#2016 was my wake up call and it has literally gotten impossibly worse since then

[dfnkt]

So the "green revolution" is just gonna be neolibs destroying South America for lithium as it becomes increasingly uninhabitable huh. It looks like the game plan is basically, fuck those mountains and those forests and the HUGE carbon sink potential it has if we'd stop deforesting it. The Panama canal is gonna dry up? Guess we'll just build a highway across the fucking continent like we always wanted to anyway.

Can't wait to see how America treats all the climate refugees at our southern border that WE created. 10k people a day or more some days at present. Picture hundreds of thousands and then millions as crisis looms and remember how our government handles people in need, regardless of whether its the red dictator or the blue dictator. Consider how both parties already weaponize fears about immigration using "displacement" or "loss of culture" or lack of available resources aka artificial scarcity. And then fucktuple that and tell me that genocide Joe is gonna make things better. Tell me that the American nation can get exponentially more radical and survive. We will be at full scale war and brazen occupation of South America probably by 2040 if I had to ballpark it, but we'll see. South America will basically resemble USNATO prison camps and military states. I can already imagine the justifications we'll offer about making trade possible in the region, curbing "terrorism" et cetera. Basically we'll do exactly what we did and are still doing to the middle east.

Gonna be fascinating. I get more sure that I'm going to witness the fall of modern civilization in my lifetime every year considering we cannot survive a 2C+ climate, but we can't avoid that climate without such extremely rapid degrowth and rewilding that it is only theoretically possible in human manpower. Like, our best case scenario is basically "if the whole global economy shifted overnight and everything was severely kneecapped especially for the most gluttonous capitalists corporations by a really huge factor then we have the *chance* at having a habitable planet for humans by 2100, albeit at a reduced population and with a smaller habitable zone for the foreseeable hundreds of thousands of years." And every single day is a case of "we should have done this a day/year/decade/century ago". Meanwhile emissions are rapidly increasing at exponential rates. The political will does not exist to save the planet. Even if we made all the right changes now, we are already locked in to changes that will reduce the quality of life of everyone on this fucking planet in the lifetime of every Gen Z and younger, and most millennials, even in wealthy nations. We may well already have signed the commitment for as much as 4C or more degrees of warming by 2050. Guess what doesn't exist at +4C? The global capitalist economy. New iPhones. Oh, or vertebrate mammals. That's you. Your mom. Your dad. Your best friends and future children. All the food you eat and everything you've ever loved. Why are we not acknowledging that we are being thrown off the cliff like Disney's lemmings?

I feel like I'm insane, living in a parallel reality. We should be shutting everything down. Nothing matters more than this. We should, quite literally, be shutting the world down in order to save it. Nothing else will. You can thank neoliberals for pushing this disaster off of capitalism and onto people's "personal carbon footprint". None of my friends can talk about this subject because they are just all too afraid, which I always respect. I don't know anyone else familiar with the science of things either, so I have no one really to commiserate with about the profound grief of watching the world end. Even if I get to live out my natural lifespan, I will witness some of the most horrible atrocities that mankind has to offer. We all are witnessing that right now. If you don't think climate change could be an extinction level event in your lifetime, then you should really seriously evaluate what kind of life you want to live and then live it while you can. That is all any of us can do anymore.

[newspropaganda]

Why do you think yugioh fans are liberals?

I'm 100% convinced people need to wake up to how Yu-Gi-Oh! fans keep going backwards with literally everything Yu-Gi-Oh! related. Isn’t it awkward, anon-kun, how most fans can’t see how messed up the Yu-Gi-Oh! community has become?

Back in the early 2010s, from around 2012 to 2014, Zexal was nearly untouchable in discussions—too toxic to say anything positive about it. Now, somehow, people are all smiles about Zexal, even though that show almost killed the fandom and didn’t offer much interesting content. Let’s be real—it was aimed at kids.

Then came 2015, and the Yu-Gi-Oh! community went full nuclear, like some campus liberal losing it over misgendered pronouns. It all started when Konami pandered to legacy fans, giving out nostalgia support in every new anime and hyping up a new movie. The community went from peaceful to a toxic battleground where any attempt at normal discussion was near impossible. Fans became too stubborn to accept any flaws in the shows and actually blamed 5D’s for every nitpicky issue they could think of—sometimes over stuff that barely made sense during its original run!

Then ARC-V came along, and people threw a tantrum because it was “stuck” in the Synchro Dimension for another year, thanks to the tournament arc. But honestly, that wasn’t even its fault—the focus was diverted to yet another movie, one that did its best to kill Yu-Gi-Oh!’s legacy for good. And just to put the cherry on top, discussing Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V became a nightmare; any debate quickly devolved into the fandom’s “headcanon” version of the plot. Insert a Critical Drinker-style joke here: "Because why bother with canon when you’ve got a nice, shiny headcanon, eh?"

