3.8 Mina de Malfois and the Relationship Upgrades

[mina_de_malfois]

Warr1or had been reacting to the destruction of his archive in exactly the sane, balanced way we'd all come to expect from him. He'd stumbled across some sort of unfunny humour forum where people were joking about it, and immediately flown into a blind rage. When he started issuing death threats to people who'd committed the grave sin of finding it vaguely amusing that a site had been deleted, they banned him.

In the meantime, everything I'd heard indicated that most of the archive had been salvageable anyway, and thanks to a lot of time and effort from PrinceC and other unnamed geniuses, it was due back online very soon. PrinceC had told me, more or less confidentially, that he'd invited Warr1or to stay with him until it was entirely sorted out. He felt, he told me, that Warr1or really needed to relax, and although I didn't quite see how PrinceC or anyone else on the planet could accomplish that goal, I lauded him for trying.

And in a way, I was profoundly grateful Warr1or's archive loss was absorbing all his attention. There was a rumour going around that Occult was about to make a major deviation from canon as set in the game, so major that bringing them into this century and giving them a car and a surname paled in comparison. There was, if the Hollywood gossip could be believed, going to be a new character introduced: a secret brother to either Pierce or Jab, who would appear bringing not just news of his canon-warping bastardry, but proof that both Pierce and Jab had been sired by the same father.

I know. If that was true than they weren't just unnaturally fond cousins: they were brothers. With, like, a third brother no one had asked for and no one wanted. I'd heard about it because the most devoted fans were all over the internet, begging for donations so they could place ads on the side of buses protesting this development, said ads to belligerently insist "They probably aren't brothers" in an admirable refusal to bow to canon pressure. Even I'd been hit up, and I'm not in the fandom. I can only imagine Warr1or's inbox seethed with the news, so it was good, really, that he was already too upset in other directions to be on top of this one.

Also, as much as I valued his traditional gardener's talents, I was rather glad Warr1or was shut up in the real-world luxury of PrinceC's pad, and not partaking of the online decadence afforded by Malfois Manor. Liz had been acting rather strange of late. Sighing and moaning at frequencies and intensities above her own average, I mean, and I had the most horrid feeling that this surplus of romanticism was directed at Warr1or himself. Liz had, over the time I'd known her, evolved into someone who was damned sensible about everything except men, but that can be quite a fatal exception, can't it?

Or perhaps I don't mean fatal--Warr1or, for all that he was deep into Occult these days, gave no signs of wanting to harm any females--but certainly worrying. Anyway, for now it was just as well he wasn't bulging manfully around the Manor grounds. Better by far that he remain safely banged up in the condo, where there was no one to be adversely affected by his throbbing masculinity, and only PrinceC to so much as set eyes on him.

I, in the meantime, had a perplexing issue of my own to work out, to wit, whether I should come down in favour of or strongly against anonymity. As this was a fandom issue, no useful middle ground suggested itself.

Pro anonymity we had free speech, protection from the retributions of BNFs and their patrols, the kindness of strangers, an open supportive atmosphere in which to discuss the workings of your bowels and uterus, picspam, commentfic from those too timid to write under the normal level of secrecy associated with a fake online name, and a sort of moral superiority imagined to accrue to the act of being funny, brutally honest, or creative with no expectation of return because no one knew to whom to attribute your humorous creative honesty.

Anti anonymity we had hate speech, hurtfulness, roving gangs of feral teenies, dogpiling, besmirching the names and characters of LNF for no good reason, breaking friendslock to screencap posts in order solely to mock them, and probably assassination attempts or something, I don't even know.

I confess I didn't really see the point of anonymity, myself. If no one knows you're the one behind your own words, how can they possibly appreciate how special you are? I suppose that just doesn't matter to really ordinary fangirls, but to BNFs like myself, it's rather crucial. BNFs are special by definition, really. Everyone knows that. Imagine what fandom would be like if we were all anonymous.

But if someone wanted to interact anonymously, and a sockpuppet wasn't an adequate level of mask, then it was pointless to deny them their anonymity. I mean, what if there was someone out there who longed desperately to tell me how much they loved my fic, but they were too crippled by shyness to comment? It would be tragic, in that instance, to deny them a faceless voice.

So I'd been hanging around at some of the better-known anon sites, alternately amused, infuriated, or bored by the slow and steady of accumulation of drivel that daily occurred therein. And it was there that I first saw him, little dreaming that some pseudonymous entity could be the means of propelling me back into conversation with Arc. But I needed, I came to realize, to warn her. Honour demanded it, even in the face of her having my should-never-have-been-delivered letter in her hands, or, assuming she'd read it, possibly the hands of a trusted therapist.

I should back up a fraction. The anon boards, you see, had their own code of behaviour, which most people adhered to pretty rigidly. Chief amongst their etiquette was the imperative that one comment anonymously. Posting logged in was frowned upon, or laughed at if it happened inadvertently. I didn't, as you might have gathered, see the point in wasting words on conversation that wasn't even going to be attributed to me, but the majority chattered happily away, anon to anon. Except every now and then the memes suffered contributions from those who persisted in giving to themselves, if not a local habitation, at least a username.

