growing up in the online sticks

11 Jul, 2025

I was, if my account's first-online date is to be believed, fourteen years old when I first logged onto the weird Tolkien roleplaying MUSH that ended up becoming one of my most important internet homes for most of my teenage years. It had all the ingredients you need from an internet home: the unhealthy emotional attachments, the internet drama . . . the perfect place for a weird, aloof kid to be socialized into a weird, aloof adult.

It was a strange place, as weird internet spaces go. There was this fixation built into the community with adherence to the canon--"theme", as they called it.¹ Players were discouraged from making characters who were special, or interesting--the goal was to just simulate the world of Middle Earth, and that meant they needed people to be merchants and barkeepers and minstrels and farmers. Most people in Middle Earth weren't heroes and adventurers; you needed to prove yourself in the community before such concepts would be considered.

For a long time, this worked somehow. When the LOTR movies were coming out the place was absolutely hopping--we're talking hundreds of active players across all the various cultures. I've always been kind of a weird recluse so, rather than hanging out in Gondor or the Shire or all the familiar places I found myself drawn to some of the places that the party visited in The Hobbit--they were less well-developed in theme, more removed from the main conflict, and allowed a little bit more play within the setting. But eventually the excitement of the movies died off and, like, it was text-based roleplaying games that you needed a client for that wasn't just your web browser. It was never going to last. The population dwindled from hundreds to dozens to a handful. So it goes.

It was from this Tolkien MUSH that I was invited to one of my other weird formative internet places, a social MUSH which called itself a capitalism MUSH--you built things and tried to sell them to other players and could make money if you made cool products--but I always mostly just thought of it as IRC with extra steps. At the time I didn't really know what a SomethingAwful or a 4chan were but I am pretty confident a significant chunk of the population--a fairly tight community of probably 20-30 active users, all told--were denizens of those places, and they brought in the weird memes but with such a small community I think the worst excesses of those places were largely avoided. It's hard to get away with being a little shit when everyone there knows you.

It was a fun creative outlet. I never got into the whole "buying and selling things on the MUSH" aspect but I really enjoyed just . . . building spaces, learning limited MUSHcode. I built a creepy abandoned house and a lovely remote forest. Later on I made some light puzzle adventures. Though thinking of the place in retrospect the culture is probably pretty toxic, this was also a place where I was able to just create, for the joy of creating, with no pressure or expectation, not even the pressure of being anything more than just a space. Something cool.²

Part of the reason I'm writing this is I've been having this thought recently that my personal history on the internet has never really intersected with what I would consider conventional fandom spaces. I was never a fanfiction writer, never really hung out on fan forums³; most of my background in fiction writing before I realized you can just write stories came from the bizarre and somewhat stilted format of roleplaying scenes on MUSHes.

So while I have dozens of original characters I could tell you about if you asked me, if you asked me "do you have any OCs?"⁴ my first instinct would be to tell you "no." I don't have an objection to the concept--if I had money and less anxiety about how my aphantasia interacts with the process of commissioning art you can bet I'd have commissioned drawings of so many of these weirdos that live in my brain--but I feel like there's nuance I'm missing.

I don't understand fandom spaces. I had a tumblr for a while but I found the website unpleasant to use and never interacted with the community much⁵; I had an account on fictionpress.com rather than fanfiction.net, which was basically the same thing but, you know, not for fanfiction. Fictionpress had a small community--I would occasionally get some randos stopping by to comment on the garbage I posted there--but it didn't have the built-in "other fans of this media franchise will probably read this" aspect. (Maybe fanfiction websites also don't have that? I've always sort of assumed they do.)

And I do feel I must stress--this isn't, like, me dunking on fandom spaces. I'm just not from there. I don't know how it works. What I do understand is these bizarre, ancient communities, built on technology that ultimately predates the internet. It's a dying world. It deserves to be preserved.

When the Tolkien MUSH lost its luster, for a while I drifted between other MUSHes--several Star Wars games, a Firefly one, a few others I didn't stick around at long enough to have any good stories--which is a shame, since some of them had some truly wild stories. Most other places weren't quite so . . . reserved. Star Wars games were more than happy to let you be a Jedi or a Stormtrooper or a cool fighter pilot (though usually, because these places had their roots in roleplaying games, it was an entry-level position and you'd have to both advance in-character and level up to get stronger)--the Tolkien equivalents of which would have almost certainly required the approval from your local admins, and you would almost certainly not even be permitted to apply if you hadn't been around for a while.

For a long time, though, I was still on that stupid game. I was the local administrator of one of the cultures and me and a small group of underlings (though as pretentious as it sounds I really did see myself as first among equals in that circle) oversaw a place that managed to continue growing and thriving even as the rest of the game's activity was dwindling away. We were proud of what we built; we also bickered with alarming regularity. We were young--you kind of have to be to be able to devote as many hours as we did to this shit--and emotionally volatile. One of the others in particular, we would often blow up at each other over the stupidest shit. But we were still pals, comrades in this weird niche hobby.

Our little golden age couldn't last, of course. Our activity as the local administration wavered, and there was almost certainly some drama, I've forgotten, many of the refugees from the game as a whole had moved on to another, more active, deeply fascinating Star Wars game (I'll write about that one one day), and just, in general, people moved on. There was this odd sense of guilt that accompanied making the decision to finally bail on the old place. Even in its most active days, it wasn't unreasonable to personally know a significant portion of the active players; if someone left, they'd know. And it felt like a cop out to leave because everyone else is leaving, you know? Like you were actively choosing to kill the place.

