Elf friends / Transit strangers

Today: Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the forthcoming Sloppy; and Trevor Alixopulos, comics artist and author of The Hot Breath of War.

Issue No. 148

Fantasy Life
Rax King

My 2024 Vibe
Trevor Alixopulos

Fantasy Life

by Rax King

I was defensive about my Avidgamers habit back in middle school and I remain defensive about it now despite having mostly (mostly) outgrown my hunger to be seen as cool or popular. As a tween, even my nerdiest friends—the ones I could count on to reenact funny scenes from Mel Brooks movies or attend local scrapbooking festivals with me—drew the line at playing Avidgamers. I never knew a single person who would, except online. 

Avidgamers wasn’t an MMORPG, or a video game in which huge numbers of people control avatars together in a world designed by the game’s creators, à la World of Warcraft. It wasn’t what you might think of when you hear “roleplaying game.” It was more like a fantasy writing community, hosting hundreds of text-only forums (known as communities) devoted to every conceivable strain of roleplay. This was the early aughts, years before J.K. Rowling took her anti-trans heel turn, and many of these communities modeled themselves after Hogwarts, with players Sorted into the Houses of the Potterverse; we all still believed in the fundamental goodness of that world. Every anime under the sun had its own dedicated forums, as did young adult literary universes from Abarat to Zazoo. 

Most Avidgamers communities, though, were devoted to the sort of high-fantasy roleplay that included faeries (never “fairies”), elves, and a sanitized take on medieval England. None of our characters had crooked teeth or lice, and it probably goes without saying that the Black Death was not an active concern for us.  The vast majority of them were not only white but platinum blonde, and even the poorest halfling was typically packing one armory’s worth of specialized weaponry—though battle, it must be said, was less common than endless suitings-up for battle. We spent a lot of time clanking flagons in taverns and running into each other in twilit copses. In our posts the adjective count was high, and accurate knowledge of medieval history—even the bastardized, fictionalized versions of medieval history that appear in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tamora Pierce—was minimal. Gowns and castles were little more than set dressing, and how richly described that set dressing was, too! An especially fine gown might warrant four paragraphs describing the sleeves alone. Nicholson Baker, eat your heart out.

Now and then I joined other forums just to add a little variety to my diet, but the communities at the base of my Avidgamers food pyramid were all medieval-fantasy or, to use the lingo of the online aughts, MF. 

We built whole universes ourselves, using words that shared many of the aesthetic and storytelling conventions of Dungeons & Dragons games—the races, the types of enemies, the magic—but our universes were not ruled over by dungeon masters or the rolls of a twenty-sided die. We were the sole, omnipotent narrators, the prime movers of our characters’ lives, and we devised every move they made and every word they said from scratch. If my faerie healer joined your ranger’s hunting party, and I wanted her to take out an Uzi and command the rest of the party to say hello to her little friend—okay, I would’ve caught a ban, but technically any action was available to her that was available to my imagination. The games had almost no rules beyond the ones we set ourselves.