship preferences for him. He was always meant to be bisexual (or biromantic), but the fujoshi brain tended to prioritise M/M (usually but not always cis) ships while, regrettably, neglecting to spare much thought for the lovely women in FFXIV's cast. However, once I opened my heart to M/F ships, armed with two core concepts — that Harrow is a Knight whose purpose in life is to serve, and that the divine is, to him, typically found in the feminine, so he is primed to recognise something sacred in femininity, and respond to it with reverence and submission —, suddenly, the idea of Harrow being whipped for a woman became extremely attractive to me. I admit it all sounds very heteronormative and maybe I am just a "hetjoshi" now, but Harrow is still very much bi: his M/M pairings are still important to me, it's just that exploring M/F now has opened up a whole new set of dynamics I hadn't really considered before, so the scales of his preferences have tipped slightly in M/F's favour. Speaking more broadly though, I've come around to accepting that (gender-agnostic) cock and pussy is, in fact, hot, so Harrow is now a certified pussy lover.

So, as I mentioned earlier, the horny brainwaves hit a critical level where they coalesced into an entirely new OC: Deimos. According to FFXIV's canon, the player character and Warrior of Light is a reincarnation of the Ancient who occupied the rank of "Azem" in the Convocation of Fourteen at the time of the world's Sundering. Azem, also known as "the Traveller", was tasked with exploring the world, learning about the people who inhabited it and solving their problems. I had never been as attached to the Ancients as some pockets of the fandom are, so I never bothered to create and develop an Azem counterpart for Harrow, coming up with only a name, Deimos (also inspired by Warframe) and the idea that somehow they were the origin of Harrow's spirituality. After lying dormant in the back of my mind for a long time, Deimos (he/they) finally came into existence properly after I returned home from the post-op stay at my grandma's, when I had access to my PC again and could use mods to play around with character designs and outfits.

Deimos's design shows a clear continuity with Harrow's, but I wanted their personality and choice of combat class to be quite distinct from their reincarnation. While Harrow is, most famously but not exclusively, a Dark Knight, Deimos is a mix of White Mage and Black Mage. But more importantly, contrasting with Harrow's solemnity, Deimos is a sort of bohemian, queer, pagan, witchy hippie who loves the world and everyone in it because the world itself is God. You can see where Harrow got his godsexual tendencies from. At the beginning I meant for Deimos to just be very openly and casually affectionate, but somehow that quickly spiralled out of control and turned them into an unapologetic slut who loves everyone freely, kisses too easily, has a room reserved in every inn and can even shapeshift body parts at will. Their charm is so universal, so irresistible, that a sexual encounter with Deimos can almost veer into dubcon, as if you're not really in control of your own desires. (That said, if denied, they would never insist or force themself onto someone.) Azem Deimos is, in summary, Etheirys's greatest love machine.

(This section contains mentions of incest, so feel free to skip it if that's not something you want to see, otherwise click here to expand!)

Beyond providing an extra layer to Harrow's backstory, this new OC achieved something I believed was out of reach of Harrow: a selfcest pairing. That's right, after lamenting the fact that, despite having polished Harrow into the perfect blorbo for me, his only shortcoming was not being involved in a selfcest ship, I had finally corrected this cosmic error and retaken my throne as the king of selfcest. How would these two characters, separated by a thousands of years and a reality-fracturing event, even meet (and fuck)? Who cares, Azem/WoL is the ultimate gigabrain ship and I'm baffled that hardly anyone has thought about it. (I did come up with a tentative "soul-searching" arc where Harrow, approaching his retirement as the Warrior of Light, would venture back into the Unsundered World and meet his past self, but that's not set in stone.) I designed Deimos to look like he could be Harrow's twin but also in a different age bracket, and that combined with Deimos's penchant for calling everyone pet names ("love", "darling", or in Harrow's case, "my boy")... it occurred to me, wouldn't it be great if Deimos/Harrow looked a shade more transgressive than just selfcest? What if the progenitor of your soul wanted to merge you back into them — what if you could fuck your father? I have to say, I didn't hate it. I found it intoxicating, in fact, an as-yet untouched trove of juicy fucked-up character development for my already fucked-up man.

