NSFW RP: consent, minors, and other boundaries

thanks! :D

 

OK, not tapping out just yet I guess, because here I think I can actually be helpful and not just defensive. :)

I think one useful distinction is between:

1) descriptions of a thing (from the past)
2) having something happen in your character's presence
3) having something happen to your character.

1) Descriptions of a thing can be spoilered. Jame and Ford's terrace conversations about how terrible life on Rathillien is and how abusive Filbrick Pines was have never been spoilered because nobody has asked that they be, but we would certainly be willing to do that.

2) Having something happen where you have to watch it isn't necessarily a thing spoilers can handle. Even in an environment like SPR where you can actively decide that your character does not see or hear other people's characters do upsetting things, sometimes the part where you know it's going on in front of you anyway is still too much. I used to have that problem a lot in SPR.

3) In games where violence is allowed, and WT is one, it's important to have rules where people get to decide how involved they want their characters to be. You shouldn't join a game like WT if you're not okay with even knowing that we have combats and sometimes people die, but at the same time, we can absolutely promise you that it won't happen to YOU if you don't want it to. You can come to WT for the fireworks parties, baby thylacines, epic rickrolls and pale puppy piles, and never ever come close to being in a fight with Bill Cipher, as long as you can accept that your character doesn't know that they're immune, even though we will have promised you that they are. You just need to like, tell us that you don't want to be part of that? We've only had one character die in the entire game so far (unlike tabletop) and that was agreed by me and the player after the character in question deliberately antagonised Bill when he was in killmode already and had been told to let Ford and Jame take the lead because they had a plan.

4) Just like with sex, violence is a thing where the nature of the description matters? I am able to handle violence in fights in games most of the time (but not child abuse, or people beating up/harassing each other without being able to stop it) but there was one character in SPR I put on Lissa's autoignore field because he just walked into a room and started giving vivid descriptions of skulls crushing for no particular reason.

 

I made a set of emotes for discord for players in a game i'm running that's inherently full of really hard topics by nature, and to help some of my conflict avoident players feel comfortable voicing discomfrt, they follow the red/yellow/green system in which red is "please stop immediately", yellow is "I am uncomfortable/I need a breather", and green is "This is fine and I'm happy for this to continue"
@seebs i think you said earlier that they'd been put on here as emotes, i can't see them in list? could potentially be a quick shorthand for ooc and ic communications if someone doesn't feel like they can articulate exactly why/why not they want a thing to continue or stop.

 

They could also be useful for triggering conversations in general to help people know that you are getting to your not-ok point! Like if that can be a thing I am all over having access to the stoplight system.

 

Absolutely agree, that's why I initially proposed them in the emote thread after realizing how useful it could be to have image shorthand on the forum.

 

It's okay. I was at the centre of the thing, not following it :) but I do understand the difference? it's just that:

1) people complain about you
2) nobody (at least in these instances) comes to you and asks for your side before it comes up in public
3) suddenly people you're not even sure you know are talking about you and they're saying things that are not true or are so exaggerated/filtered/changed in the hearsay chain they might as well not be
4) everyone's listening to them and the person in charge is listening to them and sure sounds like they already decided you're wrong

is a sequence of events and emotions I didn't need to come back to 10 years later.

I hope this clarifies the issue. nothing of mine has been deleted but all of the other fun stuff has sure happened.

 

i think it's also important to note the importance of context in how and why people are bothered by things.

like, speaking of skull-crushing, there was this one fic on tumblr with that in it and it really bothered me then. but i was bothered by the skull-crushing there because it was in a relatively popular, untagged au "fix-it" fic, written because the author thought mark temple should have died at the end of season 15, in which mark temple, my fave, was killed by lavernius tucker, with his sword, and then got his skull stepped on by tucker. so what the fic, the lack of tagging, the skull-crushing, and the relative popularity of the fic all felt like to me was "everyone hates your fave and wants him to die." and that made me uncomfortable.

whereas when the character in the rave that cT mentioned talked about skull-crushing, i was unfazed because... i don't know why i was unfazed, honestly. because no one's skull actually got crushed? because it didn't have any bearing on fandom's feelings about my fave? i don't know!

and i have no idea how'd i react if someone crushed the skull of a mark temple in the rave. or how'd i react if someone crushed norm the genie's skull in the rave. or how i'd react if someone crushed burt's skull. it's literally uncharted territory for me.

anyway, what i'm trying to say is that context matters. that context can turn a skull-crush from something i can skim through without a reaction to something that makes me feel like shit. and that if someone took my reaction to the Tucker Crushes Mark Temple's Skull Fic and generalized it to All Skull-Crushes In Written Fiction Ever, that would bother me.

