The All-New Down With OPP Thread
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@Selira said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
@Derp I'm not doing this again, there already are multiple threads, you've said what you're going to say on the subject and I've said what I'm going to say. I think you're complicit, you think you've done no wrong, that's not changing.
Sounds like a good reason to never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever bring it up again! #deadHorse
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I think the post was a good post even after verifying that Lithium is not DWOPP. Some of those behaviors were really creepy and gross and I can't understand how anyone could've put up with them for so long. Please just don't hit on female characters like that and especially do not get antagonistic with them after they make it clear they're not interested in you that way.
Also, maybe people who were "in the know" knew who Lithium was, but without naming names, people who are out of the loop had no idea. Like I had no clue at all; I don't even play that game. But now I know, and I see zero contrition from Lithium, just defensiveness and ambiguation, as if the way they treated female characters was perfectly acceptable. At least Runescryer apologized for his mistakes and plans to do better in the future.
I was thinking about this some more, about how to play a womanizer-type without actually making women uncomfortable. I think a great way to do it would be to show some damn self-awareness about how disgusting your character is. Emote winking sleazily, or make comedically stupid approaches that immediately stop. Have your character develop real respect and treat others as full people once their idiocy is rebuffed or ignored.
It's difficult to be sure... because I've never really played womanizers. There was one time I played a guy who went through a phase where the love of his life died and then he was miserable and sleeping with women randomly whenever he got super drunk. But that was just a phase, and it was very obvious -- his pickup lines were appalling, and I'd emote about the smell of alcohol and all that. And I guess he was presented as enough of a rounded character that those women still felt comfortable around him despite that. No idea.
But I still think the behavior that prompted this thread was/is problematic, and needs to be addressed and considered, and that Runescryer shouldn't be crucified for making it. I already waxed judgmental about what I think Runescryer did wrong (jumping down someone's throat OOCly for IC things), and it was taken really maturely, so that's good.
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@hobos Right. I think it's important to recognize that @Runescryer simply posted that the person (OPP) was potentially on an unnamed game, and would be looking into it. There is ZERO chance of damage to innocent people with that kind of announcement. It wasn't until Lithium showed up and outed themselves that really any of this couldn't have been recovered from.
It's also important to understand that there is no checklist of behaviors or RP themes that are specific to CreeperA vs CreeperB. There's a lot of overlap in terms of pushiness/harassment/issues that aren't truly singular to one particular usual suspect. So the best you can do is say either "person with this behaviors" or "I don't know it might be OPP?" and just keep an eye out.
On a lighter note, I'm rewatching the Office (US) for like the 6th time and am ironically on the episode where Michael, for "women's appreciation" takes all of the women into Victoria's Secret and offers to buy them all 1 item each, his treat. While he's in there, Angela won't buy anything, and Michael's all "You sure you dont want anything? A g-string? A thong? Perhaps something lacy? A nice bra? Padded bra? See through? You know i would just like to buy you a fresh set of underwear..."
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost Regardless, I do understand the complaint of how I approached this. I still feel the need for secrecy and to respect the privacy of those involved. So, in the future, I won't mention any possibilities of who the person in question might be, but just a more general 'creeper' alert, advising players and Staff to be aware that there's potential creeper activity noticed on a game and that Staff of the game is investigating. No names, no details until they're okayed by Staff to be released upon completion of an investigation. No speculation of which bad actor might be returning...
Hopefully, this is an approach that is more acceptable to the community at large.
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I think that your approach was just fine. You held a genuine belief that turned out to be untrue. It won’t be the last time you do this.
Reputations get hurt. This happens. You made a mistake. This too happens. Everyone with torches and pitchforks is as absurd as you would imagine.
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The log with the pushing-lingerie-buying on someone was pretty creepy for sure, but I guess that creepiness was OOCly marked as acceptable by the person who was creeped on, so I'm more looking at the logs with Betsy. The one that I read was like... Betsy said Warren could live with her if he wanted for a while, and then Warren concocted this whole drama about how it'd be so scandalous and paparazzi would besiege them and of course they'd have a great time locked in together anyway (hyuck hyuck). And then he tried to sexily convey his body heat to Betsy's cheek through the palm of his hand. And Betsy was kind of like "no that's okay anyway you want to spar sometime?" And then misinterpreted Warren's unwillingness to spar as confusion that she, a purdy delicate lady, would be violence-inclined. And then Warren got quickly turned off by what a tough girl Betsy was acting like, which honestly seemed like a big part of the purpose to me, as an outside reader... and Warren was like "okay bye" and Betsy was like "bye" and fin.
