You may have become aware that I think Gaia Online's Barton Town roleplay forums are made of suck and phail.

Well, they are. And, as a Public Service announcement, I bring you this handy guide for how to spot a really bad Gaia RP by its title alone, thus sparing anybody who may happen to wind up on the Barton Town RP forums from the worst of the stupidity that lurks therein (all of it). If you follow this guide's advice, you'll be left with about one thread on the whole page that could possibly be considered 'not too bad, maybe, if you don't think about it too hard', and then you'll realize that the whole forum is a waste of time and go off to do something more productive.

Either that or you, like I, will be tempted onward and will discover the delights of trainwreck syndrome as it relates to online roleplay. I'm really only in it for the hilariously bad character biographies and the ripped-off pictures of anime characters pastede clumsily onto people's horrible Mary Sues - I've already seen Youji used for a random sex slave, Aya as a guy called Julian and Light Yagami, complete with Death Note, again as some random form of slave. Besides, it's always fun to see how many times the same four or five characters show up, or play Spot the Hentai Game CG. Generally speaking, it's really easy to tell the porn images once you know what kind of things you're looking for even when the characters are fully dressed, to the extent one wonders why the RPers who chose them couldn't do likewise...

There are a lot of RPers out there unwittingly using images of characters from hentai games to represent their Sues and Stus, including Akira from the yaoi game Togainu no Chi, a character who looks pretty badass but gives it up - consensually or otherwise - to just about every other male character in the damn game, to the extent I have come to refer to him as the You're Gonna Get Raped Guy.

If you're a sporker in need of a laugh, these are the thread titles to watch out for. If you're anyone else - steer clear!


The thread creator lists needed players or player characters by gender:

This may just be my experiences with the Highly Esteemed Youji-Mun speaking, but it seems to me that if a game creator wants to control a story to the extent that he or she knows exactly how many characters it needs and of what gender they all should be, and they just can't settle for anything else - perhaps because anything else would mean that all the characters wouldn't be able to be happily and heterosexually paired up - then they should probably just sit down and write the damn story themselves instead of trying to force several other people to do most of the work for them. This doesn't exactly suggest that the thread creator is looking for 'roleplay' to me; it suggests that what he or she really means is 'I've had this really neat idea but I can't be bothered to come up with any other characters aside from my speshully speshul Sue or do any of that hard stuff like come up with an actual plot, so help me write my story please'.

It just gets a little iffier in the games where the RP creator literally means 'one male and one female player' - as if he or (more usually) she couldn't imagine female authors playing male characters or vice versa. These, very usually, turn out to be romance RPs, leading me to wonder if the game creator actually wants to roleplay a scenario or is looking for a virtual boyfriend using her Sue as proxy. Why else would she specify a male player rather than a male character? It's roleplay, not a singles' bar, even if half these games do degenerate into absurd hook-up-fests....


The thread title makes ░▒▓ ɠŗåŧųïʈөȗƨ ūşɛ ϕᶂ ƒøяəĩġŋ & ƥђȱҋęƗîɔ ϧɕɾįρț ▓▒░ in a desperate attempt to ►►ʂʇǻɳđ ѻʋţ◄◄:

Okay, I will admit this works. It does make the titles stand out on a forum page. That, however, doesn't stop it being stupid.

See, foreign and phonetic characters, while they may look like standard alphanumerics, are not. They're very often pronounced differently and don't always stand for the letters they may, to the English-trained eye, appear to. Take the infamous esset. The esset - ß - just looks like a rather ambitious, florid capital B with ideas above its station, but it's actually used in German to denote a double S. Take this letter - Ü - and its umlaut. The umlaut, in German, indicates that the pronunciation will differ from a standard U. Take this Ō. In romanized Japanese, the line above the letter indicates a long vowel sound, and is often alternatively romanized as 'OH' or 'OU' (the double 'O', while technically correct, often cause English-speakers to mispronounce the long vowel like the double 'O' in 'Hoover'). This character - ɛ - is phonetic, used to indicate a particular way to pronounce the letter 'E' - it's the 'E' sound as in the word 'met'. It's not necessarily the right one to use.

I know, this is nitpicky. But if you know this stuff, even a little bit of this stuff, attempting to make a thread title stand out in this way - by using accented letters, phonetic script, and foreign letters as decoration - looks not only pretentious but ignorant. Finally, if a fancily-written generic title is really the only way a thread creator can think of to catch the attention, how likely is it that they have anything interesting to say beneath it?