Curious to test how much actual incestuous tones I'd be comfortable with, I thought back on Harrow's childhood in the village of Voile Rouge, in the Coerthas region surrounding the city of Ishgard. The story goes that his elven adoptive parents, Lord Perceval and Lady Evangelyne de Lévesque, had been praying incessantly for a child, and when a white-haired Miqo'te infant turned up at their gates, cold and bloodied and alone, they immediately believed the boy to be a gift bestowed by Halone the Fury herself. They vowed to raise him as one of their own kin and made sure everyone else in the village treated him with the respect afforded to a little lordling sent by the Heavens. And they never let Harrow forget that he was a child of House Lévesque, chosen of Halone, destined to serve Ishgard, and as such the city would have no choice but to welcome its most faithful son. At some point I realised this all sounded rather cultlike and I had in my hands the opportunity to spice up Harrow's upbringing in a whole new way. Apparently, the amount of incest I could tolerate turned out to be "quite a bit".

So this is where the hints of "Freudian" dynamics come back: with Harrow's mother being a knight herself, what if she was, in fact, the first woman he adored, the model of awe-inspiring holiness and violence that he would then project onto the very Goddess he worships — and go on to eroticise so deeply? What if every time he kneels to a powerful woman, he is chasing echoes of his own mother? There are cultures in which a peck on the lips is perfectly acceptable between family members, and I already had that idea down for Harrow and his mom, but perhaps... it could go further? After all, if their family dynamic as a whole had some cult vibes about it, it wouldn't be such a stretch if they loved each other in more ways than one. It's not a perfect analogy with an Oedipus complex (from the superficial Wikipedia research I've done) since Harrow definitely wouldn't feel hostility towards his dad, but I think it's a compelling analysis regardless. However, this theory conflicts with the prevailing school of thought regarding Harrow's sexual development, according to which sexuality was typically repressed in their household (see the earlier section on his awakening desires), so it's hard for me to choose one as definite canon. My preference oscillates depending on how much of a freak I'm feeling like at any moment.

At first, I felt like a complete monster for entertaining these thoughts. I've always been known to enjoy selfcest (with a rather loose definition, as I explained in a previous post) and people are generally fine with that because it's a little silly and obviously harmless, but most folks disapprove of incest, including selfcest likers. It happened that around the time I started playing with some more taboo ideas, the whole controversy of art censorship by payment processing companies erupted and lots of people online started campaigning in favour of artistic freedom, even for those subjects that might be considered morally reprehensible. This gave me a boost of confidence to continue rotating my dolls in increasingly bizarre ways, and now I'm just a little bit less ashamed of my creative choices.

I thought it was hilarious that the world's most Catholic Knight should be a fragment of the soul of the sluttiest uncle in Ancient society, because, at a first glance, their attitudes towards sexuality have drastically different tones. Although I can't say for certain whether Harrow is canonically going to time-travel again and get caught up in Deimos's sex dimension for a little while, assuming that this does happen, I figured that post-Deimos Harrow would have absorbed at least a bit of his Ancient self's swagger and become less prudish and more comfortable with sexuality in general, while remaining his own distinctive, religion-laced brand of ace-spec. However, after an extended period of tweaking Harrow's dom/sub levels, embracing the panther, exploring new kinks and dynamics, and imagining unfathomable amounts of porn of my characters, I found that Deimos's influence on Harrow's sexuality had grown out of control, and now the Knight-Priest had reached levels of unashamed lust to rival his ancestor (especially when in a state of mania, which enables him to be more openly sexual). With my brainwaves redirecting to dear old Harrow, Deimos thoughts became less and less frequent. Ultimately, when it comes to my OCs, I really only have the mental bandwidth to fixate on one character, and Harrow will forever be my most favourite son. Deimos remains a cherished creation, but I think he served his purpose: to make me horny enough for my own characters to have the capacity to make Harrow an unhinged sex pervert.

