One of the most noticeable things about Barton Town RPs - and yes, I am ranting about Gaia again but it's my journal and I'll TL;DR about stupid teen sites if I want to - is how very, very samey they are. There's this high school for the flangily gifted, that generic fantasyland straight out of a D&D sourcebook, the other slave shop full of angst-ridden vampires. Can't get into DeVayne School for Otherwordly Creatures (now open)? No problem, Hidden High. A Place For The Unwanted. (O///A) is right there.

One of these games is very much like another - the only real difference is in the literacy level and whether the plot is hilariously stupid or (at least where it struggles free from the needlessly over-decorative post layouts) laughably pretentious.

It's not just the premises and plots that are familiar to the point of tedium either: the OC 'cast' of these games are often quite painfully samey too.

By that, of course, I don't just mean that they casts of these games are all tiresomely flange-powered and angst-ridden Sues laden down with enough special powers and significant Sue bling that one of them could keep an entire fantasy universe could going for a year, though that is sadly true of most of them. I mean that at least half the time they're using the exact same generically 'sexy' anime characters to represent said tiresome flange-Sues. The same characters show up as 'OCs' time and time again - and not only do the same characters keep showing up, the same images of the same characters do. There's an entire intertubes out there, and yet there they are: the same old faces, showing up time and time again.

I've come up with a virtual rogues' gallery of the most common 'OC' images as chosen by Gaia RPers. There are quite a lot of them. Chances are if you visit the profile thread for a Barton Town RP, you'll find at least one of these characters, or horrifically unnatural and badly-photoshopped palette-swapped version of of the same, staring back at you. In a lot of cases these badly-edited palette-swaps are perhaps even more commonly seen in RP profile threads than the original images; as far as possible, though, I've gone with the original version of the image simply because nine times out of ten the photoshopping is really that obnoxiously bad. Don't thank me, thank TinEye Reverse Image Search!

Proof if it were needed that counter-culture is the new mainstream? Check out how many 'goth', 'punk' and 'emo' characters made the cut...






The end result is that sometimes one can browse an RP's profile thread and come across no more than two or three players who've actually gone out of their way to choose a character image that doesn't shown up on several other 'OCs' in several other completely different threads, played by several other completely different users. I don't doubt that some of these pictures are kind of pretty, but why the Hell should they be showing up so damn often when surely the sheer amount of anime images available online should go some way to mixing things up a little?

The reason for this constant repetition of content is very, very simple: Photobucket.

Try image-searching like a fourteen year old girl for a minute. Open the Photobucket front page and type in 'hot anime boy' and see how many of the images on the first few pages look kind of familiar. Now clear the search box, and enter 'anime goth'. Again, there should be a good number of familiar faces there. Trying search strings like 'anime goth', 'purple haired anime girl', 'cute anime guy' and 'gaia rpc' have exactly the same results - including, on page three of the 'gaia rpc' search, a picture of one Aya Fujimiya labeled, of all things, Horace. To my eyes this makes it painfully obvious what must be happening. These RPers, all or most of them, are finding their character images - which, in many games, are obligatory for a profile to be accepted - using Photobucket image searches and, because the same few character images show up in the first few pages, are constantly choosing the same images for character after character, game after game.

So why not just describe the characters? Isn't that the point of writing? Aren't you more likely to get a character who's genuinely interesting - and genuinely your own - that way?

Honestly, I don't think that's occurred to a lot of the RPers on Gaia, or elsewhere for that matter. It's a cycle - new RPers are told when they join their first games that they need a character image for their OCs as a precondition of joining, and so diligently go and hunt one down because they don't want to make a mistake and that's what they've been told they have to do. And these same new RPers get more confident, eventually maybe starting games of their own - and they tell prospective players that character images are mandatory to get a profile accepted. Nobody really sits down and wonders, is all this really necessary? Everyone else thinks it is, so it must be, right?

Of course, it's not necessary. It's no more necessary to good roleplaying than fancy post styles and copy/pasted song lyrics are. It's just a convention, and like most conventions it's passed unquestioned for so long it's sometimes hard to remember there is another way to do things. You don't have to comb Photobucket for a generic anime character to represent your OC any more than you have to write all their dialog in teal blue. If you want to, that's fine, but you shouldn't get so carried away with finding the perfect anime picture to represent your neat new character you forget to give them a personality.

Oh, and don't forget that picture is of a pre-existing character, and if someone knows that character, they might find it rather harder to believe in your OC when they know damn well he was Ken Hidaka first.