Sirpa’s question swung the spotlight back onto Jay, who had somehow not seen it coming, and for a moment Jay just sat there blinking. Their eyes drifted over to Dr. Everson, who was still standing at the edge of the circle, and it felt rude to launch into answering while the doctor was hovering, so Jay waved at one of the empty folding chairs instead. “You can, uh, take a seat, if you’d like.”
“Did it fizzle out,” Jay echoed, mostly to themselves. “I guess I never really made that clear. The RP’s still going, I was kicked out because I was ‘negatively impacting the GM’s mental health.’ You can probably scroll down and find it. I haven’t actually checked on it myself since the falling out. But, according to some people I’ve been talking to, it’s been using more and more AI, and just gotten.” Jay hesitated, because the next word wasn’t one they particularly liked. “Bland.”
“Which, on its own, isn’t a death sentence. Every RP hits slow patches; that’s just how it goes. The first major slowdown in
❀✿❁✾❁ & †‡⚔⚔⚒⛏☠ hit around six months in, and at the time I was still operating on the assumption that the GMs had storylines queued up for everybody’s characters. So I was mostly just waiting. Stalling, honestly. Most of my posts back then were foreshadowing, or seeding details for others to use and build on.”
Pulling in a slower, longer breath before going on, Jay felt the next part catch a little. “Which turned out to be wasted effort, on... kind of a lot of levels, actually. It eventually became clear that, one, almost nobody was reading the posts. Not even the GMs. At best they were skimming. One of them,
Not-A-Queen, admitted to it. And two, for some reason a lot of people seemed to have gotten the idea that I had my own, like, self-contained thing going on over in a corner somewhere. So there wasn’t really any attempt to engage with my characters, or pick up on the stuff I was actually putting out there. I just............was there?”
Somewhere in there a tangent had happened, and Jay shook their head at themselves for it.
“Sorry. I’m derailing. Uh. What was I. Right. The first big slowdown.”
After a second to reset, Jay picked up where they’d left off.
“So. To get engagement back up,
Not-A-Queen started trying some OOC things. Stuff like
player character tier lists,
favorite character polls, that kind of thing. Which. Honestly made me uncomfortable. One of my characters actually won one of the favorite character polls. But I kept thinking about what it would feel like to not even make the top three. Or worse, to not even be on the list at all. Because that happened too. That same character of mine who won the favorite character poll? Wasn’t even a selectable option on any of the tier lists. And a few other characters got the same treatment. If I’m being honest, the rankings felt kind of rigged—not maliciously, more like they were curated by the GMs and the GMs’ posse to manage everyone's feelings.” Jay went quiet for a second. “Looking back, I think what I was actually seeing was the hierarchy. Just in an early form. For a long time I gave
Not-A-Queen the benefit of the doubt. I thought she genuinely believed she wasn’t playing favorites. But small moments like these kept piling up, and by the time I got kicked out it wasn’t subtle anymore.”
Across the circle, Jay’s eyes found Sirpa again.
“Have you ever been in a situation like that? Where you can see it happening, but no one else seems to acknowledge it?”