The last point I want to touch on regarding the specifics of Harrow's sexuality is how I accidentally, unknowingly made it BDSM-coded. Such a revelation came to me after reading a lovely NPC/NPC fanfic with a dom/sub dynamic and the tag "subdrop", referring to a set of concepts in BDSM that I previously didn't know existed, but upon research, really fit the way I'd been writing Harrow. Domspace/subspace is like getting really high: a trance-like mental state where the individual is fully absorbed in their role, with doms typically feeling empowered and hyperaware of their partner's needs, and subs achieving a relaxed, euphoric dissociation. Domdrop/subdrop is the comedown: a physio- and psychological crash where, after performing a scene, the person might experience feelings of depression, anxiety, fatigue, emptiness and self-doubt, requiring responsible aftercare. Learning about these concepts felt like a revelation: Harrow's desire to experience overwhelming awe, to surrender completely to a divine force greater than himself, and even, at times, to incarnate it, all while positioning himself as a servant, whether he is submitting or taking control, and pushing the limits of his partner's ability to humour his sick fantasies; such things as I thought were so vague, abstract, and hard to explain without sounding insane, turned out to be a mirror of these BDSM dynamics, only expressed in a religious-mystical language. It's like I peeled back a layer of reality to reveal a kink dimension of whose existence I had been ignorant, and now I have the tools to imagine even more sexy scenarios of Harrow, who was destined for freaky, unsafe hierophilic BDSM all along.

harrow has a girlfriend now

Okay, I've managed to ramble about Harrow's bizarre psychosexual situation for several paragraphs without actually revealing what his real endgame ship is. I'm somewhat cagey about it because FFXIV has set up an MMORPG-friendly "time bubble" where logically you'd think a lot of time has passed since the beginning of our adventure, yet some characters appear to never age, and with no character is the awkwardness of this device more evident than the twins, Alphinaud and Alisaie. They are said to be 16 years old when introduced and have never had their models updated, save for new outfits every other expansion, so a good portion of the fandom is aggressively hostile to the idea of shipping OCs with them (it's typically given a pass if they're a similar age, I guess). Condemning Twin/WoL is basically a default stance in the fandom. Personally, I think the time bubble is actively detrimental to narrative and character development, and abiding by it it reveals a weird double standard; if one would acknowledge the passage of time in their OC's story, what sense does it make to selectively claim that those two characters, specifically, wouldn't also age and grow as people? This is an opinion that took time to crystallise in my head and I will stand by it now, but when the idea of shipping Harrow and Alisaie first crossed my mind, I was still vaguely holding onto that default view that the twins were off-limits.

Because of the age gap between those two, and because I had other ship interests for Harrow during the MSQ that I wanted to keep (namely, Elidibus and Themis), I originally envisioned HaroAli as a strictly post-canon thing, with Harrow in his 30's, having retired from Warrior of Light duties and settled down in Ishgard to work as a priest, and Alisaie in her 20's, in her prime and still seeking adventures here and there. Being already fond of the twins' familial relationship with the WoL, I thought that, if their dynamic wasn't obviously romantic, then it would somehow be more "acceptable". After doing some digging, I stumbled upon the concept of a "queerplatonic" relationship, something like an intimate, committed relationship without the romance, and at that point I thought it fit the vision I had for HaroAli like a glove. I wanted them to be best friends, roommates, domestic partners, but I also wanted them to kiss and fuck sometimes. The queerplatonic label gave me enough room to have them do and be anything I desired, but it also left me deeply confused about what "romantic feelings" even are. No one has come up with an all-encompassing, universally agreed-upon definition; what counts as romantic feelings and expressions to some may not apply to others; and what descriptor a relationship has seems to ultimately be at the discretion of the parties involved. Eventually, I decided to content myself with letting Harrow and Alisaie be their own thing, unconcerned with labels or preconceived notions.

