~~completely un-noteworthy: fanon affection & blather on rpg's.

[reenka]

for a split second, i was going to wax poetic about fanon!draco. just because. er. it's fun to blaspheme against one's own ideals, or something like that (*laughs*). no, i mean, it's fun to be affectionate towards the things you can't stand-- you look at them in a different light, and presto!. instant cuteness.

well, i mean, this doesn't work with everything-- i can't suddenly decide to feel affectionately chagrined towards say, a horrible evil dictator. though sometimes i come close, with long-dead monarchs (it's a quirk). i mean, i totally think iron-ivan (monarch of old russia) is cute. i think henry the eighth is cute. you know, it's the insanity. it makes people cuter than they would otherwise be. it's that note of the absurd. it's easy to have affection for.

it is in thinking of draco as dryly intelligent and swanky and sleek and vain and promiscuous (either that, or seemingly so and rather insanely picky in reality) that i find him absurd-- impossible-- like pink flying pigs-- like, oh, i dunno, leather trousers worn with black turtlenecks and a passion for cucumber sandwiches-- in other words, really really cute. adorable, even. heh. i easily go, awwwww.
    though, testing this, i easily buckle is what i do. any mention of "harry", "sweet harry", "tenderly kissing harry" or sweetness and tenderness in general and i want to scream. scream at draco, and possibly disown him. scream, "you are a bloody bastard, and don't you forget it prissyboy!!". the course of affection never did run smooth, of course. especially since right now, the only couple i will allow to be gooey love-bunnies (as long as there's angst) is sirius & remus. ddtm has done a number on my brain, indeed. though, a lot of s/r fic sucks (naturally). yes, i looked. probably even worse than h/d fic, but no. still, the word "mate" begins to grate on one. shutupshutupshutup, i want to scream. heh. not as bad as "my sweet muffin sugarplum". no, i do not love you after all, fanon!draco. sigh. at least, you're bearable until you admit your burning tender passions for one harry potter, at which point you're impossible (and not in the good way). love him, but even harry has more spunk than defanged!draco. sad, very sad.

speaking of cute.
    i made some icons for the taking. tell me if you do, but i don't need 'em.

sigh. i -still- haven't gotten around to reading/reviewing/reccing a growing number of recent fics (half-finished recs post ever-growing to my horror). i refuse any paranoia sternly, and will not wibble. life is getting hectic. cannot even read thamiris' clex fic, 'cause of recent developments in the show. wah. best-friends!clark&lex fic doesn't work in my head anymore, sadly. does anyone else have this problem? i'm all like-- "where's the distance and the underhanded double-crossing and the discomfort with each other??" sigh.
~~
EDIT -
i've role-played twice in my life-- in real life, that is. i'm not great at it, since my shyness seems even more blatant then than not in-character, and i didn't have very good dm's who didn't help me get my bearings. and anyway, online role-playing is so different. you don't have each other's expressions to go by, no dm to narrate for you, just you and the other player(s), trying to make things up as you go along, for the most part. which is fun.

the idea of role-playing as co-writing is a tricky one, though. co-writing seems to me a different sort of beast-- obviously unique to each particular group of writers, but overall, you're still following the habits of writing alone. but there is a weird merger with online role-playing that i've only experienced by watching-- reading entries and logs. and it's just weird. first of all, any rp where the character comments on their own feelings within the course of an rp seems even more flagrantly dissonant than in regular writing. you don't just tell people what you feel, directly. narrating your life as you enact it is rather more meta than even i can handle.

there are rp's that just write the story of the game as if it was just that-- a story. but then, that's what it is. you just have a collaboration on a story rather than a simulation of human interaction-- because as i understand it, role-playing is supposed to simulate life, right? you're having -some- sort of "idea", or quest, but the point is to just fool around in some sort of world that's not your own with an identity that's not your own. you go to bars pointlessly, get into stupid arguments, get colds and get bored and fall into pits that even the dm didn't know were there because you rolled the dice weird. that's what's fun about role-playing as opposed to writing (say, in first-person, even), isn't it? well, traditionally.

so this experience with traditional role-playing is really tripping me up. because all this concentration on relationships and romance and feelings is just... overwhelming. it's either death-and-darkness or romance-and-intrigue, as far as the hp rp's i've seen. except n_a i suppose, but i guess n_a falls into the "romance-ridden" category too. there was no romance in both of the rp's i've been in-- none. there is no great romance that i've heard about from any of the numerous people i know who are gamer freaks. so this is just... seemingly a quirk of online role-playing, then? especially blog-style?

