the masses thirst for the smallest drop of wank

[socksuke_uchiha]

Rundown: rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not post personal information. This includes but is not limited to full names, addresses, phone numbers and so on.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme. Your unfunny, forced memes also fall under this rule.
Do not treat this comm like your personal therapist. Threads about nonfictional suicide, self injury, rape, and abuse will be deleted. There are better resources out there for you.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.
Shut up about Tumblr. If it's not a discussion about Tumblr RP it will be deleted.
Do not solicit money, Dreamwidth points, or other currency unless you are offering a good or service in return.


CONCERNS | RESOURCES


Navigate:

Political topics are banned. Report threads and they will be deleted.

LATEST PAGE | LATEST FLATVIEW PAGE

GAME DISCUSSIONS | CANON DISCUSSIONS | HTML/GRAPHIC HELP | RP COMMISSIONS

ATP/ENABLE ME | GAME ADVERTISEMENTS | PB SUGGESTIONS | USERNAME SUGGESTIONS

GAME IDEAS | CHARACTER ADVICE | RP WITH ME | TEST DRIVES

KINKS YOU WANT TO PLAY | PAIRINGS YOU WANT TO PLAY | RECOMMEND A CANON/CHARACTER | GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

Comments

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

I'm having the tiniest, most inconsequential crises of option and I'm going to crowdsource what my opinion should be!

By that, I mean— so I largely play characters from book series..es... that will likely never be adapted in my lifetime. I use live action PBs. At what point would be it weird and/or immersion breaking to use a PB from a very well-recognized property, or one that is (over)saturated in DWRP? For example: if I used Jensen Ackles in his role as Dean Winchester for a character from a book no one has heard of. Would that be weirder and more difficult to tag than using some other scruffy, handsome white guy with a less significant resume? Tell me your onions! (I meant opinions but the typo is staying.)

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

imo i would find it pretty immersion breaking, esp if that character (using your example, dean supernatural) were already in game, and i would wonder why you didn't bother looking for a less obvious handsome brunette white guy, since plenty of actors fit the role.

also, if you were particularly thirsty with the character in question and it sounds like your book series is pretty obscure/niche? i might wonder if you were actually just angling to write smut with dean's face while filing off the supernatural serial numbers and baggage, while also avoiding calling your Jensen ackles oc an oc.

+0.5

[(Anonymous)]

its immersion-breaking because i look at your pb and expect dean supernatural, so its a little off-putting, but not overly offensive or anything. if its a canon im particularly involved with i might avoid, but more for personal reasons than anything else

latter half of this verges on being loopy bitch fanfiction imo. sure it happens, but thats assuming a weird level of deception about someone you probably have no clue about where player bias and laziness is more likely. not everybody is out to trick you

Re: +0.5

[(Anonymous)]

OP here. It's definitely laziness.

ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

oh it's fanfiction for sure and I wouldnt cast it as 'deception' or 'trickery' so much as... i dunno. i think I've just come across enough people who were really fixated on one particular actor and play a bunch of [ actor sameface characters ] that I would be on the lookout for that kind of behavior, which can run the spectrum from 'just a huge fan' to 'you're obsessed and you need to stop stalking them'

Re: ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

anon im interested to know what specific problem you have with calling "angling to write smut with dean's face while filing off the supernatural serial numbers and baggage, while also avoiding calling your Jensen ackles oc an oc" deception

because like to me thats just deception by definition. its not a super serious example or anything but its still pretty uncharitable

Re: ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

i guess i think of calling it 'deception' as something more serious and deliberate than it warrants. to me it'd be closer to for example, making an implausible au of kylo ren completely obsessed with smutting it up - not in character in the slightest, but calling it an au and not an oc isn't exactly trickery either.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

I'm mostly just popcorn.gif-ing this discussion but I will say that the character that prompted me to take my initial query is ace-coded. Smutting with them was so far from my mind that I didn't think of how it would look from that perspective.

ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

i mean if you did want to play them with the specific goal of smutting it up, that would be fine too. if you said "I'm making a jackles same face oc because i wanna write with a Sam Winchester without the canonical baggage" that's almost definitely something someone has done with no problems in dwrp. i'm more addressing the potential assumptions people might make about the pb you go with, rightly or wrongly.

Re: ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

so i guess my next question is who cares

why does it matter to you

why did you caution op about it if you dont see it as a behaviour that should be avoided

ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for that! You made some good points I didn't even consider.

why you didn't bother looking for a less obvious handsome brunette white guy, since plenty of actors fit the role.

Regarding this!! I will say it's often easier to find usable icons of a popular character from a popular canon. That's part of why I, at least, and possibly others (dozens of us, etc.), may go for PBs you might recognize over the less known handsome white guy. Is there a wide variety of expressions and body language available? Or is it one film in non-book-appropriate period clothing and a smattering of unusable stills? And so on.

ayrt

[(Anonymous)]

yeah that makes sense, and seeing what you wrote below i think the more specific the look of your character (race, unique appearance or expressions, period accurate costuming) the more people are likely to get over the "huh? what??" initial bump and recognize why you picked the (well known) pb. whereas the more generic the look and dress, the more people are likely to wonder why you didn't go with a less recognizable actor

da

[(Anonymous)]

idk, man. i see plenty of ocs and book characters in bakerstreet with popular actors in roles that make me doubletake when i scroll by until i see they're an oc or not the character i thought they were. then i either get interested enough to see what the char's about, or i scroll on.

