roleplay
28 Dec, 2024
For a moment today, occupying this body and being this person felt strangely bearable. For context, this body is currently at home with its parents. Its parents were initially very pleased with it for being able to lose weight, but the first thing it noticed was that none of the mirrors here had that gentle concavity of its mirror at home. In these mirrors it looked bloated and wide and greasy and pockmarked. It initially used the ‘he’ pronoun for itself while writing that last sentence. It ripped through the page with the surprise of an exploding landmine. That wasn’t a good simile. It isn’t good at writing, and sometimes the façade of self-assuredness it has built over years of reading its own painful attempts at affect and convincing itself it’s all worth something - sometimes it crumbles.
Occupying this pockmarked, bloated body and being this waste of skin felt bearable for a moment today, but then I realized it’s because I’ve been sucked back into the world of online roleplay. Roleplay lies somewhere on the spectrum between gooning and amateur online fiction. On one extreme of the spectrum, erotic roleplayers write crisp, succinct sentences about what they want to do to each other’s bodies. This is sort of like sexting, but executed through quasi-institutional trappings. Sexting carries at least the pretense of legitimate physical attraction between the parties involved. In erotic roleplay, you pretend to be the body your partner likes and vice versa. You can start with a swap of kink-lists, character descriptions, quickly hash out a scene starter and get going in a matter of minutes after first encountering your partner.
The other side of the spectrum is much more respectable. These roleplayers (who go by advance literate, novella-style, and other such honorifics) enjoy building detailed character sheets, conceptualizing complex backstories, and structuring their plots before starting to roleplay. They used to congregate around tumblr and livejournal.
Now, all of these roleplayers can be found on Discord, all across different servers.
My own experience with roleplay began with the smuttier side of the spectrum, on Omegle. I wonder, nowadays, what my first one was like. I wonder how ‘advanced-literate’ I was. Omegle was a fun place at the time for roleplay. You had many of the baseline gooner types that still pervade almost all online spaces. But you also had people coming up with interesting sci-fi plots. I once roleplayed a man having sex with a strange alien.
I don’t know how I realized that many of the roleplayers on Omegle saying they were women were actually men. Maybe that isn’t a very woke way of looking at it. I don’t know, maybe they were women. Anyway, I began to pretend to be a woman on Omegle to do erotic roleplays. Verisimilitude was very important to me. I drove men urgent with need. And some other people who claimed to be women too. Maybe they were women. Maybe they were whatever I was/am.
This one time, I had a very strange experience with another girl-avatar on an MMO game. We met because of a reference she made about the culture on that MMO a few years ago, which she caught. We identified each other then as girl-avatar people who have been around for a while. We began to talk, and then to wander through old, abandoned, user-generated rooms and joked and laughed. We arrived at a room where players used to get married years ago – a sort of church room. It had long been abandoned. We fake married each other there, but there was a certain breathlessness to it. My heart was beating so fast. We did erotic roleplay – the terse, rapid-fire kind, but it was better than any of the advance literary stuff I’d done till then. We held hands, explored more rooms, made fun of people and did hilarious bits together over the course of the next three days. Once, her chat got locked because she said something inappropriate, so I would speak to her over text and she could respond only in emojis.
On the third day, I became very afraid and consumed with the guilt of the Lord. I abandoned the game for a couple of weeks. When I returned, she had left me long, plaintive messages and then deleted the account.
I don’t have a profound point to make about all of this. I’m not a very good writer or thinker, and I don’t think I will do a PhD or make any good art or do anything very different from what I’m doing now. But I think that all the roleplaying was very necessary to help me survive that period of my life. It died out when I left, and I could be my own person a little bit. In the months leading up to this visit back home, I picked it back up again, logging into a years-old discord account to reconnect with old roleplayer friends and restarting old roleplayer threads.
(tw: really intense description of how dysphoria makes me feel)
Occupying this pockmarked, bloated body and being this waste of skin felt bearable for a moment today, because I’ve been doing roleplay. The moment I realized this, some of the charm was lost, and I am left with wave after wave of crippling dysphoria crashing into me. I saw a photo of myself in which everything was so clear: the bald patch where my hair parts, the disgusting facial hair, the chest hair, the rotund male-pattern waist and belly. The photo was taken from at least 3 or 4 meters away, but that’s what people see: this huge, hulking man with a head full of long hair, soft flabby jowls covered with facial hair, dead eyes, mouth slightly ajar. Fucking disgusting.
My mother looks and me and yearns for me to have a Christian wife, to be the father of children. She says this over and over again. I said I’m going out to meet a couple of friends and mentioned their names, and she asked so many questions about the one with the female name. It’s funny but also serious and also a little bit disgusting.
I am trying to imagine good futures for myself where I can be free and without all this pain. But I am also so lonely.