Chase

Brief Summary

When I made up characters like Mika and Zippy, I made these characters specifically for myself and my own amusement. I wasn't aware of collaborative storytelling at the time, so if I did have stories for them I just made comics or wrote something a few pages long for my own reading pleasure. However, a friend of mine introduced me to the world of roleplaying--something that already existed in a little sub-forum on the popular pet site called Neopets. I was intrigued, but immediately intimidated. I was not used to chatting it up with strangers unless I was asking a question or posting in some opinion poll. I scoured them, quickly finding all these different types of games with different settings and rules. Words like casual, semi-literate, and literate took on a different meaning. No longer did literacy simply mean the ability to read, but the ability to type a coherent sentence. Not that I was incapable, I just did not know what was the RIGHT way to do it. At the time chatspeak was highly popularized. I hated it, but I wasn't sure if NOT following the trend would go poorly for me.

I was also intimidated by most of the settings, unsure of whether some themes were related to pop culture phenomena I was not familiar with or perhaps not familiar enough. However, I determined at least that semi-literate was the place to be (because back then literate sometimes meant using big words for no discernible purpose other than to wave big linguistical cocks around oooh look at me I call eyes 'orbs' and 'optics' and what did they call ears again satelites? Sorry tangent--). I finally settled on starting with a Wolf RP because hey, I know about wolves. I like wolves. They're cool. Let's be a wolf.

In prior research because I am a huge nerd I came to the conclusion that most participants used characters with some very interesting patterns and colors as well as powers or fantasy names or fantasy heritage. I wanted none of that. I didn't want to compete for most sparkly wolf in the room. I just wanted to test the waters with a perfectly mundane character. So he was to be just a typical lone grey wolf, scraggly from undernourishment, non-confrontational, cowardly yet charismatic. And thinking that for the most part he and I would just be casual observers due to how 'unspecial' we were, I gave him the equally mundane name of 'Chase'.

Funny enough, he often garnered the most interest. Maybe it was because he was always approachable, or maybe people thought I was making such a normal wolf for the sake of trolling. I don't rightly know. But even if he never did get a complex backstory and even if all the games I used him in (maybe a total of three or four) lasted a night at most (old Neopet threads never lasted over a day), I still remember him fondly as my ambassador to the roleplaying world.