Fantasy Crazies I Have Known

2004-06-05 [BarleySinger]: I wonder at times how many of these people knew that they were not telling the truth. I know that a few did, but I am pretty sure than many did not.

2004-06-07 [Incontinence Happens]: ...where did you find these ppl?!

2004-06-08 [Rondel]: Well, as for the ones *I* added, I just met them in the course of day to day life, though mostly during the period when I used to hang out in one of those groups that likes to dress up and pretend to be someone else (actually, several different such groups, so I prefer not to be specific). The groups themselves are a magnet for people who are fantasy obsessives, unfortunately. Most of the folks participating may well know that they're just "playing dressup" and "playing let's pretend" -- unfortunately, a few don't. And, of course, there are a few crazies pretty much everywhere... those who obsess sometimes obsess on people, too, and then you wind up with a "collection" of them.

2004-06-08 [BarleySinger]: [Rondel] I think part of the problem may be that if a person "wants" to spend all their time playing fantasy dress up, living in a pretend LARP subsulture, then they might be unstable enough to lose track of reality. ...like the vampire people who play LARP and end up drinking blood casue they were a bit loonie to start with.

2004-06-08 [BarleySinger]: Well [Incontinence Happens] I met the first few when I was growing up in a small town, filled with fundamentaists. The rest were met later in life. I spent some time in the subculture of "fandom", you know: SF cons, LARPS, medieval recrationists (most of these are just LARPS pretending to be historical). If you think about it....who is likely to be drawn to a life spent in "fantasy"? People who dislike reality. Who has the most reason to hate reality? Abused people, with bad homes, emotionlly dead or abusive parents, folks who were mollested.  I could tell you stories for a long time about the odd people I met in one group.

2004-06-09 [Incontinence Happens]: that's a really good point, and i suppose everyone has their own ways of dealing with life. though... why choose something that's so... blatently not fake? what's the point in wrapping yourself up in unreality, when deep down you know it's not real... or maybe they don't anymore...

2004-06-09 [BarleySinger]: Why wrap yourself up in fantasy? What is "nationalism" after all but a fantasy that one has some sort of "connection" to ones nation, that it has a meaning other than where you live and who runs the local government. Yet people over identify with their nation and can get very angry at peope who say "bad things" about it....even when they are obviously true. What about religious ideas that are really "out there" and could not possibly be true? Why do people wrap themselves up in those ideas? There are all sorts of fantasies to latch on to. Connection overidentification is very common..sport team fans, school "pride/spirit", nationalism? In all these cases there's overidentification.

2004-06-09 [BarleySinger]: In the "vampire vein" of self delusion, - if you grew up as a victim (of cruel people, peers, parents), and saw a way story that was a way of looking at things that made "you" into the powerful one, the predator and not the prey, it would look rather attractive. If you only saw the world as made up of victims and victimizers...and if you had been conditioned to believe that yuo were "evil" and "tainted", the "dark atteraction factor" could be rather large.

2004-06-14 [Morrigon]: It does seem like a way for people to deal with life if it becomes to hard or even boring. (btw hi!) I know one guy, i guess i'll be nice and call him weeny or something. any way weeny once asked me for a baseball bat so he could go and kill the demons that were threatening the earths existance. he makes all of us curious with his seemingly HUGE ego. insisting that he has supernatural powers and once threatening to blow one of my friends apart with his "mind powers". He does seem to have a huge ego or something because he has never minded ordering people around and once i was going to bash his head in because he was trying to order me around. Most people try to avoid him.

2004-06-14 [Morrigon]: His mom is deeply into what she calls witchcraft, and her version of it involves making people come with her into the forest to do rituals that involve using camel cigs for tobacco, making people read lines from little cards before tearing them up the cards and throwing them around with great vigor. i suppose for poor weeny, rebelling against his mother would be very hard since she's already incredibly insane and unbalanced

2004-06-14 [Rondel]: Yipes! Yeah, "Weeny" sounds like a definite candidate for this page all right! I shudder to think what he'd have bashed with that baseball bat if anyone had actually let him get his hands on it. I wonder what he was seeing as demons? People? Mailboxes? Air? Who knows... As for rebelling against parents like that, it can be done -- one such person I know of became a Mormon, others have converted to other forms of fundamentalist Christianity (the "demons and devils are everywhere" kind). Or they rebel by becoming cynical skeptics.

