"I don't want your stupid money!" - FFXIV Starlight Festival 2020 thoughts

The quote in the title was quoted by a little girl you meet in Gridania if you took up the Starlight Festival quest. While Heavensturm 2021 is going on now and it's fun to participate in a FATE involving a flan shaped like traditional Japanese mochi and delivering "advent cakes" to the NPCs in Limsa Lominsa - the character I have settled as my main character started in Limsa as an Arcanist so he is somewhat intimately familiar with these people including Admiral Melwyb, who I think is the most awesome Roegdyn ever - I wanted to go back and start this blog with a discussion of Starlight Festival 2020 after hearing someone on a podcast slam it for being insensitive.

The story goes that you join the children of Gridania in helping An Gydan... sorry, I forgot her name already! :( You help the quest giver decorate the city for Eorzean Christmas, and The God participates as  Eorzean Santa Claus while accompanying a Lalafell merchant son from Ul'dah who clearly acts like Ebeneezer Scrooge, thinking that celebrating Starlight is a waste of money because everything is just the gift giving. He does a slapdash job of decorating and halfway through, he offers to bribe the Elezen girl you are helping, Isalle. (Sorry, the names escape me.)

Next task, you learn that Isalle's father is sick. It's not fatal and he can be cured, but the family hasn't been able to get the medicine as demand is too great for it and it is hard to manufacture. Said Lalafell merchant is shocked to hear this and then he asks you to help make snowmen. (I like how they explain how Gridania makes snowmen last during the festival, with enchanted ice crystals. ^_^)

You help make the snowmen and Isalle is brought to them and she is joyous, saying that it looks like a snowman family. Then the merchant gives her a gift, he says that he got some alchemist friends in the Alchemist's Guild to make that medicine and The Spirit of Nymeia(which my character worships, btw) said he gave the medicine to Isalle's father, so he will be cured and capable of attending the festival.

Now, why would we players slam this as being a jerkwad story when it clearly is re-enacting A Christmas Carol sans ghosts? Well, let's look at 2020... you see, this situation is real to life because of a little thing called COVID-19... and many girls like Isalle not only had sick fathers because of this pathogen, but some of them didn't have happy endings - they lost grandparents or baby siblings to the virus.

So people are saying it's a jerk move to show people being sick. I know how you people feel. While not personally affected by the Virus, it's forced me to do things that I would have never done. I never wore a mask when SARS and the Bird Flue came about, but now I have to wear a mask if I want to leave the house and buy groceries or go to church. I can't have friends because of social distancing, and I have a little sister who became a nurse and is pregnant with her second child and has to go through this nightmare, worried that her firstborn child might get the virus and die from it as she's only two as of this post. COVID is not fun.

And I know people play MMOs to escape from reality, and the thought that someone might be "gasp" ill and dying from disease in your favorite MMO is mean and rude! How dare Square-Enix does this!

GET OVER YOURSELVES.

I know this is a harsh thing to say, and I sympathize with those who suffer from the Virus. But pretending that Eorzea is immune to disease is folly. In fact, there is actually a questline for a certain battle job that addresses a situation similar to COVID-19 even more intimately, but people miss this story because they ignore this battle class due to the way you get skills from it...

I am talking about the Blue Mage questline.

If the people who slammed Starlight Festival 2020's questline for being insensitive because "Oh no, someone is ill with a common disease and can't get the medicine", they obviously did not play a Blue Mage and learn the story behind the Whalaqee, the people who discovered Blue Magic, because Blue Mage is a limited job and nobody can raid with a Blue Mage. Which is a shame as Blue Mage is my favorite Disciple of Magic class, I love going on scavenger hunts for new magic spells.

With Blue Magic getting a major upgrade in the future and the level cap for Blue Mage becoming 70, we should all try this class out and not skip the cutscenes because we can learn something from Martyn, the con artist trying to make a buck, the guy who gives us the Soul of the Blue Mage. :(

Happy New Year's, everyone. Let's hope 2021 becomes the year that COVID is deleted and we can get back to a normal healthy life. I'll start putting up guides soon.