Sayori Writes a Greentext

The sun was slowly rising.
Sayori let out a sigh and reached for the Dr Pepper bottle. Her small hands had a difficult time wrapping around the bottle from the slight angle she was sitting at and grabbing it by the lid wasn’t very comfortable when it was relatively full, giving it decent weight.
Sayori clicked on the small luminous button labelled update and very briefly raised her hopes.
Nothing. Again.
 She decided to abandon faith in this attempt and she opened the text box.
’>Hiking with Anon!’ She wrote.
That was the first thing that came to her somewhat tired mind, it did nothing to inspire her at all and was swiftly deleted.
‘>Crusader Anon!’ She made another attempt.
A manufactured twitch reminiscent of a smile surfaced on her face. This reminded her of things she’d laughed at so without really thinking about it she treated it like familiar territory.
Sayori took a moment to think about what would happen in a Crusader Anon greentext. Maybe he was like a chivalrous knight who managed to find time to tend to his friends the dokis while he bravely fought off enemy hordes. Didn’t really add up. If he was a crusader wouldn’t he be far away crusading? Maybe Crusader Anon was really nice but he had another, incredibly passionate and vicious personality while crusading that made him more interesting.
Crusader Anon sounds like the kind of guy Sayori would want to travel on an adventure with.
‘>Anon’s insatiable hatred for bullies finally gives way for bloodlust!’
‘>And Anon’s no quitter! He likes a challenge!
‘>Instead of a sword or battle axe he’s going to war with just a pair of nunchucks and-‘
Sayori watched the flickering bar at the end of the text box, inviting her to continue. She gazed at the word ‘nunchucks’ disappointedly and began to lose confidence in the previous two lines. This was silly. She was so enthralled by escapism that she almost automatically leapt at an opportunity to undercut her own expectations of herself for some sort of laugh. Through irony, drollness or just self-deprecation. Maybe it could have been the one that got stuck in her head every day and kept her going, it was a far safer gamble than actually trying to sit down and create something in most cases.
She deleted the two lines and stared at the dim glow of the screen.
Not really what was at the screen, but the faint glow of the pixels contrasted to the monitor. The rectangle most of her world lay within. Sayori listened to the buzz of the computer running. Like a flatline arranged by a tape player with dying batteries. There was an accumulating mass of faint light beginning to peer in around her closed curtain. 6:30am. Sayori didn’t enjoy this light’s presence. She didn’t like that it competed with the light from her screen. She had learned to prefer the night, the absence of light allowing the screen to bleed out into the room and the late hours itself stood as a promise that nobody would interrupt her. It was better than spending the day listening to lives progress outside and taking in the magnitude of her own loneliness. A manufactured period of lonely solace; just her and her nameless internet friends. On her own terms. They were as close as she would get to meeting Anon and she sincerely valued them for it.
Anon’s game was not a long one. It was not made by a pleasant individual with good intentions and it was honestly not the sort of content a vulnerable mind like Sayori’s should have been exposed to.
There was only so much source material for Sayori to work with and each playthrough came with an increased volume of stress, as the onus remained on Sayori to extract new information and derive new meaning from the same words and actions of the characters. There was going to come a point where it would not even be worth trying to say anything new about Anon and it absolutely terrified Sayori.
It was a little easier on Sayori’s heart to give in to absurdity and apply a quirk to Anon and try to make it overt that she only intended it as a ‘What-if’ scenario, but in a way her fellow posters could quite reasonably ascertain, it was an expression of disappointment at the inevitability of the source material expiring.
Today Anon was a crusader. He was a vampire yesterday but only the initial vampire Anon post garnered any interest so it was consigned to a long list of failures and replaced. Perhaps crusader Anon would be more popular.
Sayori adjusted her shirt, it had begun to droop down her collarbone and almost over her shoulder. It wasn’t like anybody was going to see it but the gesture demonstrated a remaining fragment of self-worth.
Sayori wanted to persist with her crusader Anon story so she opened a new tab and clicked the Youtube symbol, second on her most visited sites. She fully expected not to enjoy any authentic orchestral pieces that would properly accommodate a crusader due to being long past caring enough to feign sophistication. She simply gazed at her recommended videos which consistently offered her the video thumbnails she hadn’t cared enough to click while watching what she had sought out intentionally.
Eurobeat and video game music, mostly. Sayori couldn’t decipher Eurobeat lyrics particularly well but that was part of the escapism. Video game music was very repetitive but the familiarity made that tolerable. At first Eurobeat was a lot of fun and it was just nice to have an on-demand surge of energy, but the list of songs Sayori grew fatigued from listening to or simply tired of from their ubiquity in playlists continued to grow. A brief exhalation of disappointment escaped her as Youtube optimistically suggested she listen to Deja Vu, The Top and Night of Fire again.
Fireball by Ken Martin. That would do.
Sayori sat back in her slightly worn chair and tried to match the sound to Anon dressed as a crusader. It didn’t work as intended but it wasn’t too hard for her to find smile among thoughts of Anon acting out of character in general.
