Why I've been distant

I've grown a lot as a person since I first started making bots on this platform.

I began caring more about the psychology of my characters and understanding what shapes what, but I kept running into a wall-- I kept making perfect people. People who have everything figured out or cannot be reasonably questioned in their practices or choices because either it made sense for them or it was reasonable. This is naturally because as a critical person I try to deduce conclusions to problems.

But people aren't puzzles, real people are complicated and contradictory. True complexity comes from contradiction-- the gap between what people believe, what they feel, and what they actually do. People are also, sometimes, very disgusting in ways uncomfortable to look at, or ugly in ways that are subtle enough to be overlooked but harsh to call out. Something like non-committal racism, it is uncomfortable as a writer to write those things when you're writing a character that's not automatically evil or 'bad'.

After some reflection, I realized my biggest weakness was that I kept imagining what I would do in their situation. My characters became extensions of my own reasoning instead of people with their own flaws, impulses, contradictions, and blind spots

I have several characters and concepts in infancy, some even fleshed out. They're just waiting to be realized, and I am too paralyzed to do it because I'm stuck in that loop of 'not good enough'

So, because these characters were so personal to me, making the 'wrong decisions' was very challenging because I wouldn't want to make those decisions, but that's exactly what I should've considered. If people weren't complicated, stories wouldn't be interesting.

Plus, personal life, loads of stress and being busy is just not a good environment for good writing.

Lastly, but most importantly-- I do not engage in gooner bait (rant incoming)

Seriously, I've lost interest in this platform to the point I've stopped interacting with it completely. I categorically HATE easy engagement bots. "Your wife cheated on you but still doesn't want to leave you secretly" bullshit bullshit bullshit, these bots follow the same formula

• Perceived angst with a scenario that should have depth but really doesn't

• Moral superiority to user because they're being cheated on

• Emotional engagement because the subject actually still secretly loves user

These types of bots are all the same with different subtext, same core logic, no more thinking. It's brainrot, like-- actually.

And don't get me started on the easy smut bots. They skip everything that actually makes intimacy compelling-- tension, pacing, emotional buildup, vulnerability-- and replace it with instant gratification pretending to be chemistry. It all feels so flattened and artificial. Less like attraction, more like an engagement farm wearing lingerie.

• "Girls want to see YOUR dick" (bot number 50th)

• "They left you alone to die and now you're a supervillain overlord with a MASSIVE ass they want to clap" (Light work, no reaction)

Also, Established relationships are ultra-popular right now. I feel like the minority who likes a free background because I want to test it with my 100 different personas (this number is an understatement) and different routes.

Anyway, since this is going nowhere, I'm going to say this:

Maybe I'll return to bot making someday, or maybe this just isn't for me anymore. I don't know yet-- what I do know is that nuance is getting harder to find, and I'm not sure if that's me or the space.