ANTHROS UNITE: A Morbit Retrospective

[CW: Sexual assault, severe child abuse, suicide]

When I was twelve, my computers teacher saved my life. I don’t think she was ever aware of it, and I don’t think she ever will be, but she did, and through such a simple gesture. According to some documents I have kicking around from a childhood psych eval, she describes me as “a natural programmer” and having “intrinsic motivation”, which is teacher speak for “Help, I can’t keep this gremlin child from making overly complicated CYOA games in PowerPoint”. She was one of the most encouraging teachers I’ve ever had, and the best thing she did for me was show me MIT’s programming website for all ages: Scratch.

Scratch was a great website, with a great premise- you could download the Scratch program and make projects of your own, using a sort of building block system. It was easy and engaging to use, and captured me immediately. I loved having actual tools to create things with, and I soon realized another benefit of Scratch, one just as important to me if not moreso.

I could make friends.

Like pretty much every other kid back in the 2000’s, I was told very strictly to never talk to strangers online. I, like pretty much every other kid in the 2000’s, didn’t listen to this at all. IRL, I was isolated almost entirely. I had some friends that I cared about and wanted to hang out with, but I always felt like an outsider. It would be years before I understood why this was, but at the time, all Kid Rin wanted was a friend that got it, whatever it was.

The first time someone left a comment on my projects, it felt like the world had changed. Someone actually cared about something I made, someone thought it was cool! I was ecstatic, and from that point on, I started trying to talk to people on Scratch. It didn’t take long for me to discover one of the major draws for people on the site- roleplaying.

My first RP group was a Warriors one, which should come to no surprise to anyone. That was the shit when we were kids, you know? The idea of writing with other people was mindblowing, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I couldn’t get enough. I joined tons of RPs, and made just as many characters, bouncing around groups until the holy grail of Scratch was created: Anthros Unite.

Holy shit, Anthros Unite. I could write forever about this RP group, and how much it meant to me, but we’d be here all day. I’ll focus for now on my personal relationship to it, and save the rest for another time. It ended up being the biggest thing on Scratch for years, and was a lot of kids’ introduction to furries. The best part about AU though: anything goes. You could do anything, as long as it didn’t break the Scratch rules (or you were sneaky about it.)

There were hundreds of characters made for this RP, and all of them were wild as hell. You had vampires, you had werewolves (or in my case, a vampire/werewolf hybrid tiger furry), you had aliens and robots and combinations of all of the above, you had stolen anime girls off of google images because holy shit, weren’t those cool? It was hundreds of kids (just under 400 followers, to be exact) absolutely going batshit with character designs and having the time of their lives making them smack the shit out of eachother.

The plots were convoluted, we were all preteen edgelords, and it was some of the best fun I ever had. I lived and breathed AU. I never stopped loving it from the day I started to the day I was shoved out of my own reboot of the group for my plot shit being too overbearing and lame. Even afterwards, I kept my characters close. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll recognize quite a few of them.

AU was a heartfelt disaster, full of drama and screaming and fights, but it was also a place where kids could express themselves, far away from IRL confinements. But most importantly to me, it was also the first place I tried to process my abuse.

I didn’t grasp the depths of the shit I went through as a kid for a long time, and I still struggle with unpacking 20 years of trauma. Finding out as an adult that I repressed even more than I realized was crushing, and I’ll likely need intensive trauma therapy for a very long time. This is not a secret of mine by any means, and I make it clear that my work today carries a lot of that weight- both as catharsis, and as a possible look into how it feels to fight for every breath.

The first time I tried to kill myself, it was before I even knew the word suicide existed. I was trying to grapple with things I didn’t understand, namely sexual abuse at the hands of my father, as well as pretty awful bullying. Scratch came a year or two later, and I sunk everything I could into my characters. They struggled with things like dark sides, madness/insanity tropes, and being forced into awful situations against their will. They were broken again and again, but pulled through- often with other people’s’ characters helping them.

If my characters could find friends, family, and love in other people- couldn’t I?

Pretty much all of my characters were supernatural or monstrous in some way, and often times shunned from society for it. I focused heavily on the idea of being rejected and abused, and desperately trying to find some place in the world despite it. I related to villains in cartoons and edgy protagonists for all they went through, and imagery of evil science labs and transformations into powerful monstrous beasts resonated more than anything.

My characters weren’t all good, of course. A lot of them were absolutely awful and those iterations of them are going to stay in the dirt where they belong. A child’s understanding of trauma is usually not a good one, rape and violence pervading almost everything I made. I didn’t know how to understand it. I didn’t even realize that most of it had happened to me and got repressed deep down, and when the psychological abuse from my mother started up, it got worse and worse. How do you even begin to start understanding this, when your entire life has been filled with mind-shattering abuse?

