rpanons | something big going down in clown town

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bluntly, very few people want to work through sexual assault recovery rp, so tread carefully. warnings are your best friend, and don't take it personally if someone doesn't want to tag you or engage with it. they might just not like the subject matter or want to deal with it in pretendy funtimes, they might find it triggering for personal experience reasons, they might not trust a write they don't know to handle it well. etc. just be considerate and clear.

genderfluid ocs are fine.

ty for the honesty guys! this is really helpful :o

i'm thinking it'd be easier to bring him way way later so he's processed it, had enough experience to feel comfortable (not necessarily have to bring it up at all in rp) and can focus on him having fun re: gender. would that work better?

i usually prefer light-hearted rp in general, i just don't want to be stumbling if something comes up i can foresee now lmao

i suppose. it's up to you. i personally probably wouldn't load an oc up with that kind of trauma if i wanted light-hearted rp, but i'm not about to tell you what to write.

I also feel like people treat OCs with trauma and heavy CWs in their backstories differently from canon characters with the same. Like it's more acceptable if it's not your fault this happened to them, it's just how they were written. Has anyone else found that?

That's just how it is for any character, though. Most (generalizing here) people wouldn't read/watch a story where the protagonist only has awful things happen to them. Or if the awful things happened in the past but they are doing fine now, then the focus of the plot and story isn't the trauma and it isn't important "at this time". That said, the latter usually needs a capable rper to pull off and the chances of seeing the character (OC or not) always be like "woe is me my backstory is so sad :(" is pretty high ime.

it's because it's easier to point at an oc and assume the writer is using it as a therapeutic tool for their own trauma in ways you can't do with canon characters, usually because they're written by multiple people or because their writer is obscure and unknown. when it's a 1:1 writing relationship the traumatic background becomes much more a set of personal choices and people put more scrutiny on that.

i think it's also because having an edgy traumatic background is *so* common with ocs that it's become a bit of a meme. it's like some people don't think an oc is really valid unless they've been traumatised some way but canon characters aren't always subject to that.

not poking fun or arguing, just making a genuine observation: it's very interesting to me how this is more or less true depending on what medium you play from. in tv shows or movies, it's absolutely true that any one given character or plotline was most likely worked on by multiple writers, and the same is true for video games made by big teams, but when it comes to books or manga (aside from the most popular stuff that i assume is written with much more studio/publisher input than the more niche titles) that is absolutely not always the case, and you could easily assume the same about characters from those mediums -- but i personally find that opinion less common. i wonder if it's just easier to assume that fellow roleplayers are working out their issues through rp than it is to assume the same of the authors of canons being played from? or if it's a degree of separation thing, like, with an oc the author and the player are one and the same but with a canon character even if the author was projecting like mad you've always got the plausible deniability of "the author might have been working through stuff but it doesn't mean that the player is"? i hope this does not come out as argumentative cus i don't want to argue, it's just something this thread got me thinking about

as someone else pointed out, it's bc published works are basically pre-vetted

that doesn't mean they're good, blah blah fifty shades of whatever etc etc, but it does mean multiple people looked it over and said "a decent number of readers won't immediately write this off as schlocky," and then, on top of that, a prospective rper of a canon has to read it and find a character interesting to someone other than the author

none of that is true of ocs by default: they have no editors, and absolutely no one has to find them interesting apart from their creator -- so it's quite possible that the author of xyz manga is using characters or story beats to work through stuff, but other people have gone over it and found it interesting anyway

+1

just having other people look something over and make suggestions/alterations makes a huge difference in the end quality. every author i follow has given huge props to their editors for having a big hand in improving their stories and characters. and in my own fanfic, i can see the quality difference between the ideas ive workshopped with my friends versus the ones where ive just sat down and written them without external input. the collaboration does make a difference!

The fact that we're not rping with the original authors is actually the main difference imo. Because this is ultimately more of an ooc issue than an ic one.

If Eiichiro Oda wrote Luffy from One Piece as having stretchy limbs because he's secretly deeply insecure about his own stubby arms, it doesn't matter, because Jane from Accounting is the one RPing Luffy. There's a degree of separation that renders whatever "purpose" the character may have been created to fulfill meaningless.

You can actually see this in play sometimes, such as characters who exist in canon for almost entirely fanservice purposes, being fleshed out as their own characters through rp.

Of course, people can absolutely imprint their own issues onto canon characters too, so it's not even an issue unique to OCs.

ime the main difference between ocs like that and canon characters is that with the canon characters, the trauma/cws are usually either a part of the larger narrative as a whole or they serve an important character development purpose, whereas with ocs i've encountered way too many of them who had trauma just to have trauma. it added nothing to the character or their story.

also 99% of the stories are just bad, canon is usually pre-vetted, ocs are rpers doing rp shit and most aren't good enough to get published

something big going down in clown town

Re: OCs, smut and gender identity

Re: OCs, smut and gender identity

Re: OCs, smut and gender identity

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