A Second Life woman has formally disowned her entire virtual family after writing everybody’s relationships on a piece of paper and realising none of it made any fucking sense.
Seraphina Moonshadow, 48, made the difficult decision after seventeen years as the daughter of Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Mσмmα Kιттєη Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ, 27. The relationship, which began in 2021, had until recently been a source of enormous comfort to both women, despite Seraphina being old enough to have given birth to her mother while already holding a full driving licence.
“I love Mom. She’s always been there for me. Well, since 2021,” explained Seraphina. “And technically I’m old enough to be her mother, but apparently that’s not how this works. She’s been a wonderful parent, although I do sometimes find it difficult taking life advice from someone who was still in primary school when I got divorced.”
Over the years, the family has expanded considerably, leaving Seraphina with two SL mothers, an SL father called xXDarkWolfDaddyXx who is 34, four sisters aged between 22 and 61, a 29-year-old daughter, her daughter’s 46-year-old husband and somebody called Auntie ღPeachesღ, whose precise relationship to anyone has never been established. There are also three grandchildren, one of whom is older than Seraphina, and a woman in Germany who insists she is everybody’s cousin despite nobody remembering meeting her.
“I think it started because someone called me sis at a club,” Seraphina explained. “Then her Mom became my Mom, and Mom already had a husband, so obviously he became Dad. Then Dad had a sister, except she was also Mom’s former daughter from another family, and at some point I adopted a woman from Belgium who is nine years younger than me. It just got away from us.”
The situation became increasingly complicated as family members entered romantic relationships, divorced, adopted one another and occasionally changed their minds about who their parents were. One particularly difficult Christmas saw Seraphina buying presents for two mothers, three fathers, seven siblings and a woman she had previously been married to but who was now, following an administrative reshuffle, her niece.
Relations finally broke down on Tuesday when Seraphina was informed that she was expected to attend the wedding of her SL granddaughter ꧁༺Luna-Rose Starlight༻꧂ to Seraphina’s former SL brother Jaxx Venom, making him simultaneously her brother, grandson-in-law and a man she once had sex with behind a Bloodlines shop in 2019.
“I sat down with a pen and paper and tried to work out exactly how everyone was related,” she said. “After about forty minutes I realised I had drawn the same person in four different places, my daughter was technically my aunt, and I appeared to be related to myself by marriage. I looked at the family tree and realised it wasn’t a tree. It was more of a wiring diagram.”
Seraphina announced her decision in the family Discord, thanking everyone for the memories but explaining that, going forward, she intended to refer to other adults simply by their names. The announcement prompted an immediate family crisis, with several relatives accusing her of abandoning her responsibilities and one of her mothers threatening to remove her from the family group photograph, which would require editing approximately thirty-seven people out of a picture taken in 2022.
Mom did not take the news well. “I DIDN’T RAISE YOU TO BE LIKE THIS,” posted the 27-year-old, before reminding Seraphina of everything she had supposedly sacrificed for her over the years.
“You didn’t raise me at all,” replied Seraphina. “You were eleven when I left university.”
At press time, a professional genealogist brought in to untangle the relationships had resigned, describing the family tree as “something that would normally result in a police investigation.”