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Finally caught up with this awesome thread, and it has convinced me to come out of lurking. While my story isn't quite as crazy-filled as some of the other tales of gold in this thread (I'm somewhat happy and disappointed I had no Denise-level crazy in my childhood), I figured I may as well throw in my lot. This is the story of Nigel, the boy who would be the next Wildlife Expert of the Glorious Land of the UK. Also Wizard, PhD. As a child, I was awkward and quiet, preferring to watch programs such as Animal Planet and a small bit of anime over MTV and other popular channels. I had very few friends, and many of those that were my companions in middle school have since fallen into the pit of furrydom, living in their parent's basements. So that's one bullet dodged. But this tale is about Sir Nigel the Second, the middle-school wildlife expert. Being the awkward, animal-loving child that I was, I was ENTHRALLED with Nigel's ability to conjure up facts of exotic creatures at any moment (did you know hippos sweat red liquid?), that his father was Sir Nigel the first, a knight from England who knew the Queen personally (he was a plumber), and that Nigel Thornberry of the WildThornberrys was actually based off of this red-headed, large nosed, nasally boy! (He actually had a nose that could only be described as colossal and had a blinding shade of red hair.) Soon after entering into middle school, Nigel detected that perhaps there was an ally among the masses of football stars and barbie-doll girls. As he swung his head from side to side and his cavernous nostrils tested the air, he realized that among the fragrance of cheap perfume and sweat, there was an odor of one who frolicked with dogs and raised hamsters. There was an Eliza to his Nigel. Me, the freckled, glasses-wearing, pig-tail sporting nerd. We quickly hit it off and were fast friends for the majority of middle school. We watched Dragonball Z together, we pretended to make documentaries about the squirrels at my house, and we pretended to be in The WildThornberrys universe. All was well. Until he revealed The Secret. That he was REALLY Nigel Thornberry in a boy's body, and that by some demonic force - his beady eyes narrowed dangerously as he referenced 'The powers of the Shaman' in hushed tones - he and his daughter Eliza had been transported across time and space into the bodies of two awkward youngsters. And that he would have to battle with her by his side in order to be returned to his world, against the evil Shaman who had done this to him. But this is perhaps a story for another time, if people should wish to hear more.
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Oct 16, 2012 21:55
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 If you have to ask, the answer is yes.
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Oct 16, 2012 22:02
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Thought I would ask, since my writing style is rather disjointed. A bit more background before I continue: Nigel's father was a plumber as I had stated, and was a hardcore Christian. Nigel never talked about his mother, but from what I gathered from Nigel's father when I visited, his deceased mother was deep into Shamanism. Nigel lost his mother when he was 3, and thus barely knew her, except for the fact that she practiced Shamanism and his father was heavily against it. This played a large part (obviously) in Nigel's Secret. But yes. Nigel revealed this earth-shattering secret to me when we were in the final year of middle-school. As weird as I was, a little red flag went up as I saw his eyes narrow further and further and his flailing arms move faster and faster as he tried to bring me into his battle against The Shaman. I relented, and he warned me that we may be attacked at any moment. I nodded with a fixed smile on my face, and weakly batted my arms at empty air every so often in attempts to fight The Shaman in order to keep him happy. From that point on, Nigel was labeled as a troubled student by our teachers. He would randomly scream in the middle of classes, and start flailing his arms and grunting DBZ-style as I looked on with horror. He was sent to detention, sent home in suspension, and most of his friends fled in fear as he attempted to force the evil power to return his manly Wildlife Expert soul back to where it belonged in the Glorious Land of the UK. The one incident I really remember is when we were in PE, and he suddenly declared that our teacher was an incarnation of The Shaman and demanded the poor woman retreat to her foul home in the abyss. The poor woman looked genuinely terrified as she had the principal drag wild-eyed and frothing-mouthed Nigel to his office. It took an entire year, heavy counseling, and more than one incident of him getting his head shoved in a toilet by bullies before he stopped. He's been (relatively) sane since, though he seems to have become a brony to fill the gap in his soul or something. And funnily enough, it seems his dream is still to become a Wildlife Expert. He's currently taking numerous classes at a nearby university.
