Woo! Well, what do you know? March 18th is not only Lolly's birthday; it marks the same day when I submitted Amy's application form to Pokemon-of-Avalon for the first time and got in! But jeez, has it really been a whole year? Feels like the time just flew right by! Though at the same time, so many things happened and I had to deal with so many other things during this whole year. Some of them were so emotionally trying that I wondered whether it was worth it to continue at all, but overall, I'm really happy I joined the group and was able to stay the whole time.
I won't bore you with how I joined the group (saw it from a friend as I was starting to not like PMD-E anymore due to the sudden drastic change in tone and decided to try PoA out). At the time, it was new, exciting, and full of potential, and I started out RPing a lot with as many people as possible to get a good feel for the world and make various friends, and now that Amy's married and kind of...stuck at the moment...the RPing has slowed down by now, but that makes sense. For one, a lot of people I RPed with are no longer in the group, and I prefer to RP with people who will be around for the long haul (and because Amy doesn't like it when the people she befriends just runs away a few weeks later). Regardless, I feel like it was an absolute blast trying out the historical fiction/romance genre this time around, and I was able to learn lots of things about how to make things historically accurate and how a realistic romance could work since this was with another person instead of two characters of my own. And in terms of art, I even learned and mastered an entirely new style!
Later on came some challenges, such as...well, certain people who became problematic, as well as the realization that I could have saved myself many nights of grief and despair if only I spoke up about stuff that made me uncomfortable sooner. I realize that this might make me appear more abrasive to certain people, and indeed, there were a few incidents in which those people just totally went berserk because I "stood up for myself", but those aren't the kinds of people you want talking to you, much less being your friend anyway!! You want friends who would respect you as a person too.
And then when I became an admin for the group, I was happy since that meant I could help things get updated a lot more quickly for the members, and though it sounds very easy to do, there are...other things. You have to answer pretty much every question for everyone that wants to join the group/has questions, and while I can easily do that, it can also require a bit of patience, especially for...certain people. It's really not easy to manage people! It. Is. NOT. And it's because of this difficulty that I would normally never dream of becoming an admin for any group in a million years. But my desire to help things move faster for the members' sake as well as how much fun I was having in the group just made it so that I wanted to be an admin to help out.
So I really should put that sort of stuff on my resume, as it should count as legit experience for managing people!
And yeah, I'm going to go attempt to get a job after I graduate since there are no graduate programs I feel like going to. (I seem to like art more than biology, so if there were graduate programs for those...) Though in the meantime, I'm glad I can finally progress to more original works. I really hate rating stuff in terms of "originality" because when you think about it, NOTHING is ever actually 100% original. So by "original works", I'm referring to stuff that you yourself can copyright the whole thing on.But yeah, you could say that sums up the whole year of PoA in a nutshell! Now that I'm promoted to Prince/Princesses, there are a few *official* group things that I am now authorized to work on and release. Though since getting The Secrets of Translocation printed is my top priority here, as there's like a 28-day processing time for the books to arrive after you send it, I'll have to finish all 48 pages of it first before I can work on those PoA thingys. Still, though, look forward to them! And I look forward to another year of PoA filled with awesomeness despite whatever new challenges it might have~.
Skin by *firstfear
