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That drat Satyr's posts made me want to share, because holy poo poo is it a "but by the grace of crazy-people go I" story. I'm honestly even a little worried to publish this, because...well, stalkers are going to stalk. Growing up I was very good friends with a girl named Danielle--we were in a small school system/had similar interests/etc. But by high school we were in different school systems--she went to a private one, me to public. We had more differences at this point, like her parents had bought her a horse she showed and I had a full-time job/about a million smaller things generally related to socioeconomic status. When it came to school things though we were pretty identical--she got a 5 on an AP exam, I got a 5 on an AP exam. She won the Best Scholar Award, I won Best Scholar Award, etc. We were basically nerdy overachievers who watched a lot of anime and spent a lot of time on slow-rear end dialup internet, and so we talked a lot on ICQ about *~how deep and intelligent~* we were/how hot Heero was from Gundam Wing/etc. Cringy, but nothing earth shattering. As time went on, however, things got weird. Danielle would continuously stand me up, make fun of me, and write long blog posts about how I was an idiot--very Mean Girls stuff. (An important note: Danielle was way, way more attractive than I was. She was honestly a very pretty girl who just happened to dress like a loon, whereas I looked like the love child of Bela Lugosi and Sandra Bernhard. I say this only because many have posited her explosion of weird was due to jealously, and...I just don't see it.) She would scream at me, I would apologize for something (like not understanding that she HAD to yell at me, because *reasons*), we'd both cry and declare our BFF status. Oddly enough pretty typical for 16-year-old girl relations. One day we got into what I thought was a pretty normal fight--she wanted me to come away with her family for an expensive weekend in the city, and I couldn't go. It didn't matter how I explained it--that I couldn't miss work, that I couldn't afford to cover my own food, that I didn't have the clothing necessary to even GET IN to the sort of restaurants her family went to--she steamrolled, insisting I just didn't WANT to. I finally blew-up, and yelled at her that she was a spoiled brat. She went NUCLEAR, and after my mom kicked her out of our apartment Danielle SAT IN HER CAR OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW, wildly sobbing and occasionally honking the horn. I actually started laughing at the absurdity, because it was so over-the-top. I think she saw me laughing in the window, or just got tired, because after about fifteen minutes of this she sped off. We had been writing fanfic together for some time (because of course we were), and the next day I found myself locked out of our shared fanfiction account. Our author profile had been changed to reflect that I had been abusive to her, so much so she'd had to start cutting (never saw evidence of this). I had stolen her boyfriends (she didn't have one); I'd taken her from Jesus (she was Jewish); I abandoned her after a party and left her "in the ghetto" (we didn't get invited to parties!). At this point I'm freaking out about being dumped by a friend who clearly thinks I did something terrible, and have a full-on breakdown. My mom, who had about 10 years of watching this cycle, snapped. She told me NOT to contact Danielle, and took me out for ice cream. She was a good parent. But then things started happening. Over the course of a year, a bunch of weird things happened: an anonymous letter was sent to my high school, alleging I had cheated in a number of courses. Calls came in to my retail boss that I had done things like spit at a customer. Our house was TP-ed several times. Someone silly-stringed my car. My boyfriend would receive ICQ messages alleging I was cheating on him. Now, my parents had the sort of job that attracted general weirdos, and initially thought that's what was happening here. The boyfriend also had a number of emo exes, who I thought might have been mad at me. I also thought that maybe, just maybe, it was Danielle. She still sent me occasional messages telling me how much she hated me, and was fond of posting about "fake friends" on Myspace, but I never thought she would risk getting into trouble. Then letters were sent to several organizations that had given me scholarships for college. One of the letters, which alleged I was faking my race/ethnicity in order to get a scholarship, spawned an investigation. My mom did not take kindly to that, and went in guns blazing. She had a meeting with Danielle's parents, while I sat at home vomiting from fear that Danielle--that I know hated me, and at the time I hated a bit back--would be mad at me. That I was a bad person, because if I hadn't been a bad friend in the first place she never would have needed to send out letters alleging I was the late 90s version of Rachel Dolezal. We had very limited contact after that--we graduated, went to different colleges, etc. The only things that continued to happen were her doing things like making a big show of ignoring me if she happened to run into me and calling me once every few months while drunk to scream that I had ruined her life. Normal weirdo stuff, until right around my senior year of college when I got a call from a mutual friend to google myself. Danielle had been writing, and writing a lot. But her Proustian efforts were no longer limited to how Heero and Duo were totes hot, oh no. Instead she had been writing about me. First and last Real Name me. About the scores of terrible, lovely things I had done to her. I was the mom from "A Child Called It," only uglier because I was attacking an amazing person who had to overcome so much (her list of claims modeled that of the tumblrs that are so often mocked here). All of these things were available online. There were hundreds of pages of this poo poo, where I (and a host of other people, only a handful of whom I knew) set out to destroy her. Yet there were other chapters praising me, which was honestly scarier. I immediately panicked, because holy shitballs. I went to college aid, who advised me to try to contact the other folks listed. A few responded, one of which was a dude who himself came from money...a hell of a lot of money. He got the family lawyer to draw something up, and within 48 hours of me talking to him, all the "fiction" about us was offline. Stories about her being weird trickled back to me, like how she had broken into one of the homes of one the "haters" from her novel, but they were very few and far between. I kept the copy of her novel just-in-case. but finally trashed it after a move when I realized it had been 10+ years without contact, and figured I wouldn't need it. If you can guess who then got a two-page handwritten letter about a month and a half later, as if crazy had some sort of sense, you win all the Internet points. (She was writing to tell me how much she valued our past friendship, and how hurt she was I didn't tell her I was moving. She had written the whole thing in multicolored pen, ROYGBIV style, with every letter being a new color.) She does not have our new address, and I do not have social media. I occasionally still look her up (because of course) she has all of her social media settings set to super-open, mainly to make sure she's not publicly planning on murdering me. She seems happy, but often posts rants about people in her local Lolita costume group.
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Oct 16, 2016 07:00
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Paladinus posted:Wait, there's someone on SA who keeps doing that whenever creepy anime poo poo comes up. Could it be?.. Oh jesus, I hope not. I would like to say that--in her favor!--her costumes always fit/are well taken care of. It is very clear she spends a ton of money on these looks. The problem is that she wears these things CONSTANTLY, which means that you're going to get looks on the street as you're a 30 year old dressed like Strawberry Shortcake.
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Oct 16, 2016 16:05
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Ugh, Mews that is awful. I am so sorry to hear that. Do the blog owners have a quick summary of what's going on? It seems like the FF7 house on steroids.
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Oct 27, 2016 07:56
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Bean posted:What did your mom say, and what did her parents do about it? Not super sure--it was 10ish years ago now, but what I recall from my mom was her basically insisting that Danielle needed to see a doctor/leave me alone, and if it didn't happen my parents were going to move forward with legal charges. Her parents were VERY into their status in the community, and I think the threat was enough--we certainly didn't have for-sure proof it was her, just that the letters were written in a way very similar to the way Danielle frequently wrote. I will say though that I also really liked her parents, and the family as a whole--they were very nice to me, and mostly seemed super befuddled about how their daughter turned into a Lolita-letter-nutjob. That said they bought her an apartment free and clear AFTER she broke into a series of houses, so probably not a healthy dynamic.
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Oct 28, 2016 05:04
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VideoTapir posted:Sounds like what I had been doing is probably the way to go. Hey, who knows, maybe she burns out on fanfic before she even realizes it's a thing. You could also try to get her onto some YA books that are based firmly in the real world. Just don't let her read Stargirl.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:46
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