The Villain's Intern AU

Happy Pride Month 2022!!!

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

His helmet had this odd discolored patch on it. Like, white against white, but … weird? It’s then that I realized his helmet didn’t have a discolored patch, it had a patch missing. A big chunk of his helmet had just been shaved away, the curve of the helmet gone and sanded flat by whatever it had been scraped against. And running through that patch, from one side of the helmet to the other, was this big crack, like the whole helmet had split like an eggshell. 

Our teacher took a couple deep panting breaths and then told our class: “And this,” he took another deep breath, “is why you always wear your helmet”. 

No bruises, no cuts or scrapes and just a couple tears for fears.

ALWAYS WEAR YOUR HELMETS, KIDS

Not sure why some people feel the need to equate OCs and self shipping to a persons real life relationships when they don't even know them

But I will say as a psa to all

Self Shipping and having self insert OCs is not shameful

It is not cheating on your partner???? They are not real and literally all people fantasize about others whether fictional, celebrity or not. Expressing your romantic, platonic, sexual or not desires is healthy and wonderful. Writing stories is wonderful.

Me and my partner literally come up with stories about my self insert together and sharing that part of myself with him is very trusting and intimate

If your partner loves and cares for you they will be happy that you are doing something you enjoy.

I'm using it to explain why "trying harder" was never an adequate replacement for the medical treatment & support I should have received sooner.

I’m calling this segment