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@Runescryer said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
So, in the future, I won't mention any possibilities of who the person in question might be, but just a more general 'creeper' alert, advising players and Staff to be aware that there's potential creeper activity noticed on a game and that Staff of the game is investigating. No names, no details until they're okayed by Staff to be released upon completion of an investigation. No speculation of which bad actor might be returning...
Nah. Fuck that. Do exactly what you did here, because it's actually useful rather than whatever kind of weird-ass vaguebooking they're mad about. The behaviors were creepy and problematic and should have been called out.
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"Not that I doubt for a second we would be able to find many ways in which to amuse ourselves, locked in a townhouse together, just the two of us."
Sometimes I'm witness to RP or read through logs, and I gotta be honest sometimes it just reads like some kind of process to determine if TS is on the table. Sure, its under the guise of roleplay, but feels like some sort of token, necessary evil the other player has to suffer because simply paging and asking for TS is considered unattractive. It's not just men who do this, too. I've been the target of scenes where a player felt like they were doing the following:
- HI, I'm so and so character that's sexy
- So we gonna TS? Sure, your character is interesting and you're trying to RP stuff but I wanna fuck your PC
- Seriously we should TS. Why aren't you hitting on my char?
- You did a bunch of RP chatty things, but seriously, I mean are you looking to TS?
- Your character isn't interested? ZOMGS electrical storm coming, I gotta pose out. KThxByeeee. Going to ignore you from now on!
All snark aside, I've had moments in RP where I'm getting pages asking what my RL kinks and fetishes are roughly 30 seconds into RP, and any attempt to roleplay something other than hardcore flirtation seemed to be a nuisance to whatever text-based mating call process the other player was up to. Which...really felt oddly negative in a personal way when the person entirely blew off the RP because I didn't put out.
Which, given what I feel is an uncomfortable reality about what TS actually is for some players, I'm not surprised to see people getting ditched because they won't put out.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
Re: the original warning... I don't feel anyone did anything wrong, but it didn't feel particularly useful to me. "There's maybe a creeper on some game somewhere who may be OPP!" Like... what am I supposed to do with that? It kind of feels like a "there might have been a stalker somewhere in America last night!"
I generally assume that at any given moment there are probably multiple creepers afoot in the MU community. Does it matter if any of them are OPP specifically? Do we actually have any reason to believe he left in the first place, much less returned? Like I said - I'm not throwing shade at the intent, just kind of agree with @ZombieGenesis that it might have been preferable to wait until more details were available.
Re: playing a mysoginistic character. I think in today's climate this needs to be treated with just as much sensitivity as playing a PC with any other offensive tendencies. "What's the big deal? My character's just a racist. It's all IC" just doesn't cut it any more. A lot of us don't want to deal with that sort of thing, unsolicited, in our fun times. I'm not saying nobody can ever play a bad person, I'm just saying you have to go out of your way to make sure you're not making other players uncomfortable. Express consent, trigger warnings in logs, making it crystal clear that you respect boundaries, etc. It's a fine line to walk, and I think you've gotta ask yourself whether it's really all that important to the character to wade into that minefield in the first place.
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@Ghost said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
All snark aside, I've had moments in RP where I'm getting pages asking what my RL kinks and fetishes are roughly 30 seconds into RP, and any attempt to roleplay something other than hardcore flirtation seemed to be a nuisance to whatever text-based mating call process the other player was up to.
No offense, bud, but where did the fuck did you used to play? Because I created and played a fuckbunny and still struggled to consistently drum up fuckfriends.
Seriously, I must give off some goddamned dread aura of unfuckability, but even praying mantises get more action than I do.
@faraday said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
I'm not saying nobody can ever play a bad person, I'm just saying you have to go out of your way to make sure you're not making other players uncomfortable.
I think it's fucking unimaginative.
"I'm sexist -- I'm evil!" No, you're sexist and you're boring. Evil isn't what you believe; it's what you do. Ask anyone: hardline religious zealots are not scary because their beliefs are evil, but because the lengths to which they are willing to follow them lead them to clearly evil ends.
The last villainous PC I played probably wasn't considered evil until she showed it, and, Lord, Tzimisce know how to show it.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
No offense, bud, but where did the fuck did you used to play? Because I created and played a fuckbunny and still struggled to consistently drum up fuckfriends.
Seriously, I must give off some goddamned dread aura of unfuckability, but even praying mantises get more action than I do.
