THE FOURTH WALL - It's important, bitch

Let's talk about this thing we call the fourth wall, ladies and germs.

Common throughout most media, the fourth wall exists to separate the fantastic from reality. It's the indelible boundary between the pretend and the truth, and it's an infallible source. It's a construct both necessary and instinctive. Since the dawn of a person's ability to conceive fantasy, it's there. Granted, as children, it's a malleable thing, but as we age it becomes the solid barrier it's supposed to be.

There are few instances where "breaking the fourth wall" makes any kind of sense. Deadpool, the Marvel Comics character, is a notorious breaker of walls; in fact, it was one of his schticks. The film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is another example of the loose adherence of fourth wallness. Eddie Murphy is also a culprit in several of his earlier films.

What makes these examples acceptable is that it's used sporadically, and artistically. It's not jarring; rather it can add to the entertainment value of the particular source. Would "Ferris Bueller" be as funny, if Matthew Broderick didn't directly address the audience? I doubt it. He takes us from a group of passive observers, to active tag-alongs in his adventures. It creates a firm emotional bond with the character, which in turn creates a more enjoyable movie experience.

He can get away with it. And he does.

But in role playing, busting through the fourth wall is generally bad fucking etiquette. Its primary purpose in RP is to distinguish between In-Character and Out-of-Character interactions. It keeps confidential character information unknown until certain criterion are met. It allows people to play something anathema to themselves in a safe environment. It's also supposed to keep drama at bay.

Running into a person who doesn't have a firm concept of the separation of IC and OOC is a chore, and generally an awful experience. He is the person who thinks his character is God's gift, so how dare you react poorly to his boorish personality. She is the player who thinks her character is the hottest, most attractive woman in the world, so therefore you must be completely fucked-up to not fall ass-over-tea kettle in love with her. These are players who are experiencing life vicariously through their pretendy fun-times extracurricular hobby, and are instead treating it as SO IMPORTANT rather than the hobby it's supposed to be.

They are people who will make it their personal goal to try and explode into drama if you don't agree on their characters. Some of these cuntweasels will go so far as to start shit OOC simply to get back at you. Their ability to discern the walls between reality and fiction are so distorted, they should not actually be role playing. I may not be a psychologist, but I know that it is not a sane person who blurs the lines between what's real and what isn't.

Through their inability to accept the fourth wall and behave maturely, they create a swarm of drama that is difficult to defuse. Part of that is that they feel justified in taking their hurt feelings out on other people, simply because they said something insulting about the character, or didn't give it the respect they think it deserves, or they were laughed out of a scene for being utterly ridiculous. So, they will now spend precious time concocting schemes, rumor milling, and basically behaving like a douchenozzle because they feel slighted.

Had said player been of a stable mindset, and mature personality, any discrepancies could be civilly addressed with the other party. Misunderstandings could be cleared, and everyone could go back to enjoying the game. Unfortunately, the faulty wiring in the headmeat of the player has made such considerate methods of problem-solving moot. Nothing but the utter ruination of the offending party will salve the injured player's ego. And really, is it worth it?

These people make role playing tedious and terrible. They can exist wherever role playing can happen -- table top, LARP, MMORPGs, and their abilities to behave poorly are not subject to which medium it comes in. Real-life acquaintances can be just as prone to fuckassery as internet ones; the only leg-up the internet ones have are the inherent caveats of anonymity the internet has. That, for some astounding reason, seems to really bring out the worst in people.

It's all right to occasionally get upset if something negative happens in play. The thing that matters is how you handle it. The majority of the time, simply talking to the other player will clear up problems. If feelings are so sour so as to make that impossible at the time, find a neutral third party to help mediate the issue, or take a few days to chill out. Taking it to extremes, though, is never the answer. And exploding into a drama ball that shames teenage girls in its sheer stupidity is never going to solve the problems. It's just going to cause more of them.

And all the other people, who are considerate enough to uphold the fourth wall, will think you're nothing more than some gibbering moron who likely still lives with your parents and never really grew up. So, fourth wall breakers, grow the fuck up, or get some goddamn help. No one wants to play with someone who can't separate what happens to their fictional persona, and what happens in real life.

DiD(iD) - Obnoxious habits of female characters

As a female gamer, few things gall me as much as watching a female character parade around like some Disney Princess. You know the type -- pretty, talented, and ultimately just a victim. She talks the talk, but when it comes right down to it, she's bound and gagged and in desperate need of a rescue.

Thus the tag "Damsel in Distress," or as I like to call them, "DiD"s. Your typical DiD is a younger woman, either late teens or early 20s, who seems fairly run of the mill. She may be powered, she may be normal, she may have some kind of paranormal talents. She may be a Mary Sue (a topic for another time), but one thing for sure about this character, she gets into trouble too damn easy.

She may simply be at a club, chatting with people when suddenly --! Kidnapping. The perp changes dependent on the genre of RP, but it's generally a dude, and he's usually the sort who like pretending he's a dominant. The DiD goes along with it. What choice does she have? (Yet another topic for another time.)

She'll get rescued, eventually, and everything will return to normal. Until the same sort of situation crops up again. And again. And again.

Mind you, the distress could also be any number of things, aside from kidnapping. She could be a super-empath, stuck feeling all the awful things around her. She could be a scrappy fighter who just has the worst luck in the world and forever loses. The ground point is that she needs to be rescued from whatever scrape she gets herself into, and after a few instances, it gets to be fucking annoying.