So eventually I did finally leave, and move on to other places, and other refugees and I would often talk about what a bizarre place the old Tolkien MUSH was. How strangely devoted they seemed to making sure it was boring. Everywhere else you couldn't shake a stick without hitting another cool action hero, and there were active stories where things happened and your actions could change the shape of the world. It felt bizarre that we ever enjoyed that old place. But it was memorable, at least, and for all of that, I still had a fondness for the old place.

Just about every other game I was on subsequently died in a blaze of glory--we're talking player revolts, admins freaking out, the works. There was always some other place some old MUSH friend would try to convince me to join. Eventually, though, the joy had gone out of it for me. I found that playing in online TTRPG sessions gave me most of what I actually wanted out of MUSHing, and the rest of it I got from getting back into writing short fiction. So, eventually, I just kind of stopped.

But that old fellow local admin, the one I used to argue with all the time, managed to talk me into rejoining because he had managed to coax yet another little renaissance out of our old culture. I wasn't particularly active--indeed, we had an argument where I explained that I didn't find MUSHing to be as fulfilling as writing fiction and he explained that I was wrong about that--but it was fun to see the old place, and he had, at least, apparently learned the lessons of the past. He was committed to making stories happen, and God help me, I am a sucker for seeing a collaborative narrative develop.

Anyway, one day he linked me to a video by one of those female men's rights activist grifters, sensing that I, someone who was not a woman who was also a fairly vocal feminist, would surely be convinced that feminism is bad actually if I saw a woman saying it. I was unconvinced; he told my asexual ass that I only cared about feminism because I was desperate to get laid. I blocked him and carried on with my life. (I also, it must be said, didn't know he was an MRA before, but it certainly explained the friction.)

That was probably about ten years ago. Shortly before I nuked my Facebook account and bailed on the whole concept, a mutual friend of the guy in question messaged me that "someone" was trying to build a history of our culture on the old Tolkien MUSH. You guessed it--same old guy. I didn't really feel like dealing with it at the time and forgot about it by the time I deleted my account. He then subsequently tracked me down on Discord and asked about some things. I sent some old logs and talked about what I remembered.

And then he mentioned that he'd managed to rope a few of the old guard back into playing on the old place, which miraculously somehow was still online, and I was curious enough that I was willing to slap together a new character and play. He even managed to recruit a bona fide new player. It was kind of nice. That old draw of the collaborative story⁶, the grind of "just write something, you don't have time to wait for it to be perfect" . . . it was good for me. I'm not sure the stories I'm writing lately would have happened without that.

I was prepared to bail at the first sign of fuckery, of course. For his part, there was this odd nervous tension about his interactions with me. He claimed not to remember why I had blocked him before, and he seemed to be . . . if not penitent, then at least determined to not offend. I took it as a sign that he was perhaps trying to be a more sensitive soul. Ten years is a long time, after all.

Then after a week or two, he blew up at his newbie for, apparently, not being sufficiently reverential to "theme", and unrelatedly at a bunch of the old guard who had formed a schism of the MUSH on Discord over some drama I had zero understanding of, and then I think he either got banned from the MUSH or just chose to retreat into hiding. I was not about to get involved in MUSH drama. He sent some cryptic messages about how it was fun while it lasted, and bailed out.

A bizarre epilogue to a bizarre tale. Every time he talked to me about this newbie he seemed proud, and understandably so--getting a genuine new player to join a dead MUSH is just this side of impossible--and I think whatever drama he fought with the Discord crew was something to do with how they hadn't welcomed the new guy. I suspect I will never know why all that went down, except that apparently the reason he seemed like he was always walking on eggshells was apparently more for his sake than mine. But it is a shame--for all I obviously have mixed feelings about the whole thing, there was something valuable there.

MUSHes are such a personal medium--at least the ones I was on.⁷ You can't get lost in the crowd; everyone knows you there. The drama is petty and personal. I had people fall in love with me (I made a character who was friendly and charismatic) and hate me intensely (for just about any reason you can imagine). On at least one occasion, I had someone who was in love with me and who deeply hated me simultaneously. (They didn't know I was the same person.) I made some lasting friends.

There are probably still some MUSHes out there. There appears to even still be a crew of the old guard of the Tolkien game who have largely moved entirely to a Discord server and are still playing their old characters, in the old style--no exciting adventures or big plots, just characters vibing. Little personal moments. I think I get it now: it's an escape. It's just a chance to inhabit a world that's not our own, in a character who doesn't have the problems we have in our daily lives.

MUSHes are probably one of the few online spaces left that still maintain the old metaphor of the internet as a place. It makes them feel charmingly old-fashioned--it makes things feel less online, despite being a hobby that is extremely online in its own peculiar way. It is somehow the least surprising thing in the world that there are still people I knew ten or fifteen years ago playing the same characters in the same place with the same people.

But it is a dying scene. I never did ask that newbie what series of bizarre events transpired that he found himself joining a new MUSH in the year of our lord 2025. I couldn't find a way to phrase it that didn't seem rude. But he had, if the story is to be believed, come from the world of combat MUDs--not new to the concept, just to this specific incarnation. It's impossible to imagine some fourteen year old signing up for a Tolkien MUSH now, unless they just really, really liked old tech.

If it must die, though, best that it be remembered, and to take what value I can from it. I told myself maybe I'd liberate the character I made for this latest attempt at reviving this lost art and put her in some stories of my own. Maybe I will. Middle-earth isn't very similar to the science fiction-ish things I've been writing lately, but I think I can find a place for her.

She'll need a name, though. I hate naming characters.

#essay