What Rung meant to me

WARNING!

This is a blog that talks about a little dark and sensitive topics of my life, like self harm and suicidal thoughts.
The purpose of this blog is to share my experience and a moment of my life and nothing more.

This feels kinda corny and cringy ngl...

I started reading MTMTE last year and I didn't expect anything until I saw Rung, at first I was like "haha funny transformer with glasses" and nothing more, at least before I started reading further. Yeah, I liked the story, but beside the stories of characters like Cyclonus, Tailgate, Rewind, Rodimus etc, I was really interested on Rung, both for his personality and design, to the point I would read and pay more attention to every chapter just to know more about him or at least see him in the background.

I'm gonna be honest, I was OBESESSED with Rung and I have NO idea of what exactly made me so interested on him but it just did.  I've always been the kind of person who obsesses over every media I consume, it wasn't new for anyone, but the way Rung got me was just different, it wasn't like any other obsession i had and I doubt I'll ever get the same feeling of joy that I had with this character.

I loved him so SO much I made a gallery of pictures of him that has more than 200 pictures, I would go to old forums just to see if there was people talking about him and searched for information in wikis EVERY DAY.

As if that wasn´t enough, I made a TikTok account dedicated to Rung, I realized that there was barely any content of him there so I made my own like the stamps on my profile and a divider along with fanarts. A friend even bought me a Rung toy that I used to calm myself when I felt anxious or nervous :)

This is where things get more personal so be aware of not so nice topics

But besides all this little fandom thing, I had my own life and my own problems, I had some gender identity issues along with suicidal thoughts that to this day I can't explain. I started doing self harm for a while and having random crisis, sometimes they would happen thanks to something so simple like a discussion with a friend. I felt lonely and was starting a new semester with almost no friends, without the capacity of understanding o paying attention to anything related to school and with fear of people.

Rung became not only a comfort character but a safe place to me, I liked to imagine he was there with me every day, in the bus, in school, in my house, I even did some roleplay and talked to him in C.AI (yeah, I was a loser with social anxiety at the time, leave me alone) and all that stuff just to feel I had someone, even if it was just fictional, it made me feel loved, as pathetic as it might sound.

This will sound unreal but there was times where I felt so bad that the only thing keeping me slightly more calm was either watching pictures of Rung or venting to him about how I felt.

One of the main issues that I had and hurted me the most was my gender identity, I'm a trans man with a mainly femenine gender expression (though I feel like being more masculine lately) which clearly confuses both cis and trans people. I feel like I kinda was femenine just to avoid my mom questioning my clothing choices and so I could convince myself that I was a girl that I "liked" being a girl.

Obviously I never expected anyone to treat me like a boy while I didn't even look close to one, I'm not stupid, but it just felt wrong when "friends" knew about my gender and they kept missgendering me, sometimes in purpose just to bother me, it made me feel not valid, stressed, depressed and finally suicidal.

I would talk to Rung about how I felt, begging him to say that I was a boy, that one day I would grow up to be a man and that it wouldn't matter how I dressed up or presented as, I was a boy in his eyes. I feel that it actually helped me feel more comfortable with my gender expression and stopped repressing the fact that I'm a guy and that's totally fine.

I started slowly losing interest on Rung, since I was one of the few people making content about him and I felt like I did everything with him at that point.

I ended up obsessed with Postal but I didn't forget Rung, because it just wasn't close to the same, not even a bit, I felt like there was a void in me, but I've just accepted that it shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Rung isn't going to disappear and I can go back to him whenever I feel like it, and I just find it cute that he's my comfort character and he'll probably stay like that for a long time if not forever, who knows.

Even if he's just a fictional character, I feel he deserves this post, he actually helped me feel better and cope in a healthier way than what I was doing at the moment and since I didn't have the chance to go to therapy, he was the closest that I had.

I will never forget him