u/TheCrimsonFire121

I always get emotional in book 4 when Ken finds out Jason is alive and how he is throughout the book, he's the dad I wish mine was...

(I've listened to the whole series a few times)

In book 3, chapter 56: faith and glory, the builder says that purity's goal is essentially; let the builder cause mass damage and casualties by taking the astral spaces and then do a purge of it's own and make the world "pure."

But later in the series, book 8 I think, it's revealed that "Purity" has been "Disguise" this whole time and he's the one who had a deal with the builder.

So either; The builder was lying/wrong about purity's intentions, or Disguise lied to the builder about what it's end goal was.

So my confusion, is what does Disguise get out of letting the builder cause all this damage? I guess just a general level of damage and chaos to the world? Why form a deal with the builder?

Unless the original purity is the one who made the deal, in which case I really have no idea.

I've been "work-shopping" a bunch of ideas and ways I can put together a functional ttrpg for the essence system, but I was curious if anyone else was already ahead of me or had any specific suggestions.

Friend group composition:

Everyone in the group is in their 20s to 30s.

Mostly guys, but a couple girls too.

The issue:

This main group of friends have been together since about 2020, some of us have been friends longer as usual.

Over the last couple years I've been feeling increasingly unliked, tolerated, manipulated and/or ignored.

Granted, I have depression, so my judgement might be compromised, I'm medicated, but obviously that doesn't fix everything.

But every time I've tried to bring up how I feel about it, I'm just told some variation of either "it's not that deep" or "how dare you be upset"

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Some examples of why I feel this way:

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We had a shared dnd campaign where we would take turns running the sessions, we would meet up every couple weeks or maybe once a month, and then I ran a session and we completely stopped after that.

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Any time there is a "command structure" in something we are doing, it is automatic that I'm not in a position of command because no one listens to me anyway.

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Some friends of mine like playing WOW hardcore classic, so I told them I wanted to join them because they sounded like they were enjoying it, so they got me onto the correct server to join them and one of them made a new character to play with me, and then they never played with me again despite my asking, and eventually they just said "dude we aren't going to play that faction or with new characters right now, we are in deep with these characters"

Meaning I just wasted hours of playing by myself trying to work up to their level only to find out that they had essentially no intention of playing with me, and when I told them that I didn't enjoy playing it by myself and that the whole reason I started playing was to join them, they told me that clearly just I didn't like playing the game.

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If I'm ever put in charge of a task, others will almost immediately start doing aspects of my task, usually undoing whatever I'm doing and then get upset with me when I get frustrated.

Example; Pulsar lost colony, I'm usually in charge of engineering and do a good job of managing it, but the captain usually just stops whatever he's doing, makes changes on the engineering board without saying anything, and then gets upset when things start going wrong.

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The same friend who is usually the captain in Pulsar likes playing stellaris in coop mode, but then just undoes whatever I do and then gets upset when I don't want to play coop with him.

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Early into our friendship, one of the friends told me(as a joke) that one of his friends was 4ft tall, and looped in most of the others in the group into the joke. We would be online in our discord and they'd start bullying him for how short he is to the point that he left the call in anger(obviously he was in on the joke, but he wanted to sell it) and I reached out to him and apologized on behalf of the others since I knew their ribbing can get a bit much and he "appreciated" me reaching out, only to find out he's like 6ft when he arrived at our apartment.

Basically they will look you in the eyes and lie to your face about anything, if they think it's funny.

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I've had beef with one of the girls for years, because when I tried to introduce my sister to her she just wordlessly turned her back on us and pretended we weren't there, and according to couple other friends in our group, I'm the asshole for being upset about it.

My sister isn't still "upset" about it, as it was years ago, but does think it was a terrible first impression to make and she just doesn't associate with her.

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That girl who turned her back on us, I'm still "friends" with because she's part of the group, but I've come to see her as akin to a "political ally" in the group, we aren't friends anymore, and the final straw for me was;

The dryer in my apartment was broken, so I asked my friends in the neighborhood if I could do laundry at their place a couple times until it was fixed, to save money and avoid using a laundromat, and that girl and her two roommates(a brother and sister pair) said yes, but the brother would be at work so he wouldn't be there to hang out, which I thought was fine as I'm friends with the 2 girls and they have lots of pets so I figured I'd do my own laundry and hang out with them and their pets.

On my way there, the girls text me and they're like "hey since he's not here, you have no reason to stay, so drop off your laundry in the garage and leave, we'll do it and leave it for you in the garage to be picked up, don't come in."

So as insulting as that is I tried to find somewhere else to do laundry, but it was a holiday and most places were closed and I had work the next day, so I dropped it off and went home and did basically nothing for a couple hours by myself and then went back and picked it up, and then removed both the girls from my contacts list and removed them from my socials.

It may not come across from this story alone, but the general understanding I came to from this woman was essentially "if there isn't a guy here to protect us from you, we don't want you here" and as someone who feels I have never given them or anyone else a reason to worry about their safety with me, I was incredibly insulted.

I thought I was friends with them, but evidently they didn't feel that way.

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I was much more recently trying to run a new ttrpg system after it was requested by my friend group and despite everyone saying things like "thanks for running the session it was great" everyone seemed to not enjoy it, and almost every time I introduced something someone would always have something sarcastic to say about it.

We were pretty consistently going on an "every other Saturday" schedule when suddenly almost everyone was always "busy" every single time we tried to get together regardless of how much time I tried to plan in advance, even if I was trying to plan for something other than a game night, to the point that I kinda blew up and asked if they were "trying to tell me something" and one of them blew up back on me and told me that not everything is a personal attack on me and to stop being a dick, and that he was only attending at all to be supportive for my "half pieced together boring campaign"

The rest didn't say anything and just watched the group chat in silence(I knew they were there because they were just saving chats, and not responding)

And when I asked the others separately why they didn't say anything, they never answered.

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If we play anything competitive (CS2 or for honor) one of my friends gets really judgemental and rude if anyone isn't doing incredible.

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I'm a bit overweight, thankfully not morbidly obese, I'm in the high 200s, but still under 300 and working to be in better shape, but hunger is very loud in my head, and most of my friends don't have to deal with being overweight, so being "fat" is a basically accepting that you're going to be belittled or mocked a little.

The only thing they understand is being out of shape, to most of them being overweight is something worthy of mockery.

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Obviously I can cherry pick every single thing that has upset me, but in our day to day friendship it's not so bad, but it's just years of things building up and any time I try to explain to them that I'm upset, my feelings are discounted or I'm told that I'm wrong for being upset by almost all of them.

I get I'm probably the "high maintenance" "overly emotional" friend, but I don't know what to do anymore aside from just cutting contact with half of them.