The vast majority of text-based roleplayers are female, so much so that when speaking out of character about another person, writers will unanimously use female pronouns. In most writing communities, there is a disproportionate number of female characters to male, which creates competition between writers for romantic storylines, one of the most popular to play out among storyline partners. Anonymous communities suggest that this is a result of a desire for wish fulfillment.
You are two years into what sometimes feels like a failing relationship and in love with the idea of being in love with another man. There's another slam poet in your town who writes about love the way you write about tragedy, and you're so enamored with the idea of loving him, it tangs in your molars. You write him into a neater package, make him taller, more successful. You stretch him into a caricature of a man in love with love, and watch him dive heavy-handed and heart first. For the next two years, you write love poems for strangers on the Internet while your real relationship treads water. Through him, you write poems to girls you loved in Georgia, to boys made girls by sloppy last-minute pronoun changes, to the version of yourself you feel deserves some measure of love you aren't receiving. You lap up the praise you receive in the anonymous journals, where people first accuse you of stealing, Google your lines and realize the words are yours. And when that's not enough, you take the poems—his poems, your poems, you can't be sure—and you perform them at slams in a slipshod attempt to repeat the process. You win on their legs and tell yourself that's basically the same as being in love. When it's still not enough, you publish a handful of them in journals no one will ever read and marvel at their permanence.
His namesake—still shorter, still heavy-handed and heart first—never notices. Instead, he leaves Juneau to fall in love with Thailand, or whatever it is that young artists do in Southeast Asia. When he goes, you're left with nothing in your hands but the knowledge of how far you'd go to make him look at you and a few unimpressive lines for your someday-curriculum vitae. You decide that's not good enough, so you pile those poems into folders and use them to get you out of this town and into graduate school. Piece by piece, you mend your failing relationship. You try to write him love poems, but they come out tin-eared, staccato and strange. When that doesn't work, you do him the service of trying not to write him into your tragedies anymore, and you write about the world instead.
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Alyce: 2015
"people bitch about not getting to have the comms they want anymore but what they don't get is that the people they used to do it with all aged out. the only people left are critters and weirdos and even they're moving on to tumblr rp. it's ever gonna be like it was."
Your reentry is as clumsy as ever. You're twenty-six, one foot barely in the water of this quiet corner of the internet you keep trying to grow out of. You've made peace with it, somewhere between hobby and obligation, and watch as the pool begins to dwindle around you.
You start writing her at the same time you begin writing another in a series of boring white males and try to examine the ways in which you internalize your perception of their respective privilege. School and activism have made you think, made you cringe at the ways in which you see communities erased. Coming back to it now makes you feel like you did when you rewatched Top Gun as an adult and learned it was never that good a movie in the first place. The stories you write for her are rife with the same melodrama—you never knew any other way—but they're shorter now. Careful in the way your nonfiction instructors taught you to be. And when you post them, you get the distinct feeling that no one is reading them but the friend you've found to write with you. There's nothing left for you here now except the knowledge that every hour you spend writing is another poem that won't get published, another line that won't wind up on your CV someday. But the deadline for your next piece is fast approaching, and you're not ready to log out just yet.
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