Why I Write Eorzea Down

I have thousands of screenshots. Genuinely thousands — a folder my computer has quietly given up trying to preview. And I could not tell you what most of them are.

Here is one: a sunset over water, somewhere, at some point, with the light doing something I clearly thought was worth stopping for. Lovely. No idea. Here is another: four of us standing in a circle doing the same emote, and I know for an absolute fact that something extremely funny had happened ten seconds earlier, and it is gone. Entirely gone. The picture survived. The reason did not.

─── ✦ ───What a Screenshot Cannot Do

A screenshot keeps the light. It does not keep the evening.

It cannot tell you who said the thing that made everybody stop typing. It cannot tell you that you had been wiping for two hours by then, or that somebody's cat had just walked across their keyboard mid-pull, or that this was the night one person finally admitted they were having a rough time of it and the whole party decided, without discussing it, that the fight could wait until next week.

❝A screenshot keeps the light. It does not keep the evening.

─── ✦ ───So: The Chronicles

This is a journal of Final Fantasy XIV kept by somebody who has never cleared anything world-first, holds no opinions whatsoever about parses, and will cheerfully spend three hours choosing between two dyes that are the same colour.

What lives here is houses, glamour, Free Company nonsense, the occasional fight that went on far longer than it should have, and a great deal about the people. Mostly the people, if I am honest with you. The game is the excuse.

─── ✦ ───Why Put It Anywhere Anyone Can See

I did consider keeping all of this to myself, which would have been easier and a great deal less embarrassing. Two reasons I did not.

The first is that Eorzea is a shared place, and writing about it alone felt like a waste of one. Somebody out there has stood in the same spot at the same hour of an in-game evening and felt the same faintly ridiculous swell of feeling about a sunrise that is not real. I would very much like to compare notes with that person. I suspect there are more of us than anybody admits at work.

The second is smaller and more selfish. Writing it down is how I keep it. A house takes a fortnight of obsession to build, and six months later it is simply where you live. A friendship takes years and can go quiet in a week. The fortnight and the years are the parts actually worth having, and they are always the first parts to go.

─── ✦ ───The Rules, Such As They Are

• ✦It is all true. Shaped for rhythm now and then; invented, never.
• ✦Nobody gets named who has not asked to be.
• ✦Every entry ends on a bad pun. I made that rule early and I am now serving the sentence.
• ✦If it was boring, it does not go in. There is a great deal of content in this game already; there is no call to manufacture more.

─── ✦ ───Start Anywhere

There is no correct order to these. Start with a house tour, or a glamour, or whichever title sounds the least sensible — in my experience that one is usually the best of the lot.

And if you have your own Eorzea and nowhere in particular to put it, take this as a nudge. Write it down. Not for anyone in particular, and certainly not for an audience. Just so that in a year, when you find the screenshot of the sunset again, you will still know what everybody was laughing at.