Journey to Iwaku

Greenie

Follow the Strange Trails
Original poster
LURKER MEMBER
FOLKLORE MEMBER
Posting Speed
  1. Slow As Molasses
Writing Levels
  1. Beginner
  2. Elementary
  3. Intermediate
  4. Adept
  5. Advanced
  6. Adaptable
Preferred Character Gender
  1. Male
  2. Female
  3. Primarily Prefer Female
Genres
Fantasy, Supernatural, Horror
An oldie but a goldie, I thought it'd be fun to revisit the old question, since we have so many new members!

How was your journey to Iwaku?

Was this the first site you found on your quest to role-play? Or were there many twists and turns before you found this comfy little corner of the internet? ^_^
 
Did some roleplaying back in like 2000, on Neoseeker, which used to be a fairly large video game and hardware forum - might still be, I'm not sure.

From around 2006-2008, found my way onto Engi no Jutsu, which at the time was either the largest or second largest Naruto fandom roleplay. Site was my first exposure to staff work, which was predictably awful, since I was put in a position of power when I was like 14 years old. LOL.

Stopped roleplaying and writing altogether for years until 2012, when I got hooked onto One Piece, and decided I wanted to join one of the larger One Piece fandom roleplays. Joined one, and ended up becoming an Admin for a site of about 100~150 members (it fucking sucked, never fucking do it).

Stopped writing again until about 2017, when I joined here in search of a Fate/verse roleplay. Still haven't consistently participated in one of those, haha.
 
I started role-playing as a tiny wee bab in 2000 on Neopets. It was never very serious. Just a lot of action-based role-playing (i.e. 'Character: *hugs other character* I love you!') that I really enjoyed. Kept that up until I was about 12 and decided I wanted to start role-playing paragraph style, to share my writing with other people. I did that pretty actively until I was 16 (first on Neopets, then very quickly off of Neopets when my interests got, uh, less than G rated lol) and my depression hit very hard. Then it was only very sporadically and nothing ever lasted more than maybe a page.

I joined a lot of forums, and tried my hand at making my own forums, but sooner or later my mental health would take a huge hit and I'd have to stop. At 23 I really, really wanted to try and make a serious effort to start role-playing again because I have always genuinely loved it, but by that point it seemed like 'all-genre/multi-genre' role-play forums were just nonexistant. ~Back in my day~ they were super popular, but when I started looking again, all I could find were invisionfree forums dedicated to one story that were decked out in pretty graphics and desperately lacking functionality.

So I just googled 'ALL GENRE ROLE-PLAYING FORUM' in desperation and found Iwaku. Now I am here.

And I'm still a huge flaky asshole but I am trying wheeze
 
Might’ve told this story before, but... I’m repetitive hehe...

- - - - - - - - -

My first RPing was in a video game with a good friend. We wound up getting accustomed to it until finding this one RP group that was really vulgar and harassing, so we pretty much dropped it all. But the experience definitely had me hooked on character creating with backstories and stuff.

Anyway. Found a site later on that I joined for art reasons but stuck around because they had “forum Roleplays.” I’d never heard of this but it looked like a cross between book writing and game RP, so I was excited. RPs never took off though, and my good friend from before and me were separate now. I’d left this new site for a while, rather dismal, but discovered a full on RP site for a certain universe.

That lasted about a week. The people there were extremely hateful. Sort of a club that only the originals could exist in, otherwise.... yeah.

So I’ve pretty much given up writing. Lotta failed communities, and my self motivation has always been poor. So after a couple months of heavy depression, I online searched for another RP community. My only friend’s been gone, and my only chance for writing I figured was to be forced by like a GM. Wanted some company too, and IRL interaction isn’t something I’m good at. So I googled RP sites, found a list, and tabbed every site there.

.... a lotta them were a bit odd for me. But one of them, Iwaku, seemed alright. I was pretty intimidated by the black background and UI but... I said hello anyway. [Insert: stuff happening...] And, here we are.
 
