 Detail, God Speed by Edmund Blair Leighton (1900), public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Today: Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the forthcoming Sloppy; and Trevor Alixopulos, comics artist and author of The Hot Breath of War.
Issue No. 148Fantasy Life
Rax King My 2024 Vibe
Trevor Alixopulos
Fantasy LifeI was defensive about my Avidgamers habit back in middle school and I remain defensive about it now, despite having mostly (mostly) outgrown my hunger to be seen as cool or popular. As a tween, even my nerdiest friends—the ones I could count on to reenact funny scenes from Mel Brooks movies or attend local scrapbooking festivals with me—drew the line at playing Avidgamers. I never knew a single person who would, except online. Avidgamers wasn’t an MMORPG, or a video game in which huge numbers of people control avatars together in a world designed by the game’s creators, à la World of Warcraft. It wasn’t what you might think of when you hear “roleplaying game.” It was more like a fantasy writing community, hosting hundreds of text-only forums (known as communities) devoted to every conceivable strain of roleplay. This was the early aughts, years before J.K. Rowling took her anti-trans heel turn, and many of these communities modeled themselves after Hogwarts, with players Sorted into the Houses of the Potterverse; we all still believed in the fundamental goodness of that world. Every anime under the sun had its own dedicated forums, as did young adult literary universes from Abarat to Zazoo. Most Avidgamers communities, though, were devoted to the sort of high-fantasy roleplay that included faeries (never “fairies”), elves, and a sanitized take on medieval England. None of our characters had crooked teeth or lice, and it probably goes without saying that the Black Death was not an active concern for us. The vast majority of them were not only white but platinum blonde, and even the poorest halfling was typically packing one armory’s worth of specialized weaponry—though battle, it must be said, was less common than endless suitings-up for battle. We spent a lot of time clanking flagons in taverns and running into each other in twilit copses. In our posts the adjective count was high, and accurate knowledge of medieval history—even the bastardized, fictionalized versions of medieval history that appear in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tamora Pierce—was minimal. Gowns and castles were little more than set dressing, and how richly described that set dressing was, too! An especially fine gown might warrant four paragraphs describing the sleeves alone. Nicholson Baker, eat your heart out. Now and then I joined other forums just to add a little variety to my diet, but the communities at the base of my Avidgamers food pyramid were all medieval-fantasy or, to use the lingo of the online aughts, MF. We built whole universes ourselves, using words that shared many of the aesthetic and storytelling conventions of Dungeons & Dragons games—the races, the types of enemies, the magic—but our universes were not ruled over by dungeon masters or the rolls of a twenty-sided die. We were the sole, omnipotent narrators, the prime movers of our characters’ lives, and we devised every move they made and every word they said from scratch. If my faerie healer joined your ranger’s hunting party, and I wanted her to take out an Uzi and command the rest of the party to say hello to her little friend—okay, I would’ve caught a ban, but technically any action was available to her that was available to my imagination. The games had almost no rules beyond the ones we set ourselves. The communities ran the gamut of quality. Some had teams of a dozen or more moderators who worked hard to keep everybody in line, while others were largely unsupervised hotbeds of iniquity (including swearing, and the occasional PG-13 sex scene). Certain forums required lengthy application essays to join. I favored these exclusive communities, which sported their own logos and weeks-long application processes, believing, like any young teen, that my ability to pass a rigorous vetting process said something positive about my writing. I’d never show that much patience and determination in an application again, not even when applying to colleges, jobs, or certain writing residencies which have the gall to charge a $30 fee just to apply. Etiquette rules in the Avidgamer communities were as obscure as they were inviolable. It was frowned upon, for example, to reply to your comrade’s multi-paragraph sally with only a sentence or two of your own. A lot of players, just to be safe, took to replying with at least one more paragraph than their roleplay partner had written, resulting in elaborate, novella-like threads a dozen pages long. The implausibly perfect character known as a Mary-Sue (or her male equivalent, the Gary-Stu) was likewise beyond the pale. Most Avidgamers users were not beautiful, alluring people—let’s be honest, most of us were pimple-ridden teenagers just trying to make it through the day without succumbing to a hormonal rage. It was common for us to write our characters as the paragons we wished we were. Sadly, these characters were as tiresome to interact with as they were emotionally gratifying to write. You can only gaze into a silver-haired elven queen’s dazzling violet orbs for so long before getting bored and doing something else with your day, which was the outcome to be avoided at all costs. Nothing was more shameful on Avidgamers than running a dead community, a ghost town whose roleplaying boom times were over. There were worse ways to decide to become a writer. Avidgamers was free and not associated in any way with an Ivy League university, which, as career strategies go, puts it well ahead of the unfunded MFA program. It was as collaborative and as social, in its way, as a workshop. It boosted my vocabulary as well as my acquaintance with great works of fantasy literature. And it offered an early taste of many other aspects of the writing life, as well. Being prodded on AIM by roleplay partners for a reply was very like the just-following-up emails I’d one day receive from editors. Spending hours on an application essay for a highly selective community that never even bothered to reject me prepared me for the cold shoulder I’d later be offered by literary agents in response to my query letters. In those years, with the Lord of the Rings movies at the peak of their cultural supremacy, high fantasy was probably more popular than ever. But there was a difference between enjoying some popular films and making a hobby out of emulating their vibe in one’s daily life. I, with my intricately shaded faerie drawings and occasional insistence on speaking with medieval-y British speech inflections, had found myself on the “wrong” side of that difference; today I guard the taboo of my Avidgamers habit the way other adults guard the details of their sexual kinks. I remember my time on Avidgamers with a bifurcated brain. Half of me is perfectly aware that there’s not a damn thing wrong with enjoying some roleplay adventures and online friends and Well met, good sir knight!’s, and the other half, problematically, wants to fucking die every time I remember how I spent my middle school years. Whatever. Let’s not dwell on that any more than I’ve spent the past two decades doing. Or, as I might have written back then, dwell ye not on the past…fair lady.
This story is part of The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past.
INCINERATING THE SWAMPFlaming Hydra David Moore and his colleagues at Sludge broke a wild story yesterday: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has spent more than $100 million on U.S. 2024 elections. If you’re interested in all the muck that’s fit to rake, Sludge is offering a special 20% off discount for Flaming Hydra readers; a one-year subscription is just $40.
My 2024 Vibe
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