I recently started a brand new Final Fantasy XI account. I’m not gonna say what server I’m on, but based on the character name in the above screengrab and the Linkshell color, anyone who knows the game can find me pretty easy in the game. Anyone who knows *ME*, the human playing the character, they’d know or can probably guess that there is very little in Final Fantasy XI that isn’t old hat for me. However, given that Final Fantasy XI is a role-playing game, I’ve been role-playing a new player. Now, I could EASILY take advantage of a lot of folks’ good will. However, I don’t. I very adamantly tell folks that I want to do things myself, and only ask for help when I have tried to do something on my own multiple times and failed. I have folks offer help, too. A LOT. Which is cool and wonderful. There’s a sort of paradoxical thing where when folks ask for a lot of help, it wears folks out, but when players are obviously self-starters and don’t need a lot of help are offered help and tend to reject it, they get help they don’t need but also don’t get help they ask for…?
I dunno, online games can be weird like that, kinda like life in general. Which brings me to the stuff going on in the above image.
A player by the name of Bongsna (who I assume is High and Mighty) offered to assist a player by the name of Ninjanymphet (who I assume is played by none other than the actual character Xenia from the 1995 film GoldenEye). The Ninja specified that they needed healing magic for their party. There’s nothing wrong with asking plainly for what one needs. I hope The Mighty Bong didn’t feel left out if their herbal powers couldn’t provide healing magic. I also hope Ninja found what she needed to accomplish her goals.
Scrolling back up in the chat, one can read that Ninja did not originally specify what kind of member she needed for the game content they were attempting to accomplish.
On my OG account, I was a healer. I was of the opinion that White Mage was my one-way ticket to anything else I wanted to do. And it was. Party invites happened quick. I made money easy with teleport shouts in Jeuno and later Aht Urhgan when that became a more central hub. I found it rather easy to sling heals, manage mana, and stay out of the monsters’ way. My basic idea was that if I was the last one KO’d with no mana for even a single cure and Benediction popped, I did things right. Of course, this was all circa 2006 to 2010 Final Fantasy XI. Anyone who was around in those days knows that everything changed when the fire nation attacked with the Abyssea battle add-ons. There are disagreements over whether those changes are for the better or the worse.
I changed, too. So did the world around me. Both Earth and Vana’diel. Between 2010 and now, I suffered agonizing personal defeats. On Earth, unlike the vast majority of video games, one oftentimes can’t just get back up and try again. Why? Usually titled authority wielding paperwork. That’s what it was in my case. It always comes back to my most hated verse in all the canon of text Christians deem to be sacred: chapter 1 verse 1 of the Gospel of John the Apostle.
I gamed a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. I cannot express adequately in words how [EMOTION] I was watching so many around me be so selfish. The general cultural response in the US to COVID-19 left me feeling the same way many healers in MMOs do: “WHO JUST STANDS IN THE FIRE?!” Then again, being someone who caught the tail end of the AIDS genocide, and knowing what it felt like to carry death within me for nothing more than just existing, I can maybe better understand why so many were reluctant to give anything up in hindsight. However, that feeling of carrying death within me was from when I was a child being forced to consume propaganda concerning drug use and sexual behaviors at school at nine years old in 1993 (eat your fucking heart out Gays Against Groomers). These folks were adults. In the year of Pope Gregory Two Thousand Twenty. They could have been far less silly.
Meanwhile, in FFXI, I found myself hitting a wall. Someone just randomly told me to “Fix [my] fast cast set,” one day. The person who said this was not kind about it.
“Fast Cast” is an ability that quickens spellcasting. It is native to Red Mages, but lots of other jobs can equip gear that give the trait. Thus, Red Mage does it the best naturally, and all other jobs need lots of equipment to max it out. Until that point, the only gear macros I had involved cure potency and MP recovered while “/heal”-ing (where one’s character takes a knee to recover mana). I eventually got to the point where my Fast Cast was capped for re-cast times, and started diving into equipment guides to get a bunch of other stuff.