Roleplayed in chatrooms in the late 90s. Bravenet, BeSeen, NBCi, Msn, Snap, etc.
I stayed in MSN chats for a very long time, but eventually those closed down, so went to AIM, YIM, MSN Groups and MSN IM.
Eventually those became sparse, and I moved to a forum named Gaia Online on recommendation from an old RP partner/friend, which I thought was dumb at first lol. That was 2004.
Roleplayed there for a long time, then I found Iwaku in... I wanna say 2009 but it could've been 2012. I wasn't here for too long, 6 months to a year. My screenname was [Q].
I was actually kinda bullied into joining by the same friend who introduced me to Gaia. I want to say the friend was Mizerok (or something like that. Guardian of wind or whatever) but I could be wrong.
Eventually I just dropped off the face of the earth internet for a few years, thus killing everything.

Didn't RP too much when I got back, but when I did I hopped between Gaia and Solia Online (another avatar forum).
Eventually I gave up both those and came back to Iwaku.

Thus ends the heavily abridged version of my insanely long online RP history.
 
When I was a youngun, around 8 or so, my dad purchased several copies of the Minecraft alpha. He helped each of us kids set up accounts, along with personal servers, and that was the best thing ever for a very long time. One of the very first things I did was roleplay in Minecraft, along with my sister and several IRL friends. Again, it was the best thing ever for a good few years. I also did a very basic form of LARP with these same friends whenever we met in person, and we still try to do that whenever we meet up.

At some point, those friends introduced me to Scratch. Scratch is basically very basic coding for kids, for yall who don't know, but we quickly discovered that the project galleries could be used for roleplaying. The projects were our character sheets, the gallery descriptions contained the roles and info, and our posts were the gallery comments. They had a small character limit, but that didn't stop us. We would chain comments together quite often, although they never got terribly long.

I eventually moved on from Scratch to the YWP NaNoWriMo forums. An IRL friend told me about Nano, so I joined up. I kept to myself for a bit, but eventually made my way over to the forums. This was my first time ever being on an online forum, and it's where I learned about things like the LGBT community and met my best friend (@Kimberlyn). I spent a good chunk of my life there, coming and going, from somewhere around 11-12 to 16. Along the way, I participated in the only RP I have ever been in to completion, and for a while, that friend group was my primary friend group. But we were kids, and we did stupid stuff and ended up drifting apart, and I barely see any of them anymore. I eventually wound up kind of growing out of the YWP, mentally speaking, and wound up looking for a new community. My old friend group was proving toxic for me, and I desperately needed a change of atmosphere

Along the way, when I was 15, I dipped my toes into RPN for about a month before being grounded. When I finally gathered the courage to come back, the site had changed to a different software, and I didn't know where things were anymore, and I wound up drifting away again.

After my failed return to RPN and leaving the YWP, I was looking for another RP site, and Kim recommended this site, so I poked around a bit, and it looked nice enough, so I went ahead and made an account.

It's been a year now as of this week, and I've honestly never felt more at home. ^.^ I've met amazingly chill people, understanding RP partners, and some of my closest friends here. So...yeah, that's it, I suppose. ^^
 
I was thirteen/fourteen. My English teacher was sitting home with a burnout, and we had no replacement. I was seriously worried about my grades and overall English ability, so I decided that role playing was the best way to remedy that. Lol

I was also looking for sites where I could fine anime and manga, so that coincided. Through an ad on Mangafox I landed on a site called Otakuzone, where I found the roleplay forums and joined. I was active for a bit, took a break as well, got on Quizilla where I started to roleplay over email, moved back, and then the site closed. I thought that would be the end, but surprise! I love roleplaying, so I needed a new place.

A few members of the site created a new place, or actually two places. One place was absolutely terrible, with bullying happening pretty frequently, and targeting the rp group I was part of. So, the GM moved us to Iwaku, and I have stuck around ever since.

The other place has since then also shut down. Was littered with cliques and elitism as well. Moderated the place for a bit, ended up as the only mod around, and gave up hope for the site after x amount of attempts of blowing life into it. Left after resigning my position and made Iwaku my main base.

Now I’m a happy fish on Iwaku.
 
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As a small thing, my best friend from school and I spent a lot of time chatting on MSN after school. At one point, she told me that she found a cool website where you could make these avatars and talk and stuff, so we joined Gaiaonline (I was around 13). We kicked around there for a bit, we had a shared account that we messed around with and our own individual accounts. It was my first taste of coding via the profiles and that was pretty cool.

