#rpcburnbook

a little bit about me: 30s, she/her, non-american. i mostly write rl but also dip into fantasy with the right plot. i really enjoy watching soccer and i make a mean banana bread

Amazingly, not everyone on tumblr is out to be the most popular kid in school.

I don't care if a bunch of twenty and thirty year olds like me, I post because you are at a formative age, and you all need to see a dissenting opinion about your fucked up ideas.

tw suicide. tw swearing. tw harassment, abuse, etc. tw medical / familial loss.

i'm so fucking tired. yeah, that's about where i am with life right now, in and out of the rpc. i'm tired.

i have done everything i can to be as kind to everyone as i can be and to promote joy in the rpc as much as i can and to offer joy as much as i can and...

you (almost) all fucking shat on me for literally breathing. for years now. for actual fucking years now i have been harassed, constantly.

i have gotten death threats. i have gotten told to kill myself. i have gotten my tumblr hacked. i've had my friendships pitted against me, had my friends ripped apart because they were friends with me, got hit with ableism, homophobia, and a shit ton of other bullshit and i. am. fucking. tired.

i was saying goodbye to a loved one, intubated and sedated and told they would come off but never recover and surgery wasn't just impossible but that it would be but they weren't a candidate to the point eight different hospitals refused, so there was nothing more that they could do. left to sit in my car and just try to breathe for a while, to see a link on my phone to a burnbook post about god knows what at this point considering what bullshit you've said about me. that was when i asked to stop being posted about. i begged actually, for a break.

this month, longer than that actually, has been rough. some have seen it, i appreciate those who reached out, but i've been mostly gone from inner child despite having helped there actively for over a year now. i haven't really been in the rpc and when i have tried to be i kept very very tight to my corner. it's been so hard, and i have barely been available offline much less on.

i just. i know the posts were from a while ago that i just reblogged. i get that. but it bothers me so much. and it isn't the first time, and it probably won't be the last. so genuinely i am at a point of 'fuck it' with the bullshit.

"i have proof athena is xyz tea blog" no you don't because i'm not. you do? share them. fuck it, share them. begging you to do it. here's your call out nonnie, give them receipts. got real fucking quiet when someone else said it so here it is from me - share them. share that proof. bet you can't. bet you can't even fabricate a good fake, despite probably 10+ years of photoshopping avatars and signatures back in day. go ahead. let's see it.

"just ask why athena and her ex-animanga friends fell out, she's burnie!" okay. ask them. ask me. shit non-rpc related happened. there was a blip where we didn't talk. that isn't the case anymore. even with this seemingly apocalyptic fall out you wanna spin to be something it isn't, we remained in shared servers and practiced civility. we have been friends since 2019 and actually didn't meet as rp friends and only were on that singular site together, first site i had been on that was animanga since before i graduated high school. but sure, yeah, post your proof. let's not mind the fact that actual friendships are involved here and your stray fucking bullets are flying at innocent people behind me, notably those same animanga "ex" friends you're apparently so close to. which, btw, fuck you for.

at this point this shit is so tired. i don't know how to be polite about this anymore. i have tried, i genuinely don't know how anymore. so you know what -

if you want me to kill myself, you're just going to have to come do it yourself, you fucking coward. quite sincerely, eat shit. fuck you, the answer is no. you want me to kill myself so bad, better figure it out yourself. it ain't happening.

let me be very very clear - i am polite and kind because that is a choice i make, because of what i believe, which is that every single person we meet deserves respect until they have proven otherwise. i am kind because i know what it is like to have people be unkind. i am kind because i know that the shallow surface we see from people on the internet isn't the full iceberg of who they are and what they might be going through. i am kind because i will not be the cause of something like what has been wished upon me.

i am kind because of my best friend. my best friend killed himself. may 2, 2012. we were both seventeen years old. it is two weeks until the anniversary of his death today, and his death is two weeks before my birthday. i got on tumblr this morning because someone sent me the link to that tea blog's posts about me, the claims i'm burnbook from like march or whatever. know what was in my inbox the second i open tumblr? an anon ask about how i should just shoot myself already.

