On Friendship

I haven’t written one of these blog posts in a while, but I feel like I learned today what true friendship is.

I might be wrong, but it suddenly dawned on me that I felt like I’d been a legitimate friend to someone I met, for the first time since I could remember.

That might sound a little pretentious, “look at me, I’m true friends with this person I met, L for you,” but it legitimately felt good, and I’d fucking do it again, to quote that line.

Now, it's worth noting that this person I met I did not meet irl. There’s a streamer called MissieMae (who I genuinely like, and I’d suggest, and the server could use more people) and she has a Discord server. One day, a person joins, they have an absolute mouthful of a name, and after telling people to “just call him 21” he decided to bite the bullet and name himself after a vocaloid song lyric. That is the name he holds to this day on Discord, he’s had it for 5 months.

It wasn’t very long until I bring up femboys in passing, and me and this guy I met start striking up a conversation, bonding over our mutual appreciation of music, anime, and femboys. Quickly we become friends, him becoming the second person I start to have long in-depth DM conversations with.

He’s a femboy himself, actually, as much as he can be in his situation, and apparently very good at it on the internet, a nonzero number of people on Discord mistook (and still mistake) him for a girl regularly (which he never corrects partially because he’s an agent of chaos). Which, if I had a dime for every close relationship I have with a femboy I met online, I’d have two, which isn’t a lot but it’s wild it happened twice.

(And for everyone who’s joined my personal Discord server, all 6 of them, he’s actually on there, I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself.)

But we talk for quite a while, and then this guy invites me to a Touhou fan server, specifically for the character of Koishi. I know next to nothing about Touhou, but I joined anyways, because I wanted to talk with him more.

To my surprise, he’s not only incredibly active there, but he’s also a mod. He wouldn’t’ve personally been my first choice for the moderator position, but according to the head mod, he was so popular on the server they had to.

I spend a few days in this server, very much enjoying my time talking to him on there, and even start platonically flirting with him (with my boyfriend’s approval). Then, shit hits the fan.

There’s a messy bit of drama among the mods, my friend is saying that he has a friend he wants to invite, but they won’t come unless some other account, who is allegedly harassing this somebody, gets banned or otherwise stops participating in the server. Note, all my information pretty much came secondhand, and from a single source, so it may be biased, but I don’t see why my friend would lie to me.

However, after reading about this information, I realize that because I care about my friend so much, I was going to use what little moderating experience I had on the Authors’ Academy Wiki to throw in my two cents.

I wrote damn near seven paragraphs of advice for this guy, my friend, and how my Libertarian Leftist view on modding should conspire.

It’s all a bunch of messy server politics, but my idea was this: Even if someone is harassing someone off server grounds, they should still be seen as belonging to the server, and that Discord is actually a massive commune that people should be able to judge using more judicial processes when it comes to sticky situations like this.

But also, this alleged harasser (provided it was all true, and I trust my friend not to lie to me) was committing the single most henious crime I could think of: not treating people with respect. That likely played a role in my conclusion.

Five minutes later, I got a response from my friend saying he was banned.

Now, I left the server soon after because I didn’t see much reason to stay there if that was the case. One of the admins apologized on the head mod’s behalf to both me and my friend, and his ban got lifted an hour or so later. I haven’t been there since, but I trust they celebrated his return, because I’ve never met a person on Discord who hates my friend (he says that people do exist, but I haven’t seen any).

So why did I have to lay all that groundwork, the 3 of you still reading? Well, because it was about the time I was pinging him in the MissieMae server, trying to give him appreciation, thinking he needed it, when I realized something. I actually realized two somethings, but one at a time.

This is what friendship is, isn’t it?

It goes beyond pinging someone with a hug bot. It’s actively being happy to see them, trying to help them when they fall. There’s a Country song called “Find Out Who Your Friends Are”, I forget the artist, but remember the name. The entire song is basically saying that true friends are people who’ll take a bullet, catch you when you fall, be with you through thick and thin, and appreciate it all (those aren’t the lyrics afaik, but still).

When I listened to this at the time, I had one person I considered my “best friend” (we’re still friends, but it’s more for business than hanging out like it was in middle school), I listened to that song and remembered that one of my thoughts about it was if my best friend was really my best friend.

It wasn’t until now that I realized I was being the friend the song talked about, and it felt so natural to help someone out, I barely even registered that yes, I would take a metaphorical bullet for this goofy bunny boy.

But I also realized another thing, and changed it to my Discord status, that everybody deserves love unless they prove otherwise. This isn’t a necessarily deep idea, but I needed words to describe how I treat people, and those happened to fit.

Basically, it’s the innocent until proven guilty mentality, just applied to friendship. Friendship is the act of standing up for the bullied kid, being happy to see your friends, and be willing to love them until they prove they don’t deserve it.

Is it all that different from love? No, but that's why they say there’s three kinds, romantic, brotherly, and platonic. Love between these types look the same, the only difference is how you feel about it.

To me, romantic love is just advanced friendship, that’s how my parents get along, and they’ve been married for almost 20 years. After that Honeymoon Phase, that’s what I treat it as (maybe with some sexual stuff on the side). Friendship is the root of all this, that idea of helping each other and boosting each other up. Not in a “I love you romantically” way, but something less based around desire than that.

Hell, to me, everything I feel about friendship can be condensed into my personal tagline. “Be awesome”. That’s all it is.

And it felt good to finally feel like I was actually helping a friend out.

And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie

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