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Oct 16, 2012 22:43
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Please tell me you have more stories about Nigel Thornberry-kin 
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Oct 17, 2012 00:14
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I wonder if People Like Denise ever get religiously zealous.
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Oct 17, 2012 00:24
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sweeperbravo posted:Please tell me you have more stories about Nigel Thornberry-kin I do however remember how he told me about how Sir Nigel the First sent him to Hogwarts and he graduated with with Harry Potter's dad. I'll type up the story once I'm done with work.
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Oct 17, 2012 02:15
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I posted this in my Ask thread, but honestly it belongs here as well, since this is a general "look at the crazies" thread"Turtlicious posted:So these religious I have specific stories, but they're all jumbled together, so I want to work them out first.
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Oct 17, 2012 02:51
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nutbags run a foster home indirectly for a Church, in fact they also work in a privatized group home that's filled with kids who like, really believe there problems are caused by satan and demons instead of poor impulse control and cocaine. (Having a Withdrawal is God telling you you have injected Lucifers Devil Juice,) Like just really fuckin' bonkers. Even have an adult home for addicts so that they can get people into the church so that they can "get help."
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So you were in the home?
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Oct 17, 2012 05:09
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So Comcast apparently dislikes Sir Nigel's tale of wizardry and Shamanism, and cut my internet out for a good 12 hours after work, eh. This is what I remember of the Wizard PhD: Sir Nigel and the Order of the Astral Plane Around the time I was in my very early teens, Harry Potter hit the shelves. Naturally my local school system got swept up in the wave and kids everywhere were sporting sharpie-made lighting bolts on their foreheads and wearing the joke glasses/big nose/mustache sans the nose and mustache in order to be just like Harry. Nigel discovered the world of Hogwarts in the year I joined the war against The Shaman, and immediately stole my copy of The Sorcerer's Stone and hid it from his father - who still to this day never knew his precious, Christian child had read and owned this evil-filled and misleading series. I never got the book back, though I'm rather happy about that; the last I saw of my copy, it had pages falling out of it and there were some mysterious brown-black and green stains on it. From the moment Nigel shoved his bird-man nose into the book, I knew it was going to be a bumpy ride. From then on, he retold magical stories of how his glorious knight of a Christian father sent his son's Nigel Thornberry soul - through the power of...God I guess? - out travel the Astral Plane as the boy slept, to the castle of Hogwarts. There he lived with the Gryffindors (why is it always Gryffindors) and was best pals with James Potter, Harry Potter's deceased father. However, because only his British Knight Man-Soul traveled, he could only perform small feats of magic in this world, as his fleshy Ginger Shell dampened his powers. And only when no-one was looking. Because he didn't want anyone else to realize that wizards really exist. He was also at the top of his class - those D's and F's in the classes of this world don't matter, this boy was Merlin incarnate in magical topics! - and he was going to graduate with a PhD? Perhaps he meant with tons of OWLS and NEWTS I mentioned? No. He was going to graduate Hogwarts with a PhD. Which is the highest honor he could think of at the time. He amazed gullible and very, very stupid me with floating coins (they had magnets inside them) the ability to stop random accidents in the world (by golly I'm glad he told me that my yogurt was expired with his powers), and made me green with envy at his "wand" (which he picked up out of a compost pile). One day, however, Nigel latched his sweaty hand onto my shoulder during lunch, with his beady eyes full of unshed tears and the sound of a vacuum running as he took huge, gulping breaths through his nose to keep down the sobs. As he shook and I tried to pry his hand from my shoulder, he choked out the story: he fell asleep in Mathematics during that same day, and it was the day his Hogwarts adventures ended at the hands of Cell attacking Hogwarts with Voldemort. EDIT: Nigel made me really sad during this time. He said I traveled there too but didn't remember it, and that I was a Hufflepuff - which is okay. He would always end his conversations with me with "By the way, Hufflepuff is a load of duffs." 