austin, my best friend, put a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. it has been thirteen years and i still think about him, nearly every day. at this point i have officially lived longer without him than with him, and in a few more years i'll officially have lived doubly as long as he did. i think about that a lot too. every time i celebrate something i say a little prayer, remind him i did it for him. i do it for both us, because he can't.

i'm not sad anymore about the messages. i was sad, because i truly wanted to spread kindness and make friends and have fun in this really niche little hobby we're all apart of. i have enjoyed sharing and helping and doing code things whenever i can, helping with rebuilding resources after the fall of the resource site era and assisting people with coding issues so we can all learn and grow together. i love writing, especially with the amazingly talented people in this hobby. i was sad, i really was. you won.

but i'm not anymore. it has been years, and all i am now is so fucking angry. the one thing, one, that i will never put onto another human being is the gaping fucking hole that losing my best friend that way put onto me. how fucking dare you throw that around like it's nothing, hiding on anon like the goddamn coward you are, as if any life holds no meaning? fuck you. my loved ones don't deserve that pain. my rp friends don't deserve the never knowing why i just disappeared one day. they certainly don't deserve the potential of finding out i followed through and living with that knowledge.

you know, i was walking into school the morning after he did it, technically morning of because it was after midnight, and i knew. it was like this sort of bile in the bottom of my stomach, swirling. something was wrong, like i was walking towards doom. i had texted him over and over, because we always hung out on wednesdays and he, living way further out of town than me and driving himself in every day, always woke up earlier than me. and he wasn't answering. he never didn't text me back, and things were weird the day before. i felt so fucking empty, before they ever even called me from class to the grief counselors who told us he was gone. mine went to the same church we did, and she cried because she got me a pepsi instead of a coke when she tried to make me feel better, because she knew it was wednesday too and we had been going to that same church every wednesday together forever. her daughter also went. it was horrible.

yeah. the reality is telling me to go kill myself made me sad for a while, but not ever for me. at least, not for the me i am now. i was sad for the versions of me i was the six times i've been institutionalized for failing to do just that, five before i was even eighteen. for the stomach i had to have pumped because i almost died from an overdose at sixteen and the fucking gross charcoal i had to drink. for the person who would have done it, because of that message. and most of all i was sad for the person i was when i lived through his death and learned what succeeding really fucking meant.

to this day i mourn on may 2nd. some may remember the absences, every year every site for that day. to this day i remember him and i love him and i'm sad that he hurt so much he had to do it. i know by now that i couldn't have done anything more, but i still wish that i could have. i still wish he was here.

fuck you. kill myself, right? how about you look in the fucking mirror and evaluate what the fuck you are actually doing with your life? with your anonymity and your inability to act like an actual adult at this point and, yk, handle finding someone moderately annoying or a little different than you without spiraling into some, at best, conspiracy theory red string bullshit and, at worst, an actual fucking abuser. or, spending your entire existence just pouring your life, karma, and conscience down the fucking toilet to tell someone to, you guessed it, kill themselves. how about you do that?

or, better yet, how about you actually seek some fucking help and finally fuck off?

the thing is, i think i would have just prayed for you, that whatever was hurting you was healed so you didn't have to feel you had to do this anymore. i think i would have just reminded myself that i'm grateful someone like me is the target, someone strong enough not to listen and follow through. i think i would have chosen kindness. i think i would have chosen to do exactly what i've done every other time.

but if you want me to put a gun into my mouth and pull the trigger? if you want me to follow in his footsteps and place every pain i am feeling, both directly from your cruel behavior and from my actual fucking life - which we all have btw - onto my loved one's, so that they can carry it without me for the rest of their lives? the answer is fuck you, make me.

there's this slam poem, btw, if you got this far and you aren't the incredibly small, incredibly hollow person (or people maybe) who have been doing this to me, that i think about a lot. someone shared it with me after austin, i want to say on one of the first anniversaries when i was truly inconsolable. it's called bug versus door, by doc luben.

