Neopets, roleplaying snobbery, and mental illness, oh my!
To start things off, I will freely admit that I know next to nil about the peculiar form of internet madness known as Neopets. Aside from, you know, the basic "fake online pets" thing. So I may be even more baffled by this than any Neopets users out there will be.

At any rate, a friend showed me this thread, and I was amazed. It starts out in a seemingly innocuous fashion: user Cally_Kari_Shokka was given a pet that bears a strong resemblance to a toddler's pillow infested with Satan. These are apparently a rare commodity in the land of Neopets, so she posted on this message board to squee about it.

It takes all of two replies for the entire thing to degenerate into a special sort of madness. User Enriana explodes onto the scene with this little number:

You know what, Cally? This is what I think.

I think you're the most selfish, idiotic, self-absorbed, kleptomaniac, egotistical, greedy, self-centered, self-indulgent, self-interested, self-seeking, stingy, ungenerous person I could ever hope to meet.

Every single time I've ever seen you post on AaToW, about OMGSQUEE!!!111 you found yet another baby pet, or OHNOESWOE!!!111 you missed a royalboy Gelert in the pound, I've surpressed the urge to ask you if you don't already have enough damn pets.

I can understand having an addiction to Neopets, completely. Hell, I have five accounts' worth of pets. But you know the difference between my addiction and yours? I actually CARE about my pets. I work hard to paint them, for petpets. I do lookups, pet pages, vivid personalities.

Your pets line up in rows on accounts. Names, personalities, petpets don't even make an imprint on you. They're just pretty things that don't mean a wit to you. What if you get frozen? You lost some decorations. Who cares about the pets, the people you got them from, the better homes they might be in if you hadn't been so damned greedy?

Oh, yes, I forgot. You did offer a HUGE service for NC. Remember? You offered to pound surf. Just PM you the pet info, account info, and you'd get to it. "Ohh," I remember thinking. "Cool! How nice of her." So I PMed you, asking you for a well-named Fire Cybunny, well-named Halloween Kougra, and/or well-named Maraquan Chomby, if you could.

I check my account, there's a badly named ghost Peophin, Chokato Chia, and something else I don't remember. Quite obviously the first painted pets you found. But, if a person tipped you, what do they get? Why, a nicely-named, nicely-painted pet, probably exactly what they asked for, of course. Was tipping ever mentioned as necessary in your post? Nope.

And then you have the nerve to post whining about the people that abandoned all your "hard work". Boo hoo! Poor Cally!

Have you ever once posted on the adoption thread, with a painted pet up for adoption? Surely, with your ever so elite pet hunting skills, you would have a bunch of times. What's that? No? Really? But, you get all sorts of baby pets, plushie pets, rare lab-ray only pets, or ones not available from the lab, not to mention the ones available.

Really, Cally. I've tried and tried to hold my tongue, but this is just too much. You don't deserve any of your "trophy" pets, and I hope Neopets freezes every single one of your accounts. I won't feel a bit of regret.

The next few posts stay relatively mellow. A couple people also think that Cally has entirely too many pets. A couple others get snarky with Enriana for being a big mean poopy-head. Then begins a debate on people who don't love their children Neopets enough.


Miss Kass: People who love their pets don't necessarily have to make beautiful pet pages for them and buy every single plushie in the universe for them, but they have to at least take care of them. They shouldn't just collect them. I have quite a few accounts worth of pets, but only one of them (my main account, pokefriends2002) contains painted pets, because I don't just go around collecting them and then going OMFG!!!1!! I own this pet on this account here and isn't it just painted prettifully! I have the one account, with the four pets, only two of whom are interestingly painted (unless you count the Ice Bori). I don't brag about my pets. I don't go to every single board I can find and say OMFG!!11!! I have a Grey Uni and a Robot Kacheek, I am like so much cooler than you!

If Cally really has 20 or so accounts, I'm afraid that I have to say she should be frozen. Like I said, I only have three or four, with NONE of them except one having painted pets. If Cally really cares, she should leave some of the nicely painted pets with nice names in the pound for newbies to adopt and enjoy, instead of adopting them onto some account that will sit on the shelf for years until the password and everything has been forgotten about it.

I don't adopt things from the pound, partly because I don't want to, partly because I am no good at pound surfing, and partly because I know for a fact that I don't need any more pets. If I want more, I will go to the Create a Pet page and make one, instead of adopting a pet that I know will pretty much go to waste.

St. Taco: well it's good getting a pet you like but you do have a large amount of pets that are never heard of again, 4/8 of my pets are adopted from people here but I give them personalitys, painted petpets, attempted to attach petpetpets, given them pictures and entered them in beauty contests (to no avail)But it seems you do think they're just there to be pretty and admired but there's a lot more to it than that. (You cannot appreciate the true subtle poetry of my anthropomorphic fart's color scheme, nor the epic beauty of the novel I wrote about his adventures, you plebe!)

