Advice/Help Should you not include this in a rp?

[Yunalescaa]

I'm back again to pick the brains of my fellow RPN users with another small group rp.

I've recently fallen in love with The Midnight Club on Netflix and would love to spin it into a small group roleplay. The concept reminds me of an adult Goosebumps, with lots of mystery and thrilling elements. There's one issue I have with working with a plot.

The kids in the club are in hospice as they're all terminally ill. They gather at midnight to tell ghost stories kind of as a way to entertain themselves. While the show doesn't focus on them being sick and dying, it's kind of used to talk about mortality and death. Personally, I feel like using this even as a minor plot point in a roleplay is...I don't want to say wrong but that's the only word I can come up with. Almost as if we would be romanticizing things like cancer when real people struggle with it and don't find it fun in any way. I debated switching it out for mental health, but again it feels like I'm romanticizing something. But I've been struggling to come up with something that would bring these characters together in a group.

So I guess I'm just looking for others opinions on this. Would including the characters in hospice be too much? Is that romanticizing or poking at a serious issue? I know roleplays can contain mature and serious themes but I always worry about offending people who have gone through this. I've had terminal family in hospice and it's a different experience with everyone. And does anyone have any ideas for a replacement? I feel like everything I turn to can be taken the wrong way.

I appreciate the feedback. Please keep the discussion civil and on track.

 

[nerdy tangents]

So in my mind romanticizing something means taking away stakes.

As I understood it the premise of the Midight Club is the characters telling the stories do in fact die (or at least some of them do)

And the club is as you said them coming to terms with their own mortality. That's the exact opposite of romanticizing it's showing people with long-term potentially fatal illnesses finding solace in a realistic coping mechanism.

What would be romanticizing things would to act like they should be nobly resigned to death or some bullshit. But telling stories to each other seems totally reasonable.

 

[nerdy tangents]

Sorry fingers slipped. If you are uncomfortable with the premise however an easy fix is just to have them be at like writing camp (ages down to teens) or doing a creative writing assignment (their adults).

Boom explains the prompts for their individual stories and doesn't require them to have any triggering character traits.

 

[StrixDesmodus]

I agree with nerdy tangents . As someone who's struggled with my mental health, and also as someone who's had family members in hospice care, I know for a fact that there are ways to portray these characters in those settings respectfully. I believe that if the situation exists, then not only is it ok to portray to a consenting audience, but there's a high probability that for difficult topics like mental healthcare and hospice care, that in portraying it and inviting others to portray it you may very well be helping people who really are going through that stuff process it.

A warning, though: A lot of people who are in the process of dying have visions of people they knew who are already dead. As I'm not familiar with the materials you're sourcing, I don't know how this might tie into the rp, but I'd research deathbed visions and see how to incorporate them respectfully should you choose to go the hospice route.