The game is called something like 'Yaoi Boarding School', or could easily be retitled that:

Now, I like slash as much as the next fangirl (and maybe rather more, depending on who I'm standing next to) but... well, put it this way, even I would be hard pushed to have fun with a lot of the 'yaoi' RPs on Gaia. They're maddeningly generic, populated almost entirely by cliches and even for a slash fan like me, who has no real problem with the whole seme/uke dynamic as long as it makes sense given the personalities of the characters involved, the insistence on the characters taking set sexual roles gets deeply tedious. It gets all the more so when all the ukes are wide-eyed, cutely effeminate little innocents who act like the worst kind of female cliche. Now, this may just be because my Ken obsession has well and truly turned me off waiflike, effeminate ukes and I now like them pushy and boyish, but if I wanted strong alpha males wooing wibbly female stereotypes I'd read het - and shitty het at that.

There's an awful lot of this 'Yaoi Boarding School' stuff about, and it's almost all this madly generic and tedious, not to mention packed to the brim with tedious, generic Stus. One of these games is much like all the others.

In more general terms, though, the concept of the Yaoi Boarding School is a ridiculously common and equally tedious one, regardless of whether or not there's yaoi in it. The premise of a lot of Gaia RPs involves a group of random teenage Sues pitching up at some isolated live-in institution - often this is a school, but I've seen the same thing happen at orphanages, asylums, laboratories and juvenile detention centers, most of which are exactly like schools but with more angst - and proceeding to hook up with one another, whine a lot and do precisely no work. These games consist of a bunch of co-dependent Sues getting it on while they wait for an actual plot to arrive, and how interesting, in the long term, is that?


The game's name is cut-my-wrists-and-black-my-eyes Emo with a capital EMO:

This largely speaks for itself. Games like this aren't so much roleplays in the conventional sense as they are constant pity parties, in which a handful of whiny emo Sues mope about the place looking beautifully tragic in the hope that some other player's character will show up, sweep them off their feet, and heal their wounds with love. Sadly, most of the other player characters are far too busy moaning and wangsting themselves to do anything of the sort. Either that or it's yet another game about how Vampires are Awesomecakes.

Usually, these games are full of characters who are self-pitying and self-regarding even for Mary Sues. This also usually means there will be vampire characters and demon characters and lycan characters coming out the walls, to the extent that the two human characters actually look remarkable and interesting. It also usually involves an overwrought 'back story', which is far more concerned with being flawlessly angsty and rambling on about vampires or broken hearts than it is with simple human logic - one game, for instance, involved a group of girls, all of whom had been ditched by their boyfriends for no good reason, emoing about it to such an extent that their families were prepared to totally uproot themselves and move to a brand new town because they feared that otherwise their daughters would never get over their Beautiful Teenage Heartbreak. And then the boys who ditched them all upped sticks to chase after them. It makes no sense, but it's angsty!


The thread title mentions 'Nekos' anywhere:

One wonders if anybody has told the good folk on the Gaia RP boards that Neko is not the name of a fantasy race, it is just the Japanese word for Cat. Not catgirl, not animal person, it just means cat. The word they're looking for to describe a human with kitty ears and a tail is nekomimi - literally 'cat ears' - not neko. RPers who create characters who are 'fox nekos' or 'tiger nekos' are claiming their character is a fox-cat or a tiger-cat, not a fox-boy or a tiger-girl. The word they want for a human with the characteristics of any other animal is kemonomimi (animal ears). It took me ten seconds to find this stuff out and I'm not even creating a catgirl character.

Any RP which mentions that scientists have discovered 'Nekos' or that 'Nekos' are living among us - well, of course they are and the scientists didn't need to look very hard. This isn't a mythic race of half-humans with kitty ears, it's just felis silvestris catus. If I said that a mystical race of cat people were known as the Gatos, every Spanish-speaker in the world would laugh at me. It sounds no less stupid with 'Neko', trust me - and trust me, it looks really stupid to lump 'Nekos' in with Lycans and Vampires and Elves and Demons. There is no such fantasy race, just anime art. I don't care how cute the anime art is, that still doesn't make nekomimi a fantasy race rather than a convention in anime art or, sometimes, a kink. Aren't there enough flangey semi-fantasy races to be going along with without inventing a new, stupid one?


