It's Not You, It's Me

About 3 months ago, I started reflecting on my first crush.

I hadn't thought about her --in depth-- in decades, so I wasn't exactly sure where this came from. I suppose you could say it came from some of the mini-Reds being involved in their own relationships, but I don't think that's the case.* And I do know that while most of my grade school classmates thought my first crush was a redhead in 7th Grade,** that's not true either.

My first real crush was in the summer after 6th Grade with a girl who lived down the street. She was two years older than me, and her parents were divorced, so I only saw her part time. She was pretty, and believe me she knew it.*** As long as I knew her she used to wheedle to get her way, and while I rolled my eyes at that most of the time, what she'd be asking for (such as to borrow my bike to ride around, as she didn't have one) was reasonable enough I'd have said okay without the extra spice.

If she knew I had a crush on her, she never seemed to give it away. But with me with my first onslaught of raging hormones took notice of everything about her and thought she was perfect. Even the fact that she listened to disco didn't deter me from crushing hard on her.

But time eventually did. 

As happens with first crushes, I eventually outgrew my infatuation and moved on to another crush. I still saw her around, and I thought she was still very beautiful and I retained a soft spot for her, but the age difference plus the total difference in interests ended all feelings for her.****

***

Ironically enough, reflections on my first crush started right around the time when the Shadowlands expac hype train began leaving the station on my WoW Classic server.*****

Retail WoW was my first MMO, and like my first crush, my feelings for Retail were pretty intense. I went through a long period where Blizz could do no wrong, and while others in Trade Chat griped endlessly about this and that, I'd defend Blizz as well as I could. I thought the game that Wrath represented as perfect as you could get, and the culmination of a trilogy that began with Vanilla, closing a huge chapter in the Warcraft story. 

But like many crushes, my infatuation with WoW began to fade as Cataclysm approached. Some of it was socially related, as some of my fellow bloggers began to close up shop, but other parts were game related as I realized that Cataclysm's release became a gigantic race to max level. Once people got there, the "I'm bored" calls in Trade Chat annoyed me to no end. I was spending my time at that point leveling two alts --one Alliance, one Horde-- and I was in Outland, so the gigantic wave was gone by the time I made it to the first Catalcysm zones. I enjoyed the ride, but the social aspect soured me a lot on WoW. And by the time I was entering the Cataclysm 5-man instances, the toxicity I found pretty much ended my crush on WoW. 

While I hung on through Mists, my heart wasn't in WoW by then. I was simply too close to the game, and invested in the blog, to see it.

Years (and several other MMOs) later, WoW Classic offered me a chance to play the game I once loved, but in a more raw state than what Wrath represented. And bumps aside, I've thoroughly enjoyed the ride. But like my first crush, I look at Retail from time to time, and wonder "what if?" on more than one occasion. 

When I went to go take that pic of Neve sitting at the bar in Dalaran about a year ago, my add-ons were so out of date that I had to disable all of them, so I got a chance to see the default UI in Retail for the first time since, oh, 2011. What surprised me was how much of it is similar to my modded UI now. What also surprised me was the sheer number of "Do this!" and "Do that!" and "Come do this other thing!" events that popped up on screen. It was as if Retail was determined that I was going to be doing something, boredom be damned. While I suppose the concept of sitting around somewhere, fishing, still existed, Retail overwhelmed you with so many things you could do that it felt like you had to do them.

I consequently "noped" my way right back to Classic and spent about an hour on Card, just hanging around Darnassus and fishing in one of the pools around the city.#

But months later, I still wonder. Not enough to spring for Shadowlands or even to play a non-Shadowlands Retail WoW, but I do wonder about my first MMO crush. 

And I ask myself "What if...."

*Sorry, not going to divulge anything here, but trust me on this.

**You know how cruel middle school kids can be? At Catholic grade schools, there's no difference. I was constantly harassed by my classmates to divulge "who I liked", so when I finally let the cat out of the bag at the end of 7th Grade, the reaction was pretty brutal. My 8th Grade year was a very miserable experience.

***She eventually became a cheerleader at the public high school.

****I'm absolutely certain she would not have been interested in most of my hobbies today, and I doubt we'd have much in common to talk about. I knew that even back then, but with crushes you tend to throw that out the window.

*****What, you thought this was going to be another post about guilds? At least give me some credit here.

#Yes, I do appreciate the irony here. But I'm probably the only person who played Mists and refused to play the destruction of Theramore event, so back in the day when I'd fly in and land in "old" Theramore, there were a couple of leveling toons but that was it. The place was a ghost town, but I liked it like that. Maybe that's why I like having Az use Theramore as her hearth location in Classic: I can continue to enjoy Theramore the way it once was.

EtA: I cleaned up some grammar in the second big paragraph. I missed that earlier.