We wrote stories together in class and decided to do the same online, unwittingly starting an rp guild. Ended up with a few people joining, joined a few other guilds to explore this "roleplay" they told us it was called. One of the guys we rubbed elbows with told us that he knew a site where everyone roleplayed and hooked us on this rp idea he said he was playing there that could use extra players. So I joined Iwaku when I was about 14.

Met awesome people, did lots of fun things, made some cool friends, etc. for a few years. Real life stuff happened and I intended to take a short hiatus and that accidentally turned into a few years oops. And then I realised that it had been a few years and shamefacedly asked one of the friends I made the first go for an invite code and slipped back expecting everyone to be mad at my flaky butt. And now here I am!
 
I started roleplaying when I was about ten years old, because I needed a way to quickly learn written English and expand my vocabulary and slang. I got started roleplaying when I was on Neopets and grew from Neopets on to MSN messenger and Invisionfree type roleplay boards. There, I roleplayed on various forums for several years back in the day when entire forums were dedicated to one large roleplay or setting, and you'd throw all your characters into them. They were always very enjoyable!

From there, I moved more in one on one style roleplays as I honed my skills, and joined Roleplayers Guild way back in the early days. I stayed there up until their epic crash of several years, in which a catastrophic attack wiped their site and content. They remained unopened for several years. I migrated to RPN, where I stayed for quite a while, until the toxicity of certain people on the site really got into my blood. Deciding I'd had enough, I moved to Iwaku, and have been here ever since. c:

My English is pretty A+, too. Roleplaying has made it so most people can't guess English is a second language for me.
 
At the start of September 2015 I had just finished up my University work and was kicking my heels looking for something to do when I heard a radio segment about forum based roleplaying and I thought it sounded like fun. I did a quick google search and clicked on the top result which was Iwaku and here we are.
 
I've gone through a lot of different sites. I think I first started back in '07 on a Warrior Cats roleplay site (don't ask, I really liked the books at the time). It was just a chat site, so most of the roleplaying was of the ' *walks into room* hi ' variety. The site was fun, but very... clique-y. Friends of the site creators became mods and could harass members they didn't like without consequences. People formed elitist groups until any outsiders were completely ignored.

Left that site when my friends left, and joined a MUD server. I also recall my friend creating a small site which I helped moderate, but it didn't last long.

I took a break for about a year before starting up roleplaying on Tumblr (yeah I know shut up). There were a few good groups (some of the TF2 groups were decent) and a whole year was spend on indie rping in which I built up a good group of friends.

I really don't remember how I found Iwaku. I must have been browsing for sites to satisfy my roleplaying needs and came across Iwaku, which was very organized, friendly, and professional. So now here I am. Trapped within the Iwaku Bubble, never to be free again.

Couldn't be happier.
 
I started roleplaying on Facebook, though I can't quite remember why. If I remember correctly, I hardly knew what play-by-post roleplaying was not long before I started. Anyways, it turns out FB isn't a pot of literary genius, so I was urged to escape my comfort zone and venture into the great internet. I visited toprpsites (vote for Iwaku btw), and opened the top two results or so, of which Iwaku was one. I don't know what made me choose Iwaku, but somehow, here I am!
 
I started RPing on MSN chats right after my oldest daughter was born, then moved onto MSN groups. When those shut down, I actually didn't roleplay for at least five years. I didn't exactly lose interest in it, but real life didn't give me much of an opportunity to search for other places to rp.

I got back into it around 2010-2011 on a few different sites, one of them being RPG. When RPG went down and I joined Iwaku to hold me over until it got back up. However, when everything was lost, including my absolute favorite rp, I took a year long hiatus before becoming active on here.
 
