And by long running I mean this game started basically the moment we left the theater from watching the original Avengers movie to now.
We fell out as friends in 2022 due to unrelated pressure on our friendship from COVID lockdowns, and me having an ongoing breakdown during that period, and she got a new relationship that was taking up her time, and also like...a bunch of other things I don't fully remember because of the aforementioned ongoing breakdown. The point is this falling out happened early in my transition, so I also wondered if there wasn't wasn't some transphobia behind it. (Based on her interactions since we reconnected there was no transphobia, or she resolved said transphobia in the intervening 2 years because she's treated me like any other woman since we reconnected.)
Anyway that's all background. The important part is we expanded the cast rapidly early on, and since I'm more comfortable hopping characters multiple times I ended up picking up the lions share of the characters, and since Marvel has so many characters it was inevitable I'd pick up one that shares my name. Which was fine, no big deal. I also picked up most of the male characters because she prefers to play women and at the time I thought I was a dude.
Fast forward to 2024. We reconnect, start playing again. Yay! Except...I'm still playing most of the dudes. And one particular Marvel character was very important to our game who shared a name with me. Which is now my deadname.
I told her I wanted to give the character a farewell and retire him, and also play more of the female characters I have. (Jessica Drew is a favorite, as are some OCs like the daughter of Jean Grey and Logan, the daughter of Cyclops and Scarlet Witch, the daughter of one of Wolverine's other kids and Nightcrawler, the daughter of General Zod (don't ask)...we have a lot of OCs after 10+ years of crack shipping)
That's what I said. I wanted to play this character less.
And here's why playing with cis people can be so hard: She heard me say that, and apparently read it as "I want to give this character a multiple session long send off after which we change his name. During the send off we use his name repeatedly, multiple times. Then we keep playing him and calling him by his name until he gets an actual name changed process, because that can't be triggering."
Of course, right before this new plotline started, her mom went into the hospital and I feel terrible going "we can't do the plotline you had planned because me being trans is complicated with that name" so I'm venting about it on the internet and will actually talk with her about it once her mom gets a clean bill of health (if it's still going on by then.)
