Okay, so I know I tagged it as "workplace drama" but it's more like college drama. I was a 3D animation major tho, and I was in a classroom of 9 students in my 3rd year, so I feel like it's kind of alike. Anyways, I have a story that, in retrospect, I definetely had a part in the drama, but I also definitely suffered from it at the time. I just want to know your opinion on if I was being a bit paranoid (which I felt I was sometimes) or not.

I feel like the atmosphere in my class degraded the more time passed. In my 1st year, it was mostly okay, I was discovering how 3D softwares worked and just trying to make at least a decent job with what I understood. I managed to model the second most important character, create some assets, animate and even voice act as the leading character in that movie (I'm a bit embarrassed about how my voice acting turned out, but I'm still proud I had the opportunity to do it) ! Group wise, it was also mostly okay, I just didn't talk all that much, though I would a little bit with people I thought I could be friends with. There was just this thing that bothered me a bit towards the end of the 1st year. I was talking with two upperclassmen, and the classmate that I was hanging around with (that was sitting behind me, let's call him Foo) was looking at us talking with a sort of angry expression while I had my back turned ? When I turned around to look at him again, I asked what was going on and like...he kept going defensive and was like "wow, so I can't look anymore ?" or "okay, then I'm not looking anymore" while pouting and things along those lines. To this day, I think it was weird, but also at the time, I was genuinely confused and was wondering if something was wrong.

Second year, however, was the WORST for me, I literally tried to fail as much as possible so that I'd get expelled and not have to go to college anymore. That was probably because I had a conversation with some of my teammates about who they'd want to work with if they had the chance to choose, and from that conversation, with a quick math, I realized that practically nobody wanted to work with me, and it weighed on me for the rest of the year. There was also this rampant "he said she said" thing going on. For example, a teammate (let's call her G-A) came up to me telling me how she found the way the way Foo smiled creepy or how the leader of our film for the second year (I'll call him G-B) was acting before leaving and other things. I remember the first time she came to me to gossip, I wanted to cry a bit because I didn't want to associate myself with gossip like that...I still ended up gossiping sometimes because I gotta survive and try to fit in this class somehow (which I failed to do so). I was thinking that, maybe I could be friends with her and that we could get along. I also tried my best to open up to her a little bit about what I liked and whatnot, because I was struggling with speaking up and was mostly silent. I'm absolutely ashamed I joined in this, and I do not wish to get myself entangled like that or feel as misrable as this ever again. If it isn't G-A, it was Foo who was kind of bothering me because I kept catching him staring at me. I think there were definitely some times where I thought I did catch him, but yeah, most of the time I did catch him staring. And everytime he'd go defensive.

3rd year of college was also a bad year. Foo's staring problem got worse, especially because I was seated next to him. Overtime, I've grown tired of it. My last straw was when I was trying to look at the board that was on my right, and Foo also happened to be seated on my right, and he proceeded to go all like "you were looking at me". I tried to explain to him that I wanted to look at the board, but he insisted that I was looking at him. From that day, I've decided to not talk to him anymore or to even look at him for the rest of the year. I was that petty 😅​. Apart from this, I was criticized by G-A over my work flow even though I was in the process of making something, the parts of the animatic that I was in charge of ended up not making it to the final animatic footage (G-A told me that I didn't do much for the team one day EVEN THOUGH I tried to greyscale the shots that were in the animatic to the best of my ability knowing my parts weren't included), almost every prop I made ended up being replaced by one another teammate did, the people in the team didn't include me in the animating team (even though I could animate just fine), Foo one day decided it was a good idea to take an object that I did to shade it without warning me when I clearly stated in the group chat that I'd take care of it. Basically, no matter what I tried to do, it didn't feel like my contributions were good enough to make it to the final product according to the entire team. Only a poster that was important in the film along with a few assets (that you don't even see that much) ended up making it, and even then, the poster almost got replaced by Foo's own version of the poster. The only reason my version was picked was because the main prof visibly had mixed feelings concerning Foo's version, and I looked at the prof like "please don't choose it". There was also this one time where G-A decided that we should add TeamViewer out of nowhere. From what I understood, we could basically take control of a computer remotely. I didn't really like that plan because of how sudden it was, and at this point I was a little paranoid, so I made it seem like I complied with it at campus while not installing TeamViewer at home, partly because I didn't understand how to even set it up, but mostly because I didn't like the idea of people accessing my computer at home from campus. Turns out, days later, G-A tried to access my computer via TeamViewer from campus, but because I didn't set it up at home, it didn't work. She said it was so that she could do some normal maps of textures of some posters, but in my eyes, TeamViewer isn't needed for this kind of thing because you can convert pictures into normal maps online, so it was at least a bit suspiscious to me. Apart from this, the group in itself still had a problem with gossiping and drama, so much that one of the leaders of the group ended up gathering everyone around a table to try and address the elephant in the room. The atmosphere got bad overtime, and with how little I had when it comes to assignments for the last movie, the main prof eventually told me I could not come to campus at a certain point because it would be pointless for me to show up only to not do anything the entire day. The moment I knew it was time for me to not go to campus anymore, I was literally out of there, I could not stand spending more time with those classmates anymore.

The more I type about this, the more I'm like "wow, college sucked :D", but I'm so used to things not going well in some aspects that I can't help but laugh. I guess I just want to have a trace of this story somewhere so that I don't forget about it. Again, please feel free to tell me your opinion about it, maybe I'll get a good laugh out of this. Thank you for reading this whole novel, and I wish you a good day/night <33

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