rpanons | [D] Free space

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Plus I feel attacked when I do have a good time in this fandom and I express that. Obviously there's a shitton of wanky history in the fandom, and my good experiences don't invalidate the bad ones, blah blah. But the bad experiences people have don't invalidate the good ones I've had either and also so much of the ranting is deetless and without substance. If there's so many shitty players who are wanky buttholes in secret then drop names and pastebins or share stories or something.

Except not a single anon has said don't have fun so if you feel like these discussions are making you guilty for enjoying yourself then that's not only really self-centred of you but it's also your own issue to deal and not anyone else's fault.

That's not true. This started with one anon being very rude because someone wanted to talk about how we think characters should be played instead of doing a normal "Favorites" thread (I wanted that thread, since I like those, but feel it should have been its own thread, not a way to one-up or undermine people who like doing the whole Favorites thing). Then it spiraled into anons going on about how everyone is "acting like there's nothing wrong in this fandom" and "sticking our heads in the sand" when the truth is some of us genuinely have no idea what the hell these angry anons are talking about. Some of us aren't involved whatsoever, but we're getting lumped into it anyway.

What about that won't make people who have fun feel guilty? It implies anyone enjoying themselves is part of the problem. Especially with how general and vague all of the claims were until someone explained things more below. We spend our time wondering if we're part of the clique or if our cast is doing something wrong and we never knew it. Sure some people are trying to ignore whatever problems might be existing in this fandom. But I'm betting a lot of us just haven't had the negative experiences other people seem to be having. Still, we've made to feel like it's our fault when so far all I've heard is about specific group of people and not everyone (even though originally people were basically saying all of us hated everyone else). So yeah, it feels like we're being made to feel bad for having fun when other people aren't.

I'm not saying the original anon was right for being so rude just because someone wanted to do something different or that all the people who jumped in to be jerks about pointing out that anon was wrong were in the right. Far from it. We shouldn't ignore whatever bad exists because eventually it will fester and keep spreading the infection (like it is now). But many of the anons here were painting everyone in the fandom with the same negative brush, too, and that's just as rude to the people who weren't even involved until this started here. And the negative little digs have been going on for months now. Neither solves whatever problems our fandom has, really, because we're just alienating each other when we should be working together.

That all sounds really nice and everything but what are the practical suggestions for getting people working together here? To me that seems like the big problem because for a lot of people the solution is just pretend nothing is wrong and hug it out and that really doesn't do anything. So when that keeps coming back up like it's an actual solution people get irritated, impatient and frustrated. Which puts us into these cycles of naive calls for everyone to just get along followed by anger because that's not a solution to the problem. Rinse and repeat every few months.

So saying all this is fine and all but I don't see any practical solutions on how to address the problems we keep seeing.

So far we've been told one of the big problems is a group of people who refuse to accept anything they do might make other people uncomfortable or blatantly ignore canon when they want. And we have the people around them that enable their behavior that seem to be spreading to give them a wider reach. Then we have the people who get ignore by them or treated poorly for not jumping on their circlejerk bandwagon.

We have the people who want to act like nothing is wrong (whether because they are part of that group or just don't have anything to do with the problem and want to keep it that way) and refuse to accept any word otherwise. Then the people who have been burned and act like everything is wrong and don't like people talking positively. And then there's the middleground people who are trying to look at everything from all sides, no matter what their experiences have been.

What are the possible solutions here. Talk it out? That's what we're doing and it's been a toss-up how well it's going, although at least the issue is now out in the open and some things have been said that needed to be. We can't make other people behave in a certain way, though. We can only leave the bad ones behind and try to build a more progressive and constructive fandom without them. We cannot change their behavior, we can only change our own.

The only solutions I see is that you can ignore that group of people and find less self-absorbed, demanding players to hang with. You cannot stop the clique because they can do what they want just as much as you or I can. We can't force them to be inclusive or to stop treating people poorly, either. We can bring that issue to light and hope people see that they aren't the be all, end all of our fandom. There are plenty of players out there to play with who just want to get along and have fun talking about the character they love within the context of the canon they come from and that's who we need to bring in on this.

We can also encourage people talking out what problems they have and to respond civilly about them without blaming everyone. Generalizations don't help. They make people defensive. We can encourage people to discuss things they want to see more often in the fandom. Like the thread about how you think a character you should be played right. I liked the idea of that thread so I hope we do it next post since this one is kind of weighted down like this. We shouldn't try to focus only on the positive, but try to be more constructive. If we can say "everything is great," we can say "this is what I would like to see or what I have seen that I wish would happen more." I'd say do a friending meme for DGM roleplayers, but I'm not sure whether that would help the problem or spread it.

We shouldn't allow people's opinions to be silenced or disregarded, even if we don't agree with them. We can only explain why we disagree and share our own opinions in return. I think if we did that more this fandom wouldn't feel so polarized as if no one is willing to listen to anyone else. The only way any of this will work is if other people are willing to get in on it, though.

Exactly this.

[D] Free space

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