I main Alliance in World of Warcraft, mostly because I love the Night Elf aesthetics, and Teldrassil is just gorgeous. Naturally – that is what my main is too, a Night Elf Fury Warrior. She is my new main; I killed off my old one – a Night Elf Outlaw Rouge – so I could use the name for the new one: Sága. Because why not? It’s my name after all.

I’m also very proud of her, being that I only recently created her, and got her up to lvl 60 within a week of playing. For a World of Warcraft-n00b like myself, that is actually quite the accomplishment. If you want to track her progress, you can do so here: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/character/eu/turalyon/sága

So, anyway – I main Alliance – and I really, really like it. So much so, that I am currently attempting to build myself a guild: The Geeky Saga. I’m still in the process of gathering signatures for the Guild Charter, though – so if you play Alliance, and would like to join a no-pressure, no-set raid/dungeon schedule, no fuss guild – let me know.

Also, I made a community in WoW with the same name, The Geeky Saga. Feel free to join. I do, however, reserve all rights to yeet yo ass out of it if you’re being a lil’ shit. Same goes for the Guild once that is up and running. I am Guild Master – I reserve all rights to protect my Guild and the people in it. If you can’t behave, you’re gone.

I have played a fair amount of Horde, too. Mostly because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about; ever since the OG WoW game launched in 2004, Horde seems to have been favored by most – if not all – of the people I know who play(ed). And all of these Horde-mainers would tell me to play Horde, ’cause Horde was the shit and all the cool kids were playing that faction.

I much prefer Alliance, personally, and it in part has to do with my own interactions in-game with other players. I may blog about that at some point, but for now I just hope it was a one-time occurrence, and not representative of Horde as such. Let’s just say it was …not nice.

So yes – track my Night Elf’s progress on the link provided above, search for my community The Geeky Saga in-game if you want to join, and do let me know if you’re interested in signing the charter for the Guild too. The Guild would be absolutely no pressure; it’s intended to be a place where people can meet up and squad up at their own leisure to do whatever they want to do in-game. Wanna do a specific Dungeon? Cool – ask your guild mates if anyone wants to squad up. Wanna do a certain Raid? Cool – ask your guild mates if anyone wants to squad up. That’s the idea, anyway…

This game has very quickly become my favorite time-waster. It’s a game I’m finally reasonably good at (by my own standards), and I LIKE playing it – a lot. I feel a weird sense of accomplishment playing it, and it does what I hoped it would: Distracts me from the chronic pain and other medical bullshit I live with.

And yes – I will be getting the new expansion when it launches later this year. I’m excited to see what it’ll be like, from what I’ve seen so far – it looks amazing.

I’ve been aware of this massively popular MMORPG franchise since launch back in the mid 2000s; but I didn’t start playing it myself until this year – 15 years later.

Why?

My personal history with WoW is a bad one: When it launched I was dating a guy – a gamer – who jumped on the hypetrain. I didn’t mind – at first. But after a while, a year or so, the game became increasingly more important to him than anything and anyone else. That included me.

See, I fancy myself a pretty chill chick; I don’t give two shits if you have a hobby or interest you love – I really don’t – in fact, I encourage it. But… If you tell me, like this guy did, that I «just had to tell him whenever I wanted to hang out (just please don’t ask on raid-night)» and then proceed to ignore me, tell me you’re busy with a raid or a dungeon or some shitty rinky-dink sidequest every time I asked to hang out (- and I never asked on raid-night), and this shit goes on for months on end… Sooner or later, I’m just gonna up and leave yo ass.

The final straw was the night (not a raid-night) I was being blatantly explicit in my asking, while buck-nekkid straddling his lap. He picked me up, walked over to the bed, threw me on it and went back to his computer. ‘Cause, you know, he was busy… Big raid. On a non-raid-night. But he just had to help out.

In that moment I went from being annoyed at the game to outright hating it – and I did so for years.

Fast forward 15 years, and I’ve started playing it myself. For two main reasons: I like video games, and especially RPG-type shit; and I live with chronic pain due to illness, and actively use things like video games to distract myself from that pain. Essentially, I wanted to show that guy my #UnicornFist and say «fuck it, and fuck you for ruining what could have been years of fun for me by being a bag of shit who happens to play the game.»

