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@silver21@Tlazolteotl@Stanifly@BaronOBeefDip
Jayโs first instinct, the moment Sirpa said bullies, was to defend the inner circle of that group, and it held right up until Jay remembered she wasnโt the first one to call them that.
At the time, Jay hadnโt thought it was malice. Careless or thoughtless, sure, but not cruel on purpose. And Jay knew there were things Jay could have done better, maybe enough that it never had to fall apart. Some of it, though, couldnโt just be waved off as careless. The group shied away from direct confrontation (at least with anyone outside the inner circle), which made them come off as wishy-washy and opaque, evasive, passive-aggressive about anything they werenโt happy with or disagreed with. Like how Not-A-Queen praised one of Jayโs characters early on, then never put that character on any of the tier lists or the wiki, and never did anything with that characterโs backstory or whatever she had going on in her own IC posts. And then Not-A-Queen decided the characterโs dislike of her PC was really Jay coming at her personally, even though the character had been written that way from the start, and never once asked Jay if Jay was actually angry at her.
People are complex, multifaceted, so flattening a whole group of them into โbulliesโ didnโt feel right to Jay. But the group dynamic had been a slow poison, and Jay couldnโt deny part of them was relieved to be free of it. The hard part was articulating all of it without it coming out like the inner group were simply the bullies. Geeze, why does communicating have to be so hard?
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The Quiet Part
Above Jayโs shoulder, unbeknownst to them, a display had popped up in the air without any fanfare, the glowing sci-fi kind. Line by line, everything Jay wasnโt saying out loud was being written onto it, clean and legible, for everyone else to read. Privacy, as a concept, did not apply here. It was, after all, the internet.
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โI donโt know if Iโd go as far as calling them bullies,โ they said. โTo be fair, the popularity-ranking stuff and the part where they said I needed to go, for their...โโalthough Jay suspected that their mostly meant Not-A-Queen, and this was her sending one of the male members to deliver the message for her so she didnโt have to, like she did beforeโโ...for their mental health happened pretty far apart.โ
At some point their thumb had started rubbing at the side of their knee.
โTo answer your question,โ Jay said, turning toward the Moderator, โitโs kind of a mixed bag. I didnโt do much of the out-of-character stuff, something about it all just made me a little uncomfortable. Like the venting channel. You needed permission from the GM to get in, so I never saw it myself, but a friend showed me some of what got posted. And honestly, it felt like a lot of it was people talking behind the backs of whoever wasnโt in there, while the rest sipped the tea and munched popcorn.โ
New displays popped up to show the screenshots, and vanished once Jay started talking again after a moment of silence.
โIn general, I didnโt talk much in the server. There were so many conversations going on at once, moving so fast I couldnโt keep up, half the time I had no idea what they were even about. Not that it mattered. I always got the sense no one really cared what I did or didnโt say. And itโs not like I had anything of value to bring to the conversation anyway. So unless somebody addressed me directly, or was talking to the RP group as a whole, I assumed the conversation wasnโt for me. I did try to be active with the video gaming stuff. But eventually that died off when people stopped playing.โ
For a bit, Jay glanced down at the group DM that included Not-A-Queen and Papa-Bear, her boyfriend-turned-fiancรฉ, who went from player to GM somewhere along the way. The last message was one about how exciting it would be to start playing a game together. It never happened. However long Jay waited.
โThereโs nothing wrong with a relationship that starts and ends with the hobby, that works for plenty of people, it just wasnโt what I was hoping for. ...I guess itโs because I thought friends in that inner group wouldnโt get ignored or brushed aside. I didnโt want to be an NPC out of character too, you know? But they tossed me aside in the end anyways, because to them I was just a hassle. Not worth any effort.โ
Jay looked at Sirpa. โDid you ever have a relationship like that? One where you mattered way less to them than they did to you?โ
Glancing around the circle, Jay noticed Silver Bladeโs face had gone slack and far-off, her eyes parked on some spot on the floor without actually seeing it. โSilver Blade? You doing okay?โ they asked.
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