Friendly Fire

I have a situation. Sometimes situations take you by surprise. You don't see them coming. You can't change the way you feel and there is just something.... hard to swallow.

I shall explain because this is where I right my garbage so as to help myself work things out.....

I play an online game called World of Warcraft. I have played it on and off for years.

F was introduced to it by a colleague at work and for a short time I had a character on his account. He played with his mate and some of his mates and it was all very male... I played alone. I think by the time, the guys realised I was playing seriously and suggested I join them, it was too late. I had gotten my own account and signed up on a new server, brand new and sparklingly empty.

It was lovely there. Roleplay was the rule not the exception as it is now. You played your character and acted out, but I had a lot to learn.

I met a guy one day, we grouped to do a quest and he suggested I join his guild. I did and it was good. A roleplay guild, where I had some fun but.... the guild was disolving under the weight of itself. A very small group of people from that Guild was bought together to form a new guild.

F liked the idea of it and he joined as well.

We became very very close but there was a problem, the guild was too small and recruitment too selective for the guild to survive indefinitely. A couple of people stopped playing for real life reasons and I think only four of us were playing. The guild dissolved and four of us moved to another, larger guild.

We had a very good friend who had been absent from the game and he came back to find our beautiful little guild dissolved and he was somewhat upset. He refused to join the new guild for reasons I never really understood.

I was not happy there. There was a lot of pressure on me, because of the sort of character I played, some people had unrealistic expectations of me. I caved under the pressure and an ugly scene occurred. I never went back.

F, friend and I went and played elsewhere in the worlds of WoW. We ended up back where F and I started and all joined up with his old work colleague and his mates. It was fine but I eventually stopped playing.

F and friend played other online games together. This friendship spanned years. Then friend started loking at forums and things and discovered that a friend or two had returned to the game and had ended up in a new guild with some of the people we liked best from the second guild and all the remaining original members of the first.

We went back and were greeted with much happiness and all was good....

Except over time, our friendship with friend suffered. He has always been temperamental, with a very good memory, he always remembers every slight, every word, but chooses to forget that what he remembers is coloured by how he felt at the time. He can be amazingly lovely but slowly i found myself increasingly at loggerheads with him.

A lot of the disagreements are sooooo petty and daft, I can not really understand why they got so big. I can not understand why he can never let them go though. Every argument follows us into the future.

A lot of the arguments involve matters of principle with regards to roleplay and the game. He asserts his right to play his characters and be true to them, even if it means that they are less than pleasant. However if your character should act in a way that forces his character (because of their personality and history) to behave in a way that he finds unpleasant to roleplay, then God forbid!

And he will not back down and sometimes his characters pick fights. For instance, most of F's characters have been the target of a fight made by friend's characters. This can be unpleasant and difficult. I have often felt that Friend has a soft spot for me, that despite his friendship with us both, he resents our happiness in our relationship.

But despite this, the recent fights seem to have been between him and I. And one of the problems is that i can't remember all the twists and turns of them, they have gone on so long and my memory is so poor. I can never win and the argument is never done. i got fed up of nodding my head politely to his grumbling and those words can never be taken back. The words surrounding them, he choses to forget, out of context you said this and i just can't remember. And I look at the old emails and I see honest words trying to explain my thoughts and feelings. He never addressed any of the valid points, just remembered those words he wanted to, to perpetuate the hurt.

And it is all pathetic, all of it. He has no job, most of the time and Wow becomes his life and all consuming, an obsession. Unhealthy. But on the surface he is a lovely bloke, a great chap, one of the best. Just underneath..... Simmering resentment and anger.

One row I remember..... One girl within the guild was having problems with another. One (A) was all hard edges and spiky words, the other (B) all wounded whiny soft hurt, when she wasn't endlessly bouncy and hyper. The two were never going to get on, but they sniped at each other, carefully, when no officers were around to witness it.

A and B were of similar ages but vastly different sorts of life. A always had huge dramas, she came out a lesbian, a manic depressive and an ex-alchie. B was the golden child, who never left home and has not yet learnt that sometimes life can not be made pleasant and your parents can not make everything right. Chalk and cheese.

B would complain to the officers that she was being bullied by A. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't this is not about that. Friend waded in and started stirring B up. In the end both of them stopped playing within the guild for a while and friend was highly critical of how everything was handled and dealt with and very disparaging of the guild leader. i disagreed strongly, I felt that the officers had really really suffered trying to handle the situation, had done their best to be fair to both and find a solution.

I talked B in to coming back after a while and friend followed along, still resentful of the guild management.

Things limped on between friend and I, he stopped playing altogether because of the way things were between us, it only lasted a few hours before he was back.

When things got bad at work, I stopped playing, in part because I couldn't be bothered to deal with any emotional stuff online when things were hard outside. I went back after a while and friend and I side stepped cautiously around each other. one last cautious chance.

The character I play at the moment may not be everyone's cup of tea but I designed her to be light hearted and fun. She has been making me smile and I know others have been enjoying her too. It began to appear that friend didn't entirely like her, his characters started making the occasional play that made this apparent, little things. So I asked him and he said that she was a pain in the arse. I replied and made light of it, he said nothing, I said something else, maybe one or two things and as he said nothing, I started to get upset. Making a statement like that and then saying nothing else, ignoring me? not calculated for kindness.

I got upset and then I told him that, he went all superior, how he was sorry, hadn't wanted to say anything but I kept asking and he knew how it felt because of things that had happened with previous characters of his. Like I say, never lets things go - I had been unhappy with the way his characers focused on falling out with F and were so focused on what ever lady was the subject of his affections that sometimes he neglected us and was not so nice to us..... The last instance was nearly a year ago.

For me, it was the end of the friendship, the final nail in the coffin. Not an active falling out, just a decision that I no longer wanted to bother side-stepping around him. I role play with his characters a little, if they start something but I have had no personal chats with him and he has made no attempt to talk to me either.

My first character is the wife of F's first character, who he still plays. One of friends characters accused F's of having an affair. F was pissed off, both in character and out of it. The day after my friendship with friend ended, friend apologised to F and they have been a friendly again ever since. I was a little hurt, but well..... *shrug*

And then i got a little repetitive strain in my elbow, because I work on a computer all day, i have been gaming less and then tonight, i look on the forum and friend has been made an officer. It feels so hypocritical after all the trouble he caused for the officers, not that they know what he was up to. It feels horrible.

It was alright to ignore him when he was equal to me, but not so easy now he isn't and is celebrating his new status. It hurts. It feels like a kick. I feel sad.

I know this will pass. I know it will be fine. It just isn't right now.