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Negative emotions and their role in RP
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@Arkandel said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
I know your comment is tongue in cheek but it’s probably hard to maintain any emotion long enough for an entire scene.
Not at all. It’s a genuine revelation to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my relationship to MUing, and this answers one of my questions about why I’m so bad at filling the roles I expect people to want of me.
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@GF said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
I’m so bad at filling the roles I expect people to want of me.
Maybe that’s another reason. They’re roles you expect people want, rather than roles you want.
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@GF said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
@Arkandel said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
I know your comment is tongue in cheek but it’s probably hard to maintain any emotion long enough for an entire scene.
Not at all. It’s a genuine revelation to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my relationship to MUing, and this answers one of my questions about why I’m so bad at filling the roles I expect people to want of me.
Think of it in terms of an actor playing a role. A single shoot, even in a single-take, can take a few minutes each time. But even a seasoned actor like, say, Jack Nickolson wouldn’t be able to channel Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men for hours in a row - which is often how long scenes run - as he’d crack or just get emotionally numb.
Plus you need to function outside the scene, too. Once you close the window you may want to have dinner. Between poses you can go walk your dog or do the dishes. The commitment to the role isn’t supposed to be either complete or long-lasting.
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@Arkandel Yeah. Be Jack Nicholson, not Jared Leto.
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“Don’t be Jared Leto” is life advice everyone should follow.
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@Pyrephox it’s interesting! Knowing you as I do, I’d have no trouble playing the target of your anger. Indefinitely! Because you are established as someone who doesn’t have worrisome IC/OOC bleed through, and as someone who wants their RP partners to also be into it and having fun.
I get tired of rping anything for too long, but yeah. My sadness and angst fatigue gets real heavy, real quick. I still like playing it.
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@hellfrog That’s also another good point: doing ANYTHING, any sort of emotion, for too long gets boring. I like RPing negative emotions, but I can’t do just…anger for long. Or sadness. Or hate. Or even joy, or contentment.
I always want things to be moving forward, changing. Stagnation, emotional or plot-wise, is my kryptonite.
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@GF said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
“Don’t be Jared Leto” is life advice everyone should follow.
Quoted for fucking truth, lol.
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Honestly, I don’t want to feel anything from my RP, aside from the contentment that I enjoyed my time doing that thing. I don’t want to be angry when my character is angry, nor orgasmic when my character is… you get the idea. I draw on experiences I’ve had to accurately portray the feelings, though, and that is what exhausts me most about negative emotion-prompting RP.
Not that I re-traumatise myself to play fearful, or anything that dramatic.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@GF This is worth cross stitching on something.
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@Pavel said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
Not that I re-traumatise myself to play fearful, or anything that dramatic.
In my opinion immersion in RP should be similar to watching a movie. It’s fine to feel things while doing it. You watch a dramatic scene and you might cry, you might inject yourself into the story for a romantic confession, feel your heart beating faster during an action sequence, cringe when the protagonist makes a fool of themselves, etc.
But once the credits roll, or if you pause to grab some more popcorn… that’s it. It’s not healthy otherwise.
All that said, there are accepted side-effects of movies that we’re all aware of. Having nightmares after a horror flick, for example. So it’s not like it’s abnormal to ‘let’ things affect you after something’s over.
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To me, whether negative emotions should be built upon goes hand in hand with what tone you’re striking for a story and a game in general.
Of all the things I’ve struggled with while running a game, I think tone is one I never feel I’ve gotten exactly right. Which is more to say that it’s so personalized that it’s incredibly hard to get it right all the time for everyone, and you can’t really do it. Some people are just going to be completely incompatible with the right tone of a story or even a game, and you can try to minimize it by having something be as obvious as possible so people can self-select out of it, but it’s so very easy to accidentally do something that flatlines the fun someone would have on a game by hitting the wrong note.
And what makes this hard to talk about is the degree matters. A lot. The degree is everything. Someone that feels a little spike of annoyance at an NPC is vastly different from someone feeling like bone deep loathing. Someone feeling disappointed or frustrated is just different from someone feeling crushed or devastated. And it can be super hard for people to hit the right point of just enough to get someone engaged without too much and really knocking them flat.
I do like content warnings in general, however they might get dragged for being oversensitive or adding too many barriers for engagement, but they aren’t a catch all either. Someone that thinks they are okay with something in the general sense, can really, really not be okay with a very harsh presentation of the same vibe.
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@WhiteRaven good shit, good shit
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@WhiteRaven I think I need to put that quote on canvas and hang it up somewhere I can see it daily. I literally asked myself the other day why I was so full of rage and anger.
Sadly there’s been so much negative emotion with RL that I’ve used RP as a creative outlet. That was until negative emotions sprang up IC; Well, an IC situation that triggered very RL negative feelings.
Yeah. I’m going to plaster this quote everywhere in my house.
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EDIT: Wrong thread, my bad.
