Hey, everyone! This is Renn once more, back with more True Life Stories for your reading pleasure. Today’s tale is of our rather dramatic rise from the ashes of trauma and the bullshit we left behind we left behind in Texas. Expect lots of curse words and dark humor, as is our specialty. So if you don’t like curse words and real talk, this isn’t the post or blog for you. And if you want to hear more of our lore/tragic backstory, you should check this post out before reading further.
If you read this post’s title and thought to yourself “there’s no fucking way a person could shitpost their way to freedom”, bear in mind that we thought there was no fucking way for us to pull it off, either. But buckle up, fuckers, because the tale I’m about to tell is completely true, though it is full of quite a bit of tasty high drama.
From the Ashes of the SuperWhoLock Trashfire on Tumblr c. 2013-15
Before I go too much further, I should explain that we’re veterans of the website Tumblr during the days when it was the Wild Wet on there and there was no censorship to speak of. It wasn’t until Yahoo bought it in 2013 that there were any kind of content filters or censorship on the site. Allēna, host of the system during our teens, joined in 2013 at the tender age of 16 or so during the heyday of SuperWhoLock, three fandoms who dominated the conversation at the time she joined and were fucking WILD. Tumblr became more of a cesspool as time went on, but it remained a formative influence on her humor and the way she wrote.
So when she married our first husband and moved up to Alaska to escape our toxic family and build a better life for herself than the one she’d been born into, she had high hopes. Sadly, these hopes were not to last.
Restless in the North, 2018-20
Our first husband, Fang*, was cold, controlling, and almost never around. When he was around, Allēna didn’t enjoy herself. So Lēna and the alters who came after her threw themselves into creative endeavors to keep themselves entertained. However, they struggled to find their creative voices or even projects and communities that they felt encapsulated who they were as people and their values.
Allēna herself started two blogs, Byzantines and Button Downs and Order and Discord, but felt very limited by the blogging advice she found online. Everything she found said to find a defined niche and write content and posts around that one thing. She couldn’t do that for the life of her. Even as a single alter, she is a multitude of things and struggled in college for that reason, as well. She couldn’t just pick ONE niche.
Still, Allēna felt compelled to write her blogs, poetry, and later, fiction because she feared that getting her work seen was the only way she would support herself. She was in her early twenties and was already disabled and chronically ill. Fang wanted her to work a traditional job, even going as far as to say the tutoring business she’d started and built up from scratch was merely a “hobby that paid”. She couldn’t, and nearly killed herself trying. She went dormant late into 2019 from stress, grief that Fang wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, and severe burnout. Peri, her successor, brought us out of the ashes of our misery in Alaska by returning to her roots.
From the Ashes and Back Again – Peri’s Tale Begins
Peri finished work on the first installment of Allēna’s audio drama series The Third Prophecy in early 2020 and self published it. Titled Lavender and Scissors, Allēna got the seed that later turned into the biting dark comedy that Peri ultimately presented to the world from studying the Byzantine Empire in high school and laughing at Tumblr posts.
Over the course of nearly the next decade, Allēna shaped and re-shaped her idea into a smart, funny, multi-generational epic that drew from the horrors she had experienced, the offbeat comedy that anonymous and often neurodivergent Tumblr users wrote, and watching our father, Xavier*, face death with grace and humor. In other words, she had a lot of experience with both comedy and very bleak situations, seeing as a master at both bleakness and humor raised us.
It’s also important to mention that Peri began work on a sequel to Lavender, but work on that stalled in February of 2020 after she wrote a scene that hit so close to home that no one could touch it for another four years. That’s probably a good thing, as much of the story predicted the system’s future and much of the world’s for the next half decade. We still struggle to work on that sequel, even though we love the story with everything we have. It simply hits too close to home for a number of reasons. She described working on it like she was being possessed by the play itself – she simply could not stop writing it. The story practically told itself.
Bedbound (But Not Alone)
By April of 2020, the COVID lockdowns were in full swing. My system was already full of old pros at social isolation by that point – neither Allēna nor Peri had many friends in Alaska, and the way Fang behaved made it very difficult for either of them to make more. The only friends they had they made online, and many of them were thousands of miles away.
Fang saw us as exclusively his, and would blame us if anyone even looked at us in a way that hinted they wanted us. We know now that what other people do is not our responsibility, but we didn’t know that then. Allēna was stuck and lonely, and Peri even more so. Everything took a turn for the worse when Peri developed crippling, unexplained abdominal pain that was so severe that she could barely stand for more than five minutes without screaming and crying. The isolation would have taken a turn for the worse if Peri had been any less determined than she was.
