Would you believe I'm actually making progress? I'm not quite as far in as I'd have liked to be - something I am choosing to blame on exhaustion - but I've written a good few thousand words and the first chapter is actually looking pretty good. The next order of duty is the introduction of this particular story's Walking McGuffin, after which things should get rather less gutty. I'm looking forward to it.

On the other hand, I'm doubting I'll get anywhere with it tonight. I got very little sleep yesterday and even an afternoon nap hasn't helped much. I just don't feel that good and don't think writing's gonna happen. Oh well.

So, to that end, I'm going to rant instead. Tonight's post is a ridiculously well-embroidered version of an archived Gaia post about my favorite guilty pleasure - though, being as I am a dork, it's actually a combination of three different posts I made in two separate threads. I blame Gaia for this, as if you say more than a few hundred words at a time the average user's eyes cross and their head explodes or something. The second one has the best explanation, though, so that gets the obligatory blockquote.

Guilty pleasures on Gaia. Everyone has one, from taking money out of your quest funds to buy that new RIG item, taking long walks in Gaia Towns and laughing at all the crazy shit noobs try to pull or, dare I say it, cybering.

What's yours?

And of course it's Barton Town Roleplays. Because... well, because they're Barton Town Roleplays.

I am, as everyone who reads this journal will well know, a long-time roleplayer. Though I didn't start out in Barton Town the drama-filled, Mary Sue packed games I got started in were pretty much interchangeable from the stuff that gets posted there on a regular basis right down to the poor choices of 'anime pictures' and tediously! Overdramatic! Pasts!, except with far fewer vampires. Visiting that forum just reminds me how far I've come as a writer and as someone who's at least vaguely decent to roleplay with. No matter how terrible some of the things I write may get - and believe me when one of your games is called 'Guilty Pleasures' you're well aware you ain't exactly writing Shakespeare a lot of the time - at least I'm not posting in games like this:

• †hê Gråvê¥årÐ'§ §ê¢rê† [Lit.need people.]
  
• Why Don't They Trust Us? ((o//a))
  
• ~~~~~Youkai Academy (Perverted,Fighting,and Romance)~~~~~
  
• LαŞt R€que§t (A Semi-Literate Yaoi Roleplay)
  
• Blood Feud (Ninja Romance Roleplay) Open and Accepting!
  
• Gangs of England ((Mobster/biker RP, open. Accepting.))
  
• Little angles...Yeah right.((Accepting/Open Yaoi)))
  
• • Tîl Dæth Dø Ûs Pãrt • {marriage RP}{3/4b}
  
• Death Castle (Open! Need humans, ghosts, and creatures!!!!!)
  
• Leave my City: A Roller Skating Gang Rp

And finally there's the game that wins the Springtime for Hitler award for sheer in-your-face tastelessness:

• +Auschwitz-Birkenau+[[Open & Accepting]]

Yup. That's a fucking Concentration Camp Roleplay.... and, to nobody's surprise, it was started by an Axis Powers Hetalia fanbeing. My jaw just about hit the fucking floor when I discovered this. There is so much that is wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin. Yes, why don't you take one of the most disgusting war crimes the world has ever seen and turn it into an excuse for cheap wangst? Way to stay classy, guys!

I know damn well that I shouldn't really laugh at this stuff. (Well, I didn't laugh at the Auschwitz roleplay because seriously WHAT THE SHIT. I'd say more but that would involve reading it and the idea that some idiot is running an Auschwitz roleplay in the first place is enough to have me reaching for the horf bag.) I wouldn't have liked it if any of my - admittedly eminently mockworthy - first RPs had gotten no response from a reader but well-earned derision. I know that a lot of time and creative energy has gone into starting those games and keeping them running. I just can't help it!

Let's take the 'lunatic asylum' roleplay (here exemplified by We're The 'Problem' Children?Your The Ones With Problems!o/a because I can't be bothered to hunt any further) as a case in point - and yes, I use the phrase 'lunatic asylum' rather than 'psychiatric hospital' totally deliberately, as a lot of these games think innovations in psychiatric practice stopped at One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and that psychiatric hospital design was perfected in about 1885. Ordinarily the patients (when they're not just there for being speshully speshul, of course) are a mixed bag of naive young innocents aboard who clearly have nothing wrong with them save wangst and theoretically 'edgy' serial-killing maniacs with angst pasts of angst whose creators think that it's perfectly acceptable for their Sues to brutally murder people for looking at them funny and yet still be considered sympathetic characters. The staff, needless to say, are of course all evil sadists.

The ins and outs of asylum RPs and why, precisely, they always suck so bad is a matter for another day, but even without going into detail I like to believe it's painfully obvious why these games are so ridiculous.

( It's gotten long again, so bear with it... )

The end result, at least for me, is simple: these people awaken my inner troll.

I didn't even know I had an inner troll before I discovered Barton Town, but I sometimes daydream about applying to the standard roleplays with an old-school Dark Elf character I dreamed up one evening in reaction to all these whiny flangesues. She's quite supremely self-centred, doesn't give a shit about anything except keeping herself amused, has all the morality of the average pampered housecat, thinks she's amazing so has no internal angst whatsoever and no time for people who do sit around whining, and has the attention span of, to borrow a phrase, an onion bhaji. She's no real use to me, I don't write fantasy, but I like her. I sometimes dream about detonating her in the middle of one of these roleplays who take the whole 'supernatural creatures are so persecuted and misunderstood, wah!' idea as their starting premise, and seeing how many people I could piss off without actually breaking game rules just by being supremely indifferent to their Sues' angst pasts and deep emotional trauma.

The other thing I sometimes think of doing - again, I haven't actually done this; I just think it would be fun - is starting a game and again seeing how many people I could piss off by actually having standards for applications. I'd refuse, for example, to let anyone play a flange-powered vampire no matter how much they whined that it was unfair. I'd turn down applications for being painfully culturally or chronologically confused - for example, because the game was set in 19th-century France so no your character can't be called Nekoharu Mitsuhayabashi and have found her family sat dead around the TV. I wouldn't let anyone join a 'school for mythical flangebeasts' RP if they were hundreds of years old and stupendously powerful - what, after all, do they think they have to learn?

But most of all the thing I'd really like to do is start one of those epic-quest survival-horror games, but add a rule that I could declare characters dead if I thought they'd done something that should have killed them. And then I would actually enforce it.