Sad sad sad

There was this kid that joined our guild recently. Well, he gave his age to be 18 on his application but he felt rather young and immature in his words and actions.

On his first Kara run with us he was all Ooo I hope this and that drops and I want this and generally blubbering away like a child, giving the impression of being very young. But we have a few more members like this, and while it gets really old after about 15 seconds or so its usually bearable, nothing to get too upset about.

The next day he managed to severely piss off some of my friends by filling gchat with a lot of annoying bullshit to the extent that they wanted one of the officers to gkick him. As I was in group with them at the time, the officer asked my opinion too, and I gave it. Had just come online, didn’t know what had been said, and maybe the kid somehow didn’t realise that he was being so offensive, perhaps a small chat officer-to-trial-member would be appropriate. Let’s be the mature ones here and give him a chance to mend his ways, so to speak.

Another day goes by, I am doing some AV’s with my warlock to prep for that upcoming nice Merciless Gladiator gear, when I see the same kid proudly stating in gchat that he always picks on any emos he meets. Eh, say again? Why? Seems his gf was once picked on by an emo and thus it was legitimate to treat all emos badly after that. Also seems there was an emo in his class once, but some headslamming made that one see the error of his ways.

Also, emos was bad for people around them, they dragged people down and mentally hurt them, so it was ok to pick on them and headslam them, thus hurting them both physically and mentally.

Gay people got a swing of the same hammer, seems you become gay by spending time with gay people, which was a really bad thing.

All these statements and then some were delivered as Absolute Truths, not opinions. And not one time, even, oh no, he was repeating himself, hammering home the points, making us all absolutely unable to harbour any hopes that maybe he was just really really bad at expressing himself instead of really really bad at being a kind and decent human being.

Somehow along the way he involved God and the church too. We should all be lucky the church had been there for us all this time, otherwise we’d all be speaking Turkish and living in a Moslem empire. The slaughtering of people in religious wars over gold and power was justified because it served a higher purpose. Even today, the church was sorely needed to keep people in line.

I told him he came across as a small-minded nasty vicious idiot, which was my opinion. Small-minded because he couldn’t accept that anyone had views and tastes and beliefs that he didn’t approve of, nasty and vicious because he advocated violence, mental and physical, against anyone with a lifestyle that he didn’t approve of, and idiot because he didn’t hesitate to spew this filth among people he had just met and was (I guess) trying to make a good impression on to let him stay and get phat lewtz.

Anyways, after an hour or so of him throwing out more and more filth in ghcat, and not being able to understand that me and everyone else was not agreeing with him and not being able to even concede that I or anyone else might not be totally wrong, I told him I considered him a lost cause and would put him on ignore so I would not have to risk feeling sickened from reading his vile so-called “facts” littering up gchat.

It was really saddening.

Most saddening of all was that this was a kid. Few kids are rational, they are too caught up in the whirlwind of hormones and fear of not fitting in and the general angst of growing up and finding your place in the world, all this in this case reinforced by the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory. I should not have argued with him like I did. He was disgusting and vicious and nasty, but still a kid.

Will he grow up like that, believing he has the answer to everything, that it is ok to hurt and ridicule people that don’t think or look like him? Will he ever find out that it is a person’s actions towards others that are important, not what said person look like or think like or what kind of music she listens to, or will he keep spreading the intolerance and ignorance he so painfully obviously displayed in gchat? Will he ever realise that it is ok to be different and help people instead of being afraid of them?

I hope he will turn out ok. He had some fun things going, like the Murloc song he sang in gchat, so there must be a streak of light in him.

And how much of this is our responsibility anyways? WoW is a game, I play it for fun, not to raise other people’s kids. When I see someone saying things I find unacceptable, I speak up, but if they don’t shape up or at least agree to not agree with me, carefully walking the line, I put them on ignore. I don’t log in to get pissed off or saddened by some little twat’s abysmal ignorance and intolerance. But do we have an obligation to try and help people see the light, so to speak, when they so obviously are floundering around in the darkness?

In a perfect world, I would say yes, we have a responsibility and an obligation to help and support people we encounter. Even in our less-than-perfect world I like to think that we will help each other out. But this... I don’t want to spend my time in WoW trying to foster a generous spirit in some anonymous jerk. Am I selfish? Probably.

He got gkicked later that night. I wonder if he will truly realise why, and if he will grow from the experience and be a better person, or if he will just blame me and think it’s a conspiracy of gay emos out to get him.

I hope for the former, but I fear it’s the latter.