Experiences What are the downsides of fandom roleplays?

I don't do romance in rp, so I can't answer that. The big downside to fandoms really is just rigidity. See I'm a massive fan of one piece and have always dreamed of rping with a group of friends through a journey from humble beginnings to challenging the world for the title of pirate king. The issue though, is people either can't divorce themselves from the fandom and won't ever get the same high they got watching luffy break into enies lobby. Or they'll be so rigid and say things like, " You're not mihawk, so you're not doing x feat".

I'm just left here sad, because I love the world and would love to come up with original ideas to expand certain parts or just relive glory moments from the anime and manga. But along with all the other struggles we have to face in rp. You also have the rigidity to deal with. That just sucks the life out of these fandoms.

One Piece RPs are impossible off the interest finder. There's awlays a large % of people with self insert captain characters. If the GM makes a captain it pisses people off but if they don't make captain it leads to pretty giant plot issues. Then everyone wants the most brolic fruits, or the highest bounty etc. I started a RP with max beginning bounty of 12 million and at least half the characters had 12 million bounties off the start. The issue with OP is the obvious outward strength indicators like bounties, crew position, devil fruits. All the inequity leads to ego conflicts OOC.

I think with a small group of people who know each other it could work, but otherwise I've been in a few OP RPs and all have gone to shambles for the same reasons.
 
One Piece RPs are impossible off the interest finder. There's awlays a large % of people with self insert captain characters. If the GM makes a captain it pisses people off but if they don't make captain it leads to pretty giant plot issues. Then everyone wants the most brolic fruits, or the highest bounty etc. I started a RP with max beginning bounty of 12 million and at least half the characters had 12 million bounties off the start. The issue with OP is the obvious outward strength indicators like bounties, crew position, devil fruits. All the inequity leads to ego conflicts OOC.

I think with a small group of people who know each other it could work, but otherwise I've been in a few OP RPs and all have gone to shambles for the same reasons.
It's kind of the same anywhere you go. Naruto is based off being akatsuki, kage and anbu. Black clover has to outrightly ban antimagic to prevent 1000 mcs. It's all just sort of hard because people latch onto ideas of status in the canon and don't want to work their way up. Which is fine, but then you have these same people that don't want to fight pvp or raid boss missions. I for one, am fine with having a naruto raid on an akatsuki compound or a raid on marineford. But these people just want thier goodies without working for it.

Thats why you have all these captains without the drive to be the captain. Or these guys who want to have the best fruits but not work for them. look, fine, you have have the ice fruit. But you gotta be like luffy when he was growing up. Maybe you accidentally freeze things when youre nervous. Cant sleep at night cuz youre not controlling your powers. Use it as a way to enhance your rp experience. HELL USE IT TO ATTACK A PC. Do something. lol

but I get you. It's hard to start from scratch when everyone wants to be alpha male badasses from day 1.

Oh and I've had the same issues with pokemon. I don't know why. People just join these things like its a fad. Then drop them just as fast.
 
I never touch canon characters. I may think that I can write a naruto plot that doesn't fairy tail revive everyone back into existence except jiraiya(that still grinds my gears lol), but I can't copy old naruto. You can never copy a real person, which means characters that are an extension of them, are impossible as well.
Politely and very strongly disagree. You have Batman or Superman comic books with different writers over the years: Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Frank Miller, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, John Byrne - go and look online, you'll find a dozen writers or more. Movies on those same characters, with different directors and writers.

It's about interpretation. While it's true that judgment and complex analysis of a pre-established character can be faulty, it's not too hard - and why should it matter, either way, if it makes for a good and compelling story?

I think a lot of people who say they can't play characters from a fandom roleplay are restricted by personal bias, which I'll touch on down below.

1. You’re limited by the rules of the world.
2. Less creativity.
I would argue limitations aren't that bad, unless you let them be.

I've once heard a cute metaphor: An artist is told to make the most beautiful painting in existence. Naturally, he struggles. He'll never know or achieve the vision that allows him to stun people with his art. But if you outline a topic, a theme, an audience; suddenly, he'll find himself with lots of ideas, and funnel them through those limitations to make something excellent. Perfection is impossible - because "perfection" is relative, and so is quality. That said, works without limitations often grow bloated; weighed down by a mass of concepts and pinned down creatively.