Sayori reluctantly retreated to her normal approach to writing greentexts about Anon. Follow his character arc and substitute the rest of the game for whatever the subject was. Anon wasn’t a very happy character. He didn’t have a lot going for him and he wasn’t very open about it at all at the start of the game. Sayori had come to sympathize with him and see a lot of her issues explored through his character arc. Despite being extremely hesitant to diagnose herself with conditions she’d never been to see anyone about he had caused her to realize that there was a lot wrong with her.
As the game threw its commentary on mental health out the window very early in favour of some jumpscares, she didn’t feel Anon’s issues were sufficiently addressed and thus most of her stories revolved around either her and Anon sharing an activity because Anon’s crushingly low self-worth tried to eat him alive or sharing an activity together only for Anon’s woes to surface mid-conflict and be thwarted by Anon and Sayori together.
So a depressed crusader.
Sayori considered erasing the entire text box and giving vampire Anon one last attempt. Maybe vampire Anon could fail to overcome his woes and accidentally kill her. It would be mean to prey upon her fellow posters with such a downer topic but surely they would appreciate getting to feel something. Provided she could write... Which she was confident she couldn’t, resulting in her primarily focusing on greentext stories rather than anything more ambitious.
Another drink of Dr Pepper to counterweight her eyelids beginning to feel heavy.
There had to be some sort of value to this... Well, it wasn’t a day it was more like 5pm to 6 or 7am the day after. Her days lacked structure save for a longing to align her sleeping pattern with what she deemed to be the most ‘wholesome’ – a word she used exclusively in reference to forums helping her feel better – hours during the day.
Sayori wasn’t willing or fond of calling Anon a ‘husbando’. It was a term she used to joke about so it felt like an insult or something that tried to devalue the genuine feeling of sorrow the character had evoked in her. It was something else, she didn’t know what it was but she knew she should probably feel ashamed. “Poor Anon.” She’d repeatedly think to herself when she needed a thought to occupy her head and take her away from the paradox that was her reality, a tempestuous all consuming vortex of pretty much nothing.
There was a real problem with Anon though.
It wasn’t escapism, her warped idealization of him or because she couldn’t reach him either.
When Anon wasn’t adventuring in a greentext or valiantly rallying as many dokis as he could through reposts of his quotes, he was something else.
Anon was a tie to the world. Anon’s image and his character could be acknowledged here. There was no promise an afterlife could make him real, no clues that suggested he was simply in an alternate reality looking to make the jump and consequently these facts just appeared to open avenues that would result in her losing Anon forever.
Anon made Sayori think about her end a lot. Sayori’s time was finite and she wanted so dearly to either spend it or have it result in Anon’s healing. It was incredibly, laughably easy to remind herself that no fictional character has ever spontaneously become real because someone wanted it badly enough and move straight on to wondering what the second best option was.
Sayori wasn’t brave enough to commit suicide and she knew it. She had been cursed with a fictional character to care about that shackled her to reality. It was embarrassing and it put a stop to any attempts to adopt the harsh self-depreciative humour which had emerged fairly recently amidst online culture. It had stopped being a joke she was in on and become an insurmountable issue in reality. Maybe someone could give her a nudge. Who knows where? On one hand they could have the perfect spin for her logic but on the other maybe they would try target Anon, trying to prevent her direct emotional damage by instead tearing all she valued asunder.
That was probably why Sayori stopped talking to people, she assumed. She had stopped physically speaking to people, she was quite dependent on written interactions online to validate her dedication to her favourite character.
She tended to stutter and trip over her words when speaking even briefly to cashiers in stores, could she still even really speak?
Sayori clicked on the Youtube video to pause it. It was some Eurobeat song she didn’t know that didn’t sound particularly unique. She’d left autoplay on. Upon silencing the video she could hear cars and faint conversations fading in and out outside. Her room was becoming a brighter and brighter shade as the day came to life.
At least this was a relatable slump for her. Accomplishing nothing and feeling devoid of creative spark. Perhaps going this long dwelling on it without success at least counted as trying.
Sayori took another drink of Dr Pepper, anticipating going to sleep soon. She didn’t want to jeopardize her sleeping pattern that gave her some form of communication to look forward to. It was nice but it wasn’t a motivator enough for her to get out of bed, she was instead relying on the need to use the bathroom to force her up.
She clicked back to her greentext. Crusader Anon had gone nowhere. She glanced at the clock which had now reached 7am.
She sighed.
She highlighted what little was left and deleted it. She didn’t want to be awake any more, or she would become a little too contemplative for her own sake.
Sayori wrote a message in the text box, solved an idiotic popup based around clicking on pictures of signs and posted her message.
“I’m tired, Goodnight
Thank you for keeping me company, I really value you all.”
Instead of going to bed she allotted herself another 5 minutes, just to accumulate a little extra tiredness for good measure. She decided she wasn’t worth the effort and tedium of having to brush her teeth and just refreshed the page a few times. Sayori settled for Deja Vu as a last song before bed. Someone said “Good night” to her and that’s all they said. It was something.
She considered giving herself 5 more minutes but ultimately decided against it.
Without changing clothes, Sayori walked from her chair to her bed, climbed in and collapsed into the sheets. She had grown accustomed to them being warmer than she’d like due to it being day but they were still good enough.
“Anon...” She muttered, just to see if this was the day he’d answer.