Lately, I’ve been trying to find an RP partner to play some of my favourite characters for my female OCs in One Piece world. Since I’m asking for canons, I offer doubling, as I also very much enjoy playing canon characters, exploring their motivations and personalities, finding out what would make them fall for the partner’s OC… all that jazz.
Although One Piece is massive, it’s not exactly a fandom that’s currently trending like e.g. K-POP Hunters. I don’t get a lot of engagement, sadly. My platform of choice for RP partner hunting is Reddit, which, I admit, might be the main source of my troubles, but hear me out.
As you may know, One Piece has insane worldbuilding with so many factions and characters. It’s an open invitation to roleplay in that world, and create a standalone storyline or incorporate your OC into the pre-existing situations and crews without straying off the canon story path too much. Each arc, often times even flashback, is a perfect RP setting of its own. The lore is deep, deals with very serious sociopolitical issues, and the main characters are navigating this world and slowly changing its course for the better as they bring down bad guys one at a time.
Unfortunately, I've been running into *certain* roleplayers over and over. These roleplayers want to completely disband the Straw Hats, just because they want me to play Nami or Robin and feel like them being a part of Luffy's crew would hinder whatever relationship they could have with their OC's. God forbid their OC's would join the crew and mingle with the Straw Hats naturally! The worst of them want to replace Luffy the goat with their own OC. Why? Are the pastures not vast enough for multiple goats?
Now, I don’t avoid nsfw scenes in my RPs. In fact, I love them and seek to include them in my romance plots, but I never label my RPs as ERP, because I enjoy slow burn and I need some story buildup or a canon-compliant reason before I let characters engage in sex scenes. I don’t post my ads to low-quality ERP subreddits, the most questionable place I’ve posted being one platform-specific sub with a somewhat huge userbase.
With that in mind, there’s another thing: Oda can’t draw a female body without giving all teen to adult women massive bazongas. Cool, I don’t mind that, it comes with the artstyle, it is what it is. What I mind, however, is when my RP ad gets a reply, asking me to really play up the bazongas part, sexualising the female characters even more. What am I supposed to do? Describe how the canon girl I’m playing is breasting boobily and pussying cuntily in each reply, just so your OC can drool over her? Brother, eww.
“Here, let me share these fanarts for inspiration,” and it’s some hentai fanart pulled from Rule34 with the canon girl usually acting incredibly out of character in 4 out of 5 of these pictures, and in 3 out of 5 cases I can’t even tell if it’s not an AI generated slop. I’m not a prude, far from it, but come on!
I get it, they say men are visual creatures, but it seems this specific fandom, One Piece, is full of these types of male roleplayers. I know that not everyone is the same, and the best partner I’ve ever written with in terms of OOC and roleplaying compatibility is a guy, but sometimes I just wish a fellow woman or a member of LGBT+ replied my ads, so we could fangirl together about cute/romantic/sensual moments between characters, instead of me wondering if the tits of the canon I play jiggle enough.
So apparently Special Edition of XC3 has a guide how to fold your own Mondo origami. Now I need a fanfic where Taion for some reason teaches Eunie to fold one.