my favorite rpg is (as is probably obvious if you read my entries), n_a. it's not a traditional rpg by any means, but it's not lame except on purpose most of the time-- or rather, it's lame on purpose so often that any time it's accidentally lame gets smoothed over. heh. the thing i notice about other rp's is that they're either dreadfully serious or melodramatic-- sort of like most fanfic, i guess. heh. the format is contrived, it seems-- there's much self-consciousness and meta, with the posting of logs and "private owls" and the very usage of computers becoming a part of the characterization.

now-- i -know- you can have "normal" role-play online-- those everquest-style games, for one, aren't self-aware as far their computer-usage. of course, suspending disbelief is easier if things are given a reason-- especially blatantly obvious things like lj-commenting, since lj is a proprietary system without a unique game interface, like an online game community would have (like everquest). an interesting idea would be an lj clone purely for rp'ing, but i dunno if it would improve anything.

so that's why i love n_a, and also the more narrative-style games-- n_a in particular seems to straddle the fence-- it uses the lj interface to comment back and forth, but doesn't try to make it do what it doesn't do naturally and doesn't link it to other parts of the web (ie, links to logs on other websites), thus confining it and letting it be part of the game. it doesn't tell you about character's feelings except in a diary manner. in a way, it's a public diary system that's aware of itself-- which is, i think, the best way to use an lj, which is, in the end, a public diary system (that's aware of itself).

that's what it -is-, so to have an rp that utilizes that seems entirely natural. i think n_a is the most like regular lj-use, which is why i appreciate it even though it's not really a "normal" rpg as far as my real-life d&d experiences would suggest to me. it is what it is, and that's good. i don't have experience with an rp that's confined to mailing lists or instant messaging, but i would think they're most successful when confined and tailored to that one medium, though i'm just guessing.

after all, real-life rpg's are tailored to their medium too-- direct human interaction. in direct interaction, you don't tell people what you feel; in a public diary, you don't tell people what you feel directly, etc. i feel the less suspension of disbelief the better, basically. the more an rpg meshes with its medium and with its purpose to simulate "real life", the more satisfying it seems to me.

i like the idea of co-writing-- multiple people writing a fanfic, one character per person. but that's not quite rp'ing in the same sense i always thought of it, though it's interesting. n_a seems to both use that method and avoid it, which i enjoy. but when an rpg co-writes -and- journals -and- enacts directly (while using the usual narrative techniques usually left for dm's or not used at all in traditional rpg's, i.e., emotional descriptors)-- it just fails for me. i mean, this is a uniquely online phenomenon, and i'm familiar with it. i think that's how cyber-sex works. you have a plot (ie, a sexual encounter with orgasm as the goal-- it's a pwp, but it's still a story), you have emotions you're looking to transmit (lust, appreciation, humor, possibly affection), and you have dialogue as well as description, both of yourself and the other person(!), by each player.

i don't know what the point of this is. i'm just observing, and saying this last style, which i know from being on irc (and inevitably, having people try to cyber with me-- you let slip that you're female, and it's only a matter of time), doesn't work for me at all, and i think it's forced and destroys a necessary sense of suspension of disbelief in rp'ing. maybe i'm just prejudiced 'cause i don't think too well of cybering. but i don't mind cyber-sex, i just think it's lame. online gaming doesn't -have- to be lame, but cyber-sex-style just can't help it. it's not a story, it's not a diary, it's not direct dialogue-- it's a mismatched goup of all of the above, and it tries to do too many different things all at once, not doing any of them well, as far as i'm concerned.

so who cares, blah blah, obviously. i just wanted to organize my thoughts on it. 'cause i do follow online rpg's on a rather random basis, and have observed certain things. i never felt like joining 'cause diary-style rp'ing seems even more difficult to excel at (without guidance) than real-life, "normal" rp-ing, for me-- but i never even considered the ones where the form involves instant-messaging -and- co-writing -and- a public diary (with owls and segmented-access entries and so on). my perfect rp would probably be the usual online rp-game style (like everquest or whatever), where there's a plot and direct interaction, but not so much with the meta-commentary on myself. that just reminds me of bad fanfic. and if i wanted to write bad fanfic, i could just do that on my own.

anyway. rant over. was anyone reading this? ahahahah, you people are weird ;p

Comments

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

*grins* yah, i caught it, alright. *laughs*
it was fun reading it again. i think now i'll remember `duran duran' as draco's muggle music of choice. *giggle* i suppose i should add it to my "h/d music" collection, except that i can't think of an appropriate song. i mean, "hungry like the wolf"? no (that's s/r, ehehehehe). "ordinary world"? no. possibly, "come undone", but i dunno.

i guess--
We'll try to stay blind
to the hope and fear outside
Hey child, stay wilder than the wind
And blow me in to cry

Who do you need, who do you love
When you come undone

sounds good.
oh.
and i added you to my other journal. just in case you're confused -.-