Rob Duffy

The main one for me was I was a part of a now-deleted fan guild for Sonic the Hedgehog on Neopets that became an outlet for role-playing stories about our fan characters within the Sonic universe.

My original characters’ name was Tyson who was a black hedgehog with yellow accents. There were two other members I remember the most. One went by Demiveemon who wasn’t as involved with the role playing/fanfic side of the community but I became closest with. After Neopets we went on to play Gunbound and then Maple Story together for several years after, and then continued to keep in touch over AIM into my late teens and early twenties which means we were friends online for probably almost ten years. We stayed friends even though we never learned much about eachothers’ personal lives. The other member I remember the most RPed an echidna named Ty, and her real name was Janice which I learned later. It was with her I came up with the most enjoyable, funny, and cool stories to me at the time. The memory that sticks out most though is that there was one night where she made a strange series of posts and one of her IRL friends who was also in the guild was getting worried about her and went to her house to check on her. I was probably 13, she and her friend were around 15/16, and I remember this very vividly being my first exposure to the concept of suicide due to depression because her friend luckily was able to get to her before she hurt herself.

The most distressing loss is that in my older teens, one of my other online friends was asking around for people’s old Neopets accounts because she thought it was fun to troll the forums and she wanted a bunch of accounts to avoid being frozen. I stupidly gave her mine to use and she pretty much erased all record of my experiences by basically wiping the account even though I can still log in. I was at one of those ages where you don’t find much value in the things from when you were younger but I really regret it now. I think the thing I would want to recover the most would be my Neomail so I could better remember all my friends and their personalities from those days.