Makin' my blorbos smooch is what gets me through the hard times

[socksuke_uchiha]

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

question for you all, anons

generally, when playing with others, how cognizant are you of their ic-ness? i know a lot of people (myself included) tend to stress a bit too much over making every single tag as 'perfect' as possible, and it's really an annoying thing to overthink about. so is that actually something that you find yourself judging? or do you more or less not tend to notice that much?

personally i rarely think "wow this person has no idea what they're doing," or "that's not how that character should respond!!," i'm just happy to be playing lmfao

[(Anonymous)]

i don't know all of the canons of the characters i play with so most of the time i have no idea if they're ic or not. but i have run into situations in games where a character reacts to an event in a totally crazy way and that can totally throw me and sometimes just kills the desire to tag them.

that said most of the time i can ignore it or write it off as something to just deal with because it's not that serious. a lot of the time the ooc actions are people making morally ambiguous or nasty characters into cute woobies which i just find boring more than annoying.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm often canonblind in the same way as the above anon. Usually I am still looking for a distinct sense of the other character's personality, though. I'm not going to get a full sense of them just from one tag but in the course of a thread I want to get an idea of what their personality is like. This is especially important if they're a character who hides their true self behind a bland front. My character doesn't need to see it but I like when the writing of that character reflects that there may be more depth to them.

Mostly though I tend to focus on the ooc parts of rp. Is there something to react to in the post, are they keeping continuity well, are they keeping the rp moving. In the longer term, is there narrative move in the relationship or is it rehashing the same point over and over without character growth?

[(Anonymous)]

chiming with other anons that most of the time i'm canonblind to the other character in rp. in that sense my enjoyment is mostly proportionate to the writing quality, the level of fun & engagement i'm getting, and whether or not the personality being portrayed at least has an internal consistency and logic to it. all the pieces needed to spin up fun stories and plot future ones

ofc on the odd occasion i do thread with castmates i do actually know what to look for personality-wise, though idk i'm still not super fussy about specifics? if the other player mixes up a little backstory detail or smth every now and then idc, as long as i can still at least hear the character's voice in the tags and the player can hit the broad strokes of the character concept in a way that's fun to play against

i think in all my years of rp i've only had like...exactly one time? where i was literally like "he would not fucking say that" about a castmate tag? it was a rando hitting me up on a meme with a guy who's an actively suspicious and distrustful stern cop type towards my guy in canon, and in the handful of tags we exchanged i got nothing but flirty eye-batting dialogue trying to get my guy in his bed. which was like. man that was my fave ship in the canon specifically for the potential of enemies to lovers...i love this pairing....but literally who is this

like did you even consume the canon at all or did you just pick up this man based off some sexy doujin of this pairing you found somewhere. surely even the doujin would have at least had an erotic arrest attempt or a sexually-charged interrogation first tho?? tbh maybe that's what annoyed me more than the actual oocness lol, like i'll roll with a lot of character-bending for the sake of a fun pairing but there's no fun at all in an unrecognizable castmate actively sucking the fun aspect (slowburn ust) out of the ship in question...

coughs anyway. yeah i've found that the vast majority of dwrp isn't that off-base with their characters, so there's a 99% chance you're probably fine op

+1 da

[(Anonymous)]

Have had this happen to me with a ship too. Though he wasn't trying to get in my char's pants, but it was a case of 'Yeah he would never say that' sadly it was a mod playing him, and badly. I ended up dropping from the game, partly because of them and partly for other reasons.

For the most part though I'm pretty canonblind with a lot of stuff, but I'm not that much of a stickler either. When it's something really ooc for a character with no basis, I will generally not tag with them. Haven't run into too many people like that though.

+1

[(Anonymous)]

for the most part i think most castmates i've had are broadly ic. i might not always agree with their interpretation for smaller details, but generally they sound the same until they angle for a ship.

there's probably only one or two in recent memory i could think of that was ooc enough for me that made it difficult to play with them, and their writing wasn't engaging enough for me to want to keep them around either. one shipped the characters and stripped all the negative traits of their character towards mine which made it weird to tag them, the other just flipped the personality entirely and sounded more like the player than the character.

[(Anonymous)]

i like to be able to pick up multiple characters in a canon for friends or whatever, so i wind up paying very close attention even to characters that don't immediately ping me. as a consequence (both of that and of having a limited number of concurrent threads i can handle), i'm definitely picky about ic-ness.

having said that, there are a lot of interpretations that a good writer can make work-- my only instant nopes would be things like characters with uk accents using american vernacular, or surface traits being accurate but major traits being somehow missed (e.g., character is genuinely overconfident at all times in canon, but they're played as only sounding superficially overconfident while with their actions they seek approval, tiptoe, and apologize).

[(Anonymous)]

the only time I'm ever able to judge IC-ness is with castmates, and like above anons 99% of them have been fine. Never noticed anything off about them, which tbh I think the only way I'd even think about whether they were IC would have been if they were off. That 1% was egregiously bizarre in its off-ness, so it was noticeable - think an emotionally-constipated character suddenly sobbing hysterically over a minor issue, that level of egregious.

[(Anonymous)]

essentially never unless something is egregiously wrong

I think it's worth remembering that unless someone you're threading with also rps your character, chances are the player has not thought about them in depth enough to even notice when things are minorly off

[(Anonymous)]

the only time I've noticed it and cared has been when that IC behavior has been used to justify ooc actions. For example, a character starting fights when they might not usually in canon wouldnt register to me bc game circumstances could make the character more combative, but when those IC conflicts sre used to make others feel bad OOC, then it becomes something worth investigating being actually important to the characterization.

[(Anonymous)]

hmm. a bit? but i don't weigh all aspects of icness equally. i'm much more bothered when the characterization feels hollow and there's no real insight into how and why the character behaves a certain way, than i am about how they sound. to me, there are multiple layers to being in-character. the most obvious is capturing the character's voice, which most people can do by studying and mimicking their lines.

what goes much deeper is understanding what's happening in the character's head, why they choose to do A instead of B or C, especially in moments where there's no introspection and you're (canonically) left to piece that together on your own. that's where some folks can go wrong and end up misinterpreting, or worse, bastardizing. others are so observant they seem to develop this gut feeling and intuition for their character. like, have you ever RPed something and then the character did or said it in canon later? congrats, you probably have a phd in your blorbo. successfully intuiting what hasn't been written in the text yet means you've hacked the mainframe and cracked the character's code. i certainly don't have that kind of insight into every character i've ever watched or read about in media.

all of this is to say i think a decent player who has the second part down can develop and write a character in a way that makes a very convincing case for something being ic, even if it hasn't happened in canon yet. "yet" because, to truly feel ic, that "something" should still fall within the realm of possibility if certain parameters are met. it should either be hinted at in the subtext or inferable. if the potential is there, that player will find a way to bridge the gap.

[(Anonymous)]

I’m too busy overthinking my own ICness to overthink someone else’s

[(Anonymous)]

i only notice icness, or the lack thereof, when the person makes their character so ooc that i consciously have to adjust how im playing to accommodate them and it gets in the way of my fun

[(Anonymous)]

it depends from person to person? sometimes things can seem ooc but they're actually extremely ic, given the right motivation. some people can shock you with a character you thought you knew, and that's the real magic of this hobby imo.

it's rare but it happens.

you can tell if a writer is in full command of their characterization and also their own ability to write.