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Oct 17, 2012 14:38
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The two things that really weird me out about Nigel's stories are a)Including his own father in his delusions, as these kind of people usually try to distance themselves as much as possible from their family, especially when they are as oppressive as you make him to be, and b)The Wild Thornberries of all things  ?
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Oct 17, 2012 15:09
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I should have been much clearer concerning Nigel the First: he was/is an awesome father. Despite raising his weird son alone, working an unforgiving job, and still somehow finding time for church on Sundays and Wednesdays, this man genuinely cared deeply for his son. I think Nigel the Second was so attached to his father and vice-versa because all they had was each other. Nigel the First tried to keep his hardcore religious beliefs toned down when I went over to his house to play, but he did let slip a few awe-inspiring phrases concerning his views of Shamanism and Harry Potter. He did have a few slips concerning how I was agnostic, but Nigel the First just made it clear that he was raising his son as a Christian, and as long as I didn't mess with that, he wouldn't mess with me. And I imagine Nigel seized upon the Wild Thornberrys due to a number of factors. He looked rather like Nigel Thornberry himself - all the other kids played Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and he wanted his own special role to play - the show was about animals, he thought the UK was the bee's knees, and it involved a Shaman giving Eliza her ability to talk to animals. Here I imagine a conflict inside Nigel was born. His father had always growled that there is no other real religion besides Christianity, that Nigel's mother was wrong. But here was that exact same religious view, shown as a being that was grateful for help from a small girl and rewarded her with an innocent power that opened up a world of amazing adventures. The views of his mother, denounced by his father, shown to this boy in a friendly and appealing form put up against the religion his father wanted him to follow. But all this is just armchair psychology. Maybe Nigel was a proto-hipster and wanted to be a nerd about something really unique.
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Oct 17, 2012 15:53
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Probably a way of feeling connected to his mum. And if uglynoodles ever pops in again if Denise thought her dad was Vegata how did she explain him not thinking that way?
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Oct 17, 2012 16:03
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ToddlerTackler posted:and it was the day his Hogwarts adventures ended at the hands of Cell attacking Hogwarts with Voldemort.
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Oct 18, 2012 02:46
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I posted:What is it with crackpots and characters from Dragonball Z? Dragonball Z was popular, dramatic, and full of flexible plot devices.
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Oct 18, 2012 02:49
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I dated a guy in high school who was obsessed with it. He tried to get me interested, and I enjoyed it, but I never could grasp what was so great about it that people wanted to live in that world. I eventually broke up with him when it got to a point that our only topics of conversation were how great it would be to be a Saiyan and how much he wanted to kill himself.
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Oct 18, 2012 03:08
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When I was quite little I tried ki manipulation.
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Oct 18, 2012 03:35
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RazorBunny posted:I dated a guy in high school who was obsessed with it. He tried to get me interested, and I enjoyed it, but I never could grasp what was so great about it that people wanted to live in that world. I eventually broke up with him when it got to a point that our only topics of conversation were how great it would be to be a Saiyan and how much he wanted to kill himself. Talk about this guy more.
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Oct 18, 2012 05:25
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Reminds me of a guy I dated in high school, though only really in the sense of "anime nerd" and "dated in high school". Dude was like...some kind of anime-themed proto-hipster. Just a lot of fairly generic "weeaboo in denial" sort of stuff, like, crying "drat weebs!" before spouting off a bunch of frighteningly overemphasized and broken "Japanese" (tourist phrases), those sorts of things, which altogether aren't horribly fascinating, but then there was this... He would always make fun of Naruto and its fans, but he was the one who thought he was a real goddamn ninja. Dude would cut class to wave around a "replica katana" in his back yard, and was constantly bragging about how BRUTALLY POWERFUL he was (dude was skinny as hell and hadn't had formal fight training since he was like, 10). But the best was that he also had this tendency of carrying throwing knives/stars around in makeshift pockets on the inside of his jacket during school hours. No one ever said anything because he was harmless and just wanted to feel badass, but he wound up accidentally stabbing himself more than once I think that's the only story of his worthy for this thread though, everything else about him was more generic E/N relationship whining. Not really sure what he's up to nowadays, last time I saw him he pretty much pretended I didn't exist.
