This thread is dedicated to those who sought answers Hey, guys. Some of you seemed to have already alluded to what I'm about to reveal and I felt I owed it to this forum consummately as it has been the greatest entanglement for Valon. Yes, it's true that Valon is a fictional character. Before I go into details about the 'why' and other aspects, let me introduce myself and my project. My real name is Matt Rayner - I'm an aspiring actor and satirical author. I'm 27, recently married and graduated from NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) in November last year. I have had two satirical books locally published: “The Perfect World is an Imperfection†and “Living with Kate and Hate.†Both delve into socio idiosyncrasies within the average human being. If you would like to know more, feel free to ask or you should be able to Google© the titles of the books. As part of my final project at NIDA, we were asked to create an original artistic piece in the course of around six months. The boundaries were broad so I decided to go against the norm and create a social experiment. The piece was entitled: “Valon's Perspective†and the core of the project was dressing up this charterer from scratch and observing his interactions with his surroundings. Giving him a personality was at first a grueling task. How does one create a human being? Against popular theories and notions, Valon's persona heavily conflicts with my own. A character that is all but an exaggerated form of one's self has been done to death so I decided to really stretch the boundaries of imagination. Bradley (director/cameraman) and I went about our project with many short mockumentaries, but first we gave Valon an in-depth personality before filming. The presentation of the project for the three markers consisted of a 30-minute mockumentary and a 45-minute lecture which included some of the following: The History of Valon -- is one of neglect. He has no siblings and his mother passed away from a heart disease when he was one. He lives alone with his alcoholic-abusive father and never attended primary or high school. Valon had little social contact when he was younger which had a massive impact on Valon today. By the time Valon was 17 he was drafted into university by 'fluking' an aptitude test that proclaimed him to be a genius, when his real IQ was only around 130. This is one reason for his intellectual boasts. Given this opportunity, he studied law, mathematics and astrophysics but dropped out soon after becoming interested in music. He is quite a good composer and played in a few rock bands but far from what he claimed to be (my brother helped by creating the compositions, by the way). By the time he was 18 he was discovering the world of socialism. He had many girlfriends whom he treated as objects and liked to play tricks on them for self-amusement. Because of Valon's early lack of social interaction he was not even sure what his major sexual turn-ons were and thus he discovered that he was bisexual. One of the tricks he likes to play on his girlfriends is that he informs them that he is gay just as they gain his trust solely so he can watch as their hearts are broken. An interesting event is when Valon's meets a younger girl named Alice and even though he thinks love is a load of nonsense, he believes that he is in love with Alice and his persona slowly begins to change (details of their relationship is omitted for length reasons). After a year being together, Alice decided to stop seeing Valon because of too many differences and arguments. This caused Valon to go back to his original persona and the story and cycle thus transforms into an ever-continuing evolution. Valon's Traits Like the average human being, Valon has fears, hopes, a favourite colour, a favourite food, etc. Repugnantly, Valon is extremely arrogant and self-absorbed. He loves to argue and he doesn't have the slightest concern about the topic. He would argue against your opinion on major issues no matter what your opinion happened to be. He would usually pick one minor detail and argue on a technicality (often in a sarcastic or insulting tone) but pretends that he knows everything about everything. Not to mention that he believes he's the best in everything. Music is just one major topic of many in which he has a negative view upon (films, television and sport are examples of others). He hates mostly all rock music for he finds it drab but I decided that he should at least enjoy one rock style. I went with progressive metal because I felt it was the best blend of music that can be ascertained as being 'cool' (the metal aspects) and technically skillful at the same time (reflecting Valon's sense of self-worth). I do not know much about the specifics of rock music or mostly any other music except that which I researched for this character. I decided for Valon to pretend to enjoy facets of classical music because of the fact that he believes he's a genius so he is deluded to what can be regarded as intellectual music. Valon has made appearances on many Internet forums for the past year or so (a total of ten different forums) so I could observe first hand how this character interacted in this environment. It was a long process of characterisations - I, in fact had this character in mind long before I even knew of the forthcoming project. At first I decided for him to be the typical 'troll' contributer who would make posts such as: “i hate u, u r a big fag, lol rofl lol, noob,†highlighting his insulting an immature nature. But because Valon was repeatedly banned from these forums I decided to abate his demeanor in this environment. And also because if he claimed to be a genius I eventually got to the stage where I believed that he should have quite good grammar and spelling abilities and structure his posts well but is quick to bring up someone else's error (ironically with purposefully thrown in self-errors every now and then). This is because Valon isn't actually that foolish in regards to logical perceptions, but he certainly is in regards to any form of social balance. Moreover, Valon needed to at least type humanely to trick others' in that kind of environment that he was the genius he claimed to be. This gave way to the abating of this demeanor in general. These forums are Valon's final characteristic form. What's the deal with Vanden Plas and “Christ 0?