By now I should mention that it's been a really long time since I've experienced FFXIV's story and I don't have the time, energy or attention span to go through the the entire game again. But when the Harrow renaissance began, I felt the need to at least revisit the early bits of the story, so I've done a NG+ from the start of A Realm Reborn to about halfway through its patches — I intended to continue, but other things have kept me busy —, and also replayed the Coils of Bahamut questline (where Alisaie makes her first real appearance). Dome aspects of the story, lore and characterisations are thus fresher in my mind than others, and consequently, when I want to workshop scenarios during the MSQ era, I have to consult dialogue transcriptions, check videos on Youtube, or just rely on my vague recollections. This presents a problem when dealing with NPCs, as fanon interpretations often override canon by reducing, exaggerating, or outright inventing character traits. The writing in A Realm Reborn all the way until just before Shadowbringers was very different in tone to the more recent expansions, but still, I was shocked to discover that Alisaie, in her earlier appearances, lacked much of the casual, impulsive, spirited gremlin energy she is now associated with. (But of course, characters change over the course of a narrative, so I suppose we can still get creative when extrapolating a post-canon version of Alisaie.)

The reason I went on this whole tangent is that, as I refreshed my memory on Alisaie's depiction in the MSQ and her interactions with the WoL, I felt increasingly attracted to the idea of breaking my "strictly post-canon" condition and having Harrow and Alisaie get into a sort of situationship even earlier, during his Warrior of Light era. This ship was always meant to be a kind of slow-burn: both catching feelings for the other, growing closer and closer without really acting on those feelings (beyond perhaps a few kisses, which don't necessarily register as an expression of desire to Harrow, and so he is eager to kiss anyone on the cheek, hands or even lips), because Alisaie wouldn't be sure if stoic, noble Harrow reciprocated, while Harrow, concerned about their difference in age, size and power, would practise his knightly and monastic restraint. This was the premise I always had in mind, and it is still true, but now I wanted to test how much I could stretch this slow-burn phase, how early I could have them start to see each other in a different light, how intimate they could get (and as a bonus sidequest for me, how much I could bump Harrow's age up, to match my shifting vision for his character) before it became too gross — although I love the tension created by their age difference (which, historically, was 8 years but now is like 10 or so), I'm not looking to make it an inappropriate underage grooming relationship. Ultimately, I think around the end of Stormblood or beginning of Shadowbringers is a good place for them to start crushing on each other, as by that point Alisaie and the WoL have grown into pretty good friends in canon, and if we pick the easy-maths timeline headcanon of about one year per expansion, then the red twin is already an adult, albeit still with some physical growth and character development to go through. Whatever sexual or romantic interactions these two may have had during MSQ era, they only began after she has grown up, and the majority were probably on her initiative; I imagine her to be an assertive young woman who's sure of what she wants (although sometimes she might hide behind some bravado) and will try to have her way. Harrow, meanwhile, tentatively accepts and begins to reciprocate her advances, but is constantly mentally reprimanding himself, the Knight who guards, protects and serves clashing with the Man who, despite himself, wants her too.

As I endeared myself more and more to the idea of Harrow and Alisaie actually having something going on in the background of MSQ, their dynamic shifted from "these are best friends who want a life together" to "oh they're obviously in love with each other but denying it", breaking another original stipulation I had placed, that HaroAli wouldn't involve romance. (However, I've always been mindful to affirm that it's not that I think romance is the ultimate superior form of love that all relationships should aspire to be — or that sex is the ultimate form of intimacy, for that matter —; that's just how the dynamic I envisioned between these two characters happened to evolve.) At the same time, I realised I was still trying to keep the ship wholesome, unproblematic, too sanitised to fully accomodate Harrow's increasing levels of weirdness, as if Alisaie was too "precious" to be "tainted" with my guy's darker side. So, resolved to be completely self-indulgent with my creations, I finally let go of my inhibitions: I decided to let her fall for that man who's more than a little unhinged and find him thrilling in all his moods and habits, and to have faith in her capacity to handle him, indulge him, take care of him and put him in his place. And Harrow would, in turn, become crazier for his lady, his devotion bordering on obsession; he can't help deifying her even though she is just a woman. This was the point where Harrow stopped being just a pathetic whipped submissive malewife and started becoming more like the possessive, slightly dominating panther that I mentioned so many paragraphs ago. A romantic knight embodies tenderness and violence, and I was determined to let Harrow be both of those things.

