The Craziest Crazy Who Ever Crazied a Craziness.
So, when last I spoke of the Evangelion PBEM RPG I played in back in the waning days of the 20th century, I mentioned a
woman who eventually joined and caused some difficulties.
For the purposes of this story, I shall call her "Alligator Sally", because that name makes me laugh, and her character "Tits
McGee", because I think Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy is an under-rated movie, which more people ought to
reference.
When Alligator Sally started playing Tits McGee, she was introduced as a member of NERV's staff, paid to keep tabs on
the pilots and potential pilots who attended the local high school, and see to their mental health. In many respects, she
could not be a worse choice for this, though this would reveal itself only gradually, over time. Nevertheless, in this capacity,
she was assigned to work as a teacher at this school, so as to be on-hand throughout most of their day.
My character, who I had designed to be sour, antagonistic, and all but a villain, immediately clashed with her, figuring that
conflict is good for a story, and adversarial relationships generate conflict. Alligator Sally didn't seem to care for this at
all. The idea that anyone might not like her character was on some level a personal offense to her, since she had not designed
Tits to be unlikeable. She took this out on me, OOC, for quite some time, and I was kind of puzzled by this, until later on.
During her first couple of months in the game, she was seen making inappropriate advances towards a number of the male
students, which made for some very awkward and uncomfortable scenes. I watched these with great interest; I
though she was doing GREAT; Evangelion was always about emotionally-damaged characters with tons of issues which they
expressed in unhealthy ways, and to me, it seemed as though she was capturing the spirit of that better than most of the other
players in the game. One day, speaking OOC, I praised her for her deranged whore of a character, asking what she planned on
doing with her next.
And Alligator Sally just EXPLODED at me. She was infuriated by the suggestion that Tits McGee was doing anything out of
line. She was mortally wounded by the fact that I would dare to insult Tits. What right did I have to say something bad about
someone else's character? Bloody typical of me, she said, to be so harsh and judgemental, and she would be sharing this
conversation with everyone else in the game, and just see what they thought of it!
I was blown away. I had sincerely meant it as a compliment to her writing skill. Even if she didn't intend to write the character
that way, I had no idea why she was so personally affronted by my insulting a fictional character of her creation - not saying it
was a bad character, even, but that it was a good character because of it's bad traits!
Eventually, I would realize that she had, in her mind, intended her character to be 100% based upon herself, and it was never
meant as anything but a self-insert, with a name change. Moreover, she assumed this was the case with all of the other
characters as well! Suddenly, her antipathy towards me became that much more clear, as I realized she was basing her opinion
of me upon my sour, antagonistic and evil character in the game.
It took a while, but eventually things cooled down. In the mean time, her character continued her weird and creepy advances
upon virtually every male character in the game, including that of my friend Colin. I would in time learn that she was taking this
OOC, as well, and making all sorts of wild promises; she would come to Vancouver, where we lived, so that she might be able to
be with him and all that. Colin was at that time a seventeen year old boy, who had never had a girlfriend, and Sally Alligator was
a thirty-something mother of seven.
When this went sour on her, she turned her attentions on me. I responded by sending an IM to my girlfriend, who was online at
the time, and advised her to have some words with Alligator Sally. Alligator backpedaled frantically; she was only kidding!
Ha, ha! She never meant that she was in love with me! What a crazy idea. Ho-ho-ho! And all that erotic artwork of my
characters she had sent me? The poems about them? The tales of her kids drawing pictures of me around the kitchen table? Ha-
ha! My goodness! No sense thinking too deeply on any of that!
I would then tell this story to another player, another virginal young man living in England, whose character had been
receiving certain amorous attentions from, from Tits McGee. He was HEARTBROKEN to learn of this state of affairs! Alligator
had promised to travel to England to be with him! She had told him that she was in love with him! How dare she?
Word got back to the Mod, living in Mexico, who began to realize this could lead to a meltdown in his game. He and I
spoke, and he told me she had tried the exact same routine with him. We'll call him "Mike", so as to give context to the love
poem she had sent him entitled "The Moon, [Mike], and Me." He had rebuffed her, and told me he began to suspect that she
had some kind of schizoid personality disorder. One by one, it became clear that she was entertaining relationships with
virtually every male in the game, and - horrifyingly - seemed to mean it with each of us, even if only for the moment during
which she was actively talking to us.
Oh, how enraged she was with me! If not for her "funny joke" about how she had fallen in love with me, Alligator's house of
cards need never have collapsed. For a while, she tried to pretend that I was just "talking shit" behind her back, making up
stories, until it became clear that I could back up everything I had said with chat logs which the people I was speaking with
could corroborate.
The resulting meltdown was epic.
She had invited a number of her teenaged daughters into the game - none of who had actually watched the show upon which
it was based, nor cared to (also worth noting: None of us were supposed to know these were her daughters, presumably
because it would horn in on her sexytime image, but I managed to ferret it out over the course of a couple of months) - and the
lot of them rage quitted like there was no tomorrow. Tits McGee in particular had a spectacularly gory and
LOOKATMELOOKATMELOOKATME public suicide as her final post to the game.
Things had become so completely poisoned, so utterly derailed by this poison that this game, which had been going along very
nicely for some years by this point, came to a screeching halt. The mod, eager to wipe the taint of this deranged clan, decided
the only cure was to reboot the game from scratch. We all know how well that sort of thing goes. It limped along for another few
months, perhaps a year, but the momentum was by this point dead, and the game ground to a halt.
(Edit: Sorry about the bizarre line breaks and formatting. I don't know what in the heck Livejournal is doing here; it looks just fine in the editor, but looks like crap when I post it)