Case in point is this very board. Many of the early posters used their real names as alter-egos for the superhero avatars they names after their poster handles. But it must be a little weird for, say, Lisa to look back on ten year old stories about how big a slut she is. It'll be weirder when her son Christopher reads them.

Back in the early days quite a few posters wrote their girlfriends in as romance interests too - Donar, Banjoooo, NTU-150, and Finny all did it. I don't think that any of those posters ended up with those girls, so it was a bit tricky thereafter.

Lisa had a good grasp of things, though. Newer posters can't know just how central she was to the character of the early board and how well she smoothed things over. When I first began posting she had her character flirt insatiably with the Hooded Hood, but after a few weeks I got an e-mail from her to check I wasn't uncomfortable about it - which I wasn't - and to assure me that it was all in fun and she wasn't some crazed stalker.

It took me a while to realise the boundaries I was comfortable with. Amongst things I probably wouldn't do now but did do in my first year or so writing at Baron Zemo's Lair (as the PVB then was) are introducing poster-Jarvis' new fiancee into the storyline and writing about Lisa's pregnancy and birthgiving and thus introducing Christopher Waltz into continuity.







I'd prefer to be sure before trying it these days. I'm aware of at least one partner who was offended by something that was written about them in a story on the board (long ago).




Also I think writing oneself into fiction tends to become very self-indulgent - "Mary-Sue-ish" as Kirk would call it.