Moderating A Hate Blog May, In Fact, Be The Key To Conflict

dr0psgum: Do you even know the first thing about rping!! ٩(๑`^´๑)۶

dr0psgum: First of all at least people have fun with my characters!! You just make the same one over and over again!! Brooding edgy quiet guys with these way too complex backstories!!
TowersFall: not fucking true
TowersFall: maxwells an intellectual whos written volumes on the meaning of life after his village was razed by dragons as a child
TowersFall: and hodrice keeps people at a distance after his sister was kidnapped by goblins when he was younger and he had to watch his country form a peace treaty with them
TowersFall: THEN you have borin who steals to survive and has to trust only himself because he grew up in a thieves guild in a poor displaced nation
dropsgum: THOSE ARE THE SAME DAMN CHARACTER TROPES YOU MORON!!! At least my cute girls have variety!! (づ ò ___ ó )づ ┻━┻
TowersFall: oh be QUIET
dropsgum: NO U
TowersFall: NO U

I slammed on my keyboard as my blood pressure grew. How the hell did my night turn out like this?

…Ughhhh, don’t make me remember!

—-

I knew writing better than any of my peers—tragedy was the cornerstone of quality, through and through. Years of consuming only the most mature, highly-rated works taught me the ins and outs on making an engaging character. Truly, is there anything else more unique in setting and character than what anime and manga provide you?

If I were to describe myself like I would my well-received original characters, I would begin with my name, my age, and my setting. Augustín Castro (Screen name: TowersFall), 16, average high school student by day, and writing maestro by evening.

My appearance was average—messy light brown hair cut above my ears, tanned brown skin and hazel eyes combined with a white shirt and black slacks. Sometimes this varied, but I got a lot of the same clothes as a gift for Christmas, and I never cared enough about my looks to bother varying my wardrobe. It’s not as if all my characters had alternate outfits for every day. Sometimes I wished I had the money to commission artists online for that, but like hell am I gonna commit myself to minimum wage labor for that.

Talking about my general personality and interests would be the last step. That’d easy: blunt, honest, real, talented, creative: like a rainbow of inspirations always coming out of my ears. There’s also quotes and visual references, maybe even fun facts, but that’d make no sense considering I’m talking about me, and I’m not that much of a weirdo to narrate my entire life into a roleplay application.

Yes, roleplay. No, not that kind of roleplay. Don’t people realize that role play are the first two words in RPG? Everyone’s played an RPG at some point, so they can’t fucking judge. RP has been a hobby of mine for nearly as long as watching anime has, when I got tired of just viewing those worlds from afar. I wanted to write those stories myself, and so I got my start doing shitty one-liner RP with twelve-year-olds on anime fan sites before those died out faster than a near-extinct species. Throwing unpunctuated singular dialogue lines back and forth soon became beyond me, so instead of pulling from existing characters, I began to make my own.Finally, years later, my talent had been recognized. I had dozens of original characters I’d engineered, inspired by the mature, brooding anti-heroes I was drawn to. Those that straddled the line between good and evil, drew people in with their hidden charisma and relentlessly pursued their goals no matter the cost. 

My current tromping grounds were through a chat client called Eclipse, in which someone could make Groups that were like IRC chat rooms, except with various options to create multiple chat rooms for different topics in one Group, and even voice calls that could host dozens of people. There was also a robust private messaging system that made it prime for organizing closed RP Groups and one-on-one RPs as long as you knew someone’s username.

I frequented a Group called Survival Game RPers United with a few hundred users, dedicated to advertising various survival game themed roleplays with their own rules and standards. Some allowed for random character death and wanted quicker, shorter responses, while others were focused on planned emotional deaths and an emphasis on long-term character development. It was here that I met RequiemsLastLaugh, an amazing long-form writer that I respected for his detailed, tragic character backstories that made you invested in them no matter the kind of person they were.

A couple weeks ago, he asked me to help him with a personal project of his.

It was a blog passed around on Survival Game RPers United called ratethischaracterorelse, where he provided critique on roleplay applications and writing samples submitted through email to him. All critique and submissions were public—his mods even accepted other people’s characters without permission, and he was known to be brutal with his words. Still, it was critique, and I admired the mission to give everyone a place to improve—so when he offered me a writing position on his blog to offset the workload, I knew it was my destiny to take it. To join the elites of my society and prove my worth.

And so, I spent this cold March evening holed up in my room. My space heater was cranked to the max and pointed at my desk, where my PC was. I leaned closer towards my monitor and took my time scrolling through the massive backlog Requiem had. My room, contrary to my interests, was simple: a few posters, my bed, a shelf for some books and manga I had, and a closet filled with my clothes on hangers. I never cared much for glorified visual distractions when all I ever needed was right in front of me.

Finally, I found my first target, a character named Emerald: already a few flaws stuck out, like seeing dog poop on an otherwise clean sidewalk. Smelly, in your face, and demanding recompense for the offense their very existence brings in

For one, the reference was excellent, clearly this RPer was a good artist and not a good writer. The art was a crisp, anime-styled blonde girl with fair skin and purple eyes with hearts in them. Points docked—no one in real life looks like this. Her dress was black lolita style with far more frills than I’d ever seen on anything, with platform-laced white boots that seemed all but impossible to take off and on casually, especially since this character was submitted to a jungle adventure style survival RP.

This was too easy—critique the appearance not fitting the setting, the unrealistic character design, and move on. The rest of the flaws were much heavier—too little description, simplistic traits—that I hardly needed to spend more than twenty minutes on it.

The last, most egregious flaw took up half of the review: the backstory. The cornerstone of your character, the most relevant aspect of them. The backstory made up the building blocks of your original character, or OC for short, and so you had to make sure you put as much thought and detail into it as you could.

Hers was two sentences long. One about her normal life, one about her Girl Scouts time lending to her survival skills.

My fingers moved faster than my brain did. My valid critique focused on her complete lack of substance along with some tips on how to add depth before I added my username at the end and posted it on the blog. It felt good to know I contributed to a project run by someone I admired—for the twenty minutes it lasted, it was true bliss.

That is, until the creator of the character messaged me.