The title suggests a 'good versus evil' plotline - and the creator cannot find people to play the bad guys:

I used the phrase 'bad guys' rather than 'antagonists' deliberately here. Most of these roleplays aren't really what you'd call subtle, and leave players with the possibility of taking a character who's either treated as wholly good and remains that way regardless of what they may have done or go on to do later, or is utterly, unrepentantly evil (either because they just want to be evil for no reason at all, or because they had a Traumatic Past). They don't have protagonists and antagonists, they have goodies and baddies. Christ. Weiss Kreuz is more subtle than this.

Needless to say, these games often have problems finding people to play the villains - but that's because while it's fun to play an antagonist, and antagonists are often interesting characters, it is very very boring to play a baddy, because the average 'baddy' is very flat and tedious indeed. They're just evil because they are; the closest they come to having reasons for their actions is 'oh, but she had a traumatic past'. That's not a motivation, it's an excuse. People don't want to play these characters because it's fucking boring, and all the more so when they can't actually do anything to any of the goodies without the consent of the person playing said goody. They, needless to say, are very unlikely to agree to anything that might actually cause lasting damage to their precious Sue, who can't even have scars unless they're in non-beauty-marring places.

Playing a bad guy in one of these RPs is a surefire route to extreme boredom, which is why people don't want to do it, and why the game creators can't find enough people who are prepared to take them.


The game's creator forces players or player characters into set roles depending on their gender:

This one just saddens me. I just don't understand how it's the game creator's decision what gender player characters should be or what kind of role they take. Rigidly defined gender roles - which usually involve one gender (most often the males) taking the predefined role of predators while the other (usually the females) are their prey - don't exactly allow players to create interesting characters, or make for particularly interesting RPing. It's heteronormative to a fault and often exceedingly tedious. If someone wanted to play a female vampire in this setting, why the Hell shouldn't they? If they wanted to play a male who went after, say, a missing sister, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that, too? Hell, if they wanted to why couldn't they play a girl who, when trapped in the damn 'vampire male mansion', just broke a window and left like a normal human being? Or would that get in the way of the wish-fulfilment? There's not a lot of potential in plots this restrictive - and which often require the characters to act like complete dumbasses, too. Why can't the girls just leave? Why do the guys even care?

Once again, though, at heart this doesn't seem so much like an attempt to roleplay a scenario as it does to virtually hook up with someone using an annoying Mary Sue as an author proxy. There may be less demand for the person on the other end of the line to be a member of the opposite gender, but it's still absurdly gendered and extremely restrictive.


The RP describes itself as 'Semi-Literate':

I'm going to ask one question as regards this one: how can you be 'semi-literate'? If you are literate, Gaia roleplayers, it means that you are able to read and write. An illiterate cannot. That's it. It's kind of an either-or thing. So, if the players in some silly rolepay are only semi-literate, does that mean that they can write their own posts, but they can't actually read what anyone else has written? That they can read and write, but only some of the time? Or is it simply a lame excuse for their writing being only semi-coherent?

There is no such thing as semi-literate roleplay. What there is, however - and it's sad to say this, but going by the way they choose to present themselves in a largely text-based medium such as the Internet, where like it or not people will judge you on your ability to write, a distressing number of Gaia users fall into this category - is roleplay for the functionally illiterate. I won't bother going into the definitions of functional illiteracy when the wiki is right here, but suffice to say when a Gaia RP advertises itself as 'semi-literate', it usually means it's being run by a functional illiterate for other functional illiterates. Why people who clearly had no interest whatsoever in learning to write correctly now want to do it as a hobby is beyond me, but there you have it. You can call me a horrible old snob if you like, but I genuinely do not understand why anybody would want to read anything written by somebody who slept through their English classes. Or, for that matter, who spent them writing Suefic instead of learning how to string a coherent sentence together.


The game's creator couldn't even spell their thread's title correctly:

How good can any roleplay be if the creator can't even be bothered to check if they've spelled the game's name correctly? This just looks sloppy and half-assed, and it's better than evens that the actual RP is going to be every bit as sloppy and half-assed as that would suggest. There's really no point in looking any further than that unless you either really like the idea of being in a sloppy, half-assed roleplay that will probably fizzle in a fortnight, or find sloppy, half-assed roleplay unaccountably amusing. Either way misspellings in the thread title pretty much guarantee that nobody who can actually write is going to want to have anything to do with the resulting game, and you the mythical forum-browser can quite happily live without ever trying to read the thread.