I have a problem: I tend to ramble.

 

And I doubt you guys want to read me recounting my entire history at TRF, So let me try the short version.

 

I joined TRF because I ran across the site's old Galaxy map while searching for maps of the Star Wars Galaxy.

 

I joined the Coalition because I was a goody two-shoes, and the Coalition were the “good guys”. Plus, they seemed to be getting constantly wrecked by everyone else on the board, so I thought maybe I could be helpful.

 

I didn't really feel like I was doing the “cooperative” part of “cooperative role-playing” early on, but then Joren Logan apparently pissed off the Imperial writers with the Battle of Bilbringi, and Dolash handed Joren's subgroup to TNO in order to keep them appeased, and then Corise pulled his group out of the Coalition, and . . . and then nothing. None of the other Coalition writers seemed to have any kind of a plan, so I took that moment as an opportunity to write something that I knew other people would get involved in.

 

I wrote “A Coalition of the Damned”. Which immediately devolved into an OOC argument and then, suddenly, Simon Kaine was retiring, and a bunch of people were mad about that, too.

 

The specifics get a little fuzzy for me around here, and I don't plan on rereading all of my past posts any time soon to refresh my memory, but eventually Cataclysm happened and over the course of that, all of the other Coalition members either stopped posting or disappeared entirely (RIP Dolash).

 

By this point, my group (the Cooperative) was far larger than any other of the Coalition's subfactions, to the point that Vinda (I think it was Vinda) contacted me at one point because he thought I was pulling the Cooperative out of the Coalition.

 

I felt like I had inherited, through attrition, the entire Coalition. But not just the Coalition: with the exception of Zark's occasional “Gray” Jedi antics, I was the only “good guy”, the only lightsider, left. And I felt like I needed to earn that, somehow.

 

So I started working on a scheme to reabsorb Corise's group, the Contegorian Confederation, into the Coalition in a sort of “caretaker” capacity, since Corise wasn't around at the time and hadn't been for a while. I contacted Omnae about my plan, and he basically said “lol no” but also that he had a plan to address Corise's absence and the inactive status of the Confederation, and invited me to write an RP with him.

 

That conversation was back in 2011. That RP got named “To Curse the Darkness”. Omnae just made a post in it yesterday. I have achieved peak TRF membership.

 

But that's not all. I've always had a vision for my place in the Coalition. I've always had an idea of what the Cooperative would bring to the Coalition. I've always had a story that I wanted to tell, a grand unifying narrative to contribute to the group that is now my sole responsibility.

 

I once asked Dolash why the Coalition had a Prime Minister. If it was just a “tight-knit group of lightside factions” fighting the evils of the galaxy, then why did it have a formalized national government with a single popularly elected leader. I don't remember his answer exactly and I doubt there's any record of that chat that could ever be recovered, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't satisfied with his response. I always felt like the Coalition could be something more than a placeholder for “we good; we fight bad”.

 

I've been working on a series called “A Coalition of the Compassionate”. I've already posted some of it. It's all about the Eastern Province, and by the end of it, I will have visited every planet in the Eastern Province, told a story about how that planet has become important to the Coalition, and also shown how the East has continued to grow and add new worlds to its membership, transforming itself and developing its own regional government as it does so.

 

But the thing is: “A Coalition of the Compassionate” is the first of six separate series, each one dedicated to a different Coalition subfaction. By the end, I will have written about every planet and species currently in the Coalition, and added quite a few new ones to the list, and only then will I get to write the story I've been waiting to write since I first Damned the Coalition.

 

I get to write “A Coalition of the Redeemed”. I get to write about the Coalition returning to Onyx. I get to write about the restoration of the Onyxian Commonwealth. And then I get to transform the Coalition into the thing that I imagined it could be.

 

Just in time for Zark to get back to Force Wars, I'm sure ;)

 

(Under a thousand words; I'm calling it a win for brevity.)

You are still a goody two-shoes.

I'm really reaching back into the old memory banks here, but wasn't there a period of time in TRF's history where the Dark Side was hanging by a thread? Basically one or two people writing for TNO, and didn't OS have to tell people to start alts and help out the Dark Side so we could still have some completition in the galaxy?

 

So, it turns out that I had the rest of my Eastern Province RPs saved on my computer from, like, 2019, so I just posted all of them to the Battlegrounds. If anyone is interested, but only interested enough to read one of them, I guess I'd suggest the last one, A Coalition of the Compassionate: the East Will Rise Again!. It's kind of the endcap for this first series that gives a glimpse of the kind of thing I want to do with the rest of the Coalition.

 

Next up: the Azguard!