I’ll be honest—I'm one of those fans who left the fandom after how far downhill things went, and it wasn’t just about the show's quality. It started feeling like some kind of biased movement, like the kind of rant you’d hear from a die-hard political party supporter. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I even had a massive feud with a user named ScarclightCipher (aka the Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC pervert), who kept stalking me with this twisted, incestuous ship that made me want to go back and rewatch bad movies—movies that actually had more substance than this junk. He was the fandom's joke until a fangirl finally kicked him out, trashing his so-called legacy. Haven't seen him since.

The problem is that Yu-Gi-Oh! fans can’t think straight anymore. It's like they’ve got a kind of “Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome,” feeling ashamed to even have an opinion without getting defensive—like chewing gum in a courtroom debate about who’s right or wrong.

Why do Yu-Gi-Oh! fans go off-topic so much? It’s like trying to explain why certain things just don’t work in the series, but they end up making the discussion worse. I remember having a conversation with someone named RainbowYuto, and he admitted he never watched 5D’s because he only got into Yu-Gi-Oh! recently, while I’ve been a fan since 2001—even though I grew up watching GX later since I didn’t have a computer at the time.

Honestly, I think Yu-Gi-Oh! fans, especially in America, can’t think straight, kind of like how people couldn’t think straight during the 2016 election. They were having complete meltdowns over the “orange man,” who, for all his faults, never actually started a war or seemed truly evil. The real issues people had with Trump were things like his comments about women or the way he insulted Rosie O'Donnell and other opponents in debates, mostly to rile up liberals.

It seems like many American Yu-Gi-Oh! fans aren’t just frustrated with politics but also with the game itself, which has turned into a toxic mess over the years. I honestly don’t get why there’s so much paranoia over politics, a president, or even a card game. In my country and others, like Japan, people seem way more relaxed. Even in Japan, the fans tend to be friendlier compared to how things have gotten in the U.S.

To me, America has always been about mainstream tastes—stuff like Tom and Jerry, The Three Stooges, and, lately, getting tangled up in bad politics with gender and woke ideology. It’s only gotten worse in the 2020s compared to 2015 onward. Just to be clear, I don’t care about the 2024 election, other than seeing it as a chance to share memes that highlight how the real losers in America are the ones who blame Trump for everything, just to help globalists who control the media and government keep fueling wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

People like Des Shinta, who support LGBTQ+ causes and hate Trump, do so because the government there is so messed up, and things can’t seem to improve. It feels like America pushes “woke” agendas even in entertainment, like Marvel movies, especially with something as big as Avengers: Endgame, which reflects how the Democratic Party seems obsessed with pushing its views at any cost, even at the expense of fans.

But what does this have to do with Yu-Gi-Oh!? A lot, actually—American fans tend to focus only on Yu-Gi-Oh! DM (Duel Monsters) and often act like jerks. I can’t stand Seto Kaiba fans who hate Trump yet support poorly adapted anime like DM or Bleach, because that’s just the kind of mindset that “modern liberals” have nowadays. Don't get me started on my problems with MangaKamen and Cancel Culture or heck, fucking literacy in American and people telling me to support it.

So, yeah—that’s my point.

[fulcrum-agent]

8: What is one mistake you've made while roleplaying?

This is super personal, so it’s going under a cut.

Since towards the end of SWG’s original height, near the time City of Heroes launched, but before EQ2 landed, the person I was dating and living with brought up the idea of having our characters in different MMOs become couples.

It wasn’t all that much of a mistake, initially. Even though he and I parted ways, it didn’t have many immediate effects.

By GW2 and SW: TOR, I got into a fairly long term (10 years) relationship again with my first fiancee. Initially, we were in different states, so we made our TOR characters a couple - our group did about 2 years of pre-game RP - though that didn’t happen in GW2 because I nope out on Asura in that manner unless I’m playing an Asura.

And that’s where things became a long, spiralling mistake. Through several games, up till the relaunch of XIV, our main characters were always romantically involved.

Fast forward a bit to December 2013. I met someone in XIV who ended up becoming my main’s oathsworn (she’s not one for marriage, at all). He lived here in the same state as I do, just two hours away, so the fiancee and I went to meet him; sometime within that month, he became part of the Household, and we started dating OOC. My fiancee liked him well enough, but always was a touch wary of him; I wasn’t sure why till after a car wreck in November 2016.

He showed us an image of himself as a teenager/young 20 year old, and he looked uncannily like the person who high-level gaslighted me as a young teen (which is another story for another time). That was only rather reinforced during the next election primaries, as my CPTSD was shot from the car wreck, and I had a night terror that was almost entirely realistic (pro tip - if you get night terrors never use sleep masks because instead of the shadowy shapes you see in normal night terrors, it reverts to REM level image creation).

The night terror was that someone had come into my room, then got into the bed, and was forcibly turning me towards them, then trying to pull me to them in a very possessive, domineering manner. The face was obscured because there was bright light in the room behind him (as it I was apparently aware it was midday), but it was impossible to tell if it was the person who gaslighted me (one of the politicians here has a name from that mess, I don’t deal well with political season here) and the guy I met in XIV.

