I haven't really posted any of the ruminative, cathartic post-Legends retrospectives I imagined I might write when it all finished. To be honest, I don't feel in a great place for it now. But it feels a little like back in 2013 when I just didn't do an end-of-the-year retrospective because it all seemed too hard and I was so crushed, and then that year slipped by without marking, and then the next. I don't want that to happen here. This thing is only here so I can look back in two years, or ten, and trace the line of where I was, more or less unfiltered. The game was so important to me, such a big, disruptive part of my life, and I loved it. It taught me a lot of things about myself and about the people I would come to call my closest friends.
When Legends started, I had about no friends. 2009 was such a year. I just gotten married, started grad school, moved to a brand new town where I knew no one. More than that, my two best friends since I was 12 had recently elected to dump me, which was hard and unexpected. I am a little shy and in my best state I rarely get close to people. Their sudden, random abandonment was devastating, and it changed me on a deep level. I still have a reactive, deep streak of fear for people turning on me or just ditching me entirely.
But the thing is, they didn't dump me because I'm the put-upon heroine of this story wherein the various monsters viciously turn on me. They dumped my ass because I was a conniving, nasty little snake, and when they were cruel to me during our long years of unhealthy friendship, I pitted them against each other with all the disinterest of a sociopath rubbernecking a fatal wreck. I've been petty and vengeful since I was a child. I see that now. I didn't see it then because I was young and my nature was mutable.
You could see how Legends might appeal to a bankrupt girl in this deserted state. Big heroes. Earnest, brave friends to the end: all that stuff that Legends was so built up on. I snapped up this myth hook, line, and sinker.
When I made up Yan, I wanted somebody as different from me as possible. I wanted a confident, vulnerable, sweet, good-hearted idiot. I felt so jaded back then, so cautious with myself and suspicious of anyone and everything. I didn't like anything about myself, and I welcomed the chance to grow as a different person.
As stupid as it sounds, pretending those qualities coaxed them out a little in me. I figured how to be more open. I said yes, and then yes please. It was good for me. I learned how to do stuff I'd never taken agency for: how to be a valuable, hard-working person, mainly by modeling off other more productive people I watched. I was so impressed by these people I ran with, and I took as many opportunities as I could to grow there. I learned to be vulnerable and let people in.
To return to Yan, briefly: that central story involves a Swedish folk legend called Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass--or Tuvstarr, if we strip off the English. It's a tale about a sweet, golden naive girl who gets lost in the dark woods and comes upon a world-wise, protective elk who tries to help her even though she's fairly clueless. Throughout the fairytale, she loses more and more until she's naked. But each time she loses a possession, she refuses to believe in despair, insisting instead that the world is good and warm. She insists that she wants to do nothing but share joy and give light, while the elk warns her against this. Eventually the elk falls into rut and abandons her to death.
These themes repeat. I always thought the important part of this was the message of relentless hoping, pouring goodness into the world regardless of what is given back. In the story I participated in for Legends, this worked out perfectly. Yan got his unrealistic happy ending and I'm glad for that. But I see it now as any greater metaphor: just a child's story. A dreamy fairytale. Not something real or ideal to duplicate when composing identity or life lessons.
The more interesting character is certainly Leap, who warns and then abandons the protagonist to his own need. Self-protective. I think this is the lesson I need now. I am standing at the edge of this year with cold reality stuffed in my mouth and all the hard realizations I put off until now filling me up. And that's fine. That's part of the world.
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