#my gf just showed me these and i had a full on meltdown so. suffer with me

[beetlejuicesgraveyardrevue]

HEY WHAT. HEY. HUH. WHAT

[elegant-etienne]

have you met any friends in RL from rp? How did that go?

Munday Story Time!

I’ve met so many it would be hard to name them all! When I try to do a loose tally, it’s probably around 30-40 RPers I’ve met IRL from the various RP communities I’ve been a part of in my 20+ years of online RP. I’ve met about seven FFXIV RPers, not counting people I met IRL at other nerdy events that wound up being Balmung RPers! So, it’s not easy to say what it’s been like in summary, aside from the fact that a majority - a large majority - of people are just wonderful and lovely when you meet them face to face. Sometimes even people who wind up behaving abominably online. One thing I can say with relative certainty is I don’t think I’ve really met a person involved with any of these communities who is ‘strictly’ neurotypical, which is something I carry with me in every interaction with new people online and off. The community is more diverse than you might believe at first blush, and a lot of marginalized folk gather here, not just those who navigate the world from different mental settings than is considered the default. Considering the core aspects of the hobby, I don’t find it surprising. 

I’ve met more nice people than creeps, but I have met a few creeps. Honestly, it’s hard to gauge when it’s appropriate to offer to give a hug, because like - a lot of the time these are people we’ve known for years online! And now we even voice-chat. I’ve met so, so many people who immediately felt like old friends after meeting them. After I’d traveled across the country to meet someone who promptly dumped me, I took a train on my own to visit some friends in our community. They looked at me and said, “You need a drink.” We had an amazing time, with both of them showing me great local spots and letting me just cry and sleep on their couch and be a mess and vent about the whole thing. To this day I have an open invitation to visit their city, even though we haven’t RPed with each other in probably six or seven years. We keep in touch a little, and I sincerely hope I get to see them again.

But I’ll never forget a particular guy (not in this community) who insisted on a hug after we happened to meet/chat at the bus stop. There was nothing particularly physically imposing to me, in fact I’m pretty sure if I’d thought about it I could’ve tackled him down like a linebacker, but I had a total-deer-in-the-headlights reaction.

Here’s more dirt behind the cut, and also toward the very, very end of the story, some discussion of some very disturbing abusive behavior. I will note it before it begins, in case you don’t want to read that part.

This guy was a textbook narcissist manipulator: nerd edition. He’d act like he was your best friend and always doing you a favor but it was clearly just a way to control others around him. He wasn’t exactly doing the ‘nice guy’ thing so much as trying to look good to everyone regardless of their gender and create a bubble of love around him, making a big show of how nice he was doing things that didn’t actually require much effort (like saying nice things or giving people gifts or doing them favors they did not ask for). But, lacking any magnetism or charisma, he instead used that ‘niceness’, and then when that didn’t work, feigned helplessness and the pity of others to get what he wanted. For me, he also tried to lean hard on a shared aspect of our identities is the LBQTIA community - ironically in the way a lot of people try to when they’re outside the community and don’t understand it. Like, bringing it up just to make positive and admiring remarks about it apropos of nothing! Thanks for outing me on the bus, asshole. Don’t bring up my name on social media in hopes that I’ll make you look more legit, I’m not here to fight people’s battles, and I don’t always agree. This was over a decade ago, I think these days we’d call him ‘fake woke.’

So yeah, to be around this person was just constant discomfort. And I don’t think he knew. I think he thought we were best friends, and I legit feared him having a huge, self-destructive public meltdown on social media (or just… in actual public) if I told him off, so, I just cringed and suffered through.

He and his gf absolutely abused all the goodwill of some mutual friends with whom they stayed during a local con they traveled to. They apparently bought the badges and the tickets to fly out (he’d left living local to me to live with the gf) and had no money whatsoever for food. When someone is visiting a city and intending to be out at an event for most of the time, one would expect they’d have a budget for food. Instead, they loudly martyred themselves over not having anything in hopes everyone else would pay their way. Naturally, the mutual friends bought them some groceries, but it wasn’t up to their standards. I’m not talking about “they accidentally bought things they were allergic to” but they were picky about brands and so on. AND, they still expected the friends they met at the con to treat them.

This cumulated in an event I sadly didn’t witness, which was him throwing a fit over wanting to eat somewhere aside from where everyone else wanted to, even though he was being treated. Later that night, he called asking if they could stay in my hotel room - probably because they could resent how close our friends were to telling them off - and I said a resounding no.

I wound up being the only person who could tolerate he and his gf’s presence the last day of the con. I think I took them to a cheap lunch. They both made a huge fuss about how they loved me so much on the bus. And I was like, can I get a helicopter to take me to safety. Fortunately I did not see him face-to-face after that.

Here’s where things get disturbing.

He wrote this post throwing a pity-party for himself, feeling like he was a bad person, for assaulting one of his cousins when they were both children (he was older), and people not understanding how sometimes things involving that subject matter triggered him. Nothing about anything he went through, only this thing he did. WHAT. Naturally the community lost their shit over it and he wound up getting blacklisted all over the place. In the end, I told him off too, that he had no right to keep begging people to be sympathetic to him, and that it was in fact abusive for him to go to victims of similar abuse (myself included) and ask this be overlooked and forgiven about him. If he cared about victims he would have tried to make his amends to his cousin and not gotten any strangers on the internet involved, it was HER story, not his to get attention from. He had no right to ask for ANYTHING from ANY victim.

Ironically he blocked me a week later (I have to admit I kept him followed just to see what depths he’d sink to, which wasn’t healthy), because I sarcastically told him he didn’t deserve special treatment and to be allowed to have his phone on him in a no-screens classroom because he felt anxious after having a dream that something bad to happen. So uh. Yeah. That’s the one I think about and do a full-body shudder. That and the guy who acted very nice to me and all of my friend’s faces and then cheated on my best friend by sexting with a woman from the RP community who had the internet persona of a misandrist lesbian. Ew to him too, but I don’t think he ever demanded a hug from me.

FTR many of us were worried about his gf, and over the years tried to contact her and see if she needed help. I want to say I messaged her but it was so long ago I don’t want to take credit for having done something like that if I only thought about it and didn’t. If I did message her, I don’t think she replied. I think eventually she got away from him, but I’ve been out of touch with that community for awhile.