ooc: why i stopped using this blog
(( i recently saw a close friend of mine (@ultimate-waifu-bait) mention this blog, only to have a few discussions ensue about the effect that its disappearance had on the community. and honestly, as much as i'm flattered that anyone would think i had that much influence, you give me too much credit while also inadvertently blaming me for a lot of the problems i still struggle with on my existing, active blogs. i'll try to keep this short and sweet, so here we go. ))
(( in truth, many of zetsuko's important relationships dissolved. one of them due to a personal conflict that i, to this day, don't completely understand and won't discuss with anyone who wasn't involved. another was haru. i think everyone is aware that the relationship between haru and zet had been building for a while, and while that was not something i initially had planned for the blog, i liked the way it was developing, and i got to know the mod of that blog and we agreed to feel it out and go for it. i built my next major event on those two relationships. both of them disappeared over the next few months, making it pretty much impossible to go forward with the event without the end result being a pretty sure death for zet. i tried to push through it anyway without the assistance of the people who were supposed to be involved, but it fell flat. i disliked it a lot, nobody took any interest in it, it was rushed and unexciting, and it was extremely discouraging. ))
(( at that point, the community had already been struggling. i say this because someone attributed the "death" of the community-- which is alive but trying desperately to get people to participate again may i add-- to my blog going inactive. that timeline is wrong. the community had already started to go inactive, which was part of the reason running this blog was so discouraging. with no relationships and no anons sending asks, it was impossible to be active. i would've had to make update post after update post, every single day, in order to even keep him alive, which at that point didn't seem worth it. ))
(( now moving on to the primary reason. i stopped liking him. when i started his blog, i had an idea of how i wanted his character to progress, and there's been a lot of adjustment over time, but the more certain relationships pulled him one way or another, the more i disliked the direction he was being taken. quite honestly, the moment the first seance occurred, it was the beginning of the end, though i had no idea at the time. his blog was around for so, so long after that, but at that point he was dragged away from the more grounded-if-absurd world of danganronpa toward the supernatural, a world he doesn't fit in or operate out of. he doesn't have powers, unless you count his luck, and that's no match for angels and demons and ghosts and all of the other forces he had to interact with. and i enjoyed the people i interacted with, but i didn't enjoy the story i was creating. by the time i stopped using this blog, he was hardly recognizable to me. i tried, in a last stitch attempt, to reset him and take him back to a more familiar place, but i realized that even then he wasn't familiar anymore-- i'd moved so far past where he started and so far away from what i wanted him to be that being him was almost jarring and uncomfortable. combined with the lack of interest from anons and the lack of impactful relationships to motivate me to care about him, especially the dissolution of two primary relationships, there was no good motive for me to stay here. ))
(( i loved this blog, and i still do, as well as all the memories i have of it. the relationships he had with people like haru, nagito, chieko, kihiro, ed, even mukuro/ash at the time, were a major part of my life, and extremely formative for me. this was my first dip into roleplay, and since then it has become one of my primary hobbies. hence why i'm still in the community, just operating in a place where i feel more comfortable and in control of the story i'm telling. ))
(( if you cared about this blog, you should care about the blogs that are still around, oc and canon and au. you should care about chieko and nagito, aditi, hajime, fay, hibiki, miyako, miu. you should care about the new blogs that are struggling to exist and dying out within days. you should care about not just witnessing the stories that we are telling, but participating in them and progressing them, sending asks, stirring drama between characters. us mods love it when you snitch to other characters, or lie to our characters, or start fights or play devil's advocate. think of the relationship between zet and nagito. it was entirely confrontational, but some of my fondest memories of roleplay are of the infamous love potion m!a, the killing game, and the two of them fighting together to save izuru and hajime from the future foundation. seeing other people mention your blog to others in the community is so encouraging, and seeing other mods care about and nurture the relationships you are interested in is incredible. the relationship between zet and nagito might not have developed if that hadn't been the case. i was terrified of nagito's mod, but they took an interest in zet and anons constantly bugged him about what zet was doing, but in a way that not only progressed the relationship but progressed both of their stories rather than ignoring them. meanwhile it's depressing to see mods have to put out update after update begging for asks and struggling to maintain relationships. the stakes in a relationship are what make it fun for the mods, and if no one cares about the relationship, there aren't any stakes, and they probably are going to either stop nurturing it or lose interest in it altogether. i'm here, saying all of this now, because i'm begging you to care about the people who are here. stop reminiscing about the people you miss and leaving everyone else out in the cold. as much as i appreciate being missed, i'm still in the community and struggling, and i don't want the hard work of the people who came before me and the continuing work of the people who came after me to be completely ignored for the sake of broken nostalgia. i appreciate being loved, but the way to respect me and show that you genuinely cared about the story i was telling is to care about the stories that people are still telling with a lot less support than i got. ))
