I don't want this to sound wrong. This person was only twenty years old. I am not calling him beautiful for any kind of sneaky secret desire on my part. It is purely aesthetic appreciation here. The viewing of some beautiful artwork--a thing put together with utmost care and magnificence. I find this young man to be a pleasure to look at. He cosplayed a lot of the things I like: Marshall Lee, the vampire boy from Adventure Time, any kind of Neko creature, anime of all sorts, and he made an awfully pretty girl. Beautiful.
While I don't mind praising his beauty, and admitting that his beauty is what drew me, it took me a long time to want to talk about what happened to him. Or, at least, what I think happened to him. I don't investigate it too much, honestly. I don't want to know the real end of the story, and I hold out hope that what I am thinking is wrong. This beautiful person was gay. He was twenty. He was a Canadian model, or so I've read. He got on camera and made a lot of our personal cosplay/anime dreams come true out of the kindness of his heart and his willingness to share. And, from what I've read, he's dead--bullied to death by those who didn't appreciate the kind of person that he was. Cyber bullying= the new, safe, anonymous, way to destroy people from the inside out.
My heart cries out against the sheer waste of life here. Frankly, I can't even imagine how anyone could be mean to him. But, because I roleplay with the written word, I hung around a bunch of the 'type' of people who brought about his demise. I pretended to be like him, and I suffered their cruelty, day in and day out for months and months and months. If asked why I did it, I wouldn't be able to give you a sane answer. I suppose it can simply be narrowed down to the fact that I honestly wanted to know something of how it felt, and I honestly wanted to understand something of the minds of the people who would do something like this--torture someone--and then continue to consider themselves good people at the end.
I can tell you this much from sheer experience and my experience was toned down because while the things they said to me where cruel, disturbing, and downright hateful, I didn't feel them the way that someone who really was what they were saying they were would--if that sentence makes any sense at all. I hurt. I felt guilty for no fucking reason half the time. I felt disturbed. I received private message upon private message of images that were so vile they made me cringe inside, and, yet, I was still distanced from it because I wasn't being me. I was being someone else. And still, a lot of times, I wanted to cry as insult after insult was hurled at me over and over again. Each insult from a different person. Some just in passing. Others, concentrated efforts by individuals for long periods of time. Purposeful. Malicious. All of it like a lead weight that kept growing and growing until I was paranoid and mistrustful.
And, yet, the same people that were torturing me would erect shrines to this particular person--which is how I found out who he was and what happened to him in the first place. "Rest in Peace" they'd write, with little poems about how tragic his death was. "Angel" and "We will miss you," and so on and etc., and then go right back to the same torture that harmed him in the first place. I would like to emphasize the fact that it was the lead weight effect that was the most damaging. Little things from individuals all day every day that a profound effect. Logging in to that site and checking my emails became something of a torture. And I often thought about how horrible they were when I wasn't even there.
I can't even imagine the way this young man must have felt in receiving that kind of feedback. And not just on that one site--but all of them. A constant deluge of that kind of off-hand cruelty building up and building up until it is huge and uncontrollable. A meanness that is almost senseless--but still takes time to click send on the email. Raining. Constant. HORRIBLE.
And what does the face of this kind of bully look like? In my case, it was a bunch of teenage girls mostly--some were a little older. The kind that love Justin Beiber and One Direction. Those little girls and young women send me some of the most disgusting pornography I've ever seen--again and again and again. They made me hate the word YAOI--how two men having sex is for women I will never understand. While love is for everyone lucky enough to find it, I don't get the meaning of that particular word. And it kind of pisses me the fuck off.
Enough for today. Maybe I'll write more about this later.
-Rage Quits The Game-
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