Remembering Quizilla

The above image is for any that might worry about us with our timeline update yesterday…

Somehow…though we are still very much suicidal…we have made it to another day.

Being alone for long periods when we’re like this is what’s the scariest.

Thankfully yesterday we were able to keep ourselves doing tasks like laundry and writing. Plus, during one of the hardest stretches yesterday, one of our friends responded to a meme/text post we sent them, and we were talking about different things.

I’m so thankful for all of our friends…the ones we have physically, the ones we have online…and both versions of friends we used to have by our side.

With the frenzied writing of yesterday, a single lyrical line kept repeating in our head

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f1e9db4e-9fc7-4b5a-8e32-9c748d56a166

And it made us really start to think about what writing means to us.

Writing has never been something that we’ve seen as a ‘dream’ of ours. Oh sure, we told people that. It was the only explanation we could formulate for why we would bring notebooks and pens with us EVERYWHERE. Why we would write, and write, and write. Numerous stories, rich characters, crazy and convoluted plots that we would sort out in the re-writes.

But don’t get me wrong. When I say that writing isn’t our dream…that may be misleading.

After all, isn’t our true dream to craft stories and share them with the world? Wouldn’t that mean that writing is EXACTLY our dream, then?

Well…one might think so. In fact, we thought that was the only attainable way to fulfill it too.

Quizilla was what gave us our writing start…but it wasn’t writing stories in the same format as one would write a novel.

No…we wrote quiz-series, where the taker of the quiz would star. They would have to choose different options, and depending on everything they chose, they would get 1+ “end scenes”, where different things would happen. Then the next quiz would take place after those branches met back up, and would bring the next piece of the story.

These were reminiscent of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories in our mind. They were also what we (or more specifically, Kay) would later use as a jumping board into the realms of Otome and Dating Sim games.

And we LOVED them.

We would still write story-format things on there as well. On our ‘main’ account, it was typically side-stories for the quiz series, or oneshots we would write in trade for others.

That brings us to our core thoughts with quizilla, actually.

In an era before we knew the words, the terms, the EVERYTHING about our system, Quizilla caused a state of semi-awareness.

Others were talking of things they experienced. We had alters in here that recognized that what they were saying matched a lot of what we also had.

We created multiple Quizilla accounts. I think we had about five, by the time the site shut down. We explained this to ourselves as “we need to separate some of our REALLY triggering writing that we want to do from this pretty tame stuff here”. But it was truly different alters, each with their own experiences, creating their own things.

Now…I don’t feel bad about creating multiple accounts, or even that we identified as different people. What I DO feel bad about is how we had to create fake narratives for these other people’s lives. A lot of these weren’t “fake” entirely…like, there was some system-based stuff to go along with each.

We had some moves (in town, and out of town, but still right nearby the town we knew), and our main friend was our “Quizilla Twin”, who lived in England. (I miss you, my friend. We used to talk about so much. You were even the first person who introduced us to the term “nonbinary”, though I’m pretty sure that happened when you and us moved over to Wattpad. I don’t know if you’ll ever see this, but we think about you a lot and hope that you are doing well).
So…our third account was ran by an alter of ours who was more newly formed, and heavily inspired by our Quizilla twin. We created a narrative where her dad had to transfer/change jobs (actually fairly close to reality), and said that she moved to England…

Looking back…that is fairly standard preteen behavior, I feel like. Especially when it comes to fanfic writers and others in that general vicinity, as I would list myself and a bunch of other Quizilla people. Yet we still feel terrible about it all.

And what’s funny is that I really don’t think we need to feel bad…

When it was announced that the site was shutting down, we made a post on all of our accounts, detailing that all of the listed accounts were ran by us, and apologizing for lying to everyone. Especially to the friends we had on what ended up being our TWO main accounts.

Everyone who responded to it didn’t seem upset. In fact, I’m pretty sure a couple of them had suspected for a time as well.

But that lie…even though in many ways, it was our only way of keeping ourselves slightly safe (we did fall victim to an online predator during our time on there…but that’s another story) as we allowed our semi-aware state of selves to develop as it would.

We RPed a BUNCH. I wish we still had access to the email we had…I know it’s a long shot, but if anyone reads this and is like “hey…I might know who you are from Quizilla/rp-ing” and wants to message us about it, feel free! We really, really, REALLY miss talking to our old friends. Especially now that we would be able to explain the fact that we’re a system, and so in reality, they have a BUNCH of friends over here who miss them all terribly.

But we ESPECIALLY miss those Quizilla friends who we called family. I know we had our “Quizilla Twin”. I know we had our “brother”, who was always full of a mixture of older and younger brother energy. He always seemed to have an uncanny sense of when we were REALLY in a bad state, and would message a bunch with his goofiness. I know he brought smiles to our face when no-one else could. But he could be surprisingly serious when it really came to it.

To some degree, one of my boyfriends in our partner system reminds me a LOT of this quizilla brother of mine. He’s goofy in a similar way, and is able to bring a smile to my face and take my mind briefly away from all of its problems.

But yeah…Quizilla quizzes. Messages. RPs. All of these are writing, no? Thus, we should once again draw the conclusion that writing is our system’s dream, yes?

Nope.

All of our favorite parts of storytelling seem to come from the interactions of the target audiences.

Finally we are at a point where we’re realizing just how much of our life has always been leading us to videogames. ARGs. D&D. Other things that we don’t have names for, but we have the FEELINGS of them.

We can create the story. All of it. We can create the visuals. We can create the sounds. We can create the characters. And yet, each player will be slightly different. They’ll experience the game through their own views, their own experiences.

Hopefully they will like it. Based on what I remember of Quizilla, people tended to really like our characters and stories. So I hope that is still true.

We have a lot of work to do, though.

In some ways, I’m wondering if we shouldn’t start with something “easier”, a youtube series similar to the Choose Your Own Adventures that Markiplier has done.

How is this easier than other things? Why would we choose to do this when we literally bought a version of RPGmaker several years ago in order to make something in that style?

Well…that’s complicated to explain, but hopefully when we have more of an idea of what we’re doing, we’ll be able to. But we do still plan on continuing work on our RPGmaker project. I just feel that getting some momentum with the other idea may be a good start.

Sheesh…ADHD and DID work together in weird ways. I don’t think I brought up one of the main things I wanted to, and instead went off on another important tangent.
But anyway.
The whole reason we added in the Hamilton lyric.

“Why do you write like you need it to survive?”

Why, when writing itself is not our dream, do we write like this at times?

Well…there’s a couple reasons, but they are both tied in to the fact that we write like that during times when we are the MOST suicidal. We write as an outlet for whatever might be filling our thoughts. And even if that isn’t usually enough to stop or even pause our suicidality, the second reason comes in.

It fills time.

It delays us.

Often, we’ll be writing and won’t realize how much time is passing as we type on our keyboard, or move our pen across a page.

It gives time for us to become not alone anymore.

Because those are the hardest times for us.

So…I guess what I’m saying is that our system might start/continue to blog like crazy. I DOUBT we’ll be like this, but we might even post multiple things in a day.

…basically, we are going to use this blog as a tool in order to help us. You know, kinda like how it was designed to be for the users lol ^^

Anyway, I am losing track of my thoughts all the more, and I THINK I’ve covered what I initially set out to do, so I’m gonna hop off of this post and figure out what we’re doing from here…even if it’s just switching someone else in, so that THEY can write.

-Deliah