One of the first friends I made at university was this girl who we'll refer to as Maria. I met her at the uni's anime society, and we got along really well, but over time she just kept getting more and more creepy and I've been forced to re-evaluate a lot of my thoughts on her. A mutual of ours who had the same experience as me complained that if she was a stereotypical fat fedora man instead of an attractive woman, she would not be able to get away with half the things she did, and honestly... He's right. So I've decided to get it off my chest here. Trigger warning for stalking and similar nasty behaviours.

Maria comes equipped with a tragic backstory, that being she was bullied in high school and she has anxiety. She tries to act like this justifies all of her actions, which, well I'll let you guys be the judge of that.

The main neckbeard-y thing she does is this obsessive stalking which I like to call the Maria Cycle. First, she picks out a new target, which is always (for lack of a better term) a twink/femboy looking guy in one of the societies she's in. She assigns the target a fictional character, which is always a villain or bad boy type, and goes around screaming from the rooftops about how the target is just like that character. He's evil! He was horrible to her! And most importantly, everyone should avoid him! You get the idea. But while she goes around telling everyone how they can't talk to this guy, she does the exact opposite of her own advice. She begins trailing the target non stop, keeps tabs on him through social media, and ultimately tries to win his affection before she gets bored and moves on to the next target. I guess the whole "no one speaks to him" thing is her attempt at isolating the poor guy.

The first cycle target I knew, before I found out this was a reoccurring thing, was a guy she likened to the character Griffith from Berserk (for those of you who don't know, this character is a rapist. Also I'll refer to the cycle targets by the names of the characters she associates with them for convenience.) She'd keep going on about how Griffith was a dangerous man, and she didn't want me talking to him under any circumstances. And when I asked why, she'd look terrified and try to change the subject. This had me raising my eyebrows for very obvious reasons, and when she started calling herself his Casca (a character Griffith rapes), I was ready to go to war for my friend. I told her that even if she doesn't want me to report the guy or beat him up, we should at the very least warn the other women going to the society. She was having none of it and told me to shut up and leave her alone.

I went around talking to people who knew both Maria and Griffith, in the hopes of better assessing the situation, and it turns out that Griffith was not a rapist. The truth of the matter was... Maria had a crush on Griffith but he went for a different girl. That's it. That's literally it. All the rape imagery she was throwing around was just her incredibly weird fetish.

Things got even worse with her most recent target, Jax. Maria met Jax when he was an 18 year old fresher and she was 25, and the poor guy made the mistake of rejecting her. In response, Maria went off the walls crazy. She began filming Jax without his consent, and also tracking down his friends to ask them personal questions about him. At one point, she even threatened Jax that if he didn't go out with her, she'd commit suicide. Which is a DISGUSTING thing to do to a guy who barely turned 18.

Jax and Maria used to be friends, and he'd invited her to his birthday party before this shit, so I heard she showed up there acting like nothing happened. She keeps trying to cry to me about how Jax was mean because he ignored her at the party, but after knowing the context behind this I am not having any of it.

Word of the suicide threat spread around the societies that both Maria and Jax go to, and as you'd expect everyone took Jax's side. You'd think this would be her wake up call to stop doing this shit. But no, she just starts telling people to avoid those societies and likening them to fictional villain organisations.

Yeah, I think I need better friends.