Ziggy: It reminds me of me when I first started the site. Im not afraid to admit it here because this was a long time ago, long before I found neocolours, and long before I really got into my pets on a personal level. I used to go and poundsurf a lot, and I would grab any painted pet that came along, wether I liked it or not. I don't even like shadow ixis especially, but I had one of those, for example, just because it was painted.
I rarely gave them personalities, or petpets, and certainly never pages, and usually they'd be old news within the week when some other painted pet came along. (snip) I now only adopt pets I really love and couldn't afford myself, and most of the time I'd rather create a pet and paint it up if I can bring myself to shell out for it.
...
You can have a lot of accounts and still love each pet and know each pet's personality in depth, I do, but I just can't play with them all every day.
...
I don't know much about your pets Cally, obviously, but if it's true that you have 30 or 40 accounts, I really don't think you ca keep on top of that. (snip) If I had 30 or 40, I don't think I could really get attatched to all the pets, sorry.

User Sparky at least recognizes that they're all a bit insane. Now, pets: I realise that quite a few people here have many pets, and possibly some have more than what is currently allowed. Personally I don't have any problem with that but, if Jazzy is correct, 30 to 40 accounts is a bit excessive.

There's a little voice in the back of my head that tells me that a Neopet is just a record in a huge database, and its colour and species just a few bytes of that record, and what does it matter? The rest of my head then tells the voice to sod off and go down the pub or something while I get back to labbing for a grey Ixi or Yurble or somesuch. Why hoard all those pets, pets that some of us would dearly like to care for, just for the 'bling' factor. How about sharing the love a little?

Then we hit the jackpot. The OP posts again! It's okay folks, the forty Neopets accounts are shared by her and her nine siblings! And she has psychological disorders (including the magic incantation "Asperger's")! As we here at f_w have learned over the years, that's the equivalent of walking up to a big glowing button labeled "WARNING: WANKBOMB" and

Ziggy: Is it purely a NC thing, or what? Far too often when someone here gets yelled at for something, they blame some 'disorder', or something similar. I've never seen it on any other board I go to. (Oh, Ziggy, blessed art thou in thy ignorance. Let me pet you.)

Locust Wind That's right, you didn't do anything wrong. These people are so obsessed that if you don't "Love" your pets ( and I use the term loosely) enough, you get blasted. Try to ignore these beasts

Ziggy: We are not 'blasting' cally for not loving her pets. Hell, I know they're a bunch of pixels, what, you think we're all fucking stupid and we truely believe these things are alive?

Ziggy: (who quite possibly wins the "most posts in any thread EVAR" award) Collecting things to a large degree does not mean you have a psycological disorder, that term is thrown about far too losely. I sometimes think people WISH they had a psycological disorder so they can
a) look interesting
b) be unaccountable for their own actions
The definition of collecting something is to gather as many as you can, thats what collecting IS. If it meant that you had some kind of disorder because you collected things, then a good percentage of people in this world would have a disorder! Think how many people in this world, even this board, collect things.
I used to collect pigs when I was about 13. I had hundreds, and I'd gathered them in a remarkably short space of time. I also used to collect cats and necklaces. Now, I collect McFarlane action figures, anything with a rat or a pug on, and bones.
Yet I don't consider myself to have a disorder. Collecting is just a fun thing to do, something to get into, no different to drawing or writing. I like rats, so I like to have related things around me, thats why I will gather any rat related items I can find.

Now, when you collect things to the point that it takes over your life and you can't move in your house for things, or you neglect your personal hygene or family because of your obsession with this collection (obsessive cat collectors, for example, who have houses full of cats but who live in their own shit) then I'd say yes, you might have a problem. But simply becoming fixated on one particular type of item and wishing to aquire more of them, perhaps even hundreds of them, isn't, in my opinion, anything unusual. Im sure people here who collect things will agree.

April: I get obsessed with things to an EXTREME extent, but there's nothing wrong with me (other than not being socialized right when I was little, but that has very little to do with anything nowadays). I used to spend four or five hours minimum on school nights refreshing the Wiz on Neopets to find deals (and you guys thought I was just lucky. No, it was persistance...)...and I've been playing Neoquest on and off for over twelve hours as I write this (GOING to get that trophy today DAMMIT). (Not especially wanky, but I just had to share this with a side of "Buh?")

Lolliruss: I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to word this right...I can't quite think of how I can put it, but anyway...
This isn't only aimed at Cally, but at a few people in the past who've blamed bad behaviour on some kind of disorder or mental illness.
You don't seem to know the difference between a reason, and an excuse. Yes, maybe there is a reason that you behave in that way sometimes, but you can't just use that as an excuse...it doesn't excuse the way you acted or make it right. It's like... *sigh* I can't find the way to word this at all tonight, but hopefully you'll get the gist of it.

There's more, so much more. More mental disorder (and whether or not it excuses one from responsibility) wank, more fake internet pet wank, more "WHAT THE CRAP YOU'RE MEEN ON THE INTERNET" wank, accusations of account sockpuppetry, and the traditional invasion of would-be diplomats hoping to calm things down. As of now, the thread ends with a last dash of "You need to be a good Neopet mommy!", though I have been informed by secret sources that a sister of the OP wants very badly to storm into the thread astride a wank-colored white horse and lay waste to all the internet meanies. So it may be worth keeping an eye on.

This was my first ever wank post on an internet f_w, so if I've made embarassing format errors or any other stupid faux pas, I fully expect to be made fun of a little. ;) In return, I promise to fix any of these problems when/if they're pointed out to me. I hope you lovely folks here enjoy it, because otherwise my new hatred of all things related to formatting journal posts will have been for naught. And also I would just feel like an arse. :P