I’ve come to love WoW for what it is – to me. I don’t do raids – yet. I don’t do dungeons – yet. And I definitely don’t squad up with others on purpose (sometimes it happens by accident, though). I just dick around, doing quests’n’shit for fun to distract my brain from the chronic pain. That’s it. That is literally all it is.

I started playing WoW because I knew it is a virtually endless open-world game I can play for literal years, and that’s the sort of game I go for when I need a distraction: Something I can jump in to, play for a little while, do some shit, and then jump out again. It’s great. I don’t have to talk to anyone (something that is physically painful and exhausting on bad days), and I don’t have to show up at given times to do shit with other people involved. Or worse yet, rely on other people to get shit done.

Playing with others has never been my forte, and especially not in video games. There’s only so many times a day I can cope with being called a «dumb whore» and be told «make me a sandwich, slut» by kids literally half my age who apparently cannot heal their dumbass Orc fast enough to save their sorry lives.

That is why I like WoW. A lot. You can do quests’n’shit alone if you want to; you can squad up and raid if you want to; Hell – you can do nothing and just run from place to place in Azeroth if you want to. It’s fun.

And for those wondering: I’m #AllianceScum and proud of it.

Being a woman on the internet is …interesting. Navigating the seemingly endless unsolicited dick-pics slid into my DMs is one thing; I can safely assume every woman with any sort of presence online has experienced the dreaded “Other”-inbox messages from random strangers.

But then you have a whole new can of worms: Being a geeky girl on the internet. For whatever reason, dudebros think it appropriate to question my “geekness” whenever I mention a fandom I’m a part of, or worse yet – mention a fandom they’re a part of, and therefore are naturally superior in all knowledge about said fandom compared to me – a mere woman… Whether or not that is actually true doesn’t even matter: They are dudes, therefore they are ~better at being geeky~ by default.

Hilariosity ensues whenever these dudes are younger than myself, though.

I was born in 1984, which makes me roughly the same age as the OG Nintendo NES (right smack inbetween the releases of the Japanese Famicom console and the North American NES console – 1983 and 1985 respectively. The European NES console came a year later, in 1986).

Some of my earliest memories include fiddling with the family computer, which ran MS DOS and used ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch, and ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks, and playing Space Invaders for hours on end. I was about 3 or 4 years old, and had taught myself to load the game from floppy. I grew up reading Donald Duck comics, as those were readily available to me in my native language, Norwegian, and DC and Marvel comics weren’t as available here at the time. By the time I was 6 years old, the Norwegian Broadcast Company (NRK) had started airing the original Batman and Robin TV-series from the 60s starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I was hooked from the first na-na na-na na-na.

When I was about 13 years old, in 1998, my household got an internet connection, and of course a serious upgrade of the computer along the way. I gorged on Doom, Diablo, and most notably Duke Nukem 3D, and spent more time online than most of my peers – I found likeminded people, and began long-lasting friendships with people I had never met in person. I delved into forums and message boards devoted to various fandoms, most notably Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wrote lengthy LiveJournal-posts, and talked to my friends via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) about the meaning of life and all in it (…42).

Suffice it to say that I have lived in geekdom for quite some time now.

And yet… if and when I assert my geekiness online, the inevitable happens: Some dude – often younger than myself – starts grilling me about the fandom or topic I’ve mentioned interest in. If I don’t regurgitate his exact knowledge of the thing, I’m deemed a “fake geek girl” and ridiculed for it. Happens every time – without fail. I don’t claim to know everything about every single fandom I’m a part of, because that would be a seriously monstrous task to undertake, but that does not make me any less of a geek than you.

It’s ridiculous, and annoying, and shit that happens way too often: Geeky dudes whining about there not being any girls in their fandom, and when a girl does enter their precious fandom – they do everything they can to ensure she never returns. All the while claiming they’re “not like other dudes” and they “totes love geek girls”, mind you.

You don’t get to decide whether or not I’m a “real” geek. I just am. Fuckin’ deal with it.