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Husk! Or: How YCM Affected My Development


Proto

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1. Weird, just weird.

 

YCM was pretty much my first online community, I was on IRC dueling people for a bit (cheated every time by the way funk you I was 10) and on friendcodes.com (which might be defunct now idk) for about a couple of months but ultimately, this was my first commitment online and my first circle of friends online. I came on here as the youngest of my friend group, even amongst my little squad of adolescents such as Ice and Smeargle I believe I was the youngest, clocking in at about 12 years old or so when I initially came here.

 

YCM was a very different place 7-8 years ago, before the advent of duelingnetwork making it very possible to simulate online, we lived in the early 5Ds era without any real method for most people to duel eachother and as such, the roleplay section underneath creative writing ended up being our haven for children's card games for quite a bit. 

Now, roleplaying was rather different back in these days for this was before Rinne had made the rule signifying that posts must be a specific length and must adhere to a strict set of grammatical rules (usually amounting to "writing like someone who's graduated high school"). The quality was about that you'd expect from a xat or IRC room rather then a real serious sort of thing, however what immediately struck the young Proto was an encounter that my nameless, generic self-insert character had with another person's character.

 

I believe a villain of sorts in the roleplay was being tracked and then a significant female main character had gotten in contact with her, with the host of the roleplay of who's name currently escapes me mentioned that they "wanted to be alone" and that the female character "had never felt more happy in her life then around that moment."

 

This, was my first encounter with a lesbian couple, ever. Or, more accurately a homosexual character with the idea that they could be romanticized in the same way that a straight person could. I've "heard" of gay people but I never really figured that there were actual repercussions regarding them romantically ever, I just thought they didn't like girls/boys. And, who can blame them, girls and icky and boys are stupid.

Anyways, being the entirely smart person I am as young Proto, I look up "lesbian" and find porn almost immediately, like within the first four results, so i end up calling the host a sick funk. Now, knowing that I was 12-13 and had been recently diagnosed with autism might've impacted his response but he surprisingly took it to the chin, being an older man then me. Saying something along the lines of "it is what it is and if you immediately thought XXX thoughts then you're the real sicko here." Now, knowing what I know now about the internet and him being unsure of any facts about my personal life, he was surprisingly cordial and accepting from someone who he could easily assume was a homophobe (I was, just because I thought gay was another term for "loser" in the same way you might say the word "incel" or "virgin" now, shut up I was dumb. )

 

Either way, that tolerance ended up effecting me pretty much to the core and began opening up my mind. Huh. Gay people exist. And they love just like I do. And they weren't weird when they called me out. That's neat. Years later I ended up getting a boyfriend. Funny how those things work out.

 

That'll be the end of this entry. I'll pretty much be going through whatever impactful moments of YCM history I can remember that have helped me with things beyond card games and such since I spent a good chunk of time here in my developing years. Names will be nitched out but if anyone ever feels uncomfortable about me sharing a story, let me know and I'll delete it. Likewise if you can remember a story and just don't want it included at all. But, yeah that'll be the basis of this here blog.

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Husk 2: Exoskeleton.

 

I'd say that YCM was my first real experience as a group on the internet, a hub, a group of friends what have you. We'd have group chats, we'd have regular calls, that whole shebang. I wouldn't be ashamed to say I had friends because it genuinely felt like that. That all began after an individual currently going by the name Marsuvees Black happened to be around in that earlier roleplay decided to invite me to a club that he'd co-founded, rp.820.

 

Now I knew of clubs in a sense and had participated in chats before. However becoming an active member of a forum's club was different, friendcode rooms were generally temporary and irc/xats were as well, with whatever chat you had the previous day being vanished into the oblivion of wherever worthless texts go. RP.820 was different, it had a similar amount of activity as these chats with a lot of fairly established personalities doing a majority of their posting there. But, also it being a club founded on the idea of roleplaying, it came with the idea of well, personas.

 

See, while we weren't in any particular narrative given setting, people in RP.820 and a later group would take on these personalities, usually signified by a change of text color, adding bold to the characters or a typing quirk such as replacing is with 1s (the latter becoming particularly popular with the later trend of homestuck). Around everyone in the community had one persona, which was effectively a character that they played, in my case they didn't really have much impact, I had around 8 or 9 of them and a majority of them were just straight rips from Ben 10 characters that I thought were cool. But, for some people this idea of being someone else even in an environment where people were expected to be their well, OOC self supplied a bit of freedom.

There were numerous people in clubs I joined that later changed their whole profile name and image to reflect a persona they've grown particularly fond of, with it eventually getting to the point that occasionally the mask would never falter. Making it indistinguishable to tell what was played up and what wasn't. I never really paid it much attention as I was, in fact using YCM as a bit of an escape mechanism myself but, really this opened me up to experiences I've never thought of before like...

When someone switches their name, their avatar, their whole online persona and even their pronouns in reflection of what was effectively a "character" that they'd put on. Who's to say that what they previously presented themselves as was what they enjoyed in the first place? As some people became completely indulged in these forms, it made me wonder something.

Were these personas the mask, or the real being? With their "normal" personality being the true act?

Though I wouldn't reflect on it much later this was very much an integral part in me developing empathy for people with dysphoria of any sort, even though some may question its validity. Because, if there's anything that being on the internet has taught me, it's that everyone always has a mask on. And who are you to determine what's underneath?

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