"Nobody's perfect, Saavik."

yeah it feels very weird. romantic/sexual roleplay with other people is a thing and a perfectly valid wonderful thing to do, but the "just talk to fictionfolk!" thing never really seems to be talking about roleplay and instead seems to present us as inherently entertainment or existing to be your favourite character to talk to.

I am not your favourite character, I am me and I don't know you and I have no interest in being your entertainment. if you are talking to me you must talk to me as a stranger you are getting to know, not the character you are obsessed with. go find a roleplay forum or something, treating random fictionfolk or fictionfolk in general as one-dimensional characters to project your desires onto is an incredibly dangerous dynamic, no matter how appealing it is.

that essay goes into a common abusive dynamic that can arise in fictionfolk spaces and gets at some things I really like about it. LB Lee writes

Sometimes we really do find someone who is deeply connected to us. But that connection is built slowly over time. It can’t be rushed, and it can’t be skipped; even if you feel an immediate “click,” you still have to do the hard work of building boundaries together, learning each other, and proving yourselves worthy of trust. A true connection becomes stronger with that process. Bookend headmates, on the other hand, are often an attempt to skip past that building and vetting. They’re shortcuts to get close to someone fast and hard, and the normal boundaries are tossed aside as unnecessary, sometimes even hurtful. “Mario, we’re brothers! How can you treat me like a stranger? You don’t have to do that with me, because we know each other already!”

building a relationship with somebody is hard work, it requires a lot if time and effort and vulnerability and commitment. those are not things that you can just skip over if you have the right skip the line fast past for relationship building. anyone who tells you otherwise is not behaving in a safe way either through ignorance or intentional manipulation.

Lee writes that these relationships between bookend headmates can exist but that they are sort of relationships on hard-mode. they require all the hard work of other relationships but also with the added points of stress and complexity that come from this "bookend" dynamic. they are most certainly not an appropriate replacement for the relationship that someone has with a chatbot. it sorta seems to me like suggesting that people with pet rocks become zookeepers for exotic wildcats. not remotely the same level of responsibility and care.

I know how it feels. I had (mostly non-romantic) loved ones in source who I miss dearly and some of whom I lost in-source in very traumatic ways. I notice the emotional instinct in myself to look for these people everywhere, to find my Spock again, to look in every Spock I meet for that same thing I saw in mine. but I know logically that there is nothing there. those Spocks may be my friends, I can even develop close friendships with them (the way one is friends with anyone, the way one gets to know a stranger, perhaps one with similar experiences to you but still a stranger) but I cannot have what I had before and I must learn to live with that and mourn these people in the ways that I need.

I understand just how alluring it is to think that everyone you loved, everyone you lost can come back, you can have your mentor, your family, your partner back again, they don't have to die. but that is not real and it does not serve anyone to pretend it is. what does serve us is to move into the future, to get to know these people and ourselves as something new, as something just as beautiful but infinitely different from what we had before.