However, nothing seemed good enough for the players around me. They would tell me how I failed, and never what I could do right beforehand. It was never like that before where we got together, discussed strategy, a white mage was included in that as an integral part because if the dudes and ladies and enbies can’t swing swords and shoot lightning bolts anymore because they took a few hits because the white mage didn’t know something she needed to…
It’s like they expected clairvoyance. No, really. In one guide I read that a White Mage should have a cure spell casting a the same moment a boss uses a big attack and it’s like “Okay, but what if my cure goes off before the bosses move connects due to all my fast cast, then I’m out something like 5%-10% of my mana, my party/alliance is down a bunch of HP and maybe has a ton of status effects, and now I’m stuck with a recast timer and they’re complaining about me doing things wrong when I’m literally following guides, but then when I follow my intuition and THE OLDE WAYS™️ focusing on the tank, HP, status removal, then buffs in that order (situation depending) I get everyone and their mom and their dog and their mom’s dog and their mom’s dog’s mom telling me I’m doing white mage wrong because I am not doing it the way they, a level 1 White Mage with 0.0 Healing Magic skill to their name would do it. Which I guess explains why most folks who play WHM seem to play it with bots and scripts and I quit WHM even though I have an account with Mjollnir, Yagrush, working on Gambenteinn(sp?), (Transimus) Maxentius(lol), and the Aeonic Club (Trisha Yearwand or something?), 119 +2 Artifact and Relic Armor, 119 Empyrean Armor…
I was at a WSU Tech graduation a few months ago. One of the county commissioners was speaking. She talked about how the county is hurting for nurses and paramedics due to the pandemic. I had to step out. I was angry. In 2010 and 2014, I was literally denied the ability to go down the career path of emergency medicine due to anti-trans hate. The nature of my second attempt was such that I’m not sure I even want to try again even if I had the resources. I passed my original EMT class with the highest mark (back then, they didn’t hide student’s grades from each other). I can only surmise I got dinged on my practical exam in 2010 for something that would have been fine in a practical situation given the circumstances. Thus, they weren’t actually testing for one’s ability to perform the job. They were testing something completely arbitrary and irrelevant, the nature of which I will not ever know. In 2014, I passed my practical and written exams. I got an interview with the local EMS outfit, and was denied due to something on my driving record. I later found out from someone it was something someone within a particular set of circumstances would not get bothered for, and something that someone outside of those set of circumstances would. The difference in circumstances involves immutable character traits. Which is definitionally discriminatory.
As I write about all this, I find the imagery of healers in video games interesting. They’re usually dressed in flowing religious garb, right? They usually have a cane or a staff? That probably comes from a lot of places, but Moses comes to mind, as well as the symbol of Hermes. Well, during one of my EMT clinicals, I was at a Catholic hospital. It was Good Friday. The chef in the café downstairs had the good graces to serve steak. I ordered some. There was a nurse there who was busting a gasket in the tiny ER break room. I simply said, “I’m not Catholic,” and slid a bite of steak cheekily into my mouth. Later that evening, I almost ran over a nun with an IV cart while she was leaving a room where a lady was just brought in code blue (in this case, no pulse AKA cardiac arrest). There’s a difference between being useless and being denied the ability to be useful repeatedly. Then there’s those who decide who gets to be useful and who doesn’t and the ways in which they get to be useful and why. Then there’s just plain being the fuck in the way for no fuckin’ reason other than to make yourself feel better at other’s expense.
Healing simply isn’t a priority in the Imperial Core. If it were, we’d no longer be the Imperial Core. The whole house of cards would come tumbling down because a big part of healing requires acknowledging harm done. And I can’t get out of my head this guy named Malcolm X and folks of my complexion refusing to acknowledge the presence of a knife in a patient with a stab wound…
So, as I play Final Fantasy XI now, and as I live my life now, I’m chilling. I’m not in a rush. I tried for so long to be what others wanted and needed. However, they wanted me to sacrifice too much. In Vana’diel, that included stuff like breaking terms of service by using 3rd party tools that just feel counter-intuitive for me (I’m not gonna unpack that or argue the point), especially considering all the changes the Dev team have made in recent years. If that stuff works for you, great. I’m happy for you. It doesn’t for me. On Earth, that simply means destroying the very core of who I am. So, I reject the wants and needs of others unless they align with my own. Healing is a priority for me. However, to quote Toni Jones from the title of one of my recent favorite songs (special thanks to my special friend who shared it with me): “healing is not my purpose.”
Our Lady of the Perpetual Metamagic 