Goodbye

Hello,

I guess it’s time.

I don’t know how many of you will read this. I was never what you’d call a primary player, or a big deal. I haven’t even been writing that much with JvS for the last few months. But I’ve garnered enough respect for my work over the last ten years, I’d hope, that the fact that I’m writing a goodbye letter means something. And yes, this is goodbye--to JvS.

I’m so glad I found this place. It’s given me some of the most profound relationships in my life, including that of the man I married. I’ll always be grateful to the JvS community for what it was to me when I needed it. Someplace to be creative, to try new things and see new things, to enjoy the uniquely enjoyable blend of stupidity and genius, to push myself and my own talents into something I’d like to think is, if not always poetic, inherently readable writing. I love the friends I’ve made--good friends that point out your own failures and force you to be bigger than you want to be.

But it’s time for me to go. And...well, if I said ‘it’s not you, it’s me’, I’d be lying.

I’ve written out this letter a couple of times because I felt I owed this community an explanation for why I’m throwing deuces and taking my toys elsewhere. I mean, I don’t, really. That’s a fallacy. There’s also the fact that nothing I could possibly complain about is ever going to change, because that’s not how people are. It’s more likely it’ll be written off as sour grapes from someone who never put in the work to Make The Site Great Again...which it might be, a little. But there’s something to be said about purging oneself when starting over, if only to try to keep from falling back into old bad habits. At the very least, I can be different. Maybe knowing that this is out there will help me change, where I’m going.

I will say this: I’m not nearly as MAD at what the site has become as some people I know, mostly because I’ve seen it coming for years. The increasingly glacial pace, the shrinking pool of writers, the cliques, the politics, the continuity lockout that makes it increasingly less appealing to read other people’s stuff because I have no idea WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. It’s all been pretty obvious, and sometimes kind of funny at how up our own butts we could be about being ‘writers’. (Yes, me too. I’m not arrogant enough to deny when my head’s been up my own butt about ‘artistic integrity’. Old Bad Habits, right?).
Yeah, the continued failed attempts at injecting fresh life into the place were frustrating, but at the same time I could laugh at it. Maybe that’s BECAUSE I wasn’t one of those big names that people seemed to depend on to carry the place. I’m not nearly as invested as you’d think, given I’ve been here for ten years. I could see it from the outside, pipe in when I was bored, write with the small pool of people I still liked writing with, and fade out when the increasing crustiness of the place bored me worse than being gone.

That’s really what most of this is: boredom. I’m SOOOOO BORED, guys, and leaving Na’an and Leigh here compared to the livelier galaxies they could be in seemed like the worst possible fate I could give them. There’s so much evolving I want to do that, if I left them here, would never happen.

I say most. Not all.

I will say what, once I really thought about it, became the straw that broke my back for this community. The moment may seem small, but it spoke volumes.

One day shortly before The Last Jedi came out, I checked into chat and find that a relatively new writer had been workshopping ideas there, only to have them summarily shot down one by one. Now, I’ve shot down a dumb idea or two in the past, and I’ve critiqued this specific writer’s ideas myself from time to time, in the spirit of wanting to help them improve (an example of me being up my own butt sometimes, as I’ve said before). That’s not in and of itself what bothered me. No, what really struck me was when some of these more established names on the site got...vocal...about the idea this new writer had about writing their character a pet porg. The logic was that since the new movie hadn’t come out yet, she knew nothing about porgs, and thus writing one was a gamble at best, and outright foolish at worst.

Then I realized that a couple of these vocal names wrote some of the 14 Knights of Ren characters on the site. Yeah, on JvS there’s 14 members of a group that NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE FOR OR WHAT THEY DO BECAUSE THEY’VE HAD LESS THAN TEN SECONDS OF SCREENTIME. A few of them are quite popular! And yet we were all shooting down a sweet girl playing with space puffins.

The more I thought about that moment, the more it put things into perspective for me. I mean, it was REALLY hypocritical. And petty. And it amounted to little more than squashing a new idea just because it didn’t live up to our ‘standards’ of ‘artistic integrity’ on first blush. (And before anyone starts, no, citing production notes, filmbooks or the wiki does not make it better. If anything, it’s even pettier.) Just how many times had that happened? Did I really want to contribute to that anymore? Because I had been.

I mean, for Pete’s sake, guys, it’s just roleplay. There’s nothing wrong with a little blatant wish fulfillment.

It took me a while between then and now, but I’ve found a place where the rules are consistent for everyone, where innovation is valued, where the pace is faster and the stories more engaging because they’re not planned to the nines--where stories may, if I let them, grow beyond me. I don’t know what’s going to happen there, and neither does anyone else, and that’s kind of beautiful because it captures what I loved about, hell, even the Facebook days of JvS. That sense of unbridled creativity, of spontaneity, of the dangerous unknown, of FUN. Even the ridiculous fanboy crossover shit, as long as it follows the rules, gets to stay and has to be worked with, because who knows? That’s where we got stuff like the Corruption, back in the day. Like Dash Vos, gods bless him. Like Vyra Amidala the former Padme expy, and like the incredibly bad but rather funny insanity of Windu drinking Jedi blood like Capri Sun, and like a certain preteen nudist with a symbiotic connection to an entire planet.

...Yeah, a lot of our old epic stuff sounds KINDA stupid when you state it bluntly. But I love the stupidity. I MISS the stupidity. It was creative. It was fun, and unpredictable, and campy, and very much in the spirit of Star Wars. You could probably do something similar with canon Star Wars stuff, but that doesn’t stop it from also being brilliant sometimes. (Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s amazing how much of a doofus Boba Fett is when you lay it all out).

The irony is..the porg thing? Once I really thought about it? It could have been cool! Imagine if someone had started writing a pet porg only to find out that porgs were sentient, and imagine the weird creative twists they would have had to take on the fly to reconcile that! Very Futurama.

As Yoda has now said, “We are what they grow beyond.” JvS was my start into this hobby. It mentored me through a long and happy decade. I may even still pop into the chat from time to time (Although some people probably won't appreciate my presence, after this). But I’ve grown past it. Me, and Na’an, and Leigh--it’s time for us to move on. Yes, I have permission from Kevin to take Leigh, and yes, they’re porting over wholesale, memories and all. It’s going to be fun. We even have a new character waiting for us over on the new place. See? I think she’s a riot, even if she’s a little shit. Hit me up if you’re ever on Chaos and want a good time.

So, I’ll just end with a bow, a smile, and just because I can’t resist, a confession that, if you’re willing to think about it, makes my point more sharply than anything I just said up there:



Do any of you remember the Sanbra Library Association?



It was my idea.



I love you all, but JESUS.




Jan
Woman in Green and Chief Librarian