This is why I should ignore Gaia Online's 'Top-Rated Forum Topics'.

I keep forgetting Gaia has RP boards. I don't see the point of forum RP, but even if I did there'd be a very good reason why an RP junkie like myself runs screaming from (or, more accurately, totally ignores) the Barton Town RP forums: the RPs there are made of suck and fail. I love roleplay, but I've had my fill of RPs full of clichéd angstwhore Mary Sues and their clichéd angstwhore tragic pasts, random vampires, boarding schools, and emo teenagers moping about in Gothic asylums.

Many of the RPs on Gaia consist of little more than a premise and a handful of speshul Sues. Often, they follow the Aggressors and Victims pattern and have real trouble recruiting enough Aggressors. An asylum set in a mental hospital with evil doctors usually can't get enough people willing to play evil doctors to make the game worthwhile; master/slave RPs tend to have difficulty finding masters. It's really hard for these games to find someone who wants to play a villain character who won't bog him or her down with enough wangst and inner woe and pathetic emo 'justifications' to sink the Titanic. Yes, she's an evil, sadistic bitch, but mommy never hugged her. Aww.

I stumbled on an 'Asylum' RP in the top-rated topics a while back. Needless to say the asylum appeared to cater exclusively to whiny Emo Sues, the play sucked, and both I and my depression were both rather offended by the way mental illness was portrayed. Finally, and perhaps most depressingly, there appeared to be absolutely no plot. Why would anyone want to join a game with no discernable plotline? It baffles me.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon Chained for Life, which describes itself as a 'Literate[+] Slave Rp', in the same way - and it's rubbish as well.

My curiosity about the game was whetted only by the fact it was described as 'literate'. The premise - and I say this as a connoisseur of Slave!Fic (and doesn't Ken Hidaka just know it?) - sounded like purest suck, but I was still curious to see what this 'literate[+]' RP looked like. So, somewhat against my better judgment, I clicked on the thread... and was greeted by a poll that asked me if I was 'a advanced literate' or not.

Oh. Oh, dear. That would be 'an advanced literate', guys - you use 'a' in front of words that begin with consonants, but it's 'an' for words that begin with a vowel: I am a writer, I am an author - and that phrase lacks a noun. 'An advanced literate roleplayer'. Or, more grammatically still, 'I am an advanced literate roleplayer'. Sadly, there was no poll option for 'I am a far better writer than you so pull your cranium out of your anus, you arrogant fanbrat', so I named myself 'a advanced literate' and moved on to the opening post, which was... well, see for yourself.

This is 'advanced literate' RP? Newsflash, honeychile: block paragraphs, Big Words and ranting on and on (and on and on and on) redundantly do not mean you, I or anyone else qualifies for the descriptor 'advanced literate'.

One of the very first things I noticed about the RP owner - or God, as she later goes on to style herself - and her amazingly high standards of advanced literacy was this phrase: It just depends on what your willing to pay. I have helpfully bolded the part of that sentence that made me wince. If you the thread creator are mixing up your and you're - well, I'm sorry, honey, but you are not writing at an advanced standard. Confusing your and you're makes a genuinely 'advanced literate' reader wince. If you're not wincing, you're not 'a advanced literate'. Oh, and a costumer? According to dictionary.com, that's 'a person who makes, sells, or rents costumes, as for theatrical productions' or just perhaps 'a clothes tree'.

I tried comprehensively red-penning this... thing but gave up in despair after about ten minutes, realizing that it was simply unsalvageable. I'd end up covering the text in corrections and the end result still wouldn't be more than semi-literate, still less like decent formal English. Consequently I've settled for highlighting the most egregious slips - as you can probably tell from the animated .gif up there, there are still a hell of a lot of them - then rewriting the (tedious, cliché-ridden and stupid) opening spiel myself. Forewarned is forearmed, though - though I did my very best to try and make that text block comprehensible, it's still made of suck and phail.

GOD. That took forever and I had to leave out some of it because it made so little sense that I had no idea what the author thought she was trying to say, and I'm still not happy with it. Still, all I'm doing is editing it into literacy - I can't really be blamed for the way the original jumps from topic to topic like a bunny on E, randomly changing gears in the middle of a sentence.

( Unfortunately, there is more. )

If you're wondering what kind of an RPer this kind of game attracts, well, wonder no more. Needless to say the entire cast, both masters and slaves, are a bunch of speshul, wangsty Sues.

I won't go into detail about the Sues. Suffice to say that I could, but I'm not going to because I'm getting stupidly hungry and ideally I'd like to finish this rant sometime before the Last Trump. It's already taken about three times longer than I assumed it would, so it's about time I practiced a little self-restraint. Still, in the interests of completion, here's a few small facts about the oh-so-Sueish 'cast' of this 'advanced literate' RP, which may go some way to explaining why they made me *facepalm* so bad.

• The masters have names like Elissiana Melodic, Eoin Valentine, Damien Raoul Veltario and Shinku Rin Yamagutski.
  
• The slaves have names like Antionette Marie DeSchway, Ornlu, Emmilea Ray Kenneth, Kimena Stronghart, Miku and Velkan Kiomlikoi.
  
• The 'cast' have profile pictures - well, their authors all chose images of random anime characters to represent their Sues.
  
• One of the slaves is a centaur. WTF? How does that even work?
  
• Another one is a shapeshifter who turns into a furry. No word on how that works, either.
  
• There's an immortal Dominatrix Bitch who hates humans for killing 'her kind' and is only a hateful sadist because she's 'SAD iNSiDE'.
  
• There's a misogynistic gay werewolf who was sold by his parents because he was a DIFFERENTLY DIFFERENT iconoclast.
  
• Every single one of the characters has a tragic past of tragedy, often involving dead, abusive or absent parents.
  
• Five of the slaves were runaways or lived on the streets, because homelessness makes teenage Sues look tragically cool.
  
• There's a 'Royal Elf' slave who has the obligatory 'entrancing' singing voice.
  
• The slaves list their sexuality, as if what melts their ice cream actually matters. They're SLAVES, for God's sake!
  
• I counted sixteen characters. Only two of them are wholly human... and actually become the most remarkable for it.
  

Needless to say, I cannot work out for the life of me why half these 'slaves' are even in slavery in the first place. Werewolves and half-demons and vampires are far too powerful and far too special. Um, guys? Making the slaves so utterly awesome misses the point (and raises the question of why the Hell they don't just overpower their all too human keepers and escape). There's no real sense of an imbalance of power here, which is what would make the RP vaguely interesting in the first place. If there's no clear imbalance of power in favor of the masters, there's no point trying to write a 'master/slave' dynamic.

Then again, there doesn't seem to be a lot of point to any of this. It's just yet another case of a premise that could be fascinating if one right, sacrificed on the altar of Sues and pointless wish-fulfillment and romantic wangstsap and yet more Sues... and, last but by no means least, the fact that a PG-13 forum on an avatar site really isn't the place to write dark RPs in the first place.

What's the point in a master/slave RP which can’t even be decently dark, manipulative and downright mean without risking being deleted for a TOS breach? Remind me again why anyone would want to RP on Gaia Online?

... and, oh look, the RP's been open a day and it's already overloaded with helpless victim Sues, leaving the game creator desperately trying to find more people who are prepared to take the initiative. Now why am I not surprised?

Oh yeah, that's right. Because it's Gaia.