I NEED HELP PLEASE!!! I've never been part of a roleplaying community before, but I've been roleplaying with a friend for 8 years, and I think what she does isn't normal...
I am so confused and have trying to figure out what is happening for about a year now, but I'm lost... so this is my problem: I’m roleplaying with this friend she is 26y/o and I am 31y/o, we started about 8 years ago, we have two roles with different stories, and in each one we like to include romance, I am a girl I love romance, she is a girl too and I think she likes romance too?... I mean, it seems like she just wants to write and be read, she doesn’t include my characters in the plots she creates and excludes them. When one of my characters takes an action to influence in the story, she overrides that action.
That’s why I always try to create situations where we can both include our characters in a balanced way… HOWEVER, the last straw was recently when I created a plot for a character of mine and she stole my idea by giving it to a character of her including it in the same story (wtf?) , excluding my characters. She stole the trauma from my character’s past and made it worse for her own character, as if to say “Look at me, I suffer more” and she also stole the dream I’d been building for my character throughout the story, and as if it were a race against time, she brought her character onto the scene before mine to start doing everything I’d planned to do with my character… every time I told her that that was pretty similar to what my character wanted to do, she just gaslight me telling me that it was not the same, even when we can clearly see it was... in the last scene she made 330 drawings, I am nor kidding, I am not exaggerating, she literally made her character the principal one with the more "time on screen" , 330 drawings of her character doing and being what my characters no just wanted in the present but will want to do in the future in the story... (in you are wondering how she made 330 drawings, she does not study or works so she have all of her time free)
In the other rol story, we’d agreed to write the kind of romance where my female character would be a depressed girl who was going to try to k!ll herself, and her male character was supposed to save her, something like in the movie *Me Before You*. And this really resonated with me because I've tried to take my own life in the past, ( I haven't tried again in 17 years, please don't worry ) so my connection to my female character was very strong, and so were my hopes that she would be saved, Well… her male character turned out to be a toxic abuser straight out of the edgiest, most nonsensical dark romance nightmare you can imagine, toward my female character… Before her I’d never created a depressed character before, so I did my best as I told you I connected deeply with her, to the unhealthy point where her pain was my pain. I have to say that I became obsessed with these roles and was always hoping everything would turn out romantic and cute… this story didn't end well, my female character took her own life after I had been dragging out her storyline for years for the sake of the script in an attempt to save her, but in the end it just wouldn’t have made sense with the rest of the plot, so she had to die. It all ended with her and the male character swapping bodies thanks to a black magic thing, and that’s where I stopped the story, because even after she died and they swapped bodies, the guy still wasn’t nice to her, and I got fed up...
Every one of her characters paired with one of my male characters has a wonderful time, everything is romantic and fun... but every one of my characters with any of her male love interests has a terrible time, It’s horrible, toxic, and boring, they’re all so serious, with no personality or charisma.
I’ve talked to her many times to express my dissatisfaction with this, that she leaves my characters out, that she draws stories just for her characters without including me, and that all her male characters are very, very serious, boring, and burdened with an unrealistic amount of trauma. She always tells me she’s going to change, we change scenes in the roleplay by redrawing them, but she always unconsciously falls back into the same pattern…
Before she stole my character’s storyline, I’d seen her steal ideas from many other stories to incorporate into the roleplay. When she met me, she started dressing in black like me and wearing goth makeup. Her personality changes like a chameleon depending on which streamers she’s watching, copying their way of speaking, personalities, etc... to the point where she has no ideas or judgment of her own, everything she says is just a repetition of something someone else has already said, but literally, So I think there’s a psychological issue here that I don’t quite understand either.... That’s why I don’t think she’s doing all this out of malice or on purpose, it comes naturally to her. So I don’t blame her, and I don’t hold any grudge against her, but that doesn’t change the fact that it has affected me emotionally and made me angry that she stole my character’s storyline.
In the end, I told her I didn't like how she copied my character's entire backstory, once again she kindly apologized, told me she hadn't realized it, and said we'd change everything, she deleted some scenes, and we redrew others... This seems like a solution, but as I said, I’ve talked to her about this many times before. She always tells me she’ll change, but since she always ends up repeating the same behavior, I don’t believe her anymore, and I’ve lost the desire to continue with our 2 roleplayings that’s been going on for 8 years… It hurts because I miss the characters, but I can’t keep doing something I no longer enjoy… ;---;
Other details for context are:
She gives all her characters the same traumatic past: a dead girlfriend or boyfriend. (Not her, she’s never had a partner die, she’s never even had a partner) It got to the point where I asked her not to give one of the last characters she created the traumatic backstory of a dead girlfriend. She told me she wouldn’t, but in the end, surprise, surprise, she did it anyway... XD
All her female characters have a male best friend who’s in love with them, and every male character has a female best friend who’s in love with him, and they’re super clingy and hug each other a lot, as if to make me jealous?
Almost all of her characters are practically millionaires, kings, queens, princesses, dukes, or some other member of royalty, They have inherited wealth and don’t worry about having to work or make their way in life.
Almost all her characters start out with their own unique personalities, but by about their third appearance, their personalities become generic and repetitive, as if she’s forgotten her own character’s personality.
Whenever I create a fun scene with a fun setting to hang out in, like an arcade, a nightclub, or whatever, she has her characters go through a crisis and some drama, an ex appears or whatever so they never get to enjoy the fun settings, and everything always turns into pessimistic drama.
As I said, almost all of her male characters are extremely serious and lack even a shred of charisma; they don't smile and have no soul
When one of her characters has a scene or laughs or whatever, she makes them the center of attention and has everyone watching them, but when I try to do the same with one of my characters, her characters ignore mine and don’t give me the same attention, not even when my character is doing backflips on a skateboard ramp 10 meters in the air (yes, this happened and her character didn't look) XD
And this is what annoys me the most: with the male character who was supposed to save my female character, she drew lots of pre-planned scenes where my female character would look at him from behind a bush, through a window, or from a distance, but never interacting with him up close. She literally drew an entire manga just so I could be nothing more than a spectator...
Today, for the first time in eight years, I opened up about this to a friend who really knows about roleplaying, he’s part of the community and has role-played with lots of people, and he explained to me that this friend of mine has “main character syndrome,” and is one of those people who only likes to write, to be read but not to read others’ work, to be the center of attention, and to overshadow everyone else... I’d never heard of that before, which is why I just joined this group and am asking for help please, can someone explain to me what’s going on, is this common in the roleplay community??!!!!
Despite all this, I love her dearly as a friend, but this has affected me to the point where I haven't spoken to her in months, and I feel reluctant to do so, I'd like to keep the role and maintain our friendship, but I can no longer trust her.
Thank you so so much for reading!! Here are some of my drawings so you can have an idea of what a roleplaying with drawings is, they are simple sketches so they can be done fast ...
