Why I will always remember and love CoH

So, as you guys can tell by looking to left here, I've been a CoH player for a fair bit, but have been very quiet on the boards. Reason is, I really feel like you guys say the sorts of things I would, but usually much more eloquently. But this is something I have to say for myself, as best as I can.

I grew up on superheroes. Much more than fantasy or sci-fi, or really any sort of nerd or pop culture touchstone. And to me, now as an adult, the best superheroes come from something personal. Whether based on hopes and dreams or feelings someone can't express otherwise, my favorites evoke something. For me though, the best hero I ever created came from a darker place.

In 2005, I had been playing CoH for a while, and unable to really find a place stopped until the release of City of Villains. A couple months in, playing a character that was based more on what I saw my brother as, I really got my start in roleplaying on Virtue. I joined a group called The Orphanage, a sort of wayward home for characters who weren't really villains, but each had their dark side.

After a couple months there, I decided to create a new character, the previous one's younger brother. Modeled more after me, I seemingly unwittingly created an avatar of the negative feelings I had about myself. At that point in my life, I was relatively alone. My family were there, but I kept to myself, and really, I didn't have any close friends. I thought there was something wrong with me, something that kept me from making friends, or even finding someone I truly cared about. It colored everything I did, like a poisonous hate.

The avatar of these feelings ended up becoming Toxpin. A character who was, by all accounts, a freak. Ugly by all classical standards because of the snake-like scales that grew over his skin, and with a mutation that kept him from coming into physical contact with nearly anyone, I played him more like myself than I could admit at the time. Timid, shy and introverted, he hated himself. But because of his regenerative powers, he couldn't really act on it. Worse, he was stuck in the Rogue Isles, a place he hated, much as I was hating the place I lived.

But hope shone through, and he was able, in story, to make a return to Paragon, a representation in his story of the hometown I never had as a military brat, and make an attempt at becoming something greater. But even arriving in Paragon, he was alone, but not for long. New friends, Bobby Thistle, Little Zoe, and Graffiti Samurai almost immediately took a chance on him, and they became fast friends, as I became shortly thereafter with the players behind them.

Within months, Toxpin, and I, changed for the better. The friendship he and I shared with the Zenvious Foundation characters and players got me through what had been a crappy part of my internal life, possibly the worst I've ever felt about myself. And, further, changed the avatar of my self-hate into the avatar of my better self.

See, I posted elsewhere that Toxpin will live on in my heart even after the servers turn off for the final time. And it's true, because he's the shining example of what I'm still working to see myself as. He's the ideal me. And just losing access to the pixels and polygons that make his pseudo-physical form isn't going to change that, nor will it take from me the friends and meaning that go along with living through his story.

So, I want to say thank you to Paragon Studios. Thank you for providing me, and well, everyone else here for a place to bring out the inner heroes in us. And thank you to everyone I've met along the way here for helping me in ways I'm not sure you even knew.

I had a character like that, as well. I won't go into details unless they're solicited, but--to speak in terms of horribly simplified Jungian psychology--the character's arc worked, through the years, from realizing how empty his Persona was to confronting his Shadow to confronting his Anima to realizing himself as an individual. I went through a very similar growth process in the same time period; the overlap was only obvious in hindsight.

The act of creating speaks as much to the creator as to the observer.