Shitposting Rave OOC: Anecdata Sharing and Policy Discussion

i would, though, like to note that i have sometimes made norm more of an asshole than i wanted him to be in situations not involving fl. it's kinda a pattern with me.

for example, this, in which norm jokingly flirted with karkat after karkat explicitly said somewhere (i'm not sure where) that he didn't want to be flirted with. i didn't notice him saying that but nonetheless, i made the joke without thinking about what it would mean for norm's characterization.

 

To be perfectly fair to both you and Norm, the referenced line was actually a conversation from earlier in the day where @Thunderwing accidentally a paleflirt at Karkat (that ended with Wiretap stepping in between KK and Afterglow, because Glow is an aggressive shithead who doesn't know how to back down on his own), not directly in the size dif/xeno discussion. By the time Wiretap got around to "dude, boundaries" it was pretty late at night for me and I'd honestly forgotten they weren't the same conversation, sorry.

 

thanks!

 

slides in

i honestly would not consider what anyone had done at karkat to be rude/asshole behavior, if that matters? like, it definitely didn't bother me and i didn't think anyone except maybe karkat was being an asshole

karkat is deeply insecure, gets jealous easily, and copes with his feelings by lashing out at other people. what he's expecting is for people to magically discern he's in a monogamous relationship and to act accordingly, without him having to say anything

slides back out

 

i appreciate the clarification. i think, before you and @Loq responded, that i had assumed myself and norm to have missed a big honking obvious hint, and thus that norm came off as more of a boundary-pushing jerk than felt right to me, characterization-wise.

and i didn't think it was bothering anyone ooc, actually. if i had, i'd have brought that up then. i thought just that norm was behaving as more of an ic asshole than felt right to me, characterization-wise.

 

FTR to me Norm comes off a clueless a lot more than intentionally boundary pushing or jerky.

 

:D

there are ways in which he is supposed to be a jerk, but those ways have to do more with mocking the cronii mercilessily, for example, than deliberately pushing boundaries and trying to initiate romantic/sexual things with unwilling people.

and i'm not sure what i think of him being clueless. to a certain extent, ic, it is 'cause he spent his life as a slave in a lamp, granting wishes, and deprived of a lot of normal human interaction, but i have a feeling that some of it is just me being clueless myself ooc.

 

To me it reads as just being bad a interaction because no good practice clueless. Which would make sense if the majority of his experiences are people just using him.

 

good! :D

 

Norm is clueless, but he's easy to rev up.

That may be because you're easy to rev up, @unknownanonymous, but that doesn't mean that people don't take advantage of that.

I feel like a lot of people don't want to accept that this is a pattern of toxic behaviour because it would feel like calling FL a "toxic person" (@Ipuntya used that phrase, but I didn't) and that is one of my frustrations with people here sometimes. Identifying a toxic pattern of behaviour is not the same thing as saying that someone is a bad, evil or toxic being.

But sometimes it feels that way. (I've gone rounds with @seebs on this.)

Therefore we are often unwilling to see these patterns.

But a person who's doing toxic shit will never learn not to if we ignore it until it becomes so bad we can't any more.

I am not asking you guys to look at each new person and examine them for toxicity, I just want to know that if there is another person who continually does this kind of shit, I won't be shut down for suggesting they're being a jerk. Because jerks don't stop being jerks until they're confronted and told that we'll help find an alternative, but they have to stop doing the jerk thing.

Other people here check in with each other about what is and isn't okay and don't ignore feedback or encourage other characters/players to fuck up. If someone doesn't, we should not write it off as brainweird, because brainweird people still need to learn how not to hurt each other.

 

yeah, i do have a tendency towards getting really excited about rping and any idea that sounds interesting and i don't have many limits, if that's what you mean by it.

and norm is not exactly like me but similar. he likes to snark and joke and flirt and mock people and be an asshole, and tends to get wrapped up in his feelings, and 'cause him being clueless makes it so he doesn't really know when exactly to stop.

and i just feel weird about the idea that i was being taken advantage of 'cause it felt to me like i was making all my own choices and like if i wanted to stop, i would've.

 

That's what being manipulated is like. It's not the Imperius Curse or the Gravity Falls mind control tie. You are making your own choices, but you're being encouraged to make bad ones, and that makes you not want to stop.

 

that makes sense but... i dunno. i guess i feel weird about the idea that i was manipulated, maybe. it feels like my agency is being taken by you saying, "ua did this 'cause fl was manipulating them into it," whereas, when it happened to me, it felt more like, "ua is doing this 'cause fl had a funny idea/gave them a funny idea/inspired something else that ua was interested in."

