Ask me about growing up with a girl who thinks she's married to anime guys

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me about growing up with a girl who thinks she's married to anime guys

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Haymaker_Betty posted:

I take a deep breath and step a little closer, looking down. And there, slightly unwrapped from it's toilet paper cocoon, is a big old piece of poo poo.

Just... sitting there, like a giant rat at the bottom of the wastebin, looking up at me as if to say, "Tanya's loving crazy."

No. We never asked her about it.

The first thing that came to my mind is maybe her parents were hoarders, and she was used to toilets that didn't work? So she pooped in the trash out of habit?

It's the only plausible explanation I can think of, really.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2012 01:55

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 11:11

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

a cock shaped fruit posted:

What answered the door was a large woman in a stained anime hoodie, thick glasses and a half smiling face that quickly turned to a look of contempt when greeted by my penis having self. Let's call her Rachel.

"Um, who are you."

"I am Cockfruit...I was given this address for a split rent agreement?"

"The form said you were a girl..." (This isn't true, the form merely showed that I had a feminine name, which is true.)

I was tired when I read this, and thought you had literally introduced yourself as "Cockfruit," in which case there would be no wonder she freaked out about your maleness. I'm still picturing the scene in my head that way.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 07:44

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Mind Loving Owl posted:

Anyone got any stories about people they know growing out of all this.

My best friend in grade school seriously believed for a while that she was going to turn into an elf and go live in the forest with the other elves. I'm not sure if these were Tolkien elves or Elfquest elves - she was really into Elfquest at the time. She was hanging out with some much older people in the Medieval Fair scene at the time, and picked this up from them, I think.

Anyway, I think it was mostly escapism because she lived in an sbusive home (I didn't know this at the time) and after dropping out of high school and moving to California to be with some guy she met on a MUDD (this was in like 1993), she ended up getting a very lucrative job in the dot-com boom years and doing pretty well for herself. These days she's married, has a kid, and seems totally normal as far as I can tell from her Facebook posts.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2012 16:17

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

I find it hilarious how thoroughly Anne Rice fandom ended up embracing the movie after the initial shrieks of protest over Tom Cruise being cast as Lestat. I was pretty into those books at the time, too, and I remember lots of fangirl rage when that announcement was made. (My primary fictional crush was a completely different whiny gay man with supernatural powers, however - Vanyel Ashkevron from Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald-Mage books. I did not quite get to the point of believing he was real and married to me, but I certainly wished he were.)

# ¿ Jan 4, 2013 01:34

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

I can't remember if I've mentioned this in this thread before, but there are either 2 or 3 different little boys named Raistlin in my town, or one kid who's done more than his share of ringbearer duties, because I've seen the name in three different wedding announcements.

I mean, I had a thing for Raistlin when I was 13, too, but I was thirteen.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2013 19:05

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Corridor posted:

Jeffrey phased off the forums a while later and we never saw or heard from him again. Right up until the time I left the place, people still talked about HarleyQuinn and Kyanna as good friends of theirs that they missed, and I would roll my eyes and say nothing.

I'll summarize this briefly because it's not quite on the main subject of the thread, but I had a similar experience on a forum I ran. First there was a couple who posted regularly. Then they died in a car wreck and the woman's best friend started posting. Then her legitimacy got questioned, and she disappeared. Shortly thereafter, a guy started posting (this is on a nearly all-female forum), followed by his girlfriend. All five of these different posters shared a few key traits: they were rabidly pro-life, staunchly Catholic, yet pro-gay rights. They believed the Catholic church would eventually come around on gay marriage. They were all Irish-Americans. Oh, and most notably, all three of the "female" posters had given up a baby for adoption who was the result of a rape. Yes, all three of them.

This went on for something like five years and included the latest couple's live-updated proposal and wedding vows before anyone questioned their reality. This despite none of them ever sharing pictures of themselves, and giant holes in their backstories (some rather gruesome details of one of the poster's supposed abortion seemed inaccurate). And the guy who claimed to be a second-generation immigrant from Ireland didn't know what the term "Black Irish" meant.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 04:10

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Dick Burglar posted:

You say you ran the forum--did you ever check if they shared IP addresses?

No, I couldn't - I didn't actually own the website, it was one of those old-school free forum sites where anyone could create a forum and admin it, but you didn't actually have a lot of control over it. (It was on Delphi, just fyi.)

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 00:03

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Hibiscus, I have to thank you for introducing me to the Aristasia internet rabbit hole. They're an endless font of batshit. And this web site definitely belongs in this thread: http://sundaughterpress.com. The author's apparently self-published novel is described as follows:

quote:

On one level a wild fantasy adventure, Goldenhead considers the subject of imaginary friends and imaginary worlds. Are they really imaginary, or are we sometimes in contact with realities that go deeper than the �real� world in which we find ourselves?

And those of us who don�t feel we �belong� here in this mundane, patriarchal world: could it be simply because we don�t?

Goldenhead introduces an amazing all-girl cast of characters, many of whom resemble anime characters, because anime is not just an art style but the �look� of certain alternate realities:

There's a photo toward the bottom of the page of a woman at an "international book tour" with an anime character inserted into the picture, and the author is billed as the first ever "anime character author." I rolled my eyes and thought "How lame, lots of authors have written about anime characters." Then I looked at the author's Amazon.com page and realized no, the anime character herself is purported to be the author of this book.