jensen ackles has a face. a recognizable face because he played a popular character for over a decade. he's playing other characters now, like in the boys and tracker, so who's to say that it's not taken from one of those roles? someone like jensen is typecast, and even though they've branched out, they'll forever be known as one role. doesn't mean someone's not using daenerys targaryan icons for amalthea the unicorn, or ben barnes from punisher as an oc. not shitting on those choices, either. but 'popularity' and negative association is going to be a ymmv thing. some people might be okay with it. some won't. in the end, who cares? the ones who don't like it just aren't going to tag you. the ones who don't care will either tag or scroll past.

perception is part of the problem too, because especially for book characters without a visible media counterpart, your brain might just supply its own version of feyre or tamlin or anita blake. and it might be because a show or movie you watched had a character that came really close to the visual representation, and that's your version of them in your head. and an already established character is usually going to be easier to find icons already made or screencaps to make icons for than using picrew or commissioning art.

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

based off what i see from people expressing this issue, it's less being "difficult to tag", and more a matter of split-second confusion scrolling past on a meme or smth and recognizing the character in the icon...only to realize it's not actually that character being played

presumably the effect hits more people when the character's more popular, which is why the advice is usually about picking less popular pbs. and tbf i've also sometimes seen people complain about the use of an obscure character too, because it got their hopes up that somebody was actually playing from that obscure canon they love and it, again, turned out not being that character

so either way somebody might fuss. but by rule of likelihood, yeah, you're apt to confuse more people using dean winchester's face from supernatural. probably wouldn't put me off from tagging personally if the guy seems neat otherwise. but if any other scruffy white dude would work for this character, i'd kinda wonder why you didn't just forego that confusion window entirely and just pick somebody slightly less everywhere in fandom?

like it's already gonna be an uphill battle for you to sell your obscure book character to passing players as it is...no need to make things more difficult for yourself than they need to be if you can help it idk

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

I think I might have played myself by going for the Dean Winchester example. I am having "do I use this person for this character"-style quandary, but I would say the exposure level would be more like... Karl Urban in his role as Skurge, maybe? Orlando Bloom as Will Turner?

But mainly I'm wondering where the line is for people I might one day tag, re: a non-immersion breaking PB, since this is likely a situation I'll keep bumping up against. Thanks for your feedback! 😊

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

I've done this and the biggest issue I faced (which wasn't really that big) was that characters from the canon I'd taken the pb from had to check with me that their face wasn't the *exact* same and that it wasn't a facetwin scenario. I did get some players who assumed that the character looked exactly like the icons even though I made sure to mention their distinguishing features as much as possible. Otherwise nobody seemed to care very much!

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

That's good to know! Thank you for weighing in. 😊

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

id probably assume you were trying to bandwagon off of the popularity of the more popular canon if the pb is a popular cockhop target, shrug, and move on

but if you tagged me id give you a fair shot

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

sa also after seeing your comment elsewhere it's a combo of actor + character they're portraying, not just a famous actor in general

and also how distinct their look is? chris hemsworth as thor vs him in ghostbusters

it depends and either way id give you a shot if you tagged me

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

i wouldn't ignore a tag from someone who did this, but i wouldn't tag them on my own, especially if it was a pb at the level of your example. it's not because i care soooo much about icons or that it's immersion breaking, but because experience has taught me that most players who pick those kinds of pbs are not players i want to interact with. usually they're over-invested in a bland white actor, or they're weird about "saving" an actor from a property they think is beneath them, things like that.

laziness would be it's own kind of putting. there are very few stars from highly recognized la properties that AREN'T one of a million scruffy brown haired white guys or pretty white women. if your oc or book character is THAT interchangeable even in YOUR mind then i'm not excited to tag you and learn more, you know?

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

That's fair! Out of curiosity, if I had said Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia was my PB or, idk, Rita Moreno from her Fast and Furious role, would that prompt a different response?

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

mcu is so prolific that for me personally i'd find it weird to use any of them, especially ones in very stylized costumes. however i know there are a lot fewer options for black pbs in fantasy-ish or sci fi-ish looks, and almost no one plays those characters, so i'd give it much more leeway than seeing somebody using chris evans as captain america as somebody who isn't captain america.

fast and the furious is pretty normal and doesn't have a real fandom presence so i personally wouldn't notice.

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

I'm starting to think I'm in the minority based on replies, but for me as long as you put your prefs and a little character info somewhere easily accessible, I'd consider tagging either way. What prompts me not to tag a person is inavailability of preference info, not their PB.

So with that in mind, if you really have to have that popular actor PB, I think you'd very much bolster your chances of getting tagbacks by having very clear preferences (and i mean stating very clearly what kind of relationships you're looking for, if you're looking for gen, what you're really not looking for) and a blurb about the character in a very accessible place on your journal. Mostly because book series tend to be obscure in this hobby and it's hard to assume CR for threading when you don't know shit about the character.

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

No advice on how it's seen, as I play largely the same sort of character as you. Just speaking from experience, I think I've erred towards picking PBs from stuff without much or any fandom presence that I've seen here. I think in the case of sharing PBs with frequently-played characters, it's not so much people can't look beyond it, but might make the honest mistake of assuming you're just playing Dean.

Hell, I've done that with a popular character's actor as a PB, and it was just one of their other *roles.* Kinda felt like an ass for not taking the time to check, but I didn't even know the actor even had other roles. Did feel like a bit of an ass for not taking time to check, still.

Re: GENERAL DWRP QUESTIONS

[(Anonymous)]

sa, also for not taking the time to check my whole post for redundancy. i'm working on the impulse issues.