Well, it's NOT!

[in_the_blue]

Well, it's probably more some rants on roleplay. Hey! I haven't had one of these in a long time!

On every RP board I've ever played on, there have been two huge rushes, one or the other of which almost everybody falls into. The first is the rush to True Love, and the second is the rush to pregnancy. But G., you might say, you're guilty as charged! Look at you! You have 3 characters in relationships and 2 with pregnancies!

Okay, I say, fair enough. Let's examine that using my characters as an example. Let's start with dogstar_academy, because it's a good place to start. I started Sirius at an old Hogwarts-based board back before... well, put it this way: I've been playing him so long, he was alive and well in canon when I started. Then, I invited sff_corgi to play with me, and she started with the understanding that her character and Sirius had a background and that her character still had a thing for him (correct me if I'm wrong, C, but that's how I remember it). They came to play together not really with the express purpose of being a couple, but of having known one another and had an unspoken thing in the past. It took a while, but he did fall for her. Of course, he had to ask her to marry him six times before she said yes, and they were actually a couple for a year and a half before they got married. And... no kids. Medeni doesn't want kids, so no kids. Just dogs. So I thnk their relationship has progressed at a pretty normal pace, all things considered. No "oh my God, Medeni, I knew you!" and waking up to her the next morning.

I just retired Charlie Weasley from there and yeah, he and Tonks are married. I have to say that Jane (Tonks's player) wanted her to get pregnant but Charlie vetoed it. She tried again; I vetoed again. It didn't feel like it was in his nature. It took them a year or so before they got hitched, too. Things progress as they're supposed to, I think. Now, though, he's retired.

And Mary Frances... she's never even had a boyfriend. Crushes, sure, but never a relationship. She's only just 17 anyway, and about to be retired too.

On milliways_bar when I brought in Spike, it was with the intention that he wasn't going to get involved. With any woman (or man because, canonically, straight, deal with it). Ever. Even though, canonically again, the one love of his life was dead and he was in essence free to move on; I just didn't see it that way. Then the bastard went upstairs with some blonde chick from another canon and decided he liked it. Two years later, she's 9 months pregnant... but ouch, not by him. It's part of Beth's canon; all we had to do was manipulate time to make it work. Did he want kids? Shit, folks, this is Spike Spiegel we're talking about: of course he didn't want kids. But it wasn't something that destroyed their relationship, although pieces of it have come closer than anything else. That's... well, we knew it would be a hard situation. They both have so many doubts and fears about it. He did kinda sorta ask Beth to marry him when they found out, but fortunately she's a pragmatic Capricorn and said something along the lines of how fucking stupid are you, we're from different worlds and that was that. Besides, they're pretty committed to each other. I think they don't need marriage. And really, who knows what will happen after that baby arrives? Not us. We don't script it all out in advance, but that goes for me with all my RP characters. I like letting them surprise me, rather than me forcefitting something on them.

When I adopted Bill, his original player wanted him to be gay. Canonically he's not, so I didn't want to play him that way. I took him over from her with that understanding, and that was fine with her or I wouldn't have done it. In Milliways canon, it had already been established that he and Fleur had split, so... yeah! He was bitter, and I had to retrofit a bunch of backstory that suited me as to why he was there and all that stuff. It took a long time for him to realize he still liked Fleur. I mean, face it (and no offense, Heather): Milliways Fleur is a slut. I had to look inside and see if he was forgiving enough to let things happen, and when they did, they were totally unexpected. In Millicanon they'd been engaged before and broken it off; getting engaged a second time was only done after some careful consideration (actually it's true!). And then... well, Fleur kind of didn't do her pregnancy prevention spellwork on purpose, and she did that without telling Bill. But Bill being who he is wasn't about to tell her to "fix" it. So their timeline... about a year and a half.

My other characters -- Gren, Howl -- aren't in relationships. Gren might like to be, but he isn't. Great as he is, he's enormously complex. Howl simply can't be, not at this point in his canon.

So I ask others: why the rush to One True Romance? Why the rush to add pregnancy and infants to roleplay situations? Have people thought it through, or do they just get swept up in the romance of the moment, of not having to be really accountable, not having to really bear the responsibililty? When people roleplay having babies, especially, have they thought through the ramifications? What it will do to their characters' relationship? What it means to be sleepless for nights on end? To share the responsibilities? To feed and bathe an infant? I can say without even getting a chip on my shoulder that I've thought this out a lot, at least so far as Spike goes. This was a canonically-inspired event for Beth; Paige and I both knew that neither of us had it in us to ignore what happens to Beth in canon. So we adapt, and we make it as honest as we can for the characters. We might not get it a hundred percent right, but damn if we're not thinking about how it might go. At least it's on our minds. At least it wasn't one of those "hey, everyone else is doing it, why don't we?"

I guess the other thing I always wonder is if pregnancies (and relationships) in roleplay aren't some odd kind of perverse fantasy fulfillment for things people aren't having in real life. That's a more disturbing trend, I think.

And those are my thoughts on it. I'd love to hear yours, especially if your opinion varies.

Your Element Is Air

You dislike conflict, and you've been able to rise above the angst of the world. And when things don't go your way, you know they'll blow over quickly. Easygoing, you tend to find joy from the simple things in life. You roll with the punches, and as a result, your life is light and cheerful. You find it easy to adapt to most situations, and you're an open person. With you, what you see is what you get... and people love that!

What's Your Element?

Comments

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

Or your two Knuts. (No pun intended.)

I'm not saying that everyone should write like me (heaven forbid) or be like Spike, Mr. Keep-it-all-inside. He's a boiling cauldron of emotion inside, and outside he's all... "huh." But that's him canonically, and for me, it's all about letting characters react in as much of a canonical way as I can fathom given the AU-ness of roleplay. It's malleable and always changing, and there's no way a roleplay board can stick only to canon. That's already been written, and you might as well just read the books at that point. The love-and-pregnancy thing has been kind of an epidemic other places beyond ours, and that's why I'm curious about that. I think we're dashedly well-behaved.

Unless you want to blame the tequila.

(And here I thought you joined my RP board so you could learn all of Madam Pomfrey's untold secrets of Hogwarts.) Heh. Juuuuuust kidding you.