I'm going to be unable to post on the forum any more because I'm dead. This fucking killed me. OMG.
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I do think that racism, sexism, and other levels of -isms, phobias, and general bigotry can be valuable to play about. Stories thrive on conflict, and flaws can drive character development, and all that writing and exploring tends to be why we play these games.
The problem is when these sorts of flaws are not actually accepted or portrayed as flaws by the player of the flawed character, and there is no path towards redemption, just a lot of giggling bigotry under the guise of intellectual exposition and/or pretendy funtimes.
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@hobos said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
I do think that racism, sexism, and other levels of -isms, phobias, and general bigotry can be valuable to play about. Stories thrive on conflict, and flaws can drive character development, and all that writing and exploring tends to be why we play these games.
The problem is when these sorts of flaws are not actually accepted or portrayed as flaws by the player of the flawed character, and there is no path towards redemption, just a lot of giggling bigotry under the guise of intellectual exposition and/or pretendy funtimes.
In other words, what happened with WoD in general as time went on...
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I wonder if it would be at all effective to skip the direct posing of isms, but include them in descriptions of actions and choices of actions. Part of me really wants to be able to portray these things in games, but even as a GM I can only describe that it is there. I barely managed to convey anti-mutant sentiments in my super hero campaign. People knew it was there, strong, and horrid, but I wasn't good at portraying it directly.
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I hear what you are saying, but I am saying that this kind of conflict is boring. Not to mention prevalent in our lives and distasteful in our pretendy-fun times.
Especially when there is so many other kinds of conflict to engage in.
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@Ganymede said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
No offense, bud, but where did the fuck did you used to play? Because I created and played a fuckbunny and still struggled to consistently drum up fuckfriends.
Seriously, I must give off some goddamned dread aura of unfuckability, but even praying mantises get more action than I do.IIRC this mostly happened to me on WoD games and on Superhero MUs. I mean, it wasn't constant but it happened to me more when I was doing pickup RP outside of my regular RP crew. I also don't want to say it was rare that it happened, but downgrade it to uncommon perhaps? I sometimes feel like the players were players who forgot they weren't on Shang, but like the log in question where the dude nopes out suddenly when it's clear TS won't be achieved? That's kind of my baseline for what I consider this kind of event.
Look. I have told you that 60% of the time wearing Sex Panther cologne works 100% of the time, but that still means that 40% of the time people run away from you screaming and claiming you smell like a used diaper filled with Indian food. (Anchorman reference)Maybe stop wearing Sex Panther I DUNNO?!?!
Sidebar: I am honestly sometimes baffled that this stuff never happens to you, but be careful what you wish for lol
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
IIRC this mostly happened to me on WoD games and on Superhero MUs.
I'm only recently getting into cape games. They are SO HORNY, holy shit.
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I guess I just give off the impression that I’d probably throat-fuck with Celerity and Vigor because that seems like the sort of thing I would do.
And that’s not really anyone’s thing, unless they were in anaphylactic shock.
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“Me so horny.”
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
@Ghost
I guess I just give off the impression that I’d probably throat-fuck with Celerity and Vigor because that seems like the sort of thing I would do."Seems like?"
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@Ganymede said in The All-New Down With OPP Thread:
I hear what you are saying, but I am saying that this kind of conflict is boring. Not to mention prevalent in our lives and distasteful in our pretendy-fun times.
Especially when there is so many other kinds of conflict to engage in.
I totally get how the existence of real-life bigotry in games can be boring and/or distasteful to people. But I still think it's useful. I'm straight, but I once played a man who found himself in love with another man. It was in a small town with conservative values. It was a pretty heartbreaking story and if it wasn't for immersively playing that out, I wouldn't have the same levels of empathy that I do now for people who are in that exact situation IRL. If a man plays a female character and notices how grossly people act towards women, that's personal growth through roleplay. If someone plays a dark-skinned refugee in a world that ostracizes dark-skinned refugees, that player is likely better suited to have empathy for dark-skinned refugees in the real world. It's a way to expand our paradigms, and roleplay can be a very valuable tool in this sense.
That said, there should definitely be content warnings on games that allow this sort of exploration, and it needs to be managed carefully so it doesn't just become a gratituitous outlet for real bigotry. I think it's worth it. But at the same time, I completely understand how someone who must deal tediously in real life with a specific sort of bigotry would not want to have to face that exact same sort of bigotry in a game. It being a game means that you neither need to play a version of yourself that will need to confront that bigotry -- or play that specific game (that has such content warnings) at all.
