Although I get the feeling for some odd reason that I shouldn't go into specific details, I had something happen earlier tonight which made it at least a little more likely that I'm going to stay in WoW.
Truthfully over the last few days, for the first time I'd genuinely begun wavering. When I got into the guild, it was with an offline friend, and I thought that was finally my chance to do some genuine progression. It might have been my only chance, as well. Thaurissan as a server has a very deep anti-Hunter prejudice; worse than most from what I've seen, actually. As far as moving forward is concerned at this point, I'm going to have to either shop around for another guild, or possibly try and scrape together the money for a transfer. I want to keep trying though; at least for the time being.
The other thing has been the steadily continuing condemnation of me on the forum, the state of the forum in general, and the fact that the trolling has now actually started to spread back here. Given that, I'm still debating banning Arithe from my comments, my earlier apology to him/her notwithstanding, and beginning to adopt an aggressive deletion policy generally. This isn't something I'm going to do lightly, if I do; particularly considering that on the forum at least, the trolls will simply move onto that as a potential focus in their attacks.
The effect that their trashing of me, and their vitriol and mockery towards nearly anyone new to the class who comes in asking questions, has on me could be compared to the steady dripping of water on rock. Each individual drop, by itself, does virtually nothing, but over a long period of time, the cumulative amount of water begins to wear through.
Rakan told me earlier that I feel too much. Yes, I do feel. I feel and display emotion more openly and honestly than just about anyone else I've seen playing this game. Most people on the forums are like the walking dead in that regard; jaded, seared, merciless, cynical, and unsparingly sociopathic. Call me emo if you want; guilty as charged. I'm not going to apologise for it, either. As far as I'm concerned, if you're calling me emo because comparitively speaking, you bury everything, I'm not the one of us who needs help.
I will also never accept the constantly repeated excuse, "It's only the Internet." There are any number of other actions that get taken in this world on a daily basis, the consequences of which are supposedly instantly and miraculously absolved via invocation of the phrase, "It's nothing personal, it's just business." America's current political scenario exists more or less entirely because the country is largely populated by people who are always able to find some rationalisation (however absurd it may be at times) for refusing to take personal responsibility for their actions.
Things do happen online that can have offline ramifications. What you write is going to be read by a thinking, feeling (even if they don't consciously acknowledge that part) human being. There are going to be those who will try to shelter themselves from examining this within the context of their own behaviour by pointing out some of my own acts of savagery on the forum, and labelling me a hypocrite.
Yes, I have attacked people at times, and sometimes quite viscerally so. I'm not like Pike, Brigwyn, or BRK in that respect; individuals who have at least the apparent genuine ability to be flawlessly positive, every minute of every day. Look at the image in the top left corner of the site, and read the story it links to. I don't see Kali as an excuse for my own behaviour, no; but I do see her as being a symbol of the dualistic nature of my own personality, as well as being a symbol of what, if you read this blog, you can realistically expect to get.
At times it's going to be positive, and hopefully informative and useful, as well as being stuff that relates directly to the game itself. Other times it's going to be vicious, negative, angst-ridden drama that will cause you to think I'm mentally ill, and to possibly question your motivation for continuing to read the blog entirely. As well as for being argumentative, I've actually been openly attacked on the forum for trying to be kind towards people at times as well; so there's darkness and light.
You might then well ask, if I attack people too, how come I'm criticising some of you for doing it as well?
The answer is that I'm not actually criticising people on the forum for attacking me and others so much. What I am criticising them for is the cowardly ("It's only the Internet") pretext in which they do it, and for being thoughtlessly sociopathic while they do it. I might not always think about what I say at the time, but I do think about it afterwards, and I often feel a fairly strong degree of remorse for it as well. Most of the rest of the people on the forum simply don't care at all, either during the act or after it.
Arithe, I'm not actually going to ban you from being able to comment; at least not yet. The reason why is because despite your lack of diplomacy, and tendency towards being overly critical, I do sense in you what I did in Alumatine; a genuine desire to try and do something positive. I wrote an obituary of sorts for Alu here which I later took down, which some of you may have seen before I did, however. The reason why I took it down is because in the end, I realised I genuinely didn't agree with it. His underlying altruism notwithstanding, Alu's treatment of people on the forum in the end, in my own mind was genuinely unjustifiable.
That's what I've got a real problem with, I realise now; not that the negativity on the forum exists, but the fact that such truly pathetic, dishonest, and cowardly attempts are made to justify it.
Whenever I attack someone, on later reflection I am nearly always able to identify the cause as having been an externalisation of my own pain. It generally has very little to do with the person I've actually attacked at all. If we (me included) call someone a newb, or a scrub, or terrible, or trash their Armory profile, and really notice some intense negative emotion while we're doing that, we need to stop and ask ourselves something; What am I really this upset about?
"Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks."
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