<Snipped quote by DarkwolfX37>
We have arcs for a reason, we dictate for the most part what happens in them, its like a choose your own story book, but we write the responses as we go, or already have them planned. I've completely winged my current arc, hardly any planning at all. Look at how well things have turned out.
I'm not going to go into how that's changed or a problem, nor am I going to go into the problems here.
<Snipped quote by DarkwolfX37>
You truly don't understand that this rp technically is supposed to be happening in real time, then.
Also, I take ityou don't watch filler episodes of anime?
You realize I've been around since there were four people, right?
There's a difference between filler and aimless wastes of time talking with three word responses back and forth, or repetitive scenes of going out to eat, or fucking bowling or golf or anything else similar. I bet we could go back to two years ago, copy and paste the going out to eat scenes, and they'd line up perfectly with the ones since then. The same with every meaningless "oh these characters are talking about literally nothing just so that the ic gets content" sections.
In an anime, there's visuals. There's more content per second. You don't get filler in books precisely because it's boring. Filler exists for the express purpose of having content when either nothing interesting is happening or official content is in the process of being made. Filler is problematic.
I can't think of a single time or arc on ifunny where anyone other than me gave responses that had no purpose other than to respond. Not banter, not action, not conversations about something of substance, just responding. An empty response made only so that whoever is driving can respond with something that matters. "Cleans my glasses," give me a fucking break. Back and forth about how two characters are overestimating themselves and underestimating each other for 10 or more posts without a single action, a need to add unbelievable actions in a vain and fruitless attempt to stave off the monotony... Pullups while talking about family because we've exhausted every avenue of conversation about "oh you know my family but don't know me guess who I am haha yeah it's the incredibly obvious answer that anyone could guess if they actually put thought into it, congratulations on getting it right I'm here know because _________ get used to more meaningless interactions with a new character" that could possibly be done? Really? Yes, show off more about how you can do things that you'd have a shorter list of characters who couldn't do it than could while you give your exposition that doesn't even lead to anything. "Is this the most interesting part of your characters' life? If not, why aren't you showing us that?" is an important writing rule. That's
why we bog down the roster with so many fucking characters, so we can add something meaningful and not have to have conversations of "mm. mhm. mm. mhm. yeah. I disagree. etc." that take up pages of posts and take away from MR's total interest factor. Not to have more of them, but to not need them.
"Hardly any planning at all." Yeah, look how that's working. Let me give you a synopsis of what's going on with everything I'm involved in. I have ten active characters. Seven are waiting for someone to do something in one plot other than "here's a response so you can give a response that actually means something because this is a fucking book and not a collaborative roleplay." One is currently dead on a table which nobody gives a fuck about. One is sitting around doing nothing because the conversation they were in suddenly stopped and someone ended the surrounding plot like it was pushed off a 90 degree cliff. The last has been waiting for a response for... what, a week now? Because somehow I get lost in nothingness since apparently only two or three of us check for responses starting from our latest post. Things are so boring or so passed by because of schedule differences that I only ever read what's in response to me, totally new, or actually interesting because something of weight is going on. All tension is gone and every single character knows it, and attempts to add tension are waved off because, honestly, there's no way to add tension. So even in the middle of something big, we'll have characters having meaningless conversations or fishing or bowling or some other thing that would never get screentime in any entertainment medium that wasn't being made at a slower rate than it's source material. I'm not even saying get rid of it, because this
is meant to be their lives, but we don't show them fucking going to the bathroom, so why are we showing them do things that don't matter as if they do matter when they have just as much impact as taking a piss? Then I get bored because why bother reading that when it's just going to bore me away from wanting to rp, so I have to skip huge chunks of IC, and when I finally get caught up on stuff that has impact it's to find out that someone cut off whatever my characters were involved in or simply ignored that I even made a post. It's boring and futile to even post at this rate. I don't want to write a book about something and just have people sit down and ride around with it, I want to make something with them like a fucking roleplay. I don't want to have to make thirty posts describing an area just to get people to do something when it used to be that we'd make them ourselves so we
could do something, because we wanted to do something as our chars for our chars rather than just to progress "writer of the week's" story. I wrote up these huge plots of multiple possibilities so I could see what people do with the ideas and be surprised by what the outcome is, and they've resulted in a total lack of movement and momentum, a show of lack of initiative, and wasted characters respectively. It's pathetic, it's horrible, and it's degrading to the characters and to the brain cells used to come up with the ideas and store them as memories and all the other processes that occur because of thinking. It's fucking depressing, and it doesn't help the regrowing mentality that I have no reason to be here nor are wanted here. I can't even be here to help when people need or want help. It's just fucking depressing.