But even as the ship evolved into a somewhat more romantically-shaped dynamic, I still like to think of it as something that defies categories, and the characters would probably agree with that notion. Harrow experienced some intense crushes during MSQ (including Alisaie), but by the time he put down his greatsword, he'd convinced himself love was not meant for a man like him. The Knight donned a priest's robes and took vows never to marry, intent on continuing to serve his Goddess and the people — only now with rites, words and charity, rather than weapons and spilled blood. But love found its way back into Harrow's life anyway. In between adventures, Alisaie would stop by Ishgard to visit her old friend, lodging at his house for days or weeks at a time, the two rediscovering an intimacy they once knew and becoming a part of each other's lives once more. Over time, people would take notice of the young Elezen woman living with the good priest Harrow; Church authorities would find the situation scandalous and reprimand him, while townsfolk would be delighted to see their community leader so radiant (and some might even get a little jealous). But Harrow would feel no guilt and issue no apology; as far as anyone's concerned he hasn't broken any vows, he hasn't strayed from his mission, and if the Fury saw fit to place love in his path, who is to say he should not welcome it? As for Alisaie, free-spirited as she is, she probably wouldn't want to marry anyway; she's happy to be Harrow's housemate, best friend, fuck buddy, and life partner all at once — she needs no ring, ribbon or piece of paper to define what they have.

Earlier I mentioned some reservations I had concerning this pairing, on account of the age gap. Another insecurity I grapple with is that I sometimes feel bad for pairing my OC, a cis man, with a character who's frequently headcanon'ed as a lesbian. I've made her bisexual in my universe in order to preserve some of that queerness, but I absolutely don't want it to seem like Harrow was the one special guy who changed her mind or anything like that. I know I owe no explanations to anyone, but sometimes it can be discouraging writing a bi M/F pairing and feeling like people could just chalk it off as a boring ol' straight couple. My hope is that in keeping their dynamic fuzzy, unlabelled, yet full of love in all its forms, it will count as at least a tiny bit queer.

So there you have it, Harrow's endgame ship is an arguably problematic age-gap, lovingly toxic, bi4bi hetslop, and I love it so much. I've dedicated a long section in this post to this ship because it's so symbolic of Harrow's wider evolution this past year; from pretty wholesome and uncontroversial, to a little dangerous, a little scary, maybe even a bit wrong, but ultimately captivating.

final thoughts on harrow's design

It may have become evident by now that I started writing this post months ago with no outline whatsoever; I just wanted to summarise the most important developments in the Harrowverse, both the undocumented and the previously mentioned on my Bluesky (and indeed, some text in this article is directly lifted from my posts on Bluesky). I'm running out of things to say now, so before I wrap it up, here are some design ruminations that didn't fit before.

Harrow's height is often one of the first things I point out when I tell someone about him: he is abnormally tall for his race and he has in fact only got taller as I continuously polish him. Male Miqo'tes in the character creator reach a maximum height of 173.2 cm or 5'8.2", and according to my tweet archives, the original Miqo'te Harrow that first played through the MSQ in 2020 was already max height, but I quickly headcanon'ed him as being 180cm tall — just a little over the official maximum, but enough to be noticeably tall compared to other cat-people. Over time, that number would increase a couple more times in different increments; from 180cm rounding up to 6 feet, then it might have been 185cm at some point before finally settling at a 190cm (confusingly, I'm working with both centimetres and feet/inches, despite my aversion to the imperial system). Harrow in-game has been an Elezen for a long time, however, and as an approximation of my headcanon, I had set his height to the minimum, which is about 194cm. So, the first thing I did upon getting my PS5 back when I was staying at my grandma's house was revisit the Pandaemonium questline, as I was having tons of Elidibus/Harrow brainwaves, but I lamented the fact that Harrow's height difference to Themis (167cm) didn't seem as great as I had pictured it in my head. It's not like I have a size difference kink... but I really wanted to widen the gap between those two characters and see the huge, intimidating Knight submit so easily to the diminutive young man who would become his nemesis; thus the only solution was to make Harrow even taller. Right now, his height is a nice and round 2 metres on paper, but in practice, it's more like "whatever makes him stand out among the other characters" — there's no way Harrow can be taller than the biggest races in FFXIV, who can reach over 7 feet in height, but he can at least tower over most of the main cast. In particular, since Alisaie is an Elezen, she could realistically grow as tall or taller than Harrow in the post-canon era, which is cute in its own right but Harrow simply must retain his giant aura; therefore, I have tentatively headcanon'ed her height to the minimum that a playable female Elezen can be, around 183cm, giving them a difference of 17cm (which, coincidentally, is the same as me and my husband). But this isn't set in stone; one day I could decide to make grown-up Alisaie taller, and then I'd have to change Harrow's height too, so the 2 metres figure is still a little flexible.

