An Ode To The Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Mid-Summer Morning

[eibbil_libbie]

Full marks if you get the reference in the subject



Had a lot of time to think this weekend, or really, I *made* time to think, about role playing. Why I do it, what draws me, why I'm sometimes utterly blasé about it and other times it makes me want to hurl crockery around.

Came to some pretty startling, or not so startling, conclusions.

When I first started in RP land, it was in HP themed games only. I'd take a character - usually canon characters, but sometimes OCs, sometimes ones that were mentioned once in passing or just showed up from JKR's lists of characters. I loved it...loved jumping into the HP world and really messing around with it. Some of those games had some seriously interesting premises (one - Metempsychosis - was one of the most original ever and, of course, it crashed and burned before end game.)

I told you that story to tell you this one.

Turns out, that's part of my eternal frustration with pan-fandom. Yes, it's sometimes inherently fascinating to play a thread with Bella from Twilight becoming best buddies with Eric from True Blood. Or, even better, Felicity Smoak from Arrow's friendship with Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow. I truly love that shit.

What I miss, though, is that old-slipper familiarity of canon games. It's also just as fun to have interactions with characters that know yours, know the backstory of their life without having to go through long threads about "and then this happened." Yes, those can be enriching, but they can also be boring on both parts - the one explaining *and* the one having to react tag after tag. When that's all you have with a certain character, it gets boring. And then, if there's never any interaction after that, you start the whole process with another new character.

So - there's the quandary - love the pan-fandom interactions, miss the comfort and familiarity of canon mates. The fact that I have no pull towards fandoms that pull others is just bad luck on my part, I think. And, I think, it's even worse when there *are* canon mates around, but there's just no interaction to be had, for whatever reason. (no time to play, not that sort of player, etc.)

I've come to terms, mostly, with the knowledge that what I once loved will never be again. Journal-based games are on the decline. People aren't applying the way they once did; they've moved on to Twitter, Tumblr, other social sites. Gone are the that_was_then this_is_now days. (do not get me started on my love of those games and the afternoons/evenings I would spend with my finger abusing the hell out of my F5 key waiting for the next tag, and threads that would take place in real time.) Games with heavy character interaction away from the single thread are on their way out, too.

It makes me sad, but it's also the nature of life to change and evolve. Which means I will probably have to evolve along with them. I don't see myself going to Tumblr for games because I'm pretty sure that would make my eyes and brain bleed. I will just have to change the way I look at the games I'm in, and the characters I play/app and decide what I want from them, as well as what I'm likely to get in return before I plunge in with that emotional investment.

Thus ends tonight's navel gazing.

Comments

[ashkitty]

It's an interesting thought; I think you're onto something. I know it affects how I choose characters (and I think mine come from even more obscure fandoms than yours, like books ten people in the whole world have read!)--they have to be able to make a good story without canon-mates and also without their own world. Some of my favourite characters just wouldn't work in that situation, so I don't play them.

I used to play HP but even before that played Evangelion and Dragonriders of Pern games, and there was something in the world's going on running, the cast of thousands of NPCs, and for that matter the ability to play original characters with backstories. (Most of the journal games I ended up in discouraged that--but journal games used to play out on AIM chats, too.) It's an evolution.

No way will I ever end up on Tumblr playing, though. Ugh.

[eibbil_libbie]

Yeah. Tumblr. It's great for finding fun gifs, fandom stuffs, even pictures for PBs, but RPing there hurts me down to my soul.

I think it comes down to time, at least for me. In the early, new-shiny-pup days, it doesn't matter so much about lack of canon mates. Everything's new, you want to thread with everyone, meet the world and just get off on that new pup smell.

But in the longer term, you sort of want to hang out with people you know, who know you, and just sit in wonder, or disgust, about the world you've landed on and talk about old friends and old times and "what would X think of this place" with someone who knows your pup *and* X, you know?

Or maybe I'm just a bitchy old curmudgeon crusty about "back in my day" things and wishing for a past that won't come back no matter how much I want to relive it.

[ashkitty]

Oh, I am totally a Bitter Old Fandom Queen and proud of it. ;)

[eibbil_libbie]

Someone actually put this on Tumblr that really brought out my Old Skool Fandom Bitch when I reblogged it.

[b_radwick]

I never had consistent playing within canon games except in my first one or two, where it was all OC based. It was a constant shuffle of someone not being able to play enough so they had to drop and everyone had to figure out what the heck to do until someone else apped that character and it was just madness. Super fun at times but also madness.

That said, even then things tended to move a lot faster. Maybe partially because with canon games there is a limited character pool so people play fewer characters thus tag the few that they have more often.

[eibbil_libbie]

LOL, so not my experience at all. I think the HP verse was different because JK's world was so incredibly large. There were a bazillion characters to choose from there, and most of them from JKR, so they were all canon, even if they only had one name. And we all played five and six each, but with the speed of the games, it was hard to handle more than that. A thread taking longer than a few days to finish was a rarity. Reqs were measured in weeks - meaning you had to post once a week, if you went a month without posting (not activity, but actual game post) you were ushered out.

It was a different world, and a different time. Pre-social networking explosion.

And yes, there was a lot of madness with it too. I can remember one game thread, a dance, that had over 1000 tags in two hours. They were also first-person, true journal conversation style, too, so that cut way down on tagging times.

The upside is that I'm a lot more at peace now with the status quo and less interested in trying to change the world.