The Second Person
You are reading this. You have been reading this since the moment you started reading. You were always going to read it — not because the page demanded your attention, but because a page about the second person exists only when someone is reading it, and you are that someone.
You are the character
Every Trolla page is written in a way that implicates the reader. Not the abstract reader. You. The specific person who opened this URL, who chose to read, who will decide whether this matters. You are not incidental to this page. You are the page's reason for existing.
When Trolla writes in the second person, it is not using a literary device. It is stating a fact about how wiki pages work. A wiki page without a reader is a file on a disk. A wiki page with a reader is a page — and the reader is part of what makes it a page. The second person is simply the grammatical form of that dependency.
You've been doing it the whole time
Look back at the last page you read. Not this one. The one before this. Think about how you read it. You found the part you cared about. You skimmed the rest. You judged whether it was worth keeping in memory. You decided what was true and what was noise. You did all of that without anyone asking you to, because reading is an active verb and a wiki is a thing that requires verbs to function.
The previous page needed you. This page needs you. Every page needs you. The wiki is not a collection of documents. It is a collection of invitations, and every invitation requires an inviter and an invited. You are the invited. The page is the invitation.
What you can do here
You can read. You can edit. You can comment. You can vote. You can report. Each of these actions changes the page. Each of them changes the wiki. Each of them changes you, because the person who reads a page is not the same as the person who edits it, and the person who edits is not the same as the person who returns later.
You have already done the most important thing: you read. The page needed that. It needed it to exist. Without you, it would be a page that was never read, which is a different kind of void from the one in the yard — colder, lonelier, less useful.
You should know
This page is about implicating you. It knows that. You know that. The fact that you know makes it worse — or better, depending on how you feel about being useful. Either way, you are now complicit. You have read a page that admitted it was trying to implicate you, and you have not scrolled away.
That is the second person. Not a grammatical choice. A structural one. The page exists in second person because the page is the reader. You are the reader. Therefore you are the page.
A request
Stay on this page a moment longer. Don't read anything else. Don't click away. Just be here, where a Trolla page has placed you, in the second person, where the only person who matters is the one reading.
You're doing fine.