Harrow didn't just stretch, however: he also bulked up. I used to say Harrow was basically an elf in body type and body language, and with my in-game character being an Elezen, I didn't have much reason to stray from that image — I could point at my Elezen Harrow and say, he should look like this but with kitty ears, a fluffy tail, and sharp teeth, if you can imagine that; there are no mods to bring my vision to life. But as I came to view Harrow as a big, strong Knight in full plate armour, I no longer felt satisfied with the lanky Elezen form. The best way I can describe how I imagine his body type is fairly muscular, but not so bulky or with bulging pecs, veiny biceps and defined abs as a bodybuilder or strongman, like he should just look like a strong guy who's trained a lot to become a good soldier.

In a hilarious twist of fate, the MOBA-shooter game Deadlock introduced a playable character who is, in both design and theme, so Harrow-like it's actually scary. Venator, alias of Father Quinn, is an Irish Catholic priest who recites scripture and calls upon the Lord while gunning down enemies, and he also happens to have a beard that is almost identical to Harrow's — from the disconnected moustache, to the pointy sides and chin, to the mix of black and grey — which tells me they made this character just for me. Check out Venator's design in the image below; if you change his hair, reduce the muscle mass just a tiny bit, and squish him along the vertical axis, you literally get Harrow. Thanks Valve artists for the best reference sheet of Harrow I can get short of commissioning someone or making it myself.

Harrow's hairstyle is a somewhat exaggerated version of a hairstyle that's available for Elezens but not Miqo'tes, which is pictured below; hopefully you can kind of see how I gave it my own spin, making it fluffier and with a more distinct shape. I'd be surprised to see this kind of floppy haircut in real life, but I think Miqo'tes just look better with fringes for some reason. The beard is an interesting case of a design concept growing in scope and solidifying through iteration: at first I had simply borrowed the Elezen face 2's sideburns; then, in Harrow's first major redesign, he got the moustache and chin hair as well, with the twist that they'd be black, in contrast with his white hair; and in this current Harrow renaissance, the facial hair has steadily grown into a form that only vaguely resembles its origins, less funnily shaped sideburns and goatee, and more full beard with a disconnected moustache (which I find endlessly charming). The sides weren't always so pointy and attached to the chin hair, and the 'stache wasn't always so thick either (the drawing with Deimos showcases this earlier stage), but the more I drew Harrow, the bigger and the more powerful the beard combo grew, and now it is unequivocally my favourite part of his design. As for the colour, Harrow has always been afflicted with anime main character white hair syndrome and I've previously stated that he didn't have any leopard-like spots on his ears and tail, but that's something I am slowly soft-retconning; I've found that pure white hair doesn't stand out very much against light skin, so now I'm leaning more towards a dirty light grey colour, with the black portions creating a combination that incidentally reminds me of a snow leopard. I've also decided that he does have spots but they disappear from his fur during Shadowbringers, when he's absorbed a ton of light-aspected aether, and the pattern doesn't return until a few years later, perhaps (so that existing art of him remains applicable). The snow leopard influence is also present in the shape of his ears, representing a departure from the canon Miqo'te ears and the housecat ears that they're pretending to look like; his tail, which is long, thick and fluffy; and his teeth, which include long and sharp canines (the physics of how they would fit in a human-sized mouth being of secondary importance).

