Armsbreaking

Junelezen Day 6: Mount

And thus I’m way past the deadline for expressing my appreciation and admiration for Sounsyy. Part of it was hoping to get a bit of art done in time, but since that can’t happen I have to settle for measly words now instead. orz

I don’t even know what to say that others haven’t expressed better and more eloquently. All my friends wrote such heartfelt things and my brain’s just been stalled the whole time. How do you adequately express gratitude to a literal pillar of your community? Someone who’s given countless volunteer hours for a passion project they’ll never get paid for? Who does it purely as a service for others? I’ve been haunting this damn game since ARR and I can’t think of a single RPer I’ve met who hasn’t referenced Sounsyy’s work. Mirke’s Menagerie is an island of sanity for all of us trying to navigate the often convoluted waters of XIV lore, doubly so if you’re a nerd for it.

Hell, so much of this community has come and gone in the decade-plus that XIV has been around. Many of the old RP resources we used to have, that once seemed like institutions, are gone. Sounsyy’s outlasted them all. Still here, still writing, still helping out.

As someone once crazy enough to create and run large-scale events in the past, I legitimately don’t know what we would have done without Souns. I still don’t know what we’d do without them. Maybe this community doesn’t deserve their hard work, but we’re sure as hell all better for having them in it.

5 years ago, I started playing XIV to RP with my friends again. Someone immediately pointed me to Sounsyy's guides and it helped me when I was trying to build a character.

I'm a stronger writer and I make better characters because of her work, and I still use them to flesh out what I do.

Roleplaying has a habit of getting you to look up the more obscure parts of a world’s lore. In a lot of fandoms there are whole wikis or communities, but in FFXIV you just hear one name when you have a lore question. “Sounsyy wrote about that!”

Sounsyy is a megastar and the work they do is invaluable and SO appreciated. Need to know about Aether? Sounsyy’s got a masterpost. Need to know about a region that’s a region that’s mentioned four times? Sounsyy’s got them all listed AND gives context for the surrounding areas.

That’s what I said on my twitter thread about it, but here I want to offer some further thoughts. Some anecdotes.

I play a nerdy arcanist born in a tiny Shroud village, and an ex-imperial whose family hails from near Thavnair - Corvos, specifically. Before 6.0, there was about three pieces of information total about Corvos. And Sounsyy had gathered them all, and provided enough of a picture of the place that I could work that into my character’s lore.

And when it comes to my arcanist, Wyda? Aether, magic, Shroud place names (and specifically Shroud place names referenced in OLD material, like 2.0 Leves or 1.x content). The differences between types of magic. That’s a LOT of information that is needed for actively roleplaying, or writing the backstory, of Hyrtwyda Eyhafrynwyn. A lot of information, found across dozens and dozens of questlines. There’s no ONE source that talks about aether in FFXIV - different details are revealed about it in different questlines. The only source that brings it all together is Sounsyy. And that’s incredible. It’s invaluable, and without them the community of this game would be a very different place.

Archival work isn’t usually thought of as transformative, but Sounsyy’s work truly has transformed the shape of FFXIV.