"i am ashamed to admit it, but i have always secretly believed that you did this for me. that you wanted to show me that there is a way out, not so that i would follow you but so i would understand that everyday i am alive is a day i choose to be alive."

there isn't a day i will allow myself to choose not to be. i remember he touched the scars, the deepest and ugliest going fully down my wrists, and he kissed them. you'd think it romantic but his friendship was just like that. he was soft, worried, but he had the strongest backbone of anyone i've ever met. i wish i was more like him, and i've tried to be every day since i lost him - soft, kind, but letting the fires that forged me make me steel when it mattered.

he asked me to never do that again, that i meant too much to his world. not the world, his world. i think about that sometime, how poetic it is - to each have our own world, and how important each person can be in it; that sometimes the world really is just one person in a shitty foster home bedroom the size of a closet kissing your scars when you're just supposed to be grabbing your backpack before youth group. see, i made the mistake of taking off my jacket. it was spring in florida. silly me. but yeah, he saw them. i think about it a lot, especially lately, especially when i get these messages.

i don't know who your austin is, but we all have one. and if you don't, you can share mine. or maybe i can be them, without that pain. please don't do that, no matter what someone tells you. you mean too much to my world. we'll get through this era of cyberbullies and mass destruction, and those responsible will get theirs for it as we all do. karma isn't so kind as to forget, and the stains on one's soul aren't so easy to wash clean.

let's all stay alive together, shall we? they aren't worth our time, and they're certainly not worth our blood.

if you are tired of the culture vicious anonymous gossip blogs have created within our community, this is for you. the bullies have been running the show for far too long, believing that public humiliation and banishment are appropriate punishments for any person they find undesirable. false narratives go unchecked. ableism runs rampant. they assure us that the cause is noble, but they are spreading poison while hiding behind anonymity. how many sites have been targeted and forced to close? how many friends have we lost after relentless bullying? i think it's time we do something about it.

the world is a scary and stressful place, especially right now, and many of us are struggling with our own mental health issues. this hobby is supposed to be enjoyable, a silly creative outlet that allows us to connect with a community. a few years ago, i relapsed into agoraphobia after experiencing several personal traumas, so i don't have much opportunity for community nowadays. when this happened to me as a kid, i found a place in the rp community. now, any comfort i might derive from being part of the rpc is tainted by a feeling of unease and sadness, because i am inevitably reminded of the hateful, punitive blogs terrorizing so many of us. i've never been named on a gossip blog that i know of, but i can care about something that hasn't personally affected me. i can care about all the people being harmed by this cruel game. because make no mistake: it is a game to these people. they get off on making others feel small. they pretend their hostility will somehow better the community, but ask yourselves: does being "annoying" or "flaky" or "weird" or "off-putting" warrant this?

i've never sent anonymous hate in my life. i've never hid behind anonymity to handle conflict. i never will. i am not afraid of the burnbook or any of the blogs like it. i am not afraid of their cronies. i am not afraid of bullies and abusers. i don't give a shit.

so if you want this to end and are willing to take some action, i've got an idea. i initially wanted to organize and make the response more structured, but i'm starting to realize that might be too big of an ask. instead i will ask that you submit positivity to the burnbook. send it every single day if you can. send it three times a day. drown out all the hate in that inbox with an influx of good fucking feelings. bullies like the one running burnbook feed off drama and fear and hurt feelings. they sidestep accountability and laugh at the people they hurt. don't bully them back, don't submit anything remotely hateful. instead, tell them about your favorite parts of the roleplay community. tell them how you started. tell them the positives rping brought to your life. tell them what you love about writing. tell them how you fell in love with writing. maybe this doesn't work. maybe this goes on forever and ever. but at least we're trying, and maybe we'll realize there are more of us out there than this bully would have you believe.

so, please join me and make a difference for your fellow writer. we can do this.

yeah, of course! i don’t mind answering. the truth is pretty simple. burnbook is a textbook predator. i’m not making this assertion to be inflammatory. in the beginning, i generally understood their assertion that the blog would stop existing if people stopped submitting. 

then, things shifted.

“burnie” became a colloquial address. familiarity is often the first “in” among predators. then, they established rules. predators want you to witness their exertion of control or power. burnbook always asserts that this is a “hobby,” and they have a normal life: partner, family, full-time job. aka they’re maintaining a double life. 

No. They are both women. Also I literally do that with one of my own characters.

I don't know how to explain to you that supporting trans people means you're supposed to perceive them as their gender, not woman-lite or a special sort of woman or not *really* women.