Blogging is not my first major foray into the field of compositional online timewasting. I, like so many over-earnest, chirpy tween girls before me, got my start in about grade seven in the field of online text-based roleplaying. No, not the sexy kind, or the kind with paladins and wizards (for the record, and in defence of DMs everywhere, I should point out that the sexy kind and the paladin-y kind are not mutually exclusive). I mean the kind where you make a character, and some chick in south Dakota makes a character, and then you write out ordinary encounters as a dialogue between you. To all you noninitiates, this must seem like a fantastic waste of time. And, I mean, it is. But when you start doing it, it’s illogically, addictively fun.
I did mostly what’s called ‘everyday’ RPs, which revolve around ostensibly normal people in a high school or community, but there are also sites where you can play ponies or superheroes or superhero ponies or or crime lords or Harry Potter fancharacters or pretty much anything at all. It’s all done through proboards or invisionfree sites that are put up and maintained by people who know how to write or steal UBBC code - no picnic, by the way. It took me a whole day to make a 200x400 box with a border, a picture of some trees and a line of superimposed text. Oy vey. But usually when you join these sites, the code is written for you. You start by creating a character, which means filling out a form about everything from their scarring (naturally) backstory to their preference in fizzy drinks. Then you pick a famous person to be their face, or ‘playby’, and post a few pictures. Then you start writing. You’re narrator for your character’s thoughts and actions, but nobody else’s, which means that an RP occupies a weird space between normal fiction and real life. You can make your character as likeable as you please, but you can’t actually make other people like them.
Naturally, the medium has its pitfalls. Quantity and frequency of posts tends to be favoured over quality. Because everyone on the site has a real life on the side, storylines never proceed in real time, which compresses everything weirdly; your characters could go from complete strangers to best friends or lovers over the course of one conversation. Characters are dreamt up so quickly they’re usually flat as pancakes. Also, keep in mind that 95% of the people on these sites are teenaged girls. That means things often have this weird, emotionally repressed, immature sparkly quality to them – think of what your fantasies looked like when you were twelve. Yeah, that. It also leads to a phenomenon I like to call attractiveness devaluation, whereby everyone picks a superhumanly good-looking playby because a) they want their character to be the centre of attention, b) they want to look at a pretty picture when they write, and c) famous people are attractive. The result? Everybody’s gorgeous, so nobody is. They also all have names like Chad Hartfield and Kendall Brae that nobody in real life actually has.
Mind you, all that is the dark side of roleplaying, and there is a light side. The better websites, which are run by college students instead of middle-schoolers, have good writers, varied and well-thought-out characters, and better storylines. They also tend to shy away from the go-to Hollywood sparklies as playby choices, so something of the normal ugly-to-pretty-people ratio is maintained. The best site I was ever on was based on the premise of taking Disney animated characters and turning them into human teenagers who were realistic while still maintaining the core of their original character. Part of that process was finding a young playby who actually resembled the character facially:
See? It’s fun!
With like-minded people, you can have a shitton of fun on these sites, creating bizarre people, writing pithy dialogue and having escapades that, because you only control one person, often spiral off in directions nobody saw coming. I liked it because it was a good way to try out new characters and get a feel for writing them in real fiction. I also made a conscious effort to rebel against the ‘everyone is attractive’ thing. Some of the more peculiar people I’ve written:
- A 6’6 motorbike-riding Quebecois historian who, despite a terrifying appearance and extensive collection of leather jackets, just wanted to make quiche and read Homer
- The human version of Trixie from Toy Story 3 (see above), a socially anxious, boy-obsessed improv performer and D&D dungeonmaster
- A massive douchebag
- A Potterverse Slytherin who was unassuming and nice and asked questions like, “why don’t we ever learn math in school?”
- A Darwin expy
- Stephen Hawking’s personal assistant, post-zombie-apocalypse
- Several characters from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame in a Film Noir setting
- An albino physical chemist/explosives and fireworks designer who turned from stoic badass to babbling child when he took off his sunglasses
- Finally, my personal favourite, an obese teenaged boy with a secret talent for writing philosophical literature, whom I had all set up to be an embittered and brilliant outcast until he inexplicably got very popular and wound up dating an Olympic hopeful. I still don’t know how that one happened. Anyway, one of my fellow roleplayers summed him up as “Jewish Santa Clause – but with hidden depths.”
As for strange and unexpected scenarios, my characters have:
- Blown up a major laboratory entirely by accident
- Rigged up machines of Rube Goldberg –worthy complexity to cook latkes in the absence of electricity and a stove
- Stowed away to Minsk
- Broken a rib in a fist fight over leaves, of all things
- Taken refuge from Zombies atop the racist Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History
Lookit the pretty cultural insensitivity.
- Expected the Spanish Inquisition (actually)
- Gotten stranded on a deserted island in a hurricane and stayed there for several weeks
- Discovered and named the okapi (historical liberties, feh)
- Given a monkey a shower
- Gotten drunk on absinthe and staged a puppet show with their shoes
- Been awarded the job title ‘official clockwork monstrosity designer’
- Ruined Christmas
Yeahh. Before this gets too self-indulgent, I should add that I have now quit roleplaying. For good. Totally. I’m not going to find an interesting-looking site and start up again like I did all those other things. Because I’ve never spent so much time on something and had so spectacularly little to show for it. But damn, it was fun while it lasted.
… I worry that someday I’ll be writing another one of these on the subject of blogging, as a preface to a book that I’ll never finish. God, I hate my prophetic moments.
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