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Oct 18, 2012 09:23
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funky not a junkie posted:Talk about this guy more. I wish I had more stories, but we were friends in middle school and dated long-distance in high school (he was at boarding school), and I've actually either blocked or straight-up forgotten most of our relationship. It was too bad, really. He was a decent looking guy, really smart, and in really excellent physical shape. Teeth could have used some work, but they were clean at least. He showered and generally smelled nice. Genuinely studied martial arts and had his black belt in karate, not sure what level in judo. He also played several instruments and excelled at all of them. But he had this incredibly overbearing mother and he became desperately obsessed with anime (woo dragon shirts!) and the last time I saw him we were 20 and he was fat and had long, greasy hair and worked at the Wendy's in the white-trash mall in our hometown. I hadn't even thought about him in years until the Dragonball Z conversation. I know he was present at the birthday party where one of our friends who grew up to be a furry bit the everloving poo poo out of one of our other friends who was really into Gundam Wing slash fanfiction, but alas I was not there to see.
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Oct 18, 2012 14:25
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RazorBunny posted:I wish I had more stories, but we were friends in middle school and dated long-distance in high school (he was at boarding school), and I've actually either blocked or straight-up forgotten most of our relationship. I had a friend in highschool that followed a similar path. In high school he was a pretty accomplished martial artist, I think he even won some tournaments. The reason I'm not sure is that I found out he lied about just about everything. Over the course of our friendship, he said:
At this point the stuff he said was just plausible enough to either pass immediate inspection or else pass off as embarrassment. It was after I had graduated that he started to really go off the deep end:
All that stuff makes me wonder what else he was lying about. There are a lot of other inconsequential things I know he embellished or fabricated, but I don't know why. All I can guess is he felt the need to impress people and that he somehow wasn't good enough 
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Oct 18, 2012 17:07
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I regret not befriending more freaky people when I was in school.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:48
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Coulrophobia posted:Reminds me of a guy I dated in high school, though only really in the sense of "anime nerd" and "dated in high school". Dude was like...some kind of anime-themed proto-hipster. Just a lot of fairly generic "weeaboo in denial" sort of stuff, like, crying "drat weebs!" before spouting off a bunch of frighteningly overemphasized and broken "Japanese" (tourist phrases), those sorts of things, which altogether aren't horribly fascinating, but then there was this... I always had a fascination with uncoordinated nerds and their fantasy ideas about martial arts. I think it's because I always secretly hope to hear about one of them challenging someone to a fight and finding out their Naruto Dragon Ninjutsu Fu isn't as effective as the animes said. Metal Gear fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 22:34
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Metal Gear posted:I always had a fascination with uncoordinated nerds and their fantasy ideas about martial arts. I think it's because I always secretly hope to hear about one of them challenging someone to a fight and finding out their Naruto Dragon Ninjutsu Fu isn't as effective as the animes said. Apparently he actually wound up beating up a pickpocket with a steel fan he was carrying around for no reason. Though, I never heard about it in the paper or anything (small town etc) so I'm not sure if that was some shitthatdidnthappen.txt or a lucky break. If it's true I guess those hours practicing ninja moves paid off 
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Oct 19, 2012 00:09
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Never had a crazy friend in real life simply because I was the fairly crazy dweeb, but I had a lot more luck on the internet. For a year or so I had this guy in my Skype list with whom I would talk daily about whatever was going on. He loved to write stories. He was going to go into film. In fact, he already made up a whole universe including lore based on some drama that happened on a minor animation forum he used to frequent. He wrote his stories in a grand fashion, with great dictators, political intrigue and very lovely characters. The character that was analogous to him would be the main character of the story. At one point he was overthrown as the admin of aforementioned animation forum and thus, in the story, the main character was back-stabbed by the treacherous mods, shadowed in the story by members of parliament. He later returned to seize control once more, writing this as a forgotten son taking up the mantle of his father. I'm not one who shies away from drama so I had a bit of fun following this event unfold. In fact, I joined in on the fun and as a result he included a shadow character of me in the story. A traveling priest, a propagandist and wordsmith. He allowed me to have some say in his stories. That was kinda cool. And hey, if he used these events to get some creative work done, great, right? However, the forum mascot was his girlfriend in the story. The forum mascot, he told me, was based on a character he had in his mind since he was a child. Whenever he had a poo poo time, he would talk to this imaginary friend. This imaginary friend apparently had never left him. I told him that's okay. I talk to myself, some people pray, others meditate. It's all the same thing, really, a way to sort things out in your mind for yourself. "After all," I laughed, "it's not like you think this character in your head is real, right?" Awkward silence. We didn't speak as much anymore after that.