And one of these, calling himself Jack in the Box, appeared determined to share the sexual urges that shaped his psyche, however little encouragement the anons gave him. They attacked and derided him with all the goodwill in the world, but still he commented. His evident goal in life was to have as many unknown people as was possible hear all about his fantasies. These, dear reader, revolved around young, virile males satisfying, and thereby sexually controlling, older women.

All well and good, you may be thinking. Or not good, exactly, but par for the internet. But that's where you're wrong. Because to my horror, as I watched his personal drama unfold, it became evident that he'd fixated on one particular woman as the creamy, dreamy ideal version of his fevered desires.

He had a crush on Arc. And not a nice crush, not that he'd have had any business having even the mildest and fluffiest crush on her. No, he had a lurid, vivid, horrid crush.

I almost didn't believe at first that he meant Arc when he said Arc. I mean, technically she is an older woman, at least older than, say, me, but the way he went on about age differences I thought perhaps the name was a coincidence, and it was some other, doddering Archivist to whom he referred. But no. My error possibly lay in the other direction; he harped on the age difference, perhaps, because he himself was terribly young. Which would at least explain the number of times per day he claimed to be doing...the things he claimed to be doing.

The more I read the more obvious it became, dear reader, that this guy was a contender for most Annoying Pervert on the Internet, if you can imagine any one person holding down such a title. It wasn't just that he was a tad twisted, so much as that he was utterly oblivious that not everyone in fandom wanted to read repetitive comments about his Mother Complex.

And he was a smugly arrogant little bastard, too, responding to all pleas that he shut up or take it elsewhere with a kind of tone-deaf moral superiority, and casting himself as the one lone defender of older women's sexuality. He was apparently incapable of working out that his fetishizing them was not, in point of fact, doing anything for older women, other than making a handful of them sick on the internet. His righteous anger when the anons rejected his fantasies was very odd, given that the shrieks of "ewww" were (probably) coming from actual women, who really and truly didn't feel liberated, sexually or otherwise, by his urge to bed his mama or a reasonable approximation thereof.

I especially didn't want to see his frankly icky speculations about what it would be like to have "the lovely Archivist12" as his adopted mother, much less to see that in a comment which included words like "bulging." I could, with years of intensive therapy, perhaps have overlooked one such slip, but he brought it up so often, and with so little encouragement or reason, that I began to fear he might start to impose his attentions on her via email, or more horrendously yet, in real life.

Obviously I needed to warn her. The thing would be to find some way of phrasing the warning that someone had an inappropriate, obsessive, sexual crush on her, without seeming to refer to any recently delivered letters or anything.

It took all the courage I could muster to email her and suggest we needed to talk. Of course immediately afterwards I saw the perfectly obvious solution: I could have emailed her an anonymous warning from a sock account, couldn't I? But it was too late. She responded promptly, and asked if I'd mind dropping by her on-campus accommodation the next day. It was the first I'd ever heard she possessed such a thing, and sheer curiosity went a long way in helping me find the nerve to agree that, yes, I'd drop by at the specified address.

I'd never been at the Ada Complex before, though it was within a stone's throw of Joshen's dorm. I approached her apartment cautiously, but she had the door open before I had even knocked, as though leaving me no opportunity to escape. I stumbled over a suitcase in the hall, apologized, lurched my way to the couch, and then stumbled through an explanation of why I'd come.

She was remarkably calm in the face of the news she had an underage stalker, so much so I wondered if it had happened before. Smoothly she assured me her security systems at home were excellent, and she wasn't in the least worried. She sounded so thoroughly unbothered, and so certain she could cope, that I began to feel faintly ludicrous for having been concerned at all. Handing me a brandy, she smiled placidly and said she was glad to see me, as there were a couple of things she'd wanted to speak to me about. My heart shot into my neck somewhere, and I made a strangled noise and sought refuge in the brandy.

'First of all, I have something of yours.'

It was my letter. Still sealed.

'You didn't read it,' I said numbly, and then immediately felt like a cad. Obviously she hadn't. Now I probably sounded like I was accusing her of steaming open the envelope or something.

But she didn't look offended, merely slightly amused. 'It was, I know, addressed to me,' she said calmly. 'But I noticed it hadn't been stamped, and thought perhaps that was a sign it hadn't been meant to be mailed.'

My knees went weak with relief.

'And...the other thing?'

She looked almost hesitant. 'There's something I'd like you to do for me. No, that's not quite accurate. There's something I think you should do, for yourself more than for me.'

At that moment, I'd have willingly done anything she asked: abandoned my username, deleted my entire body of fanfiction, anything. And a damned pity I'd had that thought, because once I'd had it I couldn't, as a point of personal honour, very well ignore it, could I? Even when she spoke the fatal words.

'I think, Mina, that young Jen has become a bit overinvested in gaining your admiration and attention.' Was I imagining a glint of something-or-other in her eyes when she spoke Jen's name? Maybe Xena had Told All. 'It's leading her to, shall we say, extremes. I think before she does any further damage, you had best set aside some time to sit down with her and talk. Please don't mistake me: I have nothing against Jen. I'd prefer, on the whole, that she felt a little more secure in your friendship. It would render her less troublesome overall. And I think it would be good for both of you.' And before I knew what I was doing, I found myself nodding in agreement and fervently promising Arc I'd make a playdate or something with Jen at the earliest possible moment.