Tales Of Xat: The Redux

PROLOGUE: FLIGHTLESS BIRDS & THE CLASS STRUGGLE

Club Penguin armies were, in a word, lame. You allied yourself with an arbitrarily chosen team of identically-dressed schmucks, took orders from a bunch of slightly older (or, in some cases, jarringly older,) schmucks, and developed an irrational hatred towards another group of idiots because they kept trying to steal your god-given land in an ongoing war. Maybe someday you'd climb the ranks and become a leader yourself. Perhaps eventually, you'll wake up one morning, and realise that this whole time you've just been spamming emotes on Club Penguin. But why, cries the audience, would anybody partake in this shit? Why would you think this was special? How did anybody even arrange such a massive waste of time?

Xat is the answer. Xat was the one thing holding the armies together, it was the way we communicated, and the home to countless enthusiasts of fake internet warfare. The jump from Club Penguin to Xat was a religious experience akin to realizing that the world extends further than the limits of the school gates. Chat in Club Penguin was restricted in every way imaginable, and suddenly you're in a place where you can throw down an entire paragraph of "FUCK"s and "HORSECOCK"s. You're introduced to the culture of screenshotting every stupid thing your enemies (and closest friends) say, for future blackmailing purposes. You learn that you should just roll with the Mods threatening to rape you in the eyehole, because one day *you'll* be the one in power saying vulgar shit to your underlings. It was glorious.

At the time, every Club Penguin Army had a bustling Xat chat through which the various ranks of assholes banded together to slag off their enemies, their parents, and anybody of a lower rank than themselves. Club Penguin Armies dominated Xat back in the early 2010s. Dozens of chats, all reaching numbers in the high double digits on battle nights, an impressive feat on the struggling site. If you weren't in an army, you were one of the faceless masses on Chat or Flirt, or a roleplayer, but more on that later.

My chosen Army, the Nachos, were the second most populated army, and probably the busiest chat. The stereotypical Mexican theming pulled in MUCH higher numbers than the boring-as-fuck ACP and their lameass basic bitch army theme. Fuck those guys.

Shit was big, basically. If you had Owner or Moderator perms on one of these chats, you were essentially the next best thing to Jesus Christ himself.

Naturally, this created a power struggle that was present in every single chatroom. Members wanted to be Moderators, the Mods wanted to be Owners. Mods were their own clique, and would include the Owners by default if they ever deigned to bless the chat with their prescence. Naturally, Members would constantly try and appeal to the Mods, because SHIT, who wouldn't want a slice of that lifestyle?. This system was true for every chat of the time, Penguin or otherwise, and still applies to this DAY. Keep this in mind, because there's going to be a pop quiz on it later.

Chatroom class politics aside, by late 2012 I'd completely had my fill. I was a mod in chat, a Colonel in army terms, and a fingertip away from joining the blessed ranks of the owners. I'd made friends, seen enemies, had some WACKY ADVENTURES (not),  but Club Penguin really wasn't my scene anymore. I was moving up in the world, into a whole new yeargroup, yet my standing on the internet remained the same. (I, like many other internet preteens, lied that I was 14 on Xat.) I had become a mere face in the crowd, a GMT Mod on an American Dominant chat. The Grand Duke of Bullshit. The funny-silly penguin game had finally bored me.

So, without any fanfare, I quietly withdrew from chat, and began seeking out other Xats in which to fuck around. I got rejected from a Mario Kart Wii clan for having too low a VR, spent hours chatting to fake members of one direction, and had many encounters with weebs & squeebs where I'd bluff that I'd TOTALLY watched Onepiece or whatever. I drifted from chat to chat, the options becoming increasingly shittier, and my optimism waning. As a last ditch effort, I checked the Featured Chats one final time, and saw a Sonic The Hedgehog chatroom. Knowing the bare minimum about the, as I'd later discover, absurdly expansive Sonic Universe, I hopped the fuck in.

Unbeknownst to me, this chat was SONICVita, and it was about to scar me for life, or at least for a summer.