Mod Post: Moment of Truth

[lickety_split]

Comments

[darth_eldritch]

Wut? All this to write a novel?

[layweed]

Ikr. But at some point did the fictional character really become the real person and just some sort of alternative account for them to post with? idgi.

[darth_eldritch]

Seriously. As someone who has written and developed characters for years, I have never seen the need to go this length to "get into a character's head." Or to pretend to be something else.

Considering this line: Along the way, she became a sort of escape for me

Probably for a time now.

[rex_dart]

No, she had an entire complex made-up persona who was totally separate from the real person. Backstory, life, identity, everything.

[trivalent]

Do people even have to share so much information to become a mod? I feel like that's going out of one's way to be lying.

[lickety_split]

She didn't do it to be a mod, she did it to make her online identity to seem more authentic to the military wives she was duping into revealing their feelings about their husbands whose jobs involve being in mortal peril a good majority of the time so that her novel for her character could be more authentic.

Also because she was depressed about her real life and because she wanted an escape... she invented a Mary Sue to fulfill her wish fantasies.

[mercystars]

whoa...

[trivalent]

Got that when I got to the mod update on page 2. It's sick what she did (which I've sadly experienced a few times before myself... which is why I usually don't share much about myself now). But my question was somewhat tangential from the start, even more so now that I read the details of what happened.

[shishmish]

[alryssa]

Fuck me, it was basically for novel research?

[darth_eldritch]

My mother did this shit, except she posed as a male fighter pilot online and managed to dupe a lot of people into revealing thier own feelings, including vets, military wives, people in the service. She had everything well researched and had notes and everything on the character she built to make him authentic. She even relied on my dad for details on military jets and fighters so she could really fake knowing the technical stuff and what it's like being a pilot.

Really fucked up. She did it for the hell of it.

And she always criticized me for playing RPGs. At least at our games we knew who we were and weren't duping anyone.

[idemandjustice]

This always amazes me, because I just tend to assume people are honest until proven otherwise.

Your last sentence is pretty much what I was mentioning as well!

[darth_eldritch]

Seriously. I can't comprehend the time and energy put into a fabricated persona like that. Or the reasons why to do it, unless it is to gain sympathy, which this person seems to be doing in a lot of the links shown here. Or to be someone they will never be in real life? I don't even know.

[serendipity_15]

She did it for the hell of it.

....So basically she was bored one day and decided that this was a totes awesome idea???

[darth_eldritch]

Yep. I couldn't fucking believe it.

[serendipity_15]

Hearing all these stories makes me think that I should reconsider my general philosophy of thinking that people are honest about themselves online (at least the basics like gender, what country you grew up in, ect) until it's proven that they're not being truthful.