InsaneJournal

I told a friend last night that I was very depressed by the state of roleplay these days. But saying that I'm "depressed" would be putting it mildy. This is my favourite hobby, one where I feel that I can express myself through creating characters and writing interactively with people who have the same passion for creation and writing that I do. It's a hobby that I don't ever want to have to give up.

It used to bother me when I was on greatestjournal, and I would read the venting community there. People would vent about the silliest things -- such as making the blanket statement that "anyone who's out of school shouldn't rp." Excuse me? I wasn't aware that creativity had some sort of age limit. I doubt that I'll stop feeling creative and wanting to make characters and write them just because I'm not in school.

When I first began roleplaying, people wrote and enjoyed themselves. Yes, roleplaying in "asterisk" format instead of "storybook" was popular then. Yes, the writing probably wasn't as lengthy or well-thought-out. But people had fun, which is something that rp should be. It should be something that's enjoyed, something that brings the participants pleasure, something that they look forward to doing.

For the most part, I still enjoy rp. But I know that if I had stayed on greatestjournal, or even on insanejournal, that I wouldn't have. Yes, I'd have been in my own little group of friends, in private, invitation-only games. But that in itself is a sad comment on what rp has become. People are literally afraid to branch out and play in new and different games, with new writing partners.

And why are they afraid? Because roleplay has become more about bashing, lies and cattiness than it has about playing a game. People spend more of their time trolling ij looking for journals to "account status" than they do actually playing and writing, it seems. Perhaps this is what the kids who've taken over roleplay find "fun" these days. If so, it's a sad comment on the attitudes of the younger generation.

I must have missed the memo asserting that being hateful to people, trying to knock down their self-esteem, making others hate them for no reason, bash them, and generally being a flaming arsehole wanker, is considered "fun." I'm appalled at the fact that the children who (unfortunately) permeate rp these days, and who have seemingly taken over ij, think that being hateful pricks is any sort of acceptable social behaviour.

My group of friends have literally been driven away from journal-based rp becaues of these sorts of people. There have been people, three of them in particular, who have wanted to play nothing but sex scene after sex scene after sex scene with our characters, and because they were denied what they wanted, they've lied about us, blackened our good names in rp, and destroyed any desire we have to branch out of our own little group.

We're much happier playing on message boards. No one can access our boards, no one can bitch and whine and tell lies about how we write, how we play our charactes, or attribute their own badly-written, cock-hungry, vapid, little-girl-with-a-penis characters' traits to us. We're left at peace, to actually be able to write intelligently with other people who are passionate about their writing and love roleplay.

But it's very sad when the bad rp'ers, the ones who think that one-liners, netspeak, meaningless cryptic/random/lyric/picture/youtube posts, and having their adult male characters act like little girls with ADD makes for good roleplaying, have alienated the real writers from a site. And it's even worse when those people have subsituted their own nasty, mean, hateful personalities for those of their characters.

Perhaps we'll actually keep cross-posting to our journals here, and tell the people who've joined our games since we moved to message boards to create journals on ij and cross-post here, too. But the way that the nasty, hateful little children have taken over rp (and what seems to be the majority of this site) in the same way that they did gj, I seriously doubt that we'll ever feel comfortable writing on ij again.