Menewsha Avatar Community - View Single Post

07-27-2015, 05:49 PM

Oh boy I could go on about this for hours.

Metagaming. Just...metagaming. Unless your character is psychic or mine has told them in-universe, they really shouldn't know everything my character has in their pockets right down to the number of pieces of pocket lint.
Godmodding my character's body. This isn't so common on sites like this, I've noticed, but on tumblr (where I do most of my RPing), where most of my characters are transgender and/or intersex, people seem to really enjoy ignoring these facts or otherwise making assumptions. The sad thing about this is, even though adult RPs are allowed on tumblr, I don't really do them, so there's even less reason for this to be happening...
Let me describe my own character's body type and I will do the same for yours, okay? Okay.
Purple prose (a.k.a. Dickensing) and being elitist about it. Charles Dickens didn't write like that because ~it's the best way to write~, he wrote like that because he was being paid by the word. You're not better than anyone because you can write like that. If you want to write like that, it's your own choice. I, personally, find long-winded, metaphor overloaded narrative to be confusing and boring, but if you don't, all the more power to you. But don't act like you're better than me because we have different taste. That's all it is. We have different taste.
Flanderizing characters. This is mostly an issue in fan-based RPs rather than original universes (because there's no canon characterization to Flanderize with OCs!), but with the canon characters I RP on tumblr, I see this a lot. Reducing a character to one or two prominent traits and then RPing them as if that's all they are - or worse, expecting other people to do the same and treating them as if they are. I work hard to show all facets of my characters and I'd prefer that you not focus solely on, say, his relationship history.
Weebery. Half of the reason I, as a gay guy, cringe every time I see "yaoi RP". Weebery is dehumanizing. Cultures and languages aren't playthings for foreigners.
Similarly, and this is a minor and very personal one, using a multilingual character as an excuse to throw around one or two simple words to sound cool. I am multilingual. If I am speaking language A and throw in a word of language B, it will probably be because it's a more advanced term I don't know in language A, or because an equivalent word doesn't exist in language A. It won't be "hello", or "good," or "sorry," or "thank you". That's not how being multilingual tends to work.