Big Schoolhive Rumpus Respite

A Guide to Constructive Criticism of a Roleplayer’s Depiction of a Specific Canon Character

First, you want to ask yourself a couple of questions.

Are they AU?
If yes, STOP.
Stop what you are doing right now and think about what you want to criticize.
If they are doing something that is impossible in canon, turn and walk away.
They’re AU.
Alternate Universe.
Whatever they do is none of your business.
A lot of people who RP here have already broken canon from the moment they made their RP blog, because they’ve aged them up to young adults, or even further.
That automatically makes it hypocritical for you to run around and bitch at people for doing something in AU, like pregnant trolls. They’ve altered the universe to allow troll pregnancies, just as you’ve altered the universe to allow for smut, or whatever other reasons you may have for aging up your character.

Second, take a minute to go over what’s canon and what isn’t.
This shouldn’t even need to be said, but unfortunately, it does.
Take for example, Beta!Bro Strider.
We do not know a single damned thing about his personality.
All we saw him do in canon was take care of Dave and kick ass.
He never spoke.
Dave didn’t talk much about him.

Pretty much every Bro Strider RPer will be going off their own personal headcanons, or a variation of Dirk’s personality.

There is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. If you don’t like the way one person portrays a character with little to no canon information, you can just as easily find another that will fit your headcanons.

Third, ask yourself why you give a shit. Are you annoyed, or do you want to actually help out?
If you’re annoyed, stop. Right there.
Dead in your tracks.
Drop it, hit unfollow, tumblrsavior their url if they have to.
There’s no need to potentially stir up drama. If you’re annoyed, you’re going to come off annoyed. They’re going to get annoyed. Vicious cycle.

Don’t send them an ask.
Don’t post anything.
Don’t submit anything.

And please, for the love of christ—
DO.
NOT.
VAGUEBLOG.

Insert huge section repeating those words over and over to a point of being obnoxious with alternating styles of text being the only variation from one line to another.

Vagueblogging is, for one, incredibly rude.
Two, it will either be specific enough that your passive aggression will be obvious to your “target” OR
if you’re going to argue “it wasn’t to anyone specific”
you’re going to end up with several people thinking you’re targeting them.

I can’t stand going through my dash and seing vagueblogging. It’s inconsiderate, it doesn’t help anyone, and it only adds to irritation.

Don’t vagueblog.

Now.
If you genuinely want to be helpful, here’s what you need to do.

After separating canon from headcanon, go to their inbox and message them— OFF anon— and ask if they’d like some constructive criticism.

Here’s why I say OFF anon.

Being embarrassed in a public forum because you’ve been doing a character wrong for an extensive amount of time is, to be blunt, really shitty.
It sucks, and it leads to people being defensive to save face.

Give them the option of talking this out PRIVATELY.

DON’T BE RUDE.

Don’t say you suck, you’re shitty, wow you’re bad, you’re awful—
STOP.
No.

Noone is going to listen to you if you start off that way.

You might want to work on this, this isn’t canon, I feel like you could do less of this, so on, so forth.

Criticize them in a way that is respectable and friendly. The point is to help them improve, not make them feel embarrassed.

If you cannot be respectable—

Unfollow.
Tumblrsavior.
Ignore.

There are probably a dozen other things in your life you could be wasting negative energy on besides how someone RPs a goddamned character with a canon as twisted and loopy as a fucking silly straw.

The time has come for me to bid this blog a fond farewell. I am, quite frankly, at a loss as of what to do with it anymore. Some of the optimism I had when I began it has faded and it’s become something of a chore. I’ve found new avenues that I’m exploring within the fandom and it is really difficult for me to work up the gumption to work on BSRR. It had a good six month run and I am proud of that. I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do which was to help people. I’d like to thank all of you for following it. I’m going to leave it up so that the articles may still be read by you or anyone else who happens to find them. Cheers to the future and may we all continue to have fun in our roleplaying shenanigans.

i am sorry. my fandom love is on hold for tonight. My friend is dying.

infinitymax:

rukawagf:

If everyone donates $5 to chibi.coco@gmail.com or $10…. she can have a surgery and live.

