Sunday, October 19, 2008

Sex and the Sue

The Obligatory Scene

Sex can make role playing more fun or a whole lot worse depending on how it’s done. There are so many ways it can go wrong because it seems so innocent if it’s just words on a screen. If you care about your character, there are some situations where sex can completely suck the fun out logging into an rpg.

I Was Made to Love You

Some characters are designed for sex. The entire point of their creation is to fuck any one they come in contact with, be it male, female or whatever. When talking about the mock Harry Potter Houses I mentioned Tootsietramps and these are the characters I mean. There’s nothing wrong with this type unless they pair up with sex partners who want more from a storyline than just sex.

I haven’t had any good experiences with these types. I always feel like Clint Eastwood in the movie "Play Misty for Me." When my characters bump uglies with a character who’s entire being is based on sex, I try to have a plot someplace else and I’m chased down by this character and author alike. By then she’s become a vicious psycho who wants me to hold her and never let her go.

I wish I had something nice to say but I’ve never had a good experience with this character. They don’t seem to believe in healthy sex lives. Apparently it’s not fun for them unless they get to cry, hug your leg and throw tantrums because they aren’t currently fucking.

Abuse, Rape and Molestation. Oh My.

I used to visit an rpg based in a chatroom. Stories were often fast, furious and you really had to work hard to make people notice you because players were jumping in and out of the chatroom quickly. When the chatroom was just starting out it was much easier to have the entire place together in one single plot for an hour or two and it was lots of fun.

Then came the characters who would enter the chatroom and promptly scream, "I’VE BEEN RAPED!" These were always damsel-in-distress characters who wanted other characters to hunt down the rapists and then teach the damsel how to love again. The last time I was there, five different damsels did this in the span of an hour and all stories halted because they wouldn’t shut up until you dealt with them.

I mentioned that Kawaii characters often seek out sex because they’ve experienced some horrible sexual trauma as a child. They never mature into adults no matter how old they get to be but they like to replay that abuse with anyone they come in contact with. Many characters that have had horrific childhoods will do this and I guess the appeal is getting other characters to try and fix the damaged one. This is where terms like hurt/comfort and whumping come from because it’s all too common for a Sue to use an atrocious event that is contrived to tug at the heartstrings to be the center of attention.

Mothers and Sues

I hate seeing pregnant women or babies in rpgs. If a Sue can’t get enough attention as one character, why not Sue for two?

Maybe I’m being negative but I’ve never seen this scenario work. Sues will gets themselves knocked up and then pop out kids at an alarming rate just to amp up the drama. Seriously, in several rpgs I’ve been in, conception and birth have happened all in the very same thread and it doesn’t matter if the kid has some wacky demon DNA or is a normal, human baby.

Babies are nothing more than Sue pawns. Suethors love to create situations where the baby is lost, stolen or in some sort of danger. The baby is an extension of the Sue and it gives her a chance to run around and scream, "WHERE’S MY BABY???," "THAT GUY TOOK MY BABY!!!," or "MY BABY IS TRAPPED IN A CAVE IN!!! WON’T ANYONE HELP ME?" Before I got wise to this practice, a Suethor once asked me to have my character kidnap her baby. I agreed to it, hated every bit of that storyline and had to fight her to take the baby back she was busy enjoying all the drama it was affording her. I will never do that again.

Perv Sues

Of course perverts join role playing games. There was once an episode of To Catch a Predator where a perv was being dragged from a house in handcuffs and he was claiming that he was only role playing. Many sickos troll role playing games looking for ways to act on their sexual fantasies. They figure if they are online, they aren’t actually doing anything wrong even if they are not even concerned with old the other players are.

I was once in a Buffy rpg where a player joined as Oz, the werewolf. For a while he seemed fine even though he was writing an awful lot of scenes for himself only. He said that a gypsy cursed him and forced him to turn into a werewolf and stay that way AND, if that weren’t bad enough, he was made to grow to 10 times his size. He started powerplaying, picking up other unwilling characters and rubbing them on his giant genitals.

As a collective rpg community we all stood up against this and he had no idea what the problem was. He assumed it was just because he didn’t ask first but he was banned, his posts were deleted and we all went on as if that had never happened.

Cigarette?

If you choose to let your character have sex, make sure the person you’re role playing with has the same outcome in mind that you do. Is the sex part of the plot or just a cheap thrill? Are you involved with someone who isn’t really interested in what you want or do they just want to use you to scratch their balls?

Role playing involves dealing with lots of selfish people and sex is just one of those issues that can make it better or worse depending on what it’s purpose is. Figure out what you want and make it clear to your partner how much you’re willing to do. If you both can’t agree, don’t go through with it.

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