Roleplaying, Interacting and Writing

Roleplaying is a colaborative effort. It might seem obvious, but one can't simply roleplay alone, unless you have multple personalities or whatever.

But... Even though one can't roleplay completely by themselves, that doesn't mean they can't roleplay partially by themselves.

I mean... If you have a party and the party split up, for a while you're going to be alone. Or, if the type of RP you're in allows it, you can simply do things alone, and that is just a part of it, you will probably interact with other people at some points, but you can spend good chunks of time while playing all by yourself.

Rather, there is a very special charm in playing for yourself I'd say, to be in complete control of the situation, to do the weirdest and most unexpected things without needing to worry how anyone will react... It's a nice feeling, to use that carefully developed character and develop them more in a controlled environment.

On the other hand, the wildness of being with others is what makes RPing so much fun IMO, to not know what will happen, to have your plans completely and utterly crushed by someone you didn't expect to interfere at all! To have things delayed or completely changed due to outside interferences... The lack of control is what makes the character so vivid I think. Because you need to react to what happens when it happens, not with how you planned it to happen.

I really enjoy this vividness, it's a very special feeling that I can't find anywhere else, so... I try making it as vivid as I can.

If there is one thing I do a lot in my writing, is to write thoughts, what is my character thinking, what is she planning to do, what is she feeling... Every line of dialogue is surrounded by a paragraph of inner turmoil, I really love doing that.

On the other hand... I don't want people to understand her inner turmoils when they are interacting with my character, I don't want them to say the right words she needs the most... I want them to do what they think is right.

So... I don't write thoughts, I simply show only actions and nothing but actions, it is actually a bit of a hard excercise, because I need to think of what my character is feeling, and react appropriately, without showing what she is truly going through, which may completely confuse the other people that are around me... But that is part of the fun I think, don't let them know what they are supposed to do, let them find out, let them miss~

As an example... I forgot a few details, but there was one time in which Hikari, my Adventurer's Guild Charater, was having memory problems, she had lost all of her memories recently and was trying to adapt to the people near her... The problem is that while she did lose her memories, she didn't lose 100% of it, just like... 99% of it, the most important parts remained as broken fragments that made no sense whatsoever, but still influenced her... What are those fragments? Traumas. Traumas and a few other things, but mostly traumas.

And when one of her traumas was triggered... She fainted, she fainted and lost the deails of what had happened when she fainted. This kinda... Made her think that her memories were disappearing again, they weren't, she was just being afflicted by her own traumas, but she thought they were... And well, she needed reassurance, she needed someone to tell her that she still remembered things properly and that it was nothing to worry about... She needed someone to tell her that that was the first time she was having that conversation, that she wasn't losing her memories time and time again, only to repeat the same things over and over again.

But people didn't quite get my drift... Which is okay! It is part of the fun! But terrible for Hikari at the same time... Because she thought she would lose her memories again, that she was going to forget everyone and need to learn them again... And the forget, and learn, and forget, a constant and desperate cycle of eternal pain... Not for her, but for the people that loved her, that would have to see it all happen again and again, while she was completely oblivious of everything.

So she ran. Not knowing that this is what would hurt them and her the most, she ran for the sake of not wanting them to need to keep dealing with a girl that would forget their names and faces every month or so... It was a very vivid experience for me, because I was really hoping they would see what she was feeling, they would reach out for her and show her that her worries were needless... But while they did try to comfort her, they took the wrong approach, and this made her suffer more instead of less...

I really love roleplaying. I already said in another blog post how much self insertion I put on my characters, so what happens to Hikari does impact me quite a bit, and this kind of occasion is what makes roleplaying so special to me.

It's a bit of a sad thing that RPing takes a lot of my free time, but... Well, I just enjoy it, so I want to spend as much of my free time on it as I can. It's a special strange sort of way of interacting with others, because... You aren't properly interacting, you are interacting through a medium... But you are still there somehow anyway. You can still make very close relationships through it.

And making those special interactions as vivid as I can is one of the things I enjoy the most when I'm in a RP.