I started roleplaying around 10ish years ago. At first I was just doing chat RPs with a friend on Skype, but then I found HexRPG and played exclusively in the Harry Potter universe for a few years. The site had a strict PG-13 content limit, and it started to feel a bit limiting after a while, so I started looking for a new home. I joined RoleplayerGuild, but got into Tumblr RPs just shortly after that, so I didn't use the site much until Tumblr updated so many times that all of my extensions were broken and many of my partners had either left or moved on to other fandoms. So, it was back to RPG and I stayed there for a while until the downtime started to make the site unusable for me. I actually heard about Iwaku from all of the people who were leaving RPG and I pretty much haven't looked back since :D
 
I first started roleplaying out on Fanfiction.net around 2012. I moved to Fictionpress.com, never had a good time, then made a step forward to find Iwaku (I believe it was through top rp sites that I found Iwaku) and here I am. I think Iwaku is one of the best roleplay sites I’ve ever been on. They don’t single anyone out and that’s what I really love; a sense of tight-knit community.
 
I started roleplaying around the age of 11, following my brother onto Fictionpress. It was nice there for a while but after a while, things started to get a bit abrasive and harsh. There was a lot of drama and after that the place started to die as my partners moved on. I then moved on to websites like Roleplay.me and Aniroleplay, needless to say it didn't work out. I could never keep things going on those sites. It always left me disinterested.

Then, I followed my brother(again xP) onto Iwaku. Best decision I ever made for my roleplaying life. On here it is so much easier, the rules and staff played a big part into it. They keep things so clean, always helpful, and just plain amazing, I love them! And the community, don't get me started on them! I made so many lovely friends and awesome partners. My writing has evolved a lot too.

Well, anyways, I suppose I should stop boasting about the site, we all know how great it is xD That's my story anywho.
 
As for myself...

I first started roleplaying back in 2008 on a manga forum. I went into hiatus for a while, resisting roleplaying until the summer of 2013, where I started to once more on Fictionpress. I remained there for a good while (until this autumn in fact).

Early 2015 an acquaintance of mine from Fictionpress introduced me to Iwaku, wanting to start a group roleplay here. We didn't actually get started, and they left Iwaku eventually. However I stuck around, jumping from roleplay to roleplay. I was actually thinking of leaving Iwaku in 2016 when I finally attempted to join GenCha.

Let's just say I stuck for good after that :D
 
Pretty sure my first role-playing venture happened when I was maybe 13 years old or younger. I vaguely remember it being an Alice Academy forum. There was a 1x1 that intrigued me so I just jumped in even though I had no idea what the heck I was doing. :P

Fast-forward maybe two years later and being the anime nerd I was, I happened upon OtakuZone. Didn't think much of it. Thought it was clickbait because they weren't actually a streaming website like I had hoped. But a few misclicks later, I checked out the forums because why not. That was when I found the role-playing section. I don't know how it happened, but I just observed how people did it, then started a role-play of my own. I remember that my first role-play was about a bunch of people dying and being stuck in some sort of purgatory-esque place where they have to play a morbid game of sorts to appease the Grim Reaper. That was... something. It didn't garner any attention though. My slice-of-life plot-less cafe role-play was a hit in comparison.

I became a staff member to the horribly moderated OtakuZone. Tried my best to archive maybe 100+ pages of dead role-plays, but turned out it was all for naught because the site died anyway soon after. The admins decided to revamp the site, and so OtakuNetwork was born. Not long after, it, too, died because of its crippling elitism, inactivity, and general toxic atmosphere (people only ever went online to rant). But just a little bit before it laid in its grave, I started a role-play where I met Nemo, who eventually managed to drag my then-reluctant ass to Iwaku. I'm really thankful for that now. The elitism in previous websites killed my creativity, but Iwaku was a breath of fresh air where I rediscovered my long lost love that is role-playing.

And so, here we are, 2+ years later. :D
 
It might have been in my head back in 1987 or 1988 when I was in the third grade. I would write fan-fiction for youth animated feature-length films my Dad or Mom took me to see. At first I thought it was weird and was ashamed. It was not until much later that I realised it was perfectly normal. I eventually took television series' and other non-animated films and wrote fan-fiction, and then did the same for "Pretty Warrior Sailor Moon" and "Pocket Monsters." Project Anime had some pretty good forums and chatrooms, -and I actually met this eKin guy in N.Y.C. once in 1997-, but so did Gaia, Willow Grove, Ravensmeet, Aberration, Dimensional Palace, Paradise, Dream Twilight, but there were all piss-poorly run by madmen and lunatics with attitude problems and egos the size of Cowboys Stadium and the Meadowlands Stadium put together on top of Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium. Those people were perpetually miserable and angry and foul-mouthed. And CLIQUE-ISH!!! Cliques within cliques with cabals within cabals. Dreams ... it got to the point where I just stopped trying and watched them all collapse under the incompetence of the administrators and moderators like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did under Communism. But it was good practice. Gaia is still up and running. I still have a name there I think. And Project Anime Communications still has their site up.

