Battle for Dream Island is an ongoing series, a parody of competition shows, that follows a varying cast of characters, who are portrayed as anthropomorphized objects, as they battle for, well, Dream Island. In around June of 2020, I stumbled upon this web-series during my containment. My 11-year-old-likely-neurodivergent self-clung onto this series as he had done to many other media many times before. I became engrossed in BFDI and the wider circle of shows surrounding it within the object show community, eventually gaining a humble following on YouTube by posting fan-works to the site.

 Soon I had stumbled upon a small circle of friends and desperately latched onto them too, my attempts to join must've been successful because in November of 2020 an online friend of mine, RJ, contacted me on the social media site, Discord, soon after I had finally convinced my mother to allow my 12-year-old self to create an account. This friend of mine decided to create yet another server as an elaborate joke of hers and invite all her friends, including me, for the fun of it. Respect the Veterans being the title, it consisted of around 40 chronically online pre-teens who were thrown inside of what I now look at and call in retrospect A Really Bad Idea. Luckily, my retrospective self never existed in those times, for without the existence of RTV I would have turned out to be a completely different person who would've likely quickly moved on from the Object Show Community.

 As a joke server, RTV was supposed to have a concerningly short lifespan; members were meant to flock in, converse, then dissipate in the coming hours and days. That is what always happens! Our prepubescent selves though, truly yearned for connection in these trying times; we stuck to each other. From what I remember, early on everyone within this server was given admin permissions and thus could edit any aspect of the server they felt the need to. This inadvertently caused RTV to grow and change almost as if it were alive. Bots that assisted with roleplaying were one of the first community-made additions, along with channels dedicated to said roleplaying. Shortly afterwards we had a channel where you could ask questions to people's original characters and receive in-character answers, then channels dedicated to each character on their own. Obvious additions to a server like this were eventually included of course, we still had art channels, spam channels, general conversation channels, but an insane number of hyper-specific additions were made then subsequently deleted in a fit of spring cleaning shortly after. This is how it continued for the next month. I spent my time watching this mass of people grow and evolve from a distance, I didn't know how to meaningfully contribute and so I attempted to train myself to. Early December is when, I would say, this server began to enter its golden age. It peaked too young for its own good.

 I can't say how exactly this began, but I remember vividly where I was that day. Through some unremembered turn of events, I was sitting in my father's bedroom alone, I was supposed to be spending my time on online classes, instead this server captivated me. An elaborate roleplay following RJ’s character, RJ, as she hunted down Stylus’s character, Stylus, took place on December 6th, 2020. This elaborate roleplay then proceeded to transform and expand into something I would have never expected to come out of the minds of a few pre-teens. The Object Anime was the story this small community developed based off of this singular roleplay, in the most honest sense, TOA was our childish expression of what the internet calls, “edge”. TOA became a series we, but mostly I, represented through the creation of animations accompanied by widely used songs, also known as Animation Memes, and then later assembled into a playlist filled with the badly-put-together lore.

 In a fit of either community building or desperation to fit in, I made the decision to host a Minecraft world in which anyone could join at any time specifically for RTV. It followed a similar structure to many other popular Minecraft realms and servers at the time; we all played survival Minecraft. Our obsession with these worlds were immeasurable. The first realm, titled “Respecc”, had our homes built on a flat, empty land. It lasted for a little while until, for some stupid reason, I enabled creative mode, and everyone went haywire. The next one, titled the same as before, was characterized by the challenge we had decided to collectively push on ourselves, where we lived exclusively in a cave underground for the entirety of its lifespan, it passed due to the inevitable boredom from being forced to stare at rocks all day. The next one took place on rocky, ugly, mountainous terrain, I avoided enabling creative mode for the entirety of the realm, good choice on my part, but it caused the world to quickly fizz out in terms of activity once we had reached a comfortable postilion in the realm. The fourth was mainly remembered for its quality of including two of my in-real-life friends, who the members of RTV immediately rejected, this world ended after a sort of cold war took place, it died through base lava castings and frantic bunker hiding.

 Once this period of the server had passed, it was as if we had to watch a rodent slowly pass away in our midst. People just found joy in other locations now, and that is okay. AJV, a friend of mine who I met in early December of 2020, was truly someone who I loved to spend time with for the small increments of time she was available. We used to be cringey and spend our time Minecraft speedrunning, our rules were flimsy, and best times were abysmal, but it was time well spent for me. If I had to pinpoint the exact moment in which RTV truly passed away, it would have to be when she decided to leave the server after months of worrying buildup. A part of me feels as if this reasoning might be misguided, but she was a good friend of mine and to me at the time this was the final nail in the coffin. RJ seemed to have noticed this death in a way too, it seemed as if RJ was constantly scrambling to add new people. Our fifth iteration of the Minecraft realm came with 3 new “permanent” members who, along with everyone else, was shortly kicked out when RJ made the decision to close the server months later in 2023.

 She had scattered us. I had failed to keep in contact with the majority of the people I knew there. For the longest time, my only meaningful interactions with former members were RJ herself, two of the newest-but-also-former-members and a few people I barely knew. It wasn’t until November of 2023 that I began to even speak to anyone else. At this point, I was experiencing heaps of loneliness because I was made to move on from this community forcibly, so when I found out RJ was not only conversing regularly with other former members but also AJV herself. Every part of me desperately wanted to join the conversation.

 I am certain that my addition to this specific chat was an insane twist of fate, for it seemed most everyone was made uncomfortable by my unfamiliar presence; I simply had become a stranger to them. I am extremely thankful to these people for doing so anyway. At this point, I have spent more time chatting with these scattered humans longer than RTV had ever existed. Each and every one of them shares a part of my soul, and I love them dearly. It sounds corny but I genuinely do not know where I would be in life without them. So, thank you, RJ, for deciding to follow a bit you found on YouTube randomly in 2020. Thank you, AJV, for being my second half. Thank you, Stylus, for being the stupidly funny person you are. Thank you, Blu, Boba, Cup and Amie. Vindi, Sugar, Ari, Lilz, Nickel, Salad, Drifty, Lemonade, Axe, Tosia, Blaze, and whoever else was in this damn social experiment of a server back in 2020. I didn’t expect this server to become such a pivotal moment in my life, I didn’t grow up thinking this is where my life would go. But still, during the middle of the night, I smile to myself at times, I haven’t died.