Again, the whole point of Tumblrite attention-seeking is to Make Posts™. Isfahan, February 12, 2013, 02:45:25 pm
My theory is pity-mongery. It's similar on the surface, but bear me out.
Ultimately, we all* want social interaction in one flavour or another. Ideally, it should be positive social interaction. An easy way to get that is to elicit feelings of pity and attendant "comfort" that follows. (I used comfort as a verb, like you were playing one of those old Zork games: comfort isfahan).
From there, it just self-reinforces. More victimization gets more pity gets more comfort-flavoured social interaction. I'm not sure this spiralling is really conscious, because it's just so patently ridiculous but there's enough examples of it out there that it's a real phenomenon.
I personally knew a man like that, who enjoyed nothing save playing online text-based roleplaying games, and parlayed these characters into MPD for the pity, and when that got played out, anted up with satanic ritual abuse, and when THAT started failing, started making up really disgusting medical conditions. I don't know how that finished, he hasn't left much Internet spoor to track him by any longer.
Anyway, where this gets pathetic is with the kinda-weird highschool (and early college-aged) crowd, who haven't really anything more piteous than a love of fantasy to draw from. That particular downward victimization-spiral results into such gold, like elven concentration camp survivor stories.
* near as matters, all of us, anyway.