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Oct 19, 2012 02:22
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Oh well, if we're including internet then I have a whole truckload of crazy stories on the backburner...
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Oct 19, 2012 03:01
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Corridor posted:Oh well, if we're including internet then I have a whole truckload of crazy stories on the backburner...
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Oct 19, 2012 06:36
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Hmm, let's see... I haven't thought about these people in years and didn't actually meet any of them, so details are hazy. Sorry if this is long, it's kind of train-of-thoughty. Okay, well, I used to be part of a now-defunct forum with a highish proportion of people from my country, around the same age. We all sorta got fairly friendly, and one of those other guys was called Russ. He was an okay dude, you like Russ, he's not the creepo (and is one of the few internet people I have met). Another dude, same country but like 40+ years old, was called Brendan. He was quite friendly, but there was something really somewhat off about Brendan. Not sexually creepy or otaku creepy, he just gave off the kind of vibe that lets you know that this guy has NO idea how humans think or behave. Nothing amazing most of the time, but now and then he'd say really off-the-wall poo poo like how us younger delinquent forum members were committing terrible crimes with our disrespectful posting, or he'd go off on shitthatdidnthappen.txt superhero stories about his days as a firefighter or EMT or whatever he was. He started out strange, but got a lot worse over time. There was one teenager, a nice kid who was very smart but somewhat merciless with his wit, who would lightly troll Brendan by pointing out how nuts he was. Brendan made this kid his personal nemesis and did a ton of hilariously inept internet detective poo poo to try and uncover the kid's SECRET IDENTITY. He posted his findings in some thread that read like Kyoon's paranoid ramblings about The Man, like this 17-year-old nerd was the cause of all society's ills. I honestly have no idea why he even kept posting. He kept logging in to speak to us every day on IRC, despite us all thinking he was a lunatic and not really hiding it. He would froth at us and call us names, then five minutes later he'd chat about some trivial crap like nothing happened. Brendan constantly posted a bunch of pics of himself and his wife, whom he never shut up about. They were both 40+ and... well, I gotta say they were ugly as gently caress. Both fat, but she was goddamn huge. Still, none of my business, if they're in love then who the hell am I to judge, right? We really could have done without him talking about his wife's ovarian cyst, though. He gave a lot, and I mean a LOT of fairly sensitive personal medical information of hers out to us, a bunch of total strangers whom he didn't even like very much. Now, back to Russ. Because he randomly lost his loving mind one day, he agreed to meet up with and hang out with Brendan. I wish to god I could remember more of his trip report, because I know Brendan did a ton of poo poo like yelling abuse out the car window to passersby to impress Russ with how badass he was. But the highlight came when Russ got to Brendan's house to meet his wife. They were introduced... and then Brendan instantly started on about the ovarian cyst again.  His wife apparently just stood there placidly while Brendan rambled on about her reproductive organs. Then suddenly... "See, here's the scar." And with no further word of warning, Brendan *flips up his wife's dress*, holding it around neck level. Out of nowhere Russ finds himself staring at an obese pale lady, seminaked in her underwear. Varicose veins, saggy underwear, surgical scar, all exposed by her lunatic husband. Brendan continued to hold the poor woman's dress up high, chatting some more about her cyst, while Russ was literally too stunned to speak or react. Eventually Brendan let the skirt drop, and kept on chatting like everything was cool. The wife didn't seem to think anything out of the ordinary had happened.Russ is still around on my FB that I never use, I might try chatting him up again so it's not too weird when I ask him to write the story up himself. e: Should add that I believe this story wholeheartedly. Russ was like the least drama-causing person out of that whole forum community, and rather quiet and respectful to others. We had to milk this info out of him when we all met up and got drunk one time. And Brendan was just that goddamn insane. Corridor fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 12:09
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Corridor posted:e: Should add that I believe this story wholeheartedly. Russ was like the least drama-causing person out of that whole forum community, and rather quiet and respectful to others. We had to milk this info out of him when we all met up and got drunk one time. And Brendan was just that goddamn insane. No, definitely, like it's a good story but it's not so far out that it sounds made up. Poor Mrs. Brendan
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Oct 19, 2012 22:59
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DarkHorse posted:
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Oct 20, 2012 00:41
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sweeperbravo posted:No, definitely, like it's a good story but it's not so far out that it sounds made up. Anyone else ever seen The League of Gentlemen? Cause' I'm totally seeing those two as Tubbs and Edward.