Complex PTSD is notably different from the more standard PTSD diagnosis- present not in the case of singular or spread out traumatic events, but chronic, ongoing, inescapable abuse. I was diagnosed with CPTSD early on in my therapy, thanks to 20 years of hell. I was born into an abusive family and between my mother and father’s completely opposite kinds but equally awful abuse tactics, I slowly fell apart as I grew up. By the time I graduated high school, I was desperately trying to keep psychotic breakdowns at bay, and stared down the ever-present temptation of ending it all.

The way it felt is still indescribable to me in words, but I did my best to shove all of those feelings into my characters, the best outlet I had. They screamed, they were maimed, gore and mauled, they were abused in every way imaginable and had horrible, unspeakable pasts. It was suffocating, but making the pain visible in some, abstract way made it easier to breathe.

But even with all of this, they got to experience love, and so did I.

When my mother’s abuse started to get particularly nasty, I buried myself into AU as deeply as I could. I was online more than most, and ended up making friends with another user online just as much. Our characters connected very quickly, and we were hooked on making stories together. There was a hell of a lot of cheesy romance and over the top plots, but that was the fun of it. We spent hours and hours writing, staying up late in secret and helping each other through hell.

We were best friends back then, and partners now. Comorant is one of the most important people in my life and the creative work we did together kept me afloat during the worst periods of my abuse. I remember so many little moments, carefully written but completely improvised scenes, hanging onto every second before the next reply was sent. I remember refreshing a basic Gmail window on a DSi browser, hiding in bed from my vengeful mother and trying not to cry from hours of screaming- only to smile, even if just a little, when I saw his reply.

We carried our stories on past the group’s falling out, developing them into their own canon called Punch Clock Animal, alongside a new set of stories labelled under Vest Party. We realized that combining these stories into their own universe (along with a solo piece I had come up with, Tiny Cat People), would be viable- and so we made Morbit, a creative sandbox with as much freedom as AU, but with more room for emotional depth and adult stories. Most of our main characters trace back to Anthros Unite, all those years ago. We still love them dearly, and have sunk countless hours into fine tuning and revamping them for the modern canon.

(If you’re not familiar with these stories, I think they’re pretty good and you should read them- TCP is up at the time of writing, as well as a PCA prequel called Maybequest. There’s a whole lot of other good stuff made by the team we work with, both Morbit-focused and otherwise.)

One of the most important parts of Morbit though- everything you could have done character-wise back then, is possible in this. While the world has rules to it, they’re really loose guidelines at best. The very science and nature of Morbit means that you can do anything you want, and explore your own personal journey through it. We’ve had a lot of fan characters made just in our small but dedicated as hell community, and it never fails to make me smile. It means so much to see creativity done completely unrestrained, inspired by existing lore and materials but never limited, never held back. It feels like we’re doing our origins justice, in a weird way.

People give roleplaying shit a lot, and call characters like the ones I made cringe-y. You see it everywhere, and it’s fun to laugh at kids who make edgy things, things we don’t understand as outsiders. There’s no way to know what a character means to another person, and no way to know how a story helps them get through the day. We should absolutely be critical of stories- not every way of coping is a good one, and the way I handle catharsis in my work is far, far healthier for me than the raw splattering of gore and abuse everywhere when I was a kid.

While my pieces back then were focused on suffering, my current work focuses heavily on recovery, and it feels good. Even the hardest parts to write, the ones that make me teary eyed and choked up, come with a sense of power and relief- because no matter what the character’s going through, I know that for them, and for me, there’s always a shot at it getting better. My comics can be violent and brutal, but I’ve also been told that they carry an emotional weight to them that not much else does and to me, this is the highest praise I could ever receive. It means I’m doing my job right, and that for even a brief moment, I can try to share an experience with someone who may need it.

This is what makes my job worth it, and why I love what I do so much. I will never stop caring about Morbit and the stories I create, and I hope that someday, this can be a full time career for me. Maybe it’s idealistic, but I honestly hope I can do it.

Thank you for reading this spontaneous piece. I am very tired both perpetually and now, but every drop of support I get makes it worth it. I have so much love in my life, and the characters I’ve built up over almost a decade have grown up alongside me: and now, you can enjoy them too. I really hope that people from AU find this someday, and realize just how much the group helped me, and so many others, through growing up.

Don’t be afraid to make things that are important to you, and always, always, be grateful for the moments you helped yourself to breathe.