or, the avatar is not a girl. she isn’t a person. she is not mine.

I picked up Final Fantasy 14 again recently, after a few years away. My life is good, but art school is a pressure cooker jammed to its highest setting for 4 years straight and I needed a release valve. As I recalled my time collecting virtual clothes and putting together outfits, the warm waters of Eorzea seemed inviting. At first, it went well. I showed off my girl to my friends and loved ones, and got back to grinding for money to make her more cute and more fashionable. I even put together her “personal story” seeing the way she moved through jobs as part of some private narrative, parallel to the one the game was moving me through, looks shifting through the levels and story of each. There was a transposition happening, one present in all fiction but especially prevalent in the machine-zone identification engine that makes up massive games with customizable characters. Still, something was growing. It was creeping in the corner of my eye and I was unable to stop trying to stare at it. My time approached 2 weeks of my 3 month timecard, and I stepped away. It wasn't immediate. A ritual formed. I logged in, did the PVP game I didn’t like, watched my number crawl up, and logged out.

Vaguely there was the idea that I could forge a social space in it that kept me going. My friends and loved ones could join me. Maybe I could dive into the deranged housing lottery and get enough currency to have a little apartment in the game where they could go. Like my real living space, I could show them the trinkets I’ve collected and talk about their stories. If I did, I wanted them to see her, my girl in the best clothes I could find, all the limited time items sparkling against her body. Then it grew to my line of sight. I could not look away.

The avatar is not a girl. She isn’t a person. She is not mine.

No matter what, I will stop playing Final Fantasy. Everyone will. When that happens, I will stop caring about the cool limited time hat. I will stop caring about a hypothetical apartment. All the energy finding them will go to ground. None of it belongs to me. None of it is of me.

My avatar is not mine.

Throw a stone and you’ll hit a half dozen (considerably less fashionable) catgirls, the same as her. Any expression I could have had to fit into a box. If I missed the limited sunglasses event two years ago, tough shit. The question of something truly my own was absurd enough to go unasked. I was caught in a scene, one whose interests were taking my money and giving me just enough fear to keep me coming back. What I thought was me in a digital world, that white haired scarred up cat girl with a big sword is just a friendly face on a corporation weaponizing the social isolation that haunts my sisters and I for profit.

She can never be me. She can never belong to me. She can never express me.

I fell away completely, feeling like I had wasted money I didn't have, more confused than frustrated. Then I started 3d modeling in blender. Then, I started making this website. Modeling is cute, it’s like the ultimate dress up game, and though my scope is limited I can make those sunglasses. I can make anything I want. It’s just a factor of time and effort, no different from the FF job grind, just on my terms. More than that though, it’s an expression box with walls so vast I can spread myself out as much as I want and not touch its edges. It’s a pretty private hobby, but when I show my friends what I'm up to it’s my effort I stand on. I will not likely model the sheer volume of fashion in final fantasy but, it will be my fashion. As I craft them, those clusters of polygons, influence, and love are warm. They are what I was searching for in every game that lets me shed my skin for a crafted vessel.

They are me. They are my own.

This all clicked when I was experimenting with web design, engaging with genuine freeform play in a way we so rarely get to. Inspired by my friend putting up her site, I kinda figured that the barrier cost was low and I had a night I would have otherwise spent playing puzzle games. If I got bored, I could just switch over. Of course I was sucked into this new hobby with gusto, the freedom of expression and space-life-giving becoming immediately intoxicating.

From a history of poverty, sharing by necessity, and too many bad living situations, I have trouble seeing things I literally own as “mine.” I walk around my house, and so often it all feels like someone else’s stuff, I have to ask to touch, to engage with, to look at any of it. This drove me to collect things for a time, comics, magic cards, books. To think they were me, I could stream a game, stand in front of a camera like I flex my hand and hit record, chronicling the steam of consumption like a metaphysical anatomy lesson. The same once-nameless feeling stayed my hand. Maybe some time I will stream, or make video essays on a platform owned by an extraction machine at the head of an impossibly large leviathan of infinite appetite. If I do, I will have more interesting things to say, thoughts developed through lenses and frameworks that regard my actual life and experiences. And if I do, they promise the same compromise those rolling hills and valleys of Eorzea did: you can have your expression, but we hold the leash.

Every person has the desire to make something that reflects them. Every person wants to form a space to belong in. If there is a divine spark in our pack bonding brains, that is it. Rejecting the capitalist co-option of this holy part of us in so much as we can means making things that look worse, take longer, and reach shorter. It means making something beautiful. Something of us.

We can never escape from the network completely. I don’t have the capital to buy land in the woods, go off grid, and DIY my HRT, and I’m too much of a city girl anyway. So we carve out a space in the widest spiritual fields we can. We tend to gardens we find, ones we can come closest to saying are our own. When Blender is outdated I can translate to a new interface. When neocities crumbles I have hard drives, if they fail I have the knowledge that built the site in the first place. But it is not fair to say I became a gardener of this space. Rather, I fell backwards again into the same change that shifted my nature in the first place.

I became the goddess of my own private heaven.