2004-06-14 [BarleySinger]: Just as there are christians like the "gawd hates fags" loonie preacher (where the whole congregation are realted to him), and just as at least one medieval pope believed that demons were out to get him, there are "witches" (and I use the term with reservation") who are basically just nut jobs...people who want to play "pretend" or be superior to other people. Different panthoen, same insanity.

2004-06-14 [Rondel]: So, BarleySinger, what do you think - does "Weeny" sound like a candidate for the page?

2004-06-14 [Morrigon]: hehehe, he's kind of crazy. he idolizes this one kid who by the way isn't crazy. weeny dresses just like him and even grew his hair out the exact same way. btw, we all had a good laugh when his girlfriend dumped him and went lesbian :P

2004-06-15 [Rondel]: That's not at all uncommon; many of the crazies I have known have had a tendency to fixate on people to whom they convince themselves that they are somehow cosmically linked. I feel for the ex-girlfriend; it's unlikely that she "went lesbian" if she wasn't a lesbian to start with -- either she was a bisexual who just got temporarily or permanently put off of the male half of the species by her experience with this guy, or she was a lesbian to start with, or she's trying to convince herself that she's a lesbian, in order to avoid more experiences like the one she had with this guy you're describing. All in all, not very complimentary, no matter how you look at it - & not good for her.

2004-06-15 [Morrigon]: heheh

2004-06-20 [BarleySinger]: I've known a number of people who tried to make themselves over into other people...changed their hair, how the dressed and talked, etc. I think it counts as an extreme form of "mirroring" which is a trait in Borderline Personality Disorder. Normally mirroring is where a person pretends to be "just like you" to be your friend...suddely they have all the same interests, etc. BPD and other disorders like it are something that people should learn about in school. BPD folks are socially delayed, view the world as a toddler does, and have lots turbulent relationships that become intimate rapidly (like getting married several times, ech one in under a few months from meeting the person). 

2004-06-21 [Rondel]: Eww, that's an incredibly creepy thing, when people do that. I've had people do that with me, repeatedly. One of them was trying to become involved with the guy who was involved with me at the time, and the other was using my then-best-friend, now-husband, for financial support, and was trying (at least in part) to take advantage of the fact that he was in love with me (something none of us had admitted, until years later). But I've known other cases where there was no ulterior motive, other than to try to "become" the person whom they thought better of than they did of themselves. It's like they were thinking "I'm not okay, you're great, I'll be you, then I'll be great, like you are."

2004-06-21 [Rondel]: Actually, that's at the heart of most of the fantasy obsessions I've known, too -- the people didn't seem to feel that just being themselves was good enough, so they wanted to believe that they had some mystical thing that made them special. I think that's why it's so common among people who are considered "geeks" by their peers -- they can't feel special in other ways, like becoming really popular (which often involves equally ridiculous obsessions, like faddism), so they fixate on the things they read to "escape from reality" for a while, and decide "I feel special when I read stories with elven heroes, so that must mean that I'm an elven hero, and now I can feel special all the time."

2004-06-24 [Morrigon]: Ugh, and about the BPD with the whole, intimate thing. reminds me of my cousin. she met one of my friends and then in the same night, did all this shit with him and since then its been annoying because she's been obsessed with him. turns out she's had a history of that and of thinking that every small sign of affection means permanent togetherness. kinda icky :p

2004-06-24 [Rondel]: I quite agree with you -- I've known far too many people like that, & while I feel for them (because I know too much about the risk factors for BPD), I also know *WAYYY* too much about the course of BPD not to worry about both the person who has it, and the suffering that they are likely to cause others, unless they get *SERIOUS* therapy. It's one of those conditions which tend to really devastate a person's life, in ways that cause them to seriously traumatize those around them. Children and spouses of people with BPD tend to wind up with serious psychological problems of their own, as well as more tangible ones, such as financial ruin and the risk of assault created by "instant bonding".