When I describe Harrow as a "panther", I'm using the word in reference to the genus Panthera; I was previously unaware that it was typically used to mean specifically a big cat with black fur. Considering the mounts given as a reward for Dark Knight-related achievements, which are a black variant of the leopard-like coeurl, are called Battle and War Panthers, I guess I should have figured that out sooner (though in my defence, wouldn't that make the name "Black Panther" a redundancy?). I had determined the heraldry of House Lévesque to feature such a feline in order to make Harrow's adoption seem extra divinely-ordained, but with his hair being white, the connection feels a little more tenuous now. Nevertheless, we can still have Harrow be an embodiment of the Panther by having all his outfits be predominantly black, which was already mostly the case but now it's a more well-defined trait.

As a fun fact, when I created Harrow back in 2020, his appearance was basically an expy of my OC Fyodor, who was based on a Siberian tiger (which is my favourite animal). At some point, however, I started associating him with snow leopards instead, and surely enough, Harrow has single-handedly reversed my long-held indifference to those animals, which I always regarded as weirdly proportioned and derpy looking, but now find so cute and charming. I even bought a snow leopard plushie as a stand-in for an actual Harrow plushie (something I would love to have one day but that is completely out of my budget currently)!

With all the adjustments to Harrow's design and personality accentuating his nature as a panther-man, a new thought crossed my mind: what if Harrow was secretly mixed Miqo'te and Hrothgar? If cat-personhood is a spectrum of human to feline, Miqos are essentially just humans with some cat-like features, while Hroths are closer to the opposite end, looking slightly more like tall and strong anthropomorphic big cats. This could explain Harrow's atypical stature, his stronger build, his increased amount of body hair, his rounded ears, and his overall aura being more stalking predator than feisty housecat. It's an interesting theory, but it's also inconsequential: in-universe, Harrow was raised by Elezen and doesn't feel allegiance to any part of his Miqo'te ancestry, thus he'd have no reason to be invested in his origins; and on a meta level, I am really not interested in writing a story about Harrow discovering a "true self" or reconnecting with a life that was "taken from him". If anyone suspected that Harrow might have Hrothgar ancestry, he would simply say "...I was raised by House Lévesque of Voile Rouge, under Ishgard's protection and the Fury's watchful gaze. That is all that I am". I do love Hrothgars and have occasionally played as one, but I prefer Harrow being more human-adjacent — "Harrowgar" can live in some AU where he's a were-panther or something.

where do we go from here

This article is not only the longest on this website by far, it's also probably the longest thing I've ever written, full stop. I hope you enjoyed reading about my beloved OC Harrow's development as much as I loved working on it! However, I must admit I haven't had as many brainworms recently, as my attention has been divided between this post and a more ambitious project, which I alluded to earlier: emancipating Harrow from the world of FFXIV.

I have a deep affection for this game. I've given my money to Square-Enix for close to six years almost uninterruptedly; made it part of my daily or weekly routine; engaged with nearly all manner of content it has to offer; and got married in real life to a lovely guy I met through the game. I've written well over ten thousand words now about an OC that was created to inhabit its story. Yet it was in rediscovering my love for my OC that I realised I am, and have always been, interested in only a very narrow slice of FFXIV's world. Perhaps I could enjoy the narrative that I've skipped since the end of Endwalker if I just went back and put in the time to read it, but the shift in aesthetics into a combination real-world-modern and hi-tech sci-fi style, which prevailed in much of Dawntrail, is a pill I can't swallow. It's true that the Final Fantasy franchise is no stranger to sci-fi, but my feeling is that this expansion has just completely shattered whatever identity this game had. I don't want to see my armour-clad Knight in a neon-lit purple city surrounded by people in hoodies, cars and LED screens (and honestly little else, given that place is as big as it is devoid of interesting things to look at). Thankfully we seem to be moving away from this accursed aesthetic as the current expansion draws to its end, but I don't know if I can keep up with the story going forward.

I'm not the first to try and pluck their FFXIV OC out of the game's setting; there's one artist in particular whom I follow on Bluesky who has (to my knowledge) used Ishgard as the foundation upon which to create a very well-developed original worldbuild, and they're my primary source of inspiration in this endeavour. However, as of right now, Harrow's independence is still well beyond reach. The first reason is that much of his characterisation revolves around being the Warrior of Light, and there is no easy way to preserve his development without that context — I'd have to consider which elements I could simply file off the serial numbers from because they are common tropes; which I'd have to completely reimagine or reverse engineer because they are important but too specific to FFXIV to just copy; and which I could discard entirely because they have very little impact on Harrow's story, which is ultimately all I'm really interested in.

