Roleplaying and Me

During the summer months of 2009 I joined an online roleplaying community.  I can imagine anybody that is into writing even remotely has tried online roleplaying.  It's a fun, creative outlet that tests your writing skills in various arenas; speed, vocabulary, indepth character portrayal and development are but a few of the most prominent of skills that are built upon by "good" roleplayers.

I'm in my mid twenties now, but when I first got into roleplaying I was 13, but that's another story in itself.  I was only allotted time to use the family computer after dinner, and after my mom made sure I finished my homework.  But it was with people I knew, people from school, so the situations never got too serious, never developed farther than generic anime plot points, and never got sexual in nature.  Cue 14, where everything got sexual all the time.  By 15 I was knee deep in a horrible, horrible piece of generic Japanese otaku culture writing I called, "Swords of Destiny".  At 17 a friend told me about an online roleplaying community.  People were doing what I was into, people that I didn't know, and they had a themed roleplaying community!

I posted a pretty amateurish application and was in by the end of the week.  Nothing could go wrong!  They had an application process!  It was a Thursday night that we all met in an AIM chatroom to get introduced to each other and get assigned partners to roleplay with that eventually switched because all of the characters were attending a party.  I thought it was brilliance.  Hell, I still think it's an amazing way to get all of your players associated with each other.  It's like playing a game your first day of a new class in grade school.  Everybody learns each others' names, you find out who likes neon green text on a black background, and you personally stand out as the kid that doesn't use AIM default font, background colors, and loves Arial Narrow in red.

As it turns out, my first foray into a roleplaying community didn't end well.  We were all young, and as such, even with mods we broke off into cliques and got lost in personal drama.  Luckily enough, I was a hit amongst most of the community and whenever a new community popped up with the same founding members, I was always invited.  My schtick was that I was male.  Not that I played male characters, which I did exclusively.  I was a male in a female dominated activity, and it made me a hot commodity.  It was never like I was "one of the girls", but my males did more believable male things because I'm actually a straight male, and not a man that's a man, but feels written by a woman.  That explanation will catch up with us, I promise.

Anyway, to catch us up to the lovely 2009 that I was mentioning earlier, I took a few years off.  Life changed, I graduated high school, attempted college but the financial aid kept fell through at the last minute 3 different times, I left a job at Domino's Pizza and started at Chipotle, I got fired by a completely corrupt manager at Chipotle and ended up at a car dealership with a great job moving cars, the recession started and I got laid off, then framed for a stolen check 4 months later, I went to jail and ended up unable to get employment for almost a year, when I ended up driving for the same Domino's I started at when I was 16, 7 years later.  But during the year I wasn't able to find work. I joined a roleplay community formed by the majority of the old people I used to run with.  It's where I came up with the idea for Adelle.