User:Rabbitty

Not a userpage, but whatever. Because I have feelings I need to purge and this is as good a place as any to write them.

The end of eesm and the end of rp do very much coincide for me. In my eyes, eesm was to some extent an expression of us outgrowing—or at the very least, getting rootbound—in darp. We had run our harry potter derived ideas into the ground. I guess eesm was technically harry potter derived too, but not in any meaningful way. There's a reason we created eesm rather than using the similar-enough durmstrang.

Yet eesm was still pretty distinctively fannish. We were all drawing, thematically and conceptually, from whatever we were into at the time—lilly from divergent, livi from a song of ice and fire, beth from that anime with the flying mint bunnies.

With eesm, we shed the constraints of harry potter, as well as strictures, imposed both by admins, and simply the culture of darp, that said we had to keep it within some sense of propriety—that we could not be too ridiculous. I think it's fair to say that at eesm, we had newly free reign, and we ran with it.

The chronology is a bit hazy, but I think after eesm, I never really did get back into darp. I had wanted to explore ideas from other stories. I wanted more creative freedom than darp allowed. And—after eesm went down particularly—I wanted more control in my storytelling. I wanted to be able to tell a story until I was done, without being cut off midway.

So it makes a lot of sense that my main writer-energy escape valve is, these days, fanfic. And the truth is, quite simply, that I don't see myself returning to darp in the foreseeable future. I sometimes want to, but I think I would just find myself run into the group once again. I don't think it would really work, I don't think it would really yield anything.

But I might give rp another try. I'm hesitant about opening this story up again—it's been like 5 years. Part of me thinks that, for better or worse, this book has been closed. I have spent years metabolizing the story as it ended, and coming to a place where I was ok with that.

But another part of me thinks this story was never closed, not properly, and that I still have endless feelings about these chars, and that we're all older and more mature now and that perhaps this could be something pretty great—that it's at least worth it to try.

But this isn't my decision to make—not really. This is, as rp always is, more out of my hands than in it. I am only one of many gears.

And so I suppose I will watch, and see.