In 2007 I shipped Knuckles and Rouge, but the illness grew and grew. Soon every woman I looked at looked like Rouge, and I would imagine her being with Knuckles. I recorded myself replaying Sonic Adventures 2 and illegally downloaded Sonic X and went back through the recordings and found all the scenes where Knuckles and Rouge have “moments.” I compiled these all into a CD and labelled it “proof.” I would spent hours every day looking at the same fan drawn art that shipped Knuckles and Rouge and my obsession grew more and more. I re watched every scene of the anime where it was hinted they liked each other and rewatched them. I would look up rule 34 of Rouge and every single one with Sonic or Shadow I would pretend didn’t exist. I got into a fight with someone on the internet about whether Rouge liked Shadow more or Knuckles and everybody in the thread said Shadow. I almost killed myself that night.
Eventually I stopped going to school pretending to be sick (I was 17) and didn’t go for 2 weeks just so I could ship Knuckles and Rouge and read every fanfiction and view every fanart. My parents discovered my gigabytes of files on Knuckles and Rouge when I went to the bathroom (the only time I left the room) and threatened to break the computer. I threw my mom and stopped myself from hitting her with my belt. I clung to my computer and screamed and they called the police where I was taken away and hospitalized for a month.
This went on for 5 months, and I stopped going to school the last 2 weeks of the fiasco. It started to get really bad during the last 2 months. I had to retake all my state tests (finals) again in January because I couldn’t take the tests. I was removed from the national Honor society after this.