Murdergurl
will turn your insides into your outsides
well, you said you are having success in your RP, so obviously you're doing something right. :-)Just to be clear, I don't take any offense to your opinion on the genres and tropes we're discussing.
Well, I guess I didn't phrase it the way I meant it- Gives the characters an excuse to interact, and to continue to interact for the duration of the rp; Gives the roleplayers a way for their characters to interact with less planning and less need for the stars to align with character creation.
And you actually just reminded me of another reason that I speculate for the school genre to be so popular, and certainly one of the reasons I return to it so often- It gives people a way to process their real-life school experience, whether they like it or disliked it.
As for the genre being overplayed, here's a reason I speculate why my rp in particular might stand out, if that's even a factor in it's success: Overplayed doesn't necessarily mean monotonous, it just means frequent. My rp doesn't play the aforementioned genre straight, as it has strong elements of urban fantasy, fantasy kitchen sink, alternate history, and dystopian worldbuilding. I can't say I'm familiar enough with other people's rps of the genre played straight to know how similar they are, but I do know that mine differs. It's custom-made to create an atmosphere that I enjoy, while leaving enough room for the rp to be different in each incarnation.
And you know your audience well enough to cater to them whilst not becoming just another story in genre X.
What I was saying in the first place was that the popular genres aren't really something I find myself interested in (regardless of whatever way you spin em')
And that's nobodies fault. People are doing what they have fun with. I was just pointing out how your success basically bolsters exactly what I was talking about in my initial comment. The themes and settings that a lot of people really go for, are usually things that I tend to not go for. No one's wrong, and nothing's bad. It's just that the interest isnt there, and I'm very often on the sidelines to what the kids are going for these days. lol