Not sure how to argue the second point, though.

* * *

Anyway, the issue with fandom roleplays stems - in my experience - from two core facts:

One, roleplay as a medium is inherently flawed in many ways. I could write an essay this, but won't elaborate too much for the sake of brevity. The main issue with roleplays is that, when you boil away the minutiae, all that's left to the definition of the word is basically: "collaborative writing project," which itself can be pretty cancerous.

If you look online, you'll find that many writers equal many disagreements. The bigger the number of people channeling their attention into one thing, the more inertia it experiences. Can you imagine a roleplay with two-hundred players? It'd probably require several GMs with superb communication skills and complicated systems for dividing players/writers into groups.

It is rare to find a roleplay that: (a) tells a good and satisfying story, (b) can survive for a length of time, (c) and overflows with players - all at the same time. Usually, you have to choose two of the three, and the remaining trait is sitting in the shadow realm.

The second core fact is that people often ignore what makes stories good.

Settings in professionally-written fiction have themes, which roleplays (more often than not) ignore, at least on a complex level. Usually, in the case of a roleplay, it will cling to pre-established archetypes, which by itself isn't bad.

An argument for fiction that I'd seen in the past is that, if you look closely enough, you probably know at least two dozen stories that can have the topic of, "knight saves princess," applied to them. This applies to all topics. What makes a story meaty and unique is the execution - the spin. You can have a theme of despair, where the knight fails to do his country proud and gets swallowed by a dragon - chances are, somewhere, a story like this exists, but it's unique enough it's not the first thing you'd think of.

Sometimes, people go overboard with this, or aren't original enough - copying a setting without carrying over key themes. Around 80% fantasy roleplays are Lord of the Rings but without any in-depth investigation into themes like greed, friendship, or tyranny that the story exhibits.

To be fair, I'm somewhat guilty of this, but I try to diversify when possible. My second-to-last fantasy roleplay that I ran happened in a setting where the apocalypse happened - gods and demon lords fought and destroyed the planet forever, and the mortal races were forced to flee to another one to survive, and the story was centered around the theme of "rebuilding" and "tying up loose ends" from the previous world.

The problem with fandoms, inherently, is that a lot of people like to outsource their identity and gain a form of mass belonging by asserting their like or dislike of a particular piece of media, without actually going into depth to explore said media and its themes. This kind of reflects in a lot of fandom roleplays, with these - let's be honest here - rather shallow people coming in expecting a grand adventure that gives them their fandom jollies with zero effort put towards what made the original great.

An important thing to know about writing, is that writing isn't strictly its own field. Writing is a form of storytelling, and storytelling is something that's hardwired into the human brain. It's a way of putting events, people, and phenomena into an order. It's a way of seeing things. Our brains replay events in themselves as stories, and make sense of things by finding common threads. This isn't metaphorical; fMRI studies have shown that when you’re lost in a story, what the protagonist or character feels travels down your neural pathways as if it were happening to you.

As a sort of inverse feedback of this, a lot of these "shallow admirers" have a bad tendency to pour out traits of themselves or people they know onto paper, without thinking too much about it, and then subconsciously assume the identity of the character with either no, or very minimal effort put towards complicating matters, or giving them a spin. It often ruins the players' ability to cooperate and make a cohesive work, assuming they even had that much group coherence to begin with.

That's pretty much all I have to say.
 
Politely and very strongly disagree. You have Batman or Superman comic books with different writers over the years: Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Frank Miller, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, John Byrne - go and look online, you'll find a dozen writers or more. Movies on those same characters, with different directors and writers.
This extends to literature. How many writers have written for Sherlock Holmes or Conan the Barbarian? People write pastiches of Doyle and Howard's writing all the time, and people don't seem to have an issue about that.
 
Politely and very strongly disagree. You have Batman or Superman comic books with different writers over the years: Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Frank Miller, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, John Byrne - go and look online, you'll find a dozen writers or more. Movies on those same characters, with different directors and writers.