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Oct 20, 2012 03:50
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A guy I went to high school with knew the devil. Rob was one of those guys who told increasingly outrageous lies for attention. How he worshipped and talked to Satan. How his 'coven' was searching for seven seals to bring about the apocalypse and become a 'demon prince' (he claimed they had six). About his metal band in New York with the seven-foot-tall guitar player named Zombie, who seriously you guys got shot and died one weekend, so we prayed to Satan and brought him back from the dead... Let me play you this black metal CD I bought, yeah, that's totally me on vocals. No one really liked this guy or god forbid believed a word of it; he was just kind of always there, and we would compare his stories and find out which new ridiculous thing he was claiming. Then, we all graduated, and I joined the military moved away for a few years. I came back and found out that Rob, now about twenty-four, was now wearing a black leather trenchcoat and The Crow face paint around town, and calling himself 'Raven.' He had started a 'gang' of sixteen year old high school goths called The Flock and had been busted for statutory. Stay
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Oct 20, 2012 18:51
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Wild T posted:Stay
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Oct 21, 2012 04:10
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Wild T posted:About his metal band in New York with the seven-foot-tall guitar player named Zombie, who seriously you guys got shot and died one weekend, so we prayed to Satan and brought him back from the dead... Bullshit, zombies can only play the bass.
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Oct 22, 2012 08:35
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Through middle and high school, I played in the school band with a girl I'll call Rinoa. I'm calling her that because she was obsessed with the character Rinoa from Final Fantasy VIII. I'm talking obsessed. She would cosplay as Rinoa to school, which I guess could've been worse since the character at least wore normal clothes, but the outfit was awkward and didn't complement her body at all. She wasn't fat, but she was definitely thicker than most girls and having the slim waif-ish clothes of Rinoa on made her look like one of those stress dolls that pop their eyes out when you squeeze them. She was also obsessed with an anime called Fushigi Yugi and flipped out once when I told her I have a dragon shaped birthmark on my leg. She took this as a sign from the anime gods that I was part of the dragon tribe or something from that anime, and would one day tragically stand against her because she was the phoenix princess. I think she differed from Denise and other people like her because she was more focused on making real life seem more like an anime instead of pretending to be from a better anime astral rape world. I remember her being incredibly awkward and had some kind of crush on pretty much every guy she knew. She had weird pet names for all the guys she liked. Mine was "Doughnut" because I once shared some of a doughnut that I had taken a bite out of with her. I guess she was thinking it was like an indirect kiss thing, just like my animes! She also had these prominent cyst lumps on her back from not properly treating the acne there, and took no pains to try and cover them up. She once sat next to this friend of mine in band and just randomly started talking to him about them and how she didn't like them. He had this look on his face the entire time, like Santa came down on Christmas and just suddenly started making GBS threads on all his presents. This was okay with me, because he was pretty weird too. For her sixteenth birthday, she this elaborate birthday party, complete with fancy dress and princess tiara. This party consisted of having a Friend Quiz-type game, where we were asked questions about her to see how well we knew her. I'll never forget the awkwardness that seeped into the room when her very normal and supportive brother pulled out a question card and asked, "Which of the four gods is Rinoa a priestess for?" Of course, we knew the answer. This party also included her having me dance the waltz with her to the Final Fantasy VIII graduation ball music. I didn't want to be a dick and deny her on her birthday, so I did it. As I spun around the room, everyone had the same content nodding smile, thinking I somehow reciprocated her feelings. I cried on the inside the entire song. After a while, I got really sick of it all and treated her probably more harshly than I should have. I was a dumb teenager at the time and it's one of those things you don't really think about since your worldview is so small. The most poignant thing I actually remember about her doesn't involve her at all. Her dad was giving me a ride to a school concert and it was just him and I in the car since Rinoa was still getting herself ready. He started talking to me about how he's glad she has good friends like me, since it's been really hard to deal with her since her mom died. He kind of went into it, even mentioning that sometimes their shouting matches get so intense she'll call the police. It really struck me that if he was telling this all to some random sixteen year old kid, then he didn't really have anyone else to talk to. I hope they're all doing better now.
