In high school, I was in the anime club.  For the most part, no one spoke in broken Japanese, or cosplayed outside of cons and specific cosplay events.  Honestly, most of us didn’t even cosplay.

We kind of devolved as a club (we didn’t do anything but watch artsy anime and Miyazaki movies).  One day, though, a girl came and began hanging out with us.  I knew her from other things, but had no idea she was into anime.  We talked about anime we both liked, and then started talking about things outside of anime.  I discovered we had a lot in common.  We started hanging out, and she would frequently stay over at my house.  It grew to the point that we were practically living together.

Then she began talking about her fanfiction.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I read fanfiction and even write small stories sometimes.  But she hadn’t actually written it, she would just talk endlessly about her “story”, and her self insert original character.  I’ll call her “Rose” (about as generic as her character’s actual name).

Rose was omnipotent and had a long term, angsty relationship with her favorite character (who couldn’t flirt with any other characters, unless they were male, because that was hot).  At first, I didn’t think it was that big a deal.  But I literally couldn’t get through a conversation without her saying, “Oh, did I tell you about when Rose did this?” or, “Rose knows everything about [insert type of tv/music/movies/etc.].”  She would frequently “cosplay” as Rose wherever she went.  Sometimes, this was just a swishy skirt.  Other times, it was uniforms and bondage.

She eventually started asking all of her friends to make up characters to be in her fic.  She made a form, and even got me to fill one out.  I pretty much just let her run with it, and tried to bring up things that we both liked, but her fanfic kept taking over every aspect of her life.  Soon, all she would talk about was Rose and her epic romance and how great she was and how she wasn’t that Mary Sue and how all the characters knew not to piss her off because she could blow up shit with her mind and I JUST COULDN’T STAND IT.  Whenever we watched the anime her fanfic was about, she would interrupt and say, “You know what Rose does here?”, and launch into a rant about how Rose did this and that and how the main characters could all just fucking bow down to Rose.

I didn’t want to stop being her friend over this.  I felt like that would be a shitty thing to do, because she was pretty nerdy, but it wasn’t like she was a bad person.  I kind of started avoiding her (which was hard when my parents liked her so much and would invite her to my house all the time).

Then we were talking one day.  She hadn’t been around much, which I was grateful for.  Then she told me why.  Apparently, she had been avoiding this person who had a character in her “story”.  This person was clearly way more involved and indulgent than I was, because she had come up with all kinds of character actions.  My friend was angry because of stuff this character was doing, saying how she was “undermining Rose”, and thus she didn’t want to talk to this person anymore.

Slowly but surely, her friends started dropping off as she stopped talking to them because of stuff their characters did, or because she didn’t like something about their character.  She started talking shit about them all the time, and saying how selfish they were, even if SHE had written this stuff about their character in her really shitty fanfiction.

Bascially, she’s delusional as all get out.

Recently, she’s started talking to me about what I want to do with my character, because apparently I “can’t just leave them there”.  I’m pretty sure I’m next on her list.  I hope she doesn’t talk shit about me, but I really couldn’t care less if she stopped talking to me.