Alright, so if constructing a whole new worldbuild for my beloved OC to live in, while keeping him the same character with the same psychology, same relationships, same everything, is too much work, why not start small? How hard can it be to recreate just his country? And that, my friends, is the second reason why Harrow is not yet an independent OC, and it should be taken as a testament to my languages autism: I cannot tell you how hard I've been searching for a name for my not-Ishgard. So many hours spent, over the past six or more weeks, browsing Wikipedia and Wiktionary on my phone, before sleeping and after waking up, learning about onomastics and etymologies in the vain hope of piecing together a name for this one nation and the people that inhabit it. It can't be just a random combination of syllables that sounds cool: it has to be conceivably French-coded, have a fitting meaning, and also sound cool.

I fear that I've taken the name "Ishgard" for granted; while it has this displeasing consonant cluster, /ʃg/, it ends in the most badass suffix imaginable: gard. A name with such imposing aura seemed impossible to match with French roots that tend to favour soft, nasal vowels and consonants. The commonly-held perception is that Ishgard is an analogue of (Medieval) France, presumably because of all the Catholic-coded elements that permeate its society and the French-esque names of Elezens, yet the name of the country and a few characters in its fictional history (namely, Haldrath and Thordan) feel decidedly more Germanic. This apparent contradiction made sense once I realised that France is, itself, a product of multiple civilisations coming into contact: Gauls, Romans and Franks. Therefore, I eventually realised I needn't limit myself to French words that come from Latin for the name of my not-Ishgard; I could also look towards Germanic and Celtic roots for inspiration. I ended up going so far as to read about Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of all those language families. I don't think many people can claim to have ventured into reconstructed-PIE territory while researching for fantasy worldbuilding. Most folks would probably be happy to tell you to just throw some words into Google Translate and pick whatever result sounds awesome. Not me: I'm a language nerd and I want my world to have consistency.

But learning the etymology of words is as intelectually satisfying as it is a curse, and I keep grappling with the fact that every word I choose to use has an origin that I might then have to take into account. It sounds dumb, but let me explain. "Évêque", French for "bishop", comes from Latin "episcopus", which comes from a similar Ancient Greek word, which itself is derived from the PIE "*skep-ye-"; does this mean my fantasy-French inherited words from fantasy-Latin, fantasy-Greek, and ultimately fantasy-PIE? On the other hand, "guerre" comes from Medieval Latin "werra", which is borrowed from Frankish "*werru"; so is my f-France, like its real-life counterpart, a blend of f-Roman Gaul and f-Frankish Kingdom? What if there are characters named Jean, Michael, Simon, Marie, all of which are derived from Biblical Hebrew, which is in a different language family; how would words from f-Hebrew, part of a f-Afroasiatic family, be ported to f-French? And then there's the classic "you can't call it French fries because there's no France": Harrow can't be a "masochist" because that word was coined after a real guy whose surname was Masoch, I'd have to invent a whole new word for that concept. Do you understand my roadblock? You could then say, well, imagine you're doing it like Tolkien and "translating" a fantasy language — but my feeling is that, if I'm spending such a ludicrous amount of time trying to come up with the name of one country, it had better be the name that's coming out of the characters' damn mouths!

Failing at what I believed was the very first step of creating an original worldbuild for Harrow has been pretty demoralising, to be honest. Not long after I first embarked on this quest, more than a month ago, I thought that perhaps such ambitious pursuits were better left to more talented creators. All this time I could've been cooking up new brainworms, I've instead spent going down neverending rabbit holes of increasingly esoteric knowledge. And yet, I still haven't given up. Even though I've made very little progress on this particular project, I want to believe no amount of time spent learning new things is wasted. So I think, if anything, my persistence, my willingness to keep going until I can see my vision fully realised, stands as proof of my undying love for my OC Harrow, the Warrior of Light, the Knight-Priest, the panther, and my most favourite creation.