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Oct 26, 2012 03:14
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My heart always goes out to most of the Dads in these stories.
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Oct 26, 2012 22:00
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PoshAlligator posted:My heart always goes out to most of the Dads in these stories. I'm with you. If I had a child I'd want to support what ever makes them happy but when does a parent make the decision to step in and say, "Put this poo poo away you're losing touch with the real world" I'd imagine being a parent of one of these people and seeing their personal development through their life would be a lot like watching someone slowly going insane.
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Oct 26, 2012 22:12
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Agreed, there isn't really that much a parent can do. Maybe give their kids grocery store gift cards instead of cash, so they know they won't blow all the parents' money on frivolous things. Other than that, a lot of this stems from the need for friendships or sexual relationships, which parents can't really help with.
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Oct 26, 2012 22:49
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Most of my friends who were the weirdest had parents who weren't much more than landlords, or else were extraordinarily overbearing. I'm sure there are plenty of parents who walk the middle ground and still end up with kids who have these kinds of obsessions, but I haven't met any. Hopefully now that mental illness is starting to lose its stigma (slowly, but it's happening), the good parents whose kids act like this from an early age will maybe take their kids in for a mental health evaluation and avoid them spiraling into this type of obsession. Because I genuinely think this behavior has to be a sign of mental illness or disability.
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Oct 27, 2012 00:52
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I had to live with one of these and it was amazing. A Totally Unrelated Prologue When I was a child, I read the Earthsea chronicles and decided that if I tried really, really hard, I, too, could talk to nature and make it do my bidding. So I adopted a pair of pebbles one day and kept them in a little pouch. I told my parents that they were a husband and wife and that I was working on communicating with them so that I could master the art of magic. (My parents just accepted this as normal, which should tell you a lot about my childhood.) I'd occasionally take them out of the pouch and try to talk to them, but I'd end up just telling them knock-knock jokes and complaining about my teachers. I'd also sit them next to my dog so that he could talk to them too and we could get some awesome three-way human-animal-mineral magical correspondence going on. They had names, but I've tragically forgotten them. Eventually I realised that I just wasn't cut out to be a wizard, and I ceremoniously released the pebbles into a stream. Helga Now for our main feature. I went to boarding school when I was thirteen. I was a weird kid, and a bit socially maladjusted; nothing serious, just poorly socialised and pretty shy. It took me about a year to come out of my shell and make proper friends at the new place. During that year, Helga happened. I was in Year 9 and Helga was in Year 11. She was seventeen, and was also a boarding student. On my first day of orientation, she saw me drawing (manga  ), and was the first person to come over to talk to me. This was good! The topic of the conversation was yaoi. This was bad. (I didn't realise how bad a sign this was until later. Nowadays, if somebody brings up yaoi or any kind of porn fanfiction unprompted in my first conversation with them, I run for the hills; I've learnt my lesson.) Anyway, I vaguely knew what yaoi was, so she decided that I was going to be her best friend. I was excited, because somebody four years older than me wanting to be my friend was a new and wonderful thing, so I was all "Yes! Best friends forever."We embarked on a beautiful friendship. Helga told me some stuff about herself. 