Get ready your meme-making abilities, push your creativity, and make the best comic strip possible!
The event will last for a month, starting on Wednesday 6th of July, and it will be split into two categories: three weekly challenges and an ongoing challenge.
For the ongoing challenge, no registration is needed, you can throw in your pictures whenever you feel like it. Additionally, you will be able to use GShade and photo editing tools for the ongoing challenge.
Registration is still necessary for the weekly challenges. If you are interested, you can register as usual with the SDS 
Emote on Discord, until the start of the event on July 6th. The use of GShade and similar tools will be prohibited there. However, depending on the challenge, you might need basic editing such as adding text/cropping, nothing Paint can’t handle.
Each challenge will be explained with examples both in ✨contest and right here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the contest channel too. This will be one of the most free-form contests so far, so fear not! The only rules are: No Endwalker MSQ Spoilers (Zones are OK), and follow the guidelines of each challenge.
After every weekly challenge, the jury will rank the pictures and announce the results both in ✨contest and on the website. Participants will get to choose from any of our minions, mounts, emotes and hairstyles depending on their standing, including the Sand Fox minion, the Gyr Abanian Plait hairstyle and many more minions, emotes, mounts and hairstyles!
Time for the contest to begin!
First of all, I would like to explain how to participate for both the weekly contestants and the freeform category alike. Please read the following section. After that, I will explain the weekly challenge and the freeform section.
How to Submit Your Screenshots
To submit your screenshots, send them to jasar@sleepingdragons.eu with your name, a title for the pic and the category you are submitting the picture for, since weekly participants can also send freeform pics.
Example: “A Very Nice Screenshot – Jasar – Freeform”
That’s it 
Remember you can send as many freeform pictures as you want, but only one for the weekly contest.
FAQ
What’s the difference between the weekly challenges and the freeform challenge?
The weekly challenges require you to sign up weekly, have a time limit and are limited in how much editing is allowed (more on this below), but it has big prizes attached to it every week. The freeform challenge doesn’t require you to sign up, anyone can send their freeform entry. It also allows heavy editing and things like GPose, and you can use any of the themes we have shown so far, but there is no winner prize, just a participation prize.
How much editing is allowed?
Depends on the category, so:
Weekly: Limited editing. No GPose or heavy photo editing. Depending on the challenge you can add text or collage multiple pictures together, but that’s about it.
Freeform: Pretty much anything goes. GPose, heavy editing, all ok.
Can I submit to both categories?
If you sign up for the weekly challenge, you can also submit to the freeform challenge. Submitting to the weekly challenge requires registration.
What are the rewards?
For the freeform challenge, everyone who takes part will receive a random minion. For the weekly challenge, winners will get their pick of the FC Chest, with things like the Sand Fox minion, Gyr Abanian Plait and many more.
How are winners decided?
Every week the jury will rank the weekly submissions based on things like effort, quality, relation to the theme and cohesion.
When are new themes announced?
New themes are announced every Wednesday around 15ST.
When is the weekly signup posted?
The new weekly signups go up some time in the weekend. They will be announced in #contest too.
When is the weekly deadline?
The weekly deadline is Wednesday 15ST.
What if I miss the weekly deadline?
To keep the contest fair your entry won’t enter the ranking, but you can still submit it and it will show up in the website with all the others. So feel free to submit even if things go wrong!
Weekly Challenge #1 – Release the Meme in You
For the first weekly challenge, we want you to come up with a meme of your own inside FFXIV. Maybe your retainers giving you trash while everyone else gets shiny minions is memeable, or missing the commander by one tile during the unreal minigame, or anything else you can come up with.
Remember you can add text with any editing software like Paint if you feel it is necessary. Besides this, the Weekly Challenge follows the usual rules: No GShade or editing. Make it look like a real meme!
You will find an example below so you can get an idea of what we are looking for. Feel free to ask if you have any questions about the theme 
The deadline for this challenge is 13/07 14ST.
Freeform Challenge Begins!
Before we get into the theme, let’s recap what the Freeform Challenge, and what’s allowed and what isn’t. So, when submitting a pic to the Freeform Challenge, you CAN:
– Use GShade
– Use Editing Software as much as you want
– Make a derivative out of a Screenshot, such as a Drawing
– Use any of the themes we will present
– Send Multiple Screenshots
The only thing NOT allowed that I can think of is, submit something that doesn’t resemble a screenshot. A drawing based on a screenshot is ok. A poem is not. This is a screenshot contest after all.
Now, the theme. We thought for a while about the best way to do this, but we ran into a few issues: A single theme is too little for a whole month, so we needed multiple themes, but choosing alternative themes made the freeform challenge feel very detached from the weekly challenges.
With this, we decided the Freeform Challenge should follow the same themes as the Weekly Challenges, with a slight twist. Every week, as the new weekly theme is revealed, it will be added to the pool of themes available in the Freeform Challenge. You will be able to choose any of the revealed themes without time constrains and mix them as you will. This means, for now, the first revealed theme is Release the Meme in You . You can find more information about the challenge above, as well as an example in the picture below. Remember though, that’s the mild version, you can go as crazy as you want. Hopefully you will get new ideas as the themes are revealed and have fun
