For almost all of the last week I’ve been serving as crew for College of Wizardry: Echoes of the Past. College of Wizardry was the first international larp I played way back in 2015,¹ and it’s hard to understate how much it changed my life. Without that trip I don’t start traveling to Europe multiple times a year, I don’t make a bunch of international friends, and I don’t end up pulling up stakes and moving² abroad.

The game was the 10^th anniversary edition. It’s something around the 30^th iteration of the game³ and reputedly had at least one person from every previous run in attendance. This presented something of a design challenge: the organizers wanted a game that explicitly allowed previous characters to return and incorporated callbacks to everything that had come before, but they didn’t want that to completely overshadow what was still supposed to feel like a “classic” CoW.⁴ The solution, I thought, was rather ingenious. There was a group of demons attempting to destroy the college by posing as auditors and undermining the values of the institution. The castle was responding by essentially dreaming into existence previous students and teachers, rummaging through its history to find things that might offer a defense.

I got to play one of the auditors,⁵ and spent a lot of time trying to creepily lurk around the castle and pedantically point out violations of the rules. My highlight of the game was when one of the students summoned a demon⁶ and ended up with me by accident, so I got to turn up and be thoroughly annoyed at being pulled away from a truly infernal load of paperwork.⁷ And there was a phenomenal set piece at the end of the game, where the auditors showed up just before the gala and attempted to cancel the dance, only to be banished back to the nether realms by the combined might of the school.⁸

It seemed like a great game from my vantage point, in that it managed to hit all its marks while still providing ample space for players to fill with their personal chaos. But I’m now sitting in a hotel room in Berlin reflecting on why I don’t crew games more often. As an organizer, you’re responsible for everything that happens. As a player, you’re given agency over your own story. But as an NPC, you’re in this kind of awkward space between the two; I feel like I was both crucial and nonessential, an integral part of the success yet eminently replaceable if so needed.

It’s an awkward place to be. I spent my whole game trying to set up other players and avoiding anything that might have redirected the spotlight to me. That means I get hit with all the larp drop without really having had the emotional engagement beforehand. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time and would do it again given the opportunity. But I’ll need a lot of time to recover. And this is talking as someone who’s both played and organized games back to back. This feels worse.

Of course, the other thing that’s affecting my mood is the election in the United States. It happened the first day I was here and went about as badly as it could have. I spent most of last Wednesday commiserating with my friends who are still living back there while feeling relieved I no longer do.⁹

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I left the United States in 2018 in large part because I couldn’t bear to live under what in retrospect feels like it was a trial run of the incoming administration. I spent a lot of 2019 trying to help friends relocate outside of the country.¹⁰ This is a catastrophe, and if you are in a vulnerable group — a status which now applies to basically any woman between 14 and 50 — I’d highly recommend at a minimum moving from a red state to a blue state and making sure your passport is up-to-date.¹¹

But I also don’t think it’s going to be as bad as it seems right now. Look, it’s going to be plenty bad — if you live there, I think you should at least consider your options for leaving — but the maximalist projects of any incoming administration have a habit of getting dashed on the shores of reality. Plans will get scaled back. Promises will be broken. Regulations will get tied up in court or blunted in implementation. And most of it will take some time to happen, so you’ll have time to react. That’s going to be cold comfort if you’re one of the administration’s priorities. Immigrants and trans folks are the most likely to get targeted early and see the most immediate effects.¹² But for most people the effects aren’t going to be nearly that severe nor that instantaneous.

The country hasn’t changed overnight. Most people voted against the Democrats because they were angry about inflation and the pandemic and the status quo, not because they support the Republican agenda. Whatever anger and bigotry emerges in the aftermath of the election was always there, even if it now feels freer in expressing itself. I think the biggest shock for most people is in realizing many of their neighbors are exactly the sort of oblivious low-information voters who will place their economic concerns over the safety and well-being of others, including yourself. But that was always true. It’s just usually easy to imagine that’s not the case.

My fear isn’t about what any single administration can or will do to the United States. I don’t think we’re close to a fascist takeover. Waiting out the next two years for the Democrats to retake the House and Senate and blunt the worst of it isn’t a naïve strategy, if you’re confident you’re out of the political crosshairs. There’s plenty of people in the United States who will need your help. But every one of these elections feels like we’re losing more and more democratic safeguards against autocracy. The courts are getting filled with loyalists. The federal bureaucracy is likely to get purged of competent careerists and stuffed with partisans. I don’t know what the breaking point is or what it might look like — civil war or constitutional crisis or just enough of a democratic breakdown that one-party rule becomes the de facto standard — but I genuinely believe something along those lines is more likely than not over the next few decades. Empires don’t last forever, and it’s always ugly when they collapse.

But that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to take a front-row seat while they do. I’m currently on a path that ends with citizenship in the EU, and while the health of the democracies in Europe isn’t all that great these days they at least offer some alternatives. I’ll take that over being trapped any day.

Next: Lisbon (LIS) to New York City (JFK)
Prev: Birmingham (BHX) to Berlin (BER)

Footnotes

¹ When it was still set in the Harry Potter universe. In retrospect being forced to lose that IP was a blessing in disguise.

² And moving, and moving, and moving

³ Numerically it would have been 27 — the previous run in the spring was 26 — but there have been enough spinoffs and tie ins that it really depends how you decide to count them. And the organizers pointedly decided not to number this one, for reasons which are still a little unclear to me.

⁴ A significant portion of the game was brand new players, including many first-time larpers.

⁵ Improbably named “Zinc Goldfinch.” I picked the name myself, and I’m still rather enamored with it.

⁶ To ask for dating advice, of all things

⁷ Someone asked what an appropriate gift for a second date might be. I suggested small trinkets of affection, like souls or contracts or legal advice. “Maybe chocolates?” they countered. I reluctantly agreed. “Sure, chocolates might work.”

⁸ I’ll gladly claim my small role in pulling that scene off, but the truth is the vast majority of it was the result of some incredible scenography and makeup. A very special shoutout to Rikke Hardbo Larsen, whose creature designs are always eye-popping and unparalleled.

⁹ One of the things that has hung up my current job search was an unwillingness to accept something that would require me to move back, just in case something like this happened, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.

¹⁰ Most of those who were looking into it just shrugged their shoulders and shelved their plans when Biden won, which I always thought was kind of like thinking your city was no longer at risk of being bombed because the air raid sirens cut off.

¹¹ I understand how traumatic it is to move, let alone try and establish yourself in an entirely unfamiliar environment. But between the shoddy health care, the patchy regulations on food and the environment, and the obsessions with guns and money, I think there’s been a compelling case to move somewhere with a better standard of living for years now and that’s before you take the politics into account.

¹² I can think of no more damning evidence of how badly the United States is doing than how many trans people I know who have left or are leaving the country. I personally had three friends reach out to me after the election to strategize about moving abroad.