Everybody's making these posts and looks like it's my turn now. Happy June 9th.
When my partner first showed me this game, I was a depressed 19-year-old mourning two family members, failing her studies, who haven't written anything substantial in years. But it was the first spring of covid, and I had so much time and so little to do with it, so I relented and started playing. And I was smitten instantly. The world! The characters! The atmosphere, ghosts of the apocalypse pervading the system, the wailing singing on Nessus, the ammonites on Io. The Christian parallels! This was such a me game even though I'd never really played FPSs or MMOs before. It was a love at first sight, headfirst and headless.
I started writing fics that summer, and that was the awakening I needed, my first time really writing in years. I'd forgotten how much I loved it and how much it healed me. In the darker moments that periodically came, this was the safe space I had carved for myself -- these thoughts, these stories, were where I could hide. Y'know how anxiety fucks you up and makes you see everything around you as terrifying and dangerous and most of all makes you afraid of yourself? When these thoughts came, I could escape here. That is why I played and wrote so much in 2022 -- because most of that year sucked ass, and I dealt with that by coming here. I tore Orbits and Nox Luminata and nothing's fair in love and war and We Meet at the Point of Tension and all the early Rhulk fics from the hungry jaws of the void.
I do feel silly making such a post, a little bit; "it's a video game, it's not real". "It's a video game, it's not yours, it's someone else's property you're only loaning in your brain, but it's borrowed, it's a little bit fake." So the emotions it creates are also a bit fake, a bit invalid, a bit uhhh criiiinge, a bit Not Mine and Corporate-Owned and Someone Else's. In this framework, I'm a fool who has wasted six years of her time, energy and creativity on something fake and useless that doesn't even belong to me, that won't get me any closer to any real artistic success--or any success, really--and who's sold her heart and soul to something fundamentally empty. This thought plagues me sometimes. But then the love comes, and it's too strong for me to stop, and I'm back here writing and thinking and feeling, so much, all the time.
I can't compress the love I have for this game and its universe into a single text post. It's all over this blog; it's in the quarter of a million words on my ao3; it's in the dozens of playlists and hundreds of pinboards and piles of drawings and shelves in my apartment. The nights spent raiding and writing and thinking, thinking, thinking, this possession that has held me for the past six years. The flights to see the friends I made because we'd played together or read each other's stories or crossed paths on a discord server. Isn't it mortifying to admit that a video game has changed you so much? That someone else's intellectual property has impacted your art and relationships and the way you see the world and what hobbies you pick up and what you think about before falling asleep to this extent? Again, a thought that plagues me. But then the love; then, always, the love.
This would be the end, I suppose, if this was indeed only a video game. Tying your heart to something so fickle would be foolish and end in a heartbreak. BUT THEN THE LOVE!!! But then the friends!!! And I sit here and ask myself, what is it all for, if not this, if not the love, if not the flicker of joy shared and created, the laughter, the community that was built on this one thing but has grown far beyond it. What is the point, if not the joy? The sheer joy of creation? Of going out there and thinking: yes, it is a beautiful world indeed, and the thoughts in my head, they are beautiful too? If not hearing your friend laugh, and letting them make you laugh in turn?
For as long as I have but a single Destiny thought in my head--or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first--I'll attempt to be here. I have so much yet to write and draw and say. The beautiful thing about all this, I think, is that it is no longer Someone Else's universe we're only borrowing, it's ours now, for as long as we'll choose to live in it. And I am choosing it.
See you all starside; and tomorrow, and the day after that.