He was very good at manipulation, he was very mentally abusive. After my fiancee moved back home for a job in September 2014, this guy only got worse with the abuse. Although I had been gaslighted as a teen, the textbook type of gaslighting is a tad unfamiliar to me; after you have someone nearly hardwire your reality into something that almost belongs in a novel, it’s actually pretty fucking hard to recognise lesser abuse.

This person was also exceptionally controlling, telling me how to run my FC even after he’d stopped being an officer. Telling me how to write stories for the FC RPs, and getting super passive-aggressive if I didn’t agree to it, rather than trying to hash out better ideas together. He also was so insecure - coupled with his controlling nature, mind you - that he basically forced every single one of my character into some sort of relationship RP, and threw fits if it seemed like the few who weren’t attached got into relationship RP; after any one of them seemed to be getting romantically involved with someone, he rather pushed one of his characters into romancing that character, until I’d relent to it.

Initially, I wasn’t so bothered by it, I’d RP’d relationships with people I’d dated before at that point, and the time spent with my fiancee before this all happened had started conditioning me into it. It was after the first time this person demanded I stopped RP’ing with someone that things started to bother me.

Unfortunately, with this person, it all became conditioned into me. I tried several times to untangle my characters after we started having massive fights - which he never got into a fight with me unless we were alone, another massive manipulator/gaslighting trick - because at that point, he wasn’t playing XIV much, and because of the car wreck in 2016, he’d moved into the other room because I literally could not be touched without massive pain (well, more than usual, fuck you fibromyalgia). I wanted to be able to continue growth with my characters, especially my main character, but any progress I made lead to him having a fit over it, and another fight.

He also always insisted things weren’t as bad as they seemed. He used a borderline personality disorder trait, splitting, against me; he’d claim he hadn’t done anything terrible, and that I was just splitting - however, largely, I learned to handle my issues with splitting in the early 2000s, after I learned I had BPD, though admittedly, his shite made it very difficult not to have splitting occur more frequently.

Eventually, someone very dear to me was on Discord with me while I was laid up from a surgery. The kindness and caring that person was showing me had been waking me up to what was going on. The day this occurred, there had been a horrible fight before the guy left for work, cus I could literally not do anything, and had an issue with the bedding, and he flipped out about absolutely having to stay home and fix it when I could have just waited by going to sleep in a lazy-boy downstairs - which I had told him, but he made the almost executive decision to deal with it himself.

After my fiancee, our future houseboy, and this person saw what I wrote out to describe it, I managed to explain what happened to my mum, and when this guy got home that day, she told him he had to move out.

The freak out he had over that was amazing. He came upstairs, heard me laughing with the dearheart who was trying to help me get back to being at least mentally/emotionally functional, and just demanded I get off the call. He refused to accept the 24 hour rule, or that I actually did not feel up to it. I was so freaked out, that I didn’t disconnect the Discord call properly, I just pulled the headset out.

Little did myself and that dearheart know, at the time, but that flips Discord into speakerphone; he muted his mic, and listened to the whole incident. This guy yelled at me, demeaned me, and bullied me into a grand maul panic attack in which I lost the ability to speak, and even move. And instead of backing off, he threatened to get my panic medication and force the conversation to continue. I can’t even remember what caused him to back off from it, but he did. Plugged the headset back in, and found out that it never disconnected, and everything was finally heard.

That single thing snapped the last chain keeping me from ending things with that person. It took him a couple of months to move out, and he was still very aggressive frequently; I had to go to Philly for an appointment, and he was being so aggressive about spending the day there even though I had planned to spend time with the person who overheard the fight via Discord, the nurse took me back to the room, and immediately asked me about domestic violence (and that was really the first time I had a good cry about it - the appointment ended up being 2 hours, because their DVU came to talk to me).

I didn’t often take it laying down. I basically became a tiger that got cornered - I would unsheathe the claws, and lash out, in an attempt to get him to back away from me, frequently. Towards the end, I was having to do so several times a week. But it was either fight back, or be totally undone. Literally, the only thing that ever worked to stop him was psychological warfare.

However, even after all that, I discovered that what he did with XIV (in particular) had left some pretty lasting ramifications.

The first of which is that I discovered that it had literally become hardwired into my brain that the game is experienced with your significant other. I get extreme anxiety about things when someone I’m with has their characters romantically involved with others - which the fact that it’s a thing pisses me off greatly. For a time, I also had issues bothering with the MSQ, because that was something that was done with the ex for basically four years; that’s gotten significantly better, as I’ve done the past two patches without someone going through them with me.

The weirdness about character relationships isn’t going away though, even when the other person is only doing it 100% IC. I’m trying to break out of that mindset, but it’s fucking difficult as hell.

I also now get massive anxiety when a stranger starts any sort of flirty or romantic RP towards my characters. Even people I’ve known a few months trigger that anxiety. Because I don’t want them to do what the ex did again, now that I’ve figured out the lasting repercussions.

So, after all that, I feel like ever getting involved with relationship RP with someone I was dating was a huge mistake.

Thanks for the ask, @vianne-solainteau - sorry it was so ah…heavy.