Zseni wrote:

The articles will stay. I would like to have them kept off of search engines if possible, but they'll stay. However I would like this message to be put on a page of its own and linked at the top of each article - the ones already written and the ones to come.

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To the players of the yaoi RPG, if you have found your way here,

Yes, these articles are about you, and I am the one who plays Seifer in the RP.

When I began writing "Fangirls in the Mist" it was out of a predilection for yaoi and a hunger for people to share that predilection with, and, at the same time, a scientific shame. Your culture confounded me, but I couldn't help responding to it. Your personalities appalled me, but I didn't want to stop talking to you. I was looking for the answers to difficult questions which have plagued me my whole life: what does it mean to be a woman, why does the average woman in America today make me feel nervous, what is my place among you, must I hammer out an entirely new genre of person to contain myself - a lot of other questions, many serious, and many self-important.

To answer those questions I used you, pushed you, manipulated you, and experimented on you. I was immensely pleased with myself for doing it and proud of my prowess. It took exactly sixteen weeks - many of which I was travelling or otherwise gone - for you to break me. On March 31 I wrote this notice to you after several days of reflection: I could not stomach the thought of hurting you. Even the ones I was most hard on, the ones I hated openly, the ones who made trouble for me and for the other players - even you I did not want to hurt. The questions were no longer as important to me as you.

So why didn't I pull the articles altogether?

In the first place, I deserve to get caught, and you deserve to catch me. I exploited your trust and gained considerable personal pleasure from doing so. You let me be privy to your secrets, and I betrayed them. You gave me your trust and confidence, and I sold you out. I sold you out to the fine people here at Caltrops, really, just because I could. It's despicable behavior. If anyone did such a thing to me I would be absolutely furious - I want your fury, because even if I had pulled the articles from the web I couldn't have pulled them from the memories of those who had already read them, and you are owed your revenge for that.

Secondly, there are still the questions. Not too many days ago one of you started asking some of my own questions back at me, and I was fascinated with the realization that you, too, are curious about the same things. Here you have my opinions and analyses on women and yaoi and each of you individually - and you are curious about those things, you want to know more about them. You, who served unwillingly as my subjects, deserve above all to reap the rewards of my research. You also deserve to know what I really think of you, and what was going on behind the games I was playing and words I was saying, so that if another me comes to you in the future you will be better prepared than you were before.

Third, and last, I believe these articles can educate other people. They are a window into a world which is at once supposedly too small to bother with and totally opaque to those on the outside, and I was not too shy about turning the camera on myself either. There's material in here sufficient to teach a man how to talk dirty just right, and material handling your internal politics - which are, as one of you put it, "locker room politics" - and there are so many other things besides that can and should be said about woman and women and culture and beauty and ideals and smut and roleplaying and anime and all kinds of big and small things. I'm hesitant to take all that offline, even though it means balancing knowledge of questionable worth against your potential unhappiness.

If I'm still in the RP when you find these articles I place myself in your hands. If you want to tell the other players, tell them. If you want to tell me that you know, tell me. If all of you want to collude against me, I don't think any other ending could make me happier. If you want me to leave, I'll go; if you want me to stay, we'll talk about that too. I can't even tell you the really big things here - I don't want the Caltrops people to know just how much some of you mean to me and just how much I have learned - so ask me for the rest of this confession before I go, or catch me for the rest of it if I have already left.

Of course you will think me both graceless and stupid for saying such a thing at such a time, but I love you, and I want to protect you, and I want to give back to you some measure of what you gave to me. Don't be ashamed of yourselves and don't tear yourselves up, no matter what you read here. If I have shown you a fault in yourself that you want to fix, then fix it, but don't be ashamed. No matter what else you have done, there is something in you that's good and human and elementally you. That's the thing I love and want to keep safe, and no matter what kind of huge mess either of us are that one little thing is all it takes to start setting the rest right.

In the end, you won.

- A. / Zseni