Peri realized early on into the lockdowns that she was in a rather unique position. Not only did prolonged social isolation not really faze her – we had spent most of our life alone in some form by that point, anyway – Allēna had tutored exclusively online from the start anyway. When the schools shut down toward the end of the 2019-20 school year, Peri found herself up to her eyes in clients. Not only that, but Fang had fallen into a deep depression at the end of 2019 and lost his job, and so Peri and one of her housemates were the only ones with jobs for months of the lockdowns. Fang no longer had any legitimate say over what she could and couldn’t do with her money.
In Position
Tutoring kept her busy, but not quite busy enough. She threw herself deep into writing a novel that many people still consider our masterpiece, The Secret History of Doloras. She started writing it because one of her favorite clients dared her to. We consider it the sort of fantasy novel we’ve always wanted to read, but have never been able to find, so we’re writing it.
As if that wasn’t enough, she started an accompanying role-play Discord server called Many Worlds that features not just the planet Doloras but every world that we’ve ever made in our stories and began livestreaming and making visual art, as well. All of these projects made her much more confident, and in July of 2020, though she was still in extreme pain and things were still heavily locked down, she appealed to two of her oldest friends and a few family members to help get away from Alaska and Fang. They answered. On July 12, 2020, she left Alaska and returned to Texas, thinking she’d finally risen from the ashes of all her pain and that the worst was over.
Operation: Dead Hand – Eight’s War (2020-23)
When Peri returned to Texas, there was a slight problem. Her period was late, and she suspected she was pregnant with Fang’s baby. She thought that that was very unlikely, however, since Fang had said on several occasions that he was sterile due to a genetic illness, so the chances of her being pregnant at all should be slim, right? Turns out she was wrong, and her suspicions were correct. She was indeed pregnant.
Her mother, who’d always been allergic to human emotion to the point of being extremely abusive and who owned the house where she was living with her paternal grandmother, was already trying to control both of them, and it was about to get much worse for them both. We’ll call her mother Hera. Hera wanted Peri to get back with Fang, and even went so far as to believe his side the story about everything. She also suspected Peri had lied about Fang’s abuse, and began to try everything she could to get the two of them back together, and failing that, Fang full custody of Peri’s child. Peri wanted nothing to do with either of them. Remember: she’d married Fang to get away from Hera and her shitshow of a family. But Peri had no idea what to do and fell into a deep depression.
When Hera found out that Peri was depressed, she organized an intervention to attempt to seize control of Peri and the fate of her unborn child. Brokenhearted at the blatant betrayal, she consented to go to group therapy to get the family off her ass and went dormant soon afterward. Eight rose from the ashes in the wake of that fuckshow, and quickly put a plan in motion.
From the Ashes, Back to Where It All Began
Hera’s betrayal left Eight deeply traumatized and he struggled to feel like he could trust anyone. Yet, he kept meeting people who thought he was fascinating and beautiful and wanted to get to know him better. So he came up with a plan he thought would be foolproof and get people the fuck away from him while further playing into Hera’s belief that he was crazy. He went back to Allēna’s old stomping grounds – Tumblr.
He began writing short text shitposts and skits similar to what he had seen there. Instead of driving people away, however, his followers turned into fans and became even more intrigued with what the bastard was doing there. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue with it, and he discovered his full influence when he asked his friends and family for help paying some bills he couldn’t cover on his own. His followers gave him far more than what he asked for. People loved him.
When Hera continued pulling fuckshit, he started talking about everything she had done. His people responded, and they were PISSED. He kept shitposting in the meantime. This tactic terrified Hera, which was exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped trying to fuck with him directly for fear of pissing his army of feral followers off further. With that, he achieved the first stage of a plan he would later call Operation: Dead Hand – clear a path.
During the next phase, he looked for jobs out of state. He landed one, a sales job in Philadelphia, PA. He still needed help getting there, though. So he reached out to his people for help once more, and they came to his aid. Four days later, he was on a plane to Philadelphia. We were free.
Conclusion
Thank you, gentle reader, for reading this far! I know this was a long, winding tale. If you enjoyed this story, give Open Sorcery a follow and join our community of like minded ferals such as yourself!
As always, stay tuned for more magic.
-Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies
*names changed for privacy