It's about interpretation. While it's true that judgment and complex analysis of a pre-established character can be faulty, it's not too hard - and why should it matter, either way, if it makes for a good and compelling story?

I think a lot of people who say they can't play characters from a fandom roleplay are restricted by personal bias, which I'll touch on down below.
You can have an entertaining iteration of a character, but at the end of the day. It is not the same person. Heath ledger's joker could be his own villain and doesn't need the title of joker. But the comic book industry's culture of fluidity with characters makes the hurdle easier to get over.
 
You can have an entertaining iteration of a character, but at the end of the day. It is not the same person.
Is that a problem, so long as the character is recognizable and their story entertaining/educational/evocative of emotion?

Heath ledger's joker could be his own villain and doesn't need the title of joker. But the comic book industry's culture of fluidity with characters makes the hurdle easier to get over.
I agree, but I think a better example can be made out of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker.

The character of Arthur has enough developmental facets that you could slot in almost any person into his shoes, instead of a clown, with only minor alterations. This, itself, is part of the theme that all a person requires to become the Joker is one bad day. Any of us could be the Joker. It's almost a meta-theme. The themes of "clown" and "comedy" make a comeback through the story, more as a nod to the comic character; they add a lot of good flavor, and extra flavor derived from cultural recognition, but the story could be its own if the Joker were vacuumed out of it. But I digress - we were talking about interpretations.

Characters aren't strictly-defined categories that you can lump colorful figures into. They're more of a sliding scale. What is the point that Batman stops being Batman, recognizably? When he stops dressing up as a bat? When he starts killing people? When he's no longer called Bruce Wayne and isn't rich? We lump things: colors, people, events into categories because it makes it easier on our brains, but it's not too hard to take a premade concept and spin it in a way you want. As long as it's compelling and tells a story, I frankly see no issue.
 
Is that a problem, so long as the character is recognizable and their story entertaining/educational/evocative of emotion?
Ofcourse it is. I love luffy. I'm capable of loving your character. But don't rip luffy skin off his face, wear it as a mask and call yourself luffy. xD
 
Ofcourse it is. I love luffy. I'm capable of loving your character. But don't rip luffy skin off his face, wear it as a mask and call yourself luffy. xD
Again - we delve into categorization, but on the inverse side. There's a difference between ripping off, paying a homage to, and writing a character.

One Piece's anime isn't written by someone else. It's still ultimately an adaptation of the manga; are they wearing someone else's face? If I was theoretically given a position as a writer/mangaka for One Piece production, would that make my take of the character more valid than anyone else's, simply because I'm a part of the "inner circle?"
 
Again - we delve into categorization, but on the inverse side. There's a difference between ripping off, paying a homage to, and writing a character.

One Piece's anime isn't written by someone else. It's still ultimately an adaptation of the manga; are they wearing someone else's face? If I was theoretically given a position as a writer/mangaka for One Piece production, would that make my take of the character more valid than anyone else's, simply because I'm a part of the "inner circle?"
There is probably some deviation here and there due to adapting a material, but this is a bad example. They aren't creating a new luffy. Most of their dialogue and facial expressions are already in comicbook form. They just have to animate based on a template already prescribed, a lot of which has oda's blessing. and if you were part of that circle. You're still following the lead of the big man himself. Not writing your own luffy.
 
There is probably some deviation here and there due to adapting a material, but this is a bad example. They aren't creating a new luffy. Most of their dialogue and facial expressions are already in comicbook form. They just have to animate based on a template already prescribed, a lot of which has oda's blessing. and if you were part of that circle. You're still following the lead of the big man himself. Not writing your own luffy.
It was an example; maybe a bad one, because the writing process of One Piece boils down to Oda writing, and taking advice from editors if he likes it.

My point is, what you're implying, whether implicitly or directly, is that I can't make a portrayal Luffy. Either because the character of Luffy is sacrosanct, or because I am physically unable to write a compelling take on him. I'm not certain if I want to argue either point, because with the stance you appear to have taken, it'd probably just loop us around in circles, but I see nothing wrong in a competent fan taking a favorite character and writing a fictional story with them in it. Maybe the story explores directions canon was unwilling to, or the author never thought of, or maybe portrays an alternate set of events.