†I picked Vanden Plas because they are apparently the band that are most akin to Dream Theater. And this being a Dream Theater board I wanted to see what reaction this would take, especially considering “Christ 0†is somewhat different from the previous albums (I was told). Again, I'm not that familiar with rock music, so Bradley pieced together these gaps for me. He also transcribed the Dream Theater “Awake†review and purposely left many errors in both grammar and musical aspects to see if Valon could get out of it and for a sense of irony in the form of an ongoing theme involving Valon's frequent technical errors. Every new forum we targeted we always persisted with an appurtenant theme. Valon had many different screen names for every forum (selected for specific reasons) and he would often come back once banned to see if he would be once again gain notice or if the moderators would care enough to repeat the banning. And this brings me to the -- 'Why' I Came Here to These Forums “The Valon Perspective†is now complete and since he is mostly my creation I wanted to put him to the ultimate and final test. I went ahead and let him use his own name for the screen name (an uncommon occurrence but makes perfect sense once you think about it) and attempted to become him as much as possible in every situation which I believe I did a satisfactory job. It was a post ongoing-experiment, if you will and I couldn't find a more suitable forum for Valon. I informed the moderator, ariich, of my intentions to make sure I wasn't breaking any forum rules (the old Valon didn't give the slightest care for any rule) as I'm a very dignitary person. What I didn't count on was that ariich would inform the other moderators of my secret. The bottom line is that I'm sorry if I aggravated anyone in anyway during the fulfillment of my hobby. I've made the slate clean on every forum Valon was involved with. About the Website This was indeed a segment of the project and its dissolution was going to coincide with Valon's, but I received many e-mails requesting that I continue. Because satirical writing is my hobby I didn't see why I couldn't continue writing for the website in my spare time despite its discontinuance which is largely because of this very post and the prospect that many will stop visiting the website if they found out that it is 100% satirical. I love the potentiality of the viewpoint: “Well, maybe it's serious and maybe it's not but it's funny.†On the homepage is a giant picture of Superman who became an important symbol in that it's how Valon viewed himself: someone alienated from the social norm but extremely intelligent and gifted. Similarities and dissimilarities between Valon and I One notability I'm mindful of is that I enjoy progressive metal, but this isn't saying much because I enjoy all forms of music. I also like the same films as Valon but that's because I enjoy many films whereas Valon only enjoys a select few, which were picked for specific reasons, by the way. I'm the type of person that doesn't really make a big deal about someone else's opinions and don't see the need to justify anything that I believe in or enjoy or need justifications from someone else. I'm a fairly nice and outgoing guy who's easy to get along with. I see music more as a pure art-form as I studied the history behind major forms of music rather than music theory as Bradley has. Valon's tone of voice is higher than mine and his voice is drastically distorted. At first the corniness was a joke when we were filming but we decided to leave it as is for humour's sake. I wear a long and light-brown wig when playing Valon whereas my hair is short and blonde in real life. I did leave some clues on this forum and was rarely half-myself (see the “Ask an Author†thread). There were many tasks I went about ensuring Valon's identity was at least secure. For example: reporting some posts, so that the moderators didn't necessarily catch on; and occasionally being modest (something Valon wouldn't really do to be honest). Infrequently, Valon may sound a little bit like me in relation to mannerisms (at least on these forums), but that is because phraseology is often hard to fake whilst simultaneously trying to seem genuine. I believe I did a much better job of this in the mockumentaries. Conclusions The conclusion of my experiment is that it went quite well at first. Most of you were expectingly giving Valon a hard time but I felt that I may have taken some of his opinions too far as some of you were suggesting the possibility of a fake account or that I was someone else. And this is why I made would make sure that Valon didn't hate absolutely everything and went to other great lengths to convince the average forum member that he was real. I found it particularly interesting when someone had edited Valon's 'dtwiki' account, adding in: “Is a very refined parody troll account.†It was at this moment where I almost stopped the charade but then I realised that this could have been someone's way of dealing with such outlandish remarks. After querying ariich, he assured me that many were still in the dark on the matter so I persisted a little longer. The “Who is Valon?†thread was the final catalyst in my decision to end the charade. We received a minor distinction for our project (or B+ for you American folk) and we had great fun with it, needless to say. Within this thread I'll be answering any questions that you may have (as I have discernibly left out a truck-load of details for simplistic sake) for me or even for Valon. But I assure you that this will be the last thread that I speak of him if I continue posting here. Which brings me to the final point. I would also like to have the big question answered, and that is: Because I quite enjoy this community, I was wondering if you would care if I started to post here under my true persona -- or has this incident tarnished me in your eyes? Cheers, guys. -Matt.
Re: The Truth You know, I really had no idea what to say to this. I think I'll now post my original reply plan: ... BLOODY HELL!
I plan on writing an in-depth report on my reaction (only one persons, but one of the unique reactions), but not now. Flights need to be booked so we can get back to the UK. For now, I'll say - You fooled us over well
An account with exaggerated idiosyncracies that falsely represents the personality of the poster? What an innovation!
Haha, I'd always suspected it was someone just fucking around, but never knew it was that premeditated.
Haha yeah--sorry for like... telling you you shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion... or whatever. Stick around!
Fairly well done, maybe a little over the top to be believable, but it certainly fooled a lot of people. I personally take things with a pinch of salt as I have my fair share of fake personallities on different forums, however I've never taken on a persona like the one you have. I tip my hat to you sir.
Not really surprised, but damn you must of put a lot of effort into this project doing what you did here on 10 different forums what were the other fourms? what was your favorite forum?