ETA: A question just occurred to me. Does it ever happen that relationships within this strange subculture turn out to be "homosexual" by their own definition? That is, do blondes ever fall in love with other blondes, and brunettes with other brunettes? Do the Aristasians consider this wrong?

pookel fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Jan 8, 2014

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 06:51

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Hibiscus posted:

Nowadays, they've abandoned romance entirely. No flirting, nothing like that. Instead, they practice amity, which is friendly love.

I saw a lot of this in the literature, but I also noticed that in practice, on the forums, there seemed to be a lot of reference to having relationships and falling in love, and discussion about how to meet nice blondes if you were a brunette and vice versa.

My mind was really blown by that Shining Maidens site, where they posted chat transcripts in which people apparently spent hours and hours dissecting episodes of Precure and attributing profound meaning to everything in it, while sneering at "Tellurians" who don't understand its deeper meaning.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 19:56

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

Hibiscus posted:

You must be talking about the older sites.

The posts are from the last year, on a site called "Heartbook" which bills itself as the Aristasia Social Network. There's a lot of anime talk there, too.

No talk of sex, but this, for example, is pretty relationship-focused:

quote:

Thank you Miss Vargas for your contribution. I find it rather interesting. I do notice how pit brunettes tend to deck themselves in masculine attire. It can at times be easy to find them this way. I think my biggest complaint about pit brunettes is that they are so focused on creating an image that they can become quite crude. My vision of a perfect brunette is one with a sense of good clean humor and wit. I believe a brunette should be articulate and well mannered as well as sensitive to a blond�s occasionally timid behavior. Blondies seldom say what they want in mixed company and will often go along with the general consensus of the crowd lest anyone become unsettled. If a brunette is gentle maiden enough to ask the blond separately, she would certainly win a piece of her heart! I have seldom met a brunette whose gruffness has not intimidated me into retreat no matter how fascinated I become.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2014 01:20

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

kinmik posted:

There isn't any weird single incident that comes to mind, but one of the strangest aspects of the church, I believe, is the concept of "baptism for the dead". If you're familiar with the Mormon temples, you know that it's open to exclusively members only (except when one is newly built in which case there's an open house), which sounds vaguely cult-ish. An array of ceremonies take place there, from marriages to family sealing to the aforementioned baptisms. The basic gist of that is when someone who isn't part of the church dies, people pray hard and if they get a...feeling that the deceased wishes to become part of the church, from the afterlife, mind you, then another person is appointed a proxy for the deceased and gets baptized for them.

Incidentally, the LDS church has gotten in big trouble in this one a few times when some brilliant people decided to start posthumously baptizing lists of Holocaust victims. I believe the LDS leadership agreed to cut it out (with Jews, anyway), but I don't know if that actually stopped all the members from doing it.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 20:47

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

It sounds like the sort of otherkin identity a really cool 4-year-old would come up with.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2016 22:27

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

CommissarMega posted:

To be fair, it's fun to imagine yourself as someone cooler than you are, no matter how old you get. Our dads like to think of themselves as cowboys (at least mine does), I'd give my nuts to be a Space Marine etc. It's just that you shouldn't let these fantasies take over. Hell, even assuming that *~all fictional worlds are real somewhere in the infinitely vast, wondrous multiverse~* and that you really are an incarnation of your favourite anime/40K character/power tool- so what? Right here and now you're a human being on Earth, and regardless of whether or not you're Heero Yuy you really need a bath. Like, right now.

See, the less crazy folks who are into this stuff tend not to think they are LITERALLY reincarnations of wolves or excavators or whatever. I know someone who self-ID'd as a furry until she found out about the creepy ones and got embarrassed. For her it was more of a metaphor, I think. Not wish fulfillment so much as "I have personality traits that I feel are represented by images of wolves."

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 17:09

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

CommissarMega posted:

Ahahaha, could you get into the specifics of this? How would your spirit animal somehow offend them, even if you were joking?

I'd imagine it's the not-even-slightly-veiled mockery of their belief system that's the offensive part, just at a guess.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2016 23:42

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 11:11

pookel: Oct 27, 2011; Ultra Carp

froglet posted:

Harry Potter - wtf is Hermione doing with Ron? Ron is lazy, jealous and petty and she herself admits he has the 'emotional range of a teaspoon'.
Wheel of Time series - Rand has like 3 love interests and while he has some cursory angst about it he decides to keep them all and all three of them are cool with this because well, he is the Dragon Reborn!
Game of Thrones - almost noone in those books has anything approximating a normal relationship with their friends, family or spouses.
Wildmage series by Tamora Pierce - in the final book of the series, the main character shacks up with her mentor, who she met when she was 13 and in the final book she's like 16 or 17.

Yeah, but no one should be letting their 9-year-olds read Game of Thrones either. I don't care how precocious the kid is, they don't need to be reading graphic, horrifying gang rape and torture scenes.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 22:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me about growing up with a girl who thinks she's married to anime guys