No, I bounced around ... I think there was Phoenix Crash, but that dumb broad was totally lost. Then a friend of mine from Church going as "Trinity" from ... I think it was ... with Keanu Reeves ... he was Neo ... I forgot. She started AnimeX Photogalleries and had her own R.P.G. chatroom.

I found this Site from an advert.
 
Ok, don't laugh but...my first experience role-playing was on Xbox Live. And no, I don't mean through chat. You know the little avatars you can make for each profile, and how you can view them all at one time? Me, my cousin, and my brother used to make a plethora of characters, and make a story for them. Like, literally using our voices for each "avatar" and doing a weird, video game play. We were like 10 at the time, and had no idea what the heck we were doing. All I know is we had so much fun doing it. Eventually that ended, and I began to get heavily involved in MMO games, anime, manga, etc etc. In 2009 I stumbled across this website called "Otakuzone". I believe that was the year the site first got started...? Don't quote on me this. But what originally attracted me to it was, besides the cute avatars, was the anime and manga section. I eventually left the site for a while, and didn't return until early 2011. That was the year I finally discovered the roleplaying section. Like @FieryCold , I kinda just perused how other people rped, and then randomly made my own rp. Have no idea I how managed to do it, but oh well.

My first rp was called "Survival of the Fittest". If you think that's cringey, just know that I wrote out everything in Comic Sans *shudders*. I actually met a really close friend there by the name of SoraAngel. She doesn't really rp anymore, but we still talk in real life; I actually visited her at college last spring as a matter of fact. I made some other friends too on OtakuZone, and had some good rps there. The website was very expansive in its content, which I liked. But alas, the site was canceled by its company. The same administrators and moderators from the site decided to make their own by the name of OtakuNetwork, but I didn't go there right away. I had a few misgivings about some of them...one of them used to harass me on OZ for reasons bewilderingly unknown to me (she got mad at me in chat one day because I said something in Spanish to a friend. I was just like ????ok??) Even after I reported her to the mods, they were just like "lol stop being sensitive, she's just playing around." Yeah ._. I didn't like that attitude. At the same time, my friend SoraAngel decided to make a little private website that was really just populated with our circle of friends---not to say that no one else couldn't join, but it was just the five of us in the beginning. Eventually, a gaggle of people from OtakuZone drifted there, but they soon ran off to OtakuNetwork. I had a great time on that site too for the short year it was active, but when my friends eventually ghosted, I went to OtakuNetwork.

Alright, so. OtakuNetwork. <----clicky to see it in its last days. Where do I even begin...? Fiery and Nemo have already said how toxic it was, but I'm just here to reiterate what a cesspool it was. Don't get me wrong, I had fun with my rps; I always enjoy that. But holy crap was it toxic on there. All people did was bitch about how inactive it was on there, and then when some of us were like "ok, then why don't you post something" then all of a sudden, here came the pity party. Wah, I'm so busy with work/school/family/pets/food etc etc. That shit was infuriating. And the mods--save Nemo--were just bumps on a log who did not contribute at all to anything. It was a roleplaying site, and yet the administrator used to frequently complain about the rps going on. WTF MAN.

Around the time the site started dying--because, you know, people were crying instead of being active-- @Nemopedia kept trying to convince me to join Iwaku. After much nagging, I eventually made an account in 2014 I believe...? But I didn't stay long. The site was really confusing to me at first, combined with the fact I didn't know anybody and was being a shy little punk. After OtakuNetwork finally closed, I just decided to take a long hiatus from role-playing. I was just entering college, and a lot of stuff was going on at home.

But I digress. FAST FORWARD TO 2017. In May I finally returned, and huzzah! Here I am! YOUR WELCOME.

Sorry for the essay, but I couldn't help myself. It's either this or write a book titled "My Struggle".
 
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