#larp thoughts

[awkward-fink]

Krüger once took König with him to a LARP Event, high fantasy, very big thing, more than a few hundred people for over 4 days. They are not talking about it anymore, due to the reasons that the portable water closets and König in thick, big, medieval like armor did not go together. Less said about Krüger now having either a stick of butter or a large bottle of lube in his carry-kit and his shit eating grin while patting his kit when König has to enter a slim entrance again.

[zandalorscat]

My larp character got a super cute handdrawn Christmas card and she, much like me the player, has no idea how to respond. That's just so sweet. She's not used to people being sweet to her. And she's not even a little bit artsy so she can't respond with a similar thing. She may just end up calling the person and making sure they feel appreciated.

[star-lark]

thoughts: perceived physical attractiveness and LARP

so it should come as a surprise to no one that I have body image issues and all the fun mental gymnastics that come with that. I struggle to make friends irl because I always assume people are going to judge me for my weight (and yeah, a lot of people do).

when I first got into LARP it was because there was a woman around my size at the information stand. no one in the photos looked like me, but she did. I don’t actually remember who it was, but let me tell you - it’s a powerful experience to see someone with your body type dressed up like royalty when you’ve never seen it before.

in the sheet for the first LARP I ever attended, the character I was given was described as someone who had broken hearts and was in love with her employer. I nearly chickened out because the thought of playing a character who was capable of being desired and loved was so incredibly strange to me! but I went along and had a fucking rad time and the guy was murdered by my sister and in his last breath he said he wished he could have married my character. as you do in LARP.

the thing that still gets me weirded out, though? whenever someone calls my characters “pretty” or “beautiful”. it used to be so strange to hear that I’d briefly drop character and have to recollect myself, but these days it’s more of a sudden ??? than a total disengagement. I don’t think I’m pretty, so by extension I don’t think my characters are either. I mean, sometimes I’ll love how an outfit looks in the mirror, but later when photos from the game come out I’ll think “oh god how could anyone stand to even look at me”. it feels like my characters are made lesser because they’re not beautiful women like you’d see in a movie or on tv. this is all my own internalised feelings, of course. when people say nice things to me in or out of character, I’m sure they do mean it. it’s just a bitch to accept.

even after the game this past weekend someone showed me a full body photo they’d taken of me in costume and I hated it so much I nearly asked them to delete it. it felt like I was doing a disservice to my character because she couldn’t be pretty.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this train of thought but it’s my tumblr and I’ll ramble if I want to

[weirdlet]

Noodling around with thoughts for Dystopia Rising: do Iron Slaves very quietly revere the ancient world’s Tony Stark?  A great builder and creator, who glowed from the inside out.  Just like them.  He made so many great things, all lost now- they use us to labor and build, we excel at it, is this not our heritage?  Our legacy?

[weirdlet]

So the new Disney Star Wars hotel Experience is going to be, all (at least hotel food and entertainment) inclusive, about 1.5 k per person, for three days two nights.  This is both not unreasonable for what you’re getting, and it’s going to spell the death-knell for the American larp scene as we know it.

This is not a bad thing.

20 years ago, the weekend games were 60 bucks, and you had gatherings that rivaled SCA groups, you could find big games with up to a thousand people there.  Now, scattered and Balkanized as it is, the weekends are still 60 dollars a head, you’re lucky if you can get 50 people at an event that isn’t a grand opening or a Halloween bash, and people expect nice facilities and something like effects and costuming and set-dressing.  Frankly, at that price, it’s barely campsite rental + insurance, and everything else you have to get people to donate, including their time and sanity to organize.  Every LARP I’ve been to dances back and forth over the line of ‘it’s a business, it’s a business’ and ‘it’s a club, it’s a club,’ when convenient, sometimes in the same breath.  And the pool of customers it draws on is small, incestuous, and honestly sometimes hostile to the idea of bringing in new blood.  New blood means change, means competition for fake money and imaginary honors, for attention from plot- and more people who might call established old guard on their bullshit.  Can’t have that, nooo.

You can’t grow a hobby that way.

So- big competition is coming into the scene.  It’s not going to be the last of its kind, either- only now, the game-makers and investors going in know they’re going to be competing with Disney-level aesthetic and technology.  They won’t all be able to do it, but that’ll be the wheelhouse they'll be trying to reach for.  It’s going to forcibly shift the paradigm, and while I believe there will always be a place for backyard larp- I think there’s going to be a big round of ‘it’s popular now it sucks’ but the people for whom it’s popular are going to have a load of fun with it.

[theplushfrog]

Did you know, when you're not exposed to recorded music for awhile, people start making their own music again?

People hum and sing just because they can, even when their voice isn't perfect.

Because music is part of being human.

Sometimes I wonder if having recorded, perfect music at our fingertips actually hurts our humanity...

This might seem like a tangent, but, for one weekend of the month, I go to a LARP (live-action roleplay, basically DnD but irl) where phones aren't allowed because it's set hundreds of years post-fall of mankind and no modern tech functions anymore.

Some LARPs have recorded music fit for the theme that they play through speakers or whatnot, but we don't. There's no recorded music the whole weekend usually, except for some edge cases.

People bring instruments, whatever their talent level, and they are encouraged to play. People will gather and sing along if they know the song ("ah, the ancient bardic tale of the Barbie Girl, truly a classic!") without the pressure to be perfect at it. It's fine if you don't know the words--no one is gonna look up the lyrics right then and there to show off. In the game it's been so long that it's only natural no one knows all the words or the exact right tune.

Especially on longer events, when it's a 4-5 day weekend instead of the usual 3 days, people start to hum as they work, or take joy in a beat hammered out on a random item that sounds cool. Sometimes people even make up their own songs just because. People laugh and cheer and enjoy even when it's silly or doesn't quite work.

And I notice... that in normal life, this doesn't happen nearly as much. If people want music, they just whip out a phone and play something. We're surrounded by perfect voices, tuned to be beautiful and unnaturally pitch-perfect. It's hard to sing in the face of that. It's hard to pick up an instrument and know you're not as good as the computer-perfected music you can just pull up at any time.

So people don't. And they only sing along if there's an excuse. Being drunk, or in the shower, or bored in a car.

But people don't really just... make music randomly nowadays.

It feels like, on those weekends, people have music just bursting out of them after a couple days of natural silence.

And I wonder if we're missing out due to that?