I feel the need to talk about something else of mine for pretty much the first time here. Granted, this ramble is a bit more... blunt, open, and a little less hopeful than I try to keep my cadence over here at.
For nearly twenty years now — and that’s crazy to say, wow — I’ve had this weird little love affair with Mephiles the Dark. I don’t think I could quite pinpoint what it is about this character that I like so much— actually, I take that back. I could, but not without going into a long discussion about everything that comes to mind, and that leads into a conversation about other characters I really like, so it’d just be a mess.
But sometime ago, back in 2012 I’m pretty sure, I ended up making a Tumblr roleplay blog for my own interpretation.
Now, before I had done that, I somehow stumbled upon an RP blog for a Sonic himself. When I realised what I was looking at, I was impressed, both at the writer themselves and that the fandom had figured out RP on Tumblr. I still think the Sonic RP community and culture back then was really interesting. It’s a shame what happened to it. It’s also a shame that when I sent an ask to this person, completely truthful and honest with my humble observations, they thought I was trolling and deleted what I sent and blocked me. I never did learn of that until interacting with them on the RP side of things, but that... that has stuck with me.
Moving on, I spent some time in this community. I made friendships that lasted quite a while. I courted a partner. I still speak to two of those friends to this day, though they are on extreme opposites of the spectrum (one is spoken to near daily, the other... sometimes?).
Eventually, I decided that so much had happened and so much time had passed with me being quite inactive that I needed to remake the blog, primarily for better organisation and for a soft reboot due to how the community had changed. I went and did that. In the 9 1/2 years since then, I’ve gotten very little done. By that, I mean that nothing had really happened story-wise, for I did have a plot that I wanted to slowly push along both organically and more directly. I got very few threads with partners completed; fewer, still, were substantial in any way. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun doing that, but I was always left wanting something more.
Somewhere around a year ago I revamped that blog, asserting that I would now be writing the story out to move it along, but that I would still be around there to RP here and there ‘cause I’ve always enjoyed it. I... really got like no responses to that. Kind of just shouting into the void. Earlier this month, I quietly edited somethings to note that it’s mostly just there as an archive. I’d never delete my old blogs, but... but I’m not doing anything with them now. This all makes me sad for a myriad of reasons.
A few days ago, I reblogged a post about how fandom is changing, and one thing noted there was that RPers are being pushed out of fandom. I wasn’t aware that there was some sort of ‘at large’ problem in that regard, but I think I can guess as to what’s happening. Personally, I noticed that, essentially, this time around, I wasn’t in any cliques at all in the RPC. I just sort of existed. Some other RPers did/do, too, I noticed. If you didn’t have a Discord and weren’t part of whatever server(s) were active at the time, you weren’t important.
That was really the summary of why I edited the blog into an archive: I wasn’t important. To anyone. I’m sure many people would say otherwise, but that’s what’s expected of them, I’ll say. I don’t really expect blunt honest truth out of anyone I know but three people: my husband (and his family I suppose?), and my two friends of roughly a decade. But, I didn’t feel important, and no one really made me feel like I was valued. There was but one other RPer who I frequently interacted with who I feel never wronged me somehow. What I mean by that is that, everyone else I can think of, they let me down somehow. They dropped threads without saying anything, they obviously preferred to interact with other people, they would say they were down for X or Y or Z but not actually show any true interest in it, a general lack of interest in my character (vs, say, interest in me personally BUT...)... and to say nothing about how infrequently I managed to interact with that community on a personal level...
I feel like a giant bitchy bitch putting all this down instead of letting it float about in my head, but it’s like ??? I’m here. I’m right here! I’m not blind to being ignored, to not being anyone’s second, third, fourth, even fifth choice for interaction! I didn’t feel welcomed. For a hobby that requires interaction with people, that is insane to me. That is the first time in any roleplaying community of any kind that I had experienced that.
The ‘giant bitchy bitch’ bit really cannot be understated.
The point of mentioning all this was, primarily, to go on about how I have this other project centered around a one-off villain from a really bad Sonic game that I enjoy the shit out of to this day. But to be honest, the mood of this text chunk has been soured, and I think going on about the project would be better off done in another session with a better mood to it. It is still important to note this history, though, for that is forever intertwined with that project and character, and while I feel bad about how badly its come to an end, that original run on the first blog did a lot to shape my own personal character.