The goal is $30,000.

This is an EMERGENCY and she’ll need the money ASAP (like possibly even THIS WEEKEND ASAP)

I apologize for the spam but to me it’s important.

More information on why she needs the money is here.

If you can’t donate, please help signal boost this guys. Please help her.

Reblogging this over here because it has more followers and this is really important. Please help if you can guys.

Homestuck Roleplaying and You: A Beginner’s Guide Part Two

Dreamwidth is a website originally intended for blogging in “journals”. To roleplay on Dreamwidth, you need to create an account (a “journal”), which should have a clever username fitting the character, and upload a set of “icons”, one of which accompanies each post to show the character’s current expression. You can’t really just post to your journal to get roleplay like on Tumblr, either. You generally post to some “community”. There are three main kinds: musebox, dressing room, and game. To get into a musebox you need to know a friend who has one, or make one yourself. They are for private plotlines and fooling around among people whom you know personally. Dressing rooms are communities where anyone can post and get responses. Homestuck is rather short on them: http://homestucking.dreamwidth.org/profile exists, but is slow. Games are very serious and very active roleplaying groups with rich plots and character relationship development, but you have to submit a rigorous application (or “app”) for your character. The most recent entry here will have a list of games who are looking for your characters: http://app-this-plz.dreamwidth.org.

Fortunately, all these hoops to jump through and elaborate structures means that the people who actually bother to roleplay here are generally much more serious. Most roleplay is done in a narrative style, or an action style that, though strange and informal in its tone, is usually almost as detailed as proper narrative, with the advantage of replies commonly coming very quickly resulting in a great deal of plot progress being made in a relatively short amount of time. The most common form of this is using [small] tags around square brackets. An example: http://singularityrpg.dreamwidth.org/464069.html. It should also be noted that it is commonly expected for you to know HTML to be able to render your character’s speech in colored courier, especially when it is known in-character that they are instant-messaging. Fortunately, http://puppetfetishist.livejournal.com/4071.html will help you out.

Some of you may have been under the impression that this would be about Livejournal. For complex reasons, there has recently been an incident that caused over 90% of the roleplayers on Livejournal to leave the site for Dreamwidth. A small part of the original community remains there; these people are generally slightly less serious than the Dreamwidth crowd, but not by much. There is also another website similar to these called Insanejournal with slightly different, better statistics and a smaller userbase.

MSPARP: I’m bringing this site up as a place to keep an eye on as it rises in popularity. Earlier today I saw it described as being Trollmegle and Pesterchum’s baby which is an incredibly accurate description.

Features:

Msparp is still an anonymous and randomized place for roleplaying. Unlike Trollmegle you are given the character’s Trolltag or Chumhandle. It also lacks a disconnect button if you wish to stop chatting with whoever you were paired with.

It features all twelve trolls, the beta kids, and Doc Scratch. You are also given the choice of being anon or picking an original character. If you have selected a canon character from the lost of those available it gives you a brief rundown of their Trolltag/chumhandle, text color, and example of how they type, and a brief description of their quirk.

Users may also limit the selection of who they want to interact with by selecting or deselecting certain characters from a list. This will block you from connecting to those characters. Fair warning though, using this feature while the site is still very young is something I wouldn’t recommend. It will lessen your chances of connecting to anyone.

One of the things I like about msparp is that it not only shows you how many people are using it at the time but also how many are searching and already chatting.

There are a few slight connectivity issues but they’re manageable and it reconnects you back to your partner quickly which is very nice. You may also be stuck waiting a while to connect to someone if there aren’t a lot of people searching at that particular moment.

Homestuck Roleplaying and You: A Beginner’s Guide Part One

Putting this under a read more break because it’s quite long.