Eos, Arm Left 🧚

Normally I’m against getting any kind of cartoon on my body, because they just look corny when I see other people with them, but I’ll make an exception for this one since it’s ambiguous enough and no one would know what it is, unless they play the game to recognize it. In 2013, I began playing Final Fantasy XIV and played it religiously for years. My main character was a scholar which is a healing class who runs around with a fairy healing other players. Like World of Warcraft, FFXIV was also a life-changing game for me. Weird I know. I met a close (and crazy) friend in-game that I’m still friends with today, that I eventually got to meet in real life. That’s how I found out he was actually crazy in real life too, and not just pretending to be crazy in-game 😆.

But anyway, the fae that runs around with you is called Eos, but her actual name is Lily. When playing the scholar class, she’s not just given to you, you first have to earn her through a series of quests about her lore, that’s given to you by a tonberry, if I remember right. I did that quest 12 years ago, so I can’t remember all the specific details. But the storyline went something like the tonberrys were originally a race of people called Lalafels who are short gnome-like people in the game. Apparently some of the Lalas went into some castle or whatever and got cursed, turning them into these angry fish-like creatures called a tonberry. Tonberries are throughout the game and are known for attacking (and killing) you with daggers. One of the Lalas was a scholar named Surito Curito, and I forget his (or her; Lala’s names and appearance are androgynous) but you go on some storyline with “him” and at the end, he thanks you for helping him by giving you his fae Lily.

I believe he’s cursed to forever remain in the castle, so that’s probably a good thing for her. She didn’t ask to be stuck in the castle with him over whatever thing he did to land himself in trouble there anyway. The storyline is very sad though, as most quests in FFXIV are. He gives you Lily and you get to keep her in-game to use with your class permanently. While Square Enix has changed her abilities several times, she is one of the original NPCs since the game’s launch in 2013.

Now, you’re probably wondering, why get a tattoo of her though? Because unlike most games, FFXIV isn’t just your typical MMO. It’s a Japanese game, and teaching life lessons is just their style, even in their cartoons. Sometimes, even hard and dark lessons like in the Endwalker expansion, when it’s not until you get to the end of the game, that you realize the entire expansion was about despair and suicide. Yeah, it gets that dark and I wonder if the Aokigahara Forest (the Suicide Forest in Japan) had some influence in the storytelling. And the fact that the end boss of the entire expansion is a goth chic (yes literally she’s a chic as in part bird), named Meteion, a.k.a. the Endsinger, just kind of solidifies my suspicions.

Spoiler Alert: In short, Meteion is a clairvoyant, and in her childlike form, she turns into some “finch” and flies (through space) to different planets, and asks the different races of people she finds, “What’s the meaning of life?” If she doesn’t like your answer, because in her clairvoyant powers, she predicts the pain you’ll bring, then she deems you don’t deserve to live. She believes that your existence is meaningless because it will only end in suffering. She thinks she’s saving all these races she finds, but doesn’t understand, nor cares to because she thinks her decision is the most logical, that she’s wiping out entire civilizations. She believes that the “cure” for suffering is death, so she then “sings” a song of despair that fills the races with depression and misery, making them all commit suicide, ending their entire existence and creating dead, barren planets with no signs of life. Yeah, she goes in like that. Meteion is their extinction event. She basically kills the entire universe. She’s Judgement Day in a finch. She’s a very complex character, which Square Enix is very good at creating. Meteion is so dangerous, that the bad guys in the game, join forces with you, to kill her, because she’s a threat to everyone.

But anyway, getting off-track here, the biggest lesson I learned from the game that leads me to want to get an Eos tattoo was not from the game itself, but the other players in it. Coming from other games like World of Warcraft, the Final Fantasy XIV community is just different. That’s likely because the game has a ton of Japanese and other Asian players since the franchise has a massive fanbase over in Japan since forever, as a result Japanese players vastly outnumber Americans, so the game doesn’t have a toxic, aggressive and narcissistic playerbase like a lot of AAA American games do.

The lessons I learned from the FFXIV community were the importance of patience, be kind to others and to never give up. I’ve always been a patient person, sometimes to my detriment, but the game is long and not really all that fast-paced, so there’s just many instances where you have to wait or work your way up to the reward. So the game reminded me to be patient and you’ll be rewarded at the end. The game also taught me to be kind to others. Not that I’m mean, I am kind to people, most people are, but I’ve learned from other players in the game, that there’s a difference between just being kind and being kind with patience and gentleness to others. That’s a whole different level of “kind” that most Americans don’t seem to have. For example, being kind while waiting on others to catch up to you, motivate them along the way; encourage them. Be kind with softness and being delightful to them. And above all, never give up. In a fast-paced world, it’s easy to become frustrated and move on to the next thing, or just can it altogether, but in FFXIV I learned to never give up. There were so many times I thought my group had lost the fight against a boss, and I and others were ready to just give up. However, a lot of times we managed to just be patient, gave it our all, and we were able to amazingly recover and win in the end. From that, I learned to just keep at what you’re doing, and you’ll pull through.

All that said, that’s why I’d like to get an Eos tattoo, and I’ll likely get a Meteion one in her bird form tattoo as well. It’s not so much of Eos herself, but for me, since I played the scholar class for so long, she’s the character that represents the game and all my adventures in it, for me. As for where to put it, there is only one logical place and that would be my left shoulder, because after you summon her, that’s the default position she flutters at beside you in-game. 🧚