1) She was super-popular in the boarding community. The girls all wanted to be her; the boys (it was co-ed) all wanted to date her. 2) She was in a passionate long-distance relationship that was going to end in marriage. 3) She had been talent-scouted as a potential future singing sensation; was already an accomplished artist with works in high demand; spoke fluent French; and came from a family of millionaires with ties to nobility. I believed everything because I was dumb and thirteen. Now, you probably don't even need me to tell you what Helga looked like. She looked like this:  But I looked like this:  So we made a handsome pair. At first, Helga just seemed like your garden-variety weeaboo. She liked DBZ, Yu-Gi-Oh, Rurouni Kenshin, all the poo poo that was available in Australia in the mid-2000s. She drew "original manga" that was exactly as terrible and derivative as you'd imagine. But so did I, so that was okay. As time went on, I began to realise that she wasn't the prodigous socialite that she made herself out to be, and that the other girls in the house actually pretty much hated her. I'd been on the receiving end of some (fairly minor) bullying in my time, so my sympathies were with her; she told me that they were just jealous of her talent, her money and her genius intellect, and I believed her. Gradually she drove a wedge between me and the other girls, until I thought they were all horrible beasts and would only talk to her. (I grew out of this.) Once I was her Best Friend, she began to open up to me. As with many terrible things, it started with porn. One day, I was sitting in her room listening to her music. She had a playlist of like ten songs that she would play over and over and over at top volume, not even turning them down to talk, so we'd have to shout at each other over the top of them. It was great. We were talking about manga and how we were Great Artists. Then she suddenly said "Hey, do you want to see my secret collection?" Manga was still pretty hard to come by back then, so I got all excited and said yes, of course! So she said "Look at the chest of drawers next to my pillow."    She'd taped up several pages of extremely explicit yaoi doujinshi right next to her bed, where you couldn't see it unless you were lying down. I mean extremely explicit. Bleeding anuses and spurting semen and huge, turgid, veiny cocks everywhere. I wasn't sure how to respond, so I just stared at it for a few seconds and pulled away with a nervous "Oh! Oh that's very nice!  " (This is still how I respond to people unexpectedly showing me their porn collections, which happens more often than I'd like to admit.) Helga went into a delighted rant about how much she loved yaoi and how she thought it was so much more wonderful and loving and ~pure~ than flesh-and-blood relationships. From then on, I was her unwilling porn buddy. We only had three computers between the thirty of us until they set up a laptop wireless network in the school, which didn't happen for about a year. Helga would sit on one of these for hours and hours, browsing that adult fanfic site. While I was working, every so often she'd go "HEY AVSHALOM LOOK AT THIS", and it would be like playing Russian roulette; sometimes it would be a funny picture or an interesting news story, and sometimes it would be a long, lovingly detailed account of Snape porking Harry Potter with a broomstick. The phrase "Lubricous Broomstick" is burnt into my memory and I suspect it will stay there forever. I don't know if she decided she liked unexpectedly springing porn on thirteen-year-olds, but after this, she became the pornographic equivalent of a trench-coat-clad guy lurking in the park. She'd log on, load up some horrifying lemon fic, walk out, and leave it just sitting there for ages. I got used to the other juniors lurching into the common room with a thousand-yard stare, flopping down on the lounges and saying "you would not believe what I just saw." That was later, however, after we were no longer friends. Somehow I strived on through the thorny brambles of random porn and carried on the "friendship" for a little while longer, with some very interesting results. Tune in later to hear about Helga's adventures at Hogwarts, her guardian angels, Helga the Egyptian, and our clandestine love affair! Avshalom fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 04:07
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 15:41 |
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Ah a return of pictures to this thread.
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Oct 28, 2012 04:18
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