 

I want to like this one particular statement far more than once.

please go to the anxiety makes you an asshole thread it is nice we should use it more and actually talk about things

 

This is not the conversation I hoped to see in this thread when I got notifs for it. A couple useful and relevant things said, a couple very upsetting and offputting things said. I'm gonna take some time finding words.

 

Whenever people react to Swirl saying I had a point about any of this stuff that happened with FL, by saying something like "but conflict avoidance is not a sign of a toxic person", I feel like I'm being told I imagined a lot of things. This leads to my wanting to explain the thing more so that people will understand I'm not just talking about conflict avoidance, that there's more to it than that.

I have figured out that this is not helpful based on the conversation @Petra and I had offline, so I'll stop.

I'm not trying to say that anyone is an evil or cruel person; I feel like I keep trying to reiterate that and it keeps getting lost.

 

The big thing that I'm hearing from CT and agree with is: if you are not able and willing to talk out-of-character about roleplaying conflicts, then initiating and playing out conflicts is likely to hurt the people around you, and that sucks. Furthermore, that sucks in an unnecessary and preventable way.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons why it can be difficult or nearly impossible to communicate about stuff. Fear of ruining the fun, difficulty with conflict, fear that the other player(s) involved will be offended and hold a grudge, and more that I'm not thinking of.

That's a personal problem.

I'm saying that bluntly and harshly on purpose. This is a forum with a lot of people with all kinds of anxiety and paranoia and so forth. If you say that it's difficult for you to talk about stuff out-of-character, people will at least have the knowing option to try working with you. If you say nothing, and do whatever you like regardless of what others ask, then you risk being a source of discomfort and pain for the people around you.

I don't know or at this point care if FL was doing that. That topic is a dead horse and I'll thank everybody to stop beating it in this thread; there's another thread if you must. I'm saying this as a final word, please, do not start it again, anybody.

I thanked CT for speaking up in the first place because, once the question was stated so bluntly, I could see a pattern that could have led me to the same conclusions, had I been in her place. I did not thank CT for the harshness of the asking, but neither did I chide for it, because asking the question harshly seemed (and still seems) better than not asking. I figured it would be better to fuck up in that degree, and apologize and seek to make amends after the fact, than risk letting it fester even longer.

With communicating OOC, I don't mean we need to start by explaining a character's motivations and reasonings and history to say why their actions were valid from their point of view. Partly because some of us are making things up as we go, and figuring out how it all works later. Partly because characterization is optional, it only matters if it's fun to make it matter. But mostly because, the characters are fictional. I don't care about their feelings. If I bring up an out-of-character concern and get back an explanation about the validity of the characterization, it distracts and annoys me, to feel like I'm being made equivalent to a make-believe person. I assume that's true for others.

What I mean by communicating OOC is saying stuff like "I'm not having much fun with this conversation, can we drop it?" And asking stuff like "I noticed character so-and-so is getting really fighty, are you still having fun with this?"

It's a chore sometimes. It requires noticing that we're out of sorts, gathering the courage to say the thing, and saying so. Each of those steps is gonna be difficult for some of us. If it helps, I'd be happy for us to come up with a bunch of statements we can copy&paste for when making the words to communicate the thing is hard.

There's plenty of roleplaying opportunities out there where being minimally kind to each other isn't a rule: this doesn't need to be one of them. Please be patient with each other for the fact that some of us will have delays in realizing that things were upsetting for us. Please try to find ways to express worries and irritations before they build up to explosion points. If you're trying, and believe you're going unheard, then ping me -- or someone that you know and trust to listen to you. It could very well be worth it to get another perspective, and another person's way of wording things, to help get the understanding across sooner.

 

You and I have had this discussion before and I want to give you a data point. I explain things over and over in terms of character motivations when people ask me why my character is doing stuff. I do that because that is the question they asked me. I'm not always able to tell whether they're curious or just really want me make them to cut it out.

If you want to talk about something my character is doing being upsetting to you, please lead with that.

If you want to know if I'm upset, please lead with that. Because if I am upset, and am not talking about it, I either am afraid to talk about it, or I haven't figured it out yet and hearing the question posed will be helpful.

I do not have a problem knowing the difference between me and my characters, but when my characters feel emotions very strongly, that can affect my emotions. Particularly if a situation is similar to something I've experienced.

I think that is true of most people? But apparently sometimes it isn't.

 

It's definitely true of me. Chances are if Tori's having an anxiety fit, I'm having one in real life. That's kind of the point of it for me though. A nice safe place where I can have anxiety fits for fun when I choose to have them. The fun of roleplaying is tricking my brain into emoting and thinking like a different person for a bit.

 

you will let us know though if you are ever upset by the spr in a Not Fun way, right?