Thread:Ecoraptor3339/@comment-4960835-20180126201945/@comment-184.97.65.242-20190121235352

Hey guys.

Hey Gorzill, hey Zilla, hey Eco. This is Crimson. God, I hated that username. I wanted to change it, never did. Should've.

It's been about a year, but I was on the site grabbing some of my old fiction and decided to say what needs saying.

This might be a bit long, so I'll preface it by saying this. I'm not interested in returning, I'll get that out of the way right now. That would be contradictory to the reason I'm writing this. I want to clear the air, so I can look back on the time I spent on this site as a good experience. I did have quite a lot of fun here, and I'm tired of that being marred by a few mistakes.

I suppose you might've wondered why I rather lost my mind towards the end there. There are reasons, but I don't think they really matter. I'll state some of them anyway, but I offer no excuses for the inexcusable, only explanations.

I've always had trouble with mental illness, which includes aggressiveness, lack of empathy for others, propensity for arguing and a total lack of any kind of verbal filter. Sound familiar? Its not usually bad to the extent it was last year, but at the time, I'd just quit school, and gone from daily interaction with others to having hardly any social contact at all. It was very jarring, and compounded by other things, resulted in what you guys witnessed. Like I said, its not an excuse for the way I treated you all, its just an explanation.

On top of that, certain politics became all I'd hear about on TV, the internet, in what little conversation I did have, day after day. I'm not really a Hitler-loving fascist; yes, I've studied them extensively, but out of morbid curiosity and the strange way my brain finds things fascinating. It'd take a wall of text twice this size to explain anything about how my brain works. Anyway, my hatred of the rising alt-right politics brewed nicely in my brain, and I needed to scream, and rant and rave. Claiming allegiance to such an ideology was how I tried coping. Kind of ironic, I know, given the flags many alt-righters like to wave. My reasonings, and justifications, they're not something I'm interested in writing and I'm sure you're not interested in hearing.

Again, not an excuse. Though I do hope you can see my offensive rants as products of frustration and other things, rather than me just being a bad person, or a... what do the internet people call them alt-right trolls? Edge-lords?

In any case, if I recall I was ready to leave around the time Gorzill and I had our falling out anyway. I think at the time I was telling myself that you guys didn't like my fiction anyway, and didn't want my participation. That might've been the case at the end due to my writing becoming increasingly nonsensical. I think part of me always felt like an outsider with you guys, and that my fiction didn't fit with yours, but I think I know why.

I didn't join the wiki because I had my own Spore ideas I wanted to publish. I joined because for the past year before I joined, I'd been reading your fiction extensively. It was my favorite of the Spore material I had read. I'm not sure why exactly I joined in the first place. I do remember I created nothing for the first few weeks, and then only small things to add onto your fiction. Like those Nexus Heads. I guess you could say I viewed your fiction like Frank Herbert's Dune, and didn't want to become Brian by adding a bunch of second-rate ideas to it. But hey, what was i gonna do? Hang around the threads like a bat and parrot "helpful" ideas?

Looking back, I was always a little resentful of my own additions to the fiction. I blame the tangents I'd go on with some of my characters as the cause of death for the Mirusian Conflicts. Almost all of my starting characters were individuals of species you guys had created, too. Because, at the time, I thought adding my own would've made me "Brian"!

So there you have it. I was never trying to steal or take over your fictions. I'm not even sure how someone would actually go about doing that. I used your stuff at first because I didn't want to damage the integrity of your fiction, and later because, and I'm not sure how well to put this into words, I guess I didn't see our fictions as being exclusive; I figured the best stories could be made from a shared collective of ideas, that any one of us could've and should've mixed and matched ideas to make the best stories. I'm not sure that's how collaboratives are supposed to work, but oh well. Truth be told, I wouldnt've minded if you guys had used my creations as liberally as I used yours. There might've been a few times when someone did, and I got irritated, and while I don't know the specifics, you might chalk it up to sheer hypocrisy. In general, though, none of you engaged with my fiction to the extend I did with yours (and that might've been a good thing!), and that made me feel a bit rejected. Whether that makes any sense, I'll leave for you to decide.

Now that I can sit back and think about my contributions, I think my work was definitely not as good as I thought it was. I'm very good at coming up with ideas, but putting them down in writing? Not so much. No matter how much detail I throw into something, I can never seem to flesh it out into more than a few skimpy paragraphs. I have the same trouble with book writing. I think my inability to flesh things out led to the degradation of my fiction. Especially Fenric Vermillion. He was supposed to be as good of a character as Glacier was. Yeah, right. I'm not sure what led to his total failure as a character, but I think the most likely explanation is I hardly wrote any actual stories about him, only descriptions, and that made him seem two dimensional and poorly developed.

On the subject of Fenric: I never should have had him conquer Ugandalore. That was, I'm almost certain of, is what killed my Spore contribution. What a stupid, nonsensical plot that was. Doing it over again, I'd have had him go straight to the northern part with the clans and had him do some kind of low-level insurgency. That would've made much more sense, and made a much better story. Or, I could've just not killed off Glacier. That might've been my ultimate mistake. But then again, Glacier'd become a good guy. His story was all but ended.

Anyway, yeah, I hated Fenric, but I wanted to make his story work, so I kept reaching. That's why he got as bad an end as Glacier. If anyone's curious, the ending I would've went with would be having him freeze to death in the blizzard as planned, but then being forced to repeat his entire doomed quest for power from the beginning (because of that crow-staff curse), having his memories intact, but being forced to fail no matter what for all eternity. That was the only good ending for him once I'd ruined his character.

Now Durrandon, he was my last gasp. I honestly think that, if I'd taken my vacation two months earlier than I did (and thus avoiding the fight with Gorzill), I could've come back refreshed and made Durrandon the best character I'd ever conceived. I don't think anything I wrote about him ruined him; I quit before I could flesh him out. I think you guys would've liked where he was going.

In light of the fact that I frequently took inspiration from real people and countries in history, I've been thinking of taking some of my fiction and combining it with other ideas, and writing a series of alternate history novels set in the early 1900s, with my characters as humans leading real or semi-real countries. It might come to something if I'm inspired enough to focus on it. That's really what it takes for me to write well is focus.

In conclusion, all I ask is that we declare our confrontations as water under the bridge, and that we part as good friends who worked together on some good stories. Things were said that should not have been, but that's in the past, and the past shouldn't haunt you. I still harbor some anger over how we parted, but I'd like to kill that hear and now, and that's why I''m writing this. I will hold no more anger towards you for anything said, nor to the admins for banning me. I hope you all will do the same. I'm not Spartan or that other guy, Thunderbird. I'm not a troll.

I'll probably visit the site from time to time to collect pieces of my fiction, so if anyone wants to reply to this I'll see it. I'll probably read some of your fiction, and enjoy it like I did before I joined the wiki. It was a fun four years I had with you guys. Pity it ended the way it did, but that's life. So here's to you guys, and Glynn and Cyrannian too. May you have long and meaningful lives. Crimson out.