Either way, I don't think there's anything bad about that, with the exception that the character probably wouldn't be one-hundred percent loyal to the original author's intent. I mean, even the original authors fuck up from time to time - some franchises receive flak or complaint over poor writing or characters not acting like themselves in new installments, some of which explicitly don't have new writers introducing novel ideas.
 
My point is, what you're implying, whether implicitly or directly, is that I can't make a portrayal Luffy. Either because the character of Luffy is sacrosanct, or because I am physically unable to write a compelling take on him. I'm not certain if I want to argue either point, because with the stance you appear to have taken, it'd probably just loop us around in circles, but I see nothing wrong in a competent fan taking a favorite character and writing a fictional story with them in it. Maybe the story explores directions canon was unwilling to, or the author never thought of, or maybe portrays an alternate set of events.
People like to write fandom pairings and I don't tell them there's anything wrong with it(to their faces lol). I just choose not to rp in that manner. However, in the back of my mind, I will never see your deviation of superman, batman, the terminator, or any other canon character in the same light. It's still just an oc to me because you can't copy the spirit of the original creator. You can only imitate their mannerisms.
 
People like to write fandom pairings and I don't tell them there's anything wrong with it(to their faces lol). I just choose not to rp in that manner. However, in the back of my mind, I will never see your deviation of superman, batman, the terminator, or any other canon character in the same light. It's still just an oc to me because you can't copy the spirit of the original creator. You can only imitate their mannerisms.
Superman, Batman, and Terminator each have dozens of creators, and at least in the case of Superman and Batman, some of those creators have clashed over what the character should be about and look like. They official writers are not always chosen for their "unique spirit." Half of the time, it's just a job they're paid to do, and they try to make a compelling story because of it.

I don't think any competent person's take on a character is any less valid than that of a competent professional writer.
 
Superman, Batman, and Terminator each have dozens of creators, and at least in the case of Superman and Batman, some of those creators have clashed over what the character should be about and look like. They official writers are not always chosen for their "unique spirit." Half of the time, it's just a job they're paid to do, and they try to make a compelling story because of it.

I don't think any competent person's take on a character is any less valid than that of a competent professional writer.
Cameron's vision and passion made 1 and 2 amazing. Those other creators put robots on a screen with arnold, but they paled in comparison to cameron's writing.
 
I feel like Sturgeon's law applies to OCs the same way it applies to media, settings, etc. Only ten percent of OCs will be very good, or even as compelling as their canon counterparts. The rest will be middling-to-crappy. I'd rather see someone try to copy the voice of an established writer and get better at varied dialogue patterns than an OC that flat-out isn't very good.
Pastiche is a good tool to improve your writing and I don't think it should be looked down on just because you're writing someone else's creations.
 
Cameron's vision and passion made 1 and 2 amazing. Those other creators put robots on a screen with arnold, but they paled in comparison to cameron's writing.
Yes, and they were still the official creators. Sturgeon's law applies, as my friend above pointed out. I'm nearly 99% sure that you could write a good take of the character yourself, if you tried hard enough. I'm not saying this as encouragement - I'm saying it as fact. All it takes to write is simple analysis and enough artistic expression to put together some themes.
 
Yes, and they were still the official creators. Sturgeon's law applies, as my friend above pointed out. I'm nearly 99% sure that you could write a good take of the character yourself, if you tried hard enough. I'm not saying this as encouragement - I'm saying it as fact. All it takes to write is simple analysis and enough artistic expression to put together some themes.
Well I don't know what to tell you. If you think you can write heath ledger, not the joker, but his actual depiction of the joker. That's on you. Meanwhile I'll not touch that as I know that these actual creators, have cratered every sequel the past 2 decades.
 
Well I don't know what to tell you. If you think you can write heath ledger, not the joker, but his actual depiction of the joker. That's on you. Meanwhile I'll not touch that as I know that these actual creators, have cratered every sequel the past 2 decades.
I don't think I'd write Heath Ledger's Joker since that's already been done. I was talking about alternative interpretations; different depictions from what we'd seen so far. If it's compelling, does it really matter if it's not the exact Joker that Heath Ledger would have played?
 

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