@kyohansha asked : 4, 8, 17 (for the Truthful Tuesday meme) TRUTHFUL TUESDAY // this meme is 5 months old i dont feel like digging through my archive for the link woo <3
4. what’s one thing that always manages to get under your skin?
“Muse does not reflect the opinions of the mun” “Agreed!”
“IC is not OOC!” “Agreed, yeah!”
“Writing is not condonement” “Exactly!”
“My muse is fictional, I am not” “Yep!”
“Fiction is not reality” “ACTUALLY YOUR BRAIN CAN’T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THEM!“
Whenever I see a mun say IC is not OOC or Mun isn’t muse and then turn around and say “Go away if you think fiction =/= reality!” or try to argue “Your brain can’t distinguish between fiction and reality!”, I put my head in my hands. It irritates me to no end, and as a roleplayer, they themselves actively distinguish between the two! The entire thing that makes fiction fiction is specifically that it’s not reality!
This argument is mainly used whenever one mun writes something icky and someone else doesn’t like it, but... Think critically. Think critically about what you are saying when you say ‘your brain can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality.’
Fun fact, RP threads themselves depend on our ability to distinguish between the two! In fact, society as a whole would crumble if we as humans couldn’t tell apart what is a concept or depiction from what is real.
I am my brain, and I know that I can distinguish between the two. If I ( my brain ) couldn’t distinguish between fiction and reality, I would be convinced that writing threads where Palmer suffers horrific injuries means I’m causing a real person to experience said pain, and that I am a horrible person for causing such suffering to another real human being. Or, when reading through such a thread, I would think that there’s a real person in front of me suffering excruciating pain or being ruthlessly attacked. I would completely panic, because oh god there’s a real person being hurt in front of me!
But I... don’t, because I can look at Palmer and go, yeah he’s fictional, these events are fictional. He’s not real, the events aren’t real.
Fiction can make you feel things, yes! A story can feel realistic, but that doesn’t mean the story is real or that I can’t comprehend that I’m reading a work of fiction. I can suspend my disbelief, and relate to the characters! A story can make me happy, or sad, or angry, or it can upset me enough to point where I can’t read it anymore, or it can completely throw me into a spiral of anxiety! But at the end of the day, when I put the story down, I can look at it and say that’s a story, that’s not real.
When I was 5 and playing Smash Bros, I knew that it wasn’t real - I knew Falco’s gun wasn’t a real gun, that shooting Samus wasn’t me shooting a real person. I knew Team Rocket getting lit on fire by Charizard weren’t real people getting lit on fire. I knew it was okay to enjoy playing Smash Bros or laugh at Team Rocket getting hurt - because nobody was actually hurt, it’s all just make-believe! At the time I knew that in real life guns and fire are bad, but that it’s okay to write and consume stories with these things in them, because it’s fiction.
As I grew up and moved into more mature fiction, that stayed the same - fiction is not real, this is not real. I might not condone or approve of what’s happening in a story were it in real life, but I can still enjoy watching, reading, or writing about the topic, because it’s not happening to any real people.
If 5-year-olds can distinguish between the two, then I am absolutely certain that us, as roleplayers who are most definitely older than that, can tell the difference between a thread with an icky ship in it and an actual real-world unhealthy relationship, or a thread with a muse being hurt and a real person being hurt, so on, so forth.
8. what’s one thing you think you’re good at?
I have multiple asks with this question in it and I have no clue how to answer them all so this is going to be a lame answer for this one...
... I think I’m... good at striking a balance between visuals and accessibility, theme-wise...? Yes this is very lame, shh.
I am a sucker for having an aesthetic-y, pretty-looking blog - though admittedly my current theme still needs some tweaks - but I feel like its very easy to go too overboard with it and make the blog very hard to navigate. I’ve seen lots of blogs where the text is pale-light-gray on white, or where the icons are too tiny to make out, or where the links are teeny tiny little dots that require a search team to find... and I think I’ve managed to avoid going overboard and turning my blog into something difficult to read!
I like to think that, with each of my themes, that I’ve managed to hit a sweet spot between aesthetically appealing and illegible? With my font choices, colour schemes, post styling, image edits, so on.
Of course, I could be totally wrong and there could be people who absolutely hate how I style my posts and find it impossible to read - which, if so, message me please - but I... haven’t had any complaints so far, so I think I’m doing good?
17. what’s your least favourite RP trope?
LONE WOLF BADASS WHO DOESN’T NEED ANYONE HE JUST NEEDS TO BROOD.
... Okay, I think any character type and trope can be written well, but when I refer to this specific trope, I’m thinking of... the type of character who is So Badass and Cool and Dark that he doesn’t need anyone else! He doesn’t want to talk to your silly little muse, he just wants to sit there in the corner, brooding over his dark past!
Lone Wolf is sitting in a bar, and there’s a bunch of Team Plasma grunts outside causing chaos. Your muse walks up to him, and she tries to strike a conversation... but Lone Wolf Badass will just roll his eyes and look away.
She tries to engage him again, he’ll say “I’m busy” and turn away.
Your muse says she needs help fighting off a bunch of Team Plasma grunts that are outside, Lone Wolf Badass says “whatever” and rolls his eyes.
She starts to beg and says that ‘there’s so many of them outside and that please sir you’re a strong trainer can’t you help us?’ Lone Wolf Badass responds “leave me alone.”
This is a very bad example that I thought up in 2 minutes, but it illustrates what I don’t like about this trope. The characters become very hard to engage in if the mun doesn’t make an effort to push their character into interactions - Lone Wolf Badass just wants to sit in the corner and brood. This type of character is fine if the mun does make that effort, but a lot of the time the reason why characters fall into this trope is specifically because the mun doesn’t make that effort.