 

Not incredibly invested in the RP community, because I'm bad at commitment and I hate to feel like I'm letting people down by not replying, but for feedback: I'm somewhat uncomfortable with being flirted with by adults, both because I'm a minor and I don't want people significantly older than me flirting with me and because I don't want to make people uncomfortable by enforcing my boundaries. I really really don't like making people uncomfortable. Having specific tags and specific sections makes me feel significantly safer and more inclined to actually join, because then there's certain expectations already stated, and I very much appreciate this is a topic we're discussing.

Spoiler: food for thought

(An addition: this site makes it difficult sometimes to state discomfort for above reasons, because antis is a word that gets tossed around a lot (for good reason! but.. sometimes in unrelated topics), and even though "I'm young and I don't want people older than me making sexual comments on my nonsexual content specifically for that reason" should be a valid argument, it feels like it isn't around here sometimes.)

 

...blinks i swore i saw an additional post after this one, went to leave a rating, and it vanished

 

Not just you, I saw it too. So it got deleted or pearwiggled.

Edit: i would suspect deleted by author since it didn´t seem pear wiggle worthy

 

Thanks, i immediately had a 'wait what the fuck did i imagine something' moment, appreciate sanity check

 

Well, yes, that's perfectly understandable!

My reaction to that was more like: here's a character who walked into the SPR at a time when everyone was getting along and having fun and complained about that, then started talking about crushing skulls!

Given that I really do not enjoy the SPR when it is full of people just being assholes for the sake of being assholes, I decided to put that character on ignore for the characters of mine that would be likely to provide said character with a reaction that would be entertaining for him but painful for me.

 

That's a reasonable boundary and a good step to take for your mental health. Explaining OOC that it was upsetting you would also be a good move.

For any other peeps who need it: saying "I'm uncomfortable with this, please stop it" is perfectly valid on its own and doesn't need window dressing.

 

its me the cowardly deleting lion, my post was phrased a little too strong so i wanted to delete it before it caused damage

i dont like the violence discussion from a few pages back, and it tends to always come up with this topic, because it seems like people are trying to articulate boundaries and other people are dismissing them because they don't agree with their social/political views

 

You're not cowardly, thank you for clarifying you just wanted to delete and reword! You didn't need too, it was nice of you.

 

There seems to be some confusion about my earlier post urging people to hit the report button.

Even if the specific reported post does not cross a line, we can get an idea of the pattern and practice in a thread or by a user or group of users. This most recent shitstorm has come about in part because no one on Staff hangs around in the rp threads and we let them become their own little world. Probably a mistake, but without getting hazard pay, I'm not going to voluntarily read a bunch of Homestuck and Transformers rp. I will, however, dip in and look around if someone lets me know weird shit is happening.

 

yep, and your reaction was perfectly understandable and i was not trying to dispute it. skull-crushing just reminded me of That Fic and when i thought about my reaction to that fic and my reaction to the character talking about skull-crushing in the spr, i realized that the role of context was worth mentioning.

from my perspective, it looks like people are advocating for rules and for banning stuff, and other people are explaining how those rules could hurt them and what attitudes those rules seem to want to codify. i will respect your boundaries but if you try to make something i disagree with into a rule for the entire site, i will dispute it. because possible rules for the site and personal boundaries are different, and if you dress one up like the other, i will treat it like what it looks like, not what it secretly is.

 

Yes that´s my position as well. Especially since if it´s worded like a rule or something people want to be a rule, I can´t magically guess it´s meant to be a personal boundary.

 

As far as I'm aware nobody is advocating for banning things other than adult/minor sexual roleplay? Which is understood at this point as not okay.
Trying to set up safety standards as fallbacks for people who might be afraid to do direct confrontation/assertion of boundaries doesn't equal banning. I understand feeling like it might lead to an escalation but rn i think most people involved just want to lay down the groundwork to provide the tools for people to protect each other and themselves + feel comfortable notifying mods and others of discomfort