2004-06-26 [Morrigon]: yes, what else was interesting is that her father was talking to me and said that she had a lot of trouble iwth people around her because she would be friends with them and then suddenly they would reject her from the group and for a while i didnt understand why. but then recently since she has been staying for a couple of weeks out at my house she seems to be acting like she's always been here. she actually tried to make plans with my friends and then didnt include me at all until the last m inute when she needed a ride and i had a car. it just seems like she goes from either extreme. from shy to controlling. i think thats what caused her to be rejected

2004-06-26 [Rondel]: It's possible, from what you describe, that she's just lacking in social skills, and has no clue that she's being offensive in her behaviour... ...but if that's the case, you'd think that someone having a good talk with her would help give her the wake-up call she needs, to get a better handle on reality and the way it affects our social interactions with one another. If that kind of thing isn't doing it, yeah, my guess would be that there's something not clicking quite right in her head, whether for physical reasons, or due to trauma, or for whatever other reason it may be; regardless, it's not your job to try to fix her life, if she's not your friend, & not trying to do HER best as well.

2004-06-28 [Morrigon]: exactly. i dont try to fix people. i just dont want her to go on being pushed away from others. so i figure i'm going to at least talk to her about it but i dont want to drag myself through all that stuff.

2004-06-28 [Rondel]: It's nice of you to want to reach out and help. :) I'd be careful though, because from what you describe, if the talk doesn't help (and possibly even if it does) she's likely to fixate on you. Whatever you do, I would do my best to approach her as one equal to another (in Transactional Analysis it would be described as "Adult" mode, as opposed to "Parent" or "Child"), rather than in any way that can be interpreted as a "mentor", or "rescuer" -- because there is a very large chance that she will try to force/assume you into that kind of a relationship, if she doesn't simply take offense to your approaching her on this subject.

2004-06-29 [Morrigon]: yeah. i might not even bother. hehe

2004-06-29 [BarleySinger]: Too true. They even touched on the idea of "story driven people" in "Buffy". People who live their lives as if it was a "play" are like the geeky guy in the "triad" on Buffy. Even after the "first evil" tricked him in to killing his friend, he still went around rationalizing everything

2004-06-30 [Morrigon]: heheheh

2004-07-11 [Izzles]: Do you mean Andrew? Because you know, all three of the nerd trio were very geeky, but Andrew killed Jonathon. That scared me.

2004-07-12 [Morrigon]: I've never even really watched the show :(

2004-07-15 [BarleySinger]: That's who I meant. Andrew killing Jonathon. The last several seasons with "the triad" had this whole "evil fan" undertone. As a person who was once was too involved with fandom, I know that there are a huge number of people in it whose lives are all about "stories". All they do is watch stories, play games about stories, read them, etc. People have this idea that the people at SF cons are these harmless geeks, some are, others are dangerous. SF cons are basically big parties with sex and drugs/drinking for all ages. At cons you can see 14 year old girls on leashes and people in fetish wear in the halls. Imagine sending your kid to the SF con, and them wandering into a "sex party"! 

2004-07-15 [BarleySinger]: my guess is that when the show started getting popular they started (Like the trek actors) going to cons, and the producer realized what the people were like...who a part of their most obcessive fan base were. Andrew killing Jonathon based on a story in his head (even without occult influences) is a thing that is not at all far fetched for fen. I met a guy who later killed his wife with a sword while she was in the shower. Another guy who was a stalker and several serial rapists in the world of fandom. There is something about the "escape from reality" that draws both the "emotionally injured" (often it's girls who were abuse victims seeking a white knight) and the crazy predators.