One would assume that in our modern feminist-powered environment, players would like to gallivant with a female character who can get herself out of trouble. What gives with the constant victimization?

It could be the attention it garners the character. I'd say that takes main stage, given the proclivity of distresses said damsel immerses herself in.

What's worse than a DiD? The DiD(iD) -- the Damsel in Distress (in Disguise). These sorts you see just as much, and they're just as cloying. They give all the impressions of being an empowered woman who can handle herself, but she's really not. At the end of the day, for all her super powers or paramilitary training, she's going to get captured and require a rescue. She talks the talk, and she walks it, but then she trips onto her ass and stares imploringly at her significant other to come do the daring-dos and make with the saving.

There is only one character I can think of who can give off the DiD vibe, and not be totally obnoxious. This (dubious) honor belongs to Empowered, of Adam Warren's graphic novel series of the same name (find it at your local comic store, or other purveyors of illustrated awesome).

I love Emp. I enjoy this series with all the girly delight that can come from the satirical adventures of a girl who just wanted to be a superhero. The origins of the character may be nefarious (she began life as a series of bondage pin-ups for a client Warren was working for), but over the course of the books, Warren has turned her into more than just a DiD.

Emp is, at the end of the day, just a normal young woman. Her powers, when they function, come from her woefully delicate super-suit. One of the running gags is that the thing can tear at the tiniest provocation. When it's intact, though, it grants her several powers that qualify her as super. 

As you can see from the picture above, she gets tied up a lot. It's part of the charm of the series. But didn't you just ramble for several paragraphs about how much you hate damsels in distress? Yeah, I did. The difference here, between Emp and other frequently-captured heroines, is that Emp grows out of it. Through her own ingenuity and intelligence, she can find ways out. And she continues to have the pluck to put on her super-suit (which often in the cause of her frequent bindings) and fight the good fight. 

Emp is a fantastic character because she is realistic (inasmuch as one can be in a comic book), and her situations are not based on the want of attention. She is a neophyte superhero trying her very damnedest to make it in a world full of Sistah Spookies and Major Havocs and Willy Petes. She is a fettered heroine who finds a way to succeed, when all the odds are stacked against her.

While the role-playing world may teem with DiD(iD)s, we can only hope that the future brings fewer of them. That for every so-called plucky heroine who can't seem to keep her fucking mouth shut and gets herself into clinches she can't get herself out of, there will be women who don't let that sort of shit deter them.

Hopefully, for every stupid bitch who Disney Princesses her way through her character life-span, we can get some balls-out chicks who rescue themselves, and likely the male protagonist. Like so:

ACCENTS - Do your damn research

One thing you'll see consistently throughout this blog is my (pressing) insisting that people who create characters to Do Their Research. That'll be a separate post; today I wanted to poke at something that's been bugging me for the past few days.

TOO MANY PEOPLE USE/WRITE SHITTY ACCENTS.

I understand that attaching an accent to your character brings more life and depth to him, but for the love of God, spend a few minutes digging through YouTube or something to listen to what they sound like. There is nothing more grating than listening to someone butcher a Cockney accent, or type out a terrible bastardization of a German accent.

British accents abound, and in visual media, producing them appropriately can be a challenge to people who don't actually speak with one. To the American public, the accents from over the Pond are charming and "cute" (see the film "Love Actually" for the tongue-in-cheek example). We think of cool characters like John Constantine, or Brad Pitt's Pikey from "Snatch." Michael Caine, James Bond, Wee Hughie; the list abounds with real-life and fictional examples of British accents in all their colors and facets. And, like an uncouth Yank, I'm including all the areas of the Isles -- Scotland, Ireland and Wales. It's easier to type, although lumping them all together is a grievous sin and would get me a sound beating.

In role-play, the players in table-top and LARP games who abuse foreign accents and few and far between, so I can't really pick at them. But in written RP, they are proliferate and often loud eyesores. If you've spent any time in a forum, or online game, I can bet you dollars to donuts you've seen them. The apostrophe-happy, clipped consonant-wielding Anglophiles who lose whatever it is they're trying to convey in a string of broken sentences. They think they're hip. They're obviously busting out the South End and "keeping it real."

You want to hit them with a two by four. That's okay, I do too, don't worry about it.

I'm not saying everyone who types with an accent is committing sins against humanity; there are the people who Do Their Research, and take the time to understand what it is they're trying to sound like. They've listened to Catherine Zeta-Jones, or Daniel Craig, and they know where to clip their words. They are judicious with their apostrophes, and take into account the other person they're playing with may not have English as their primary spoken language.

But German accents, they seem to get dragged through the mud and abused like gingers left and right. German accents are cool, too -- look at Hans Landa. Nazi, psychopath, but he sounds awesome. And it's that awesome that suggests to people that, they too, could be cool with a German accent. What they don't pick up, however, is the appropriate way of utilizing that accent.

It's a particular pet peeve of mine because I took German for so many years (high school and college). I may not fluently speak the language, but I know enough to know when people are taking a cudgel to it. And GOOD SWEET JESUS, is that shit irritating!

For example -- I have run across two players in "City of Heroes" (you'll see that game bandied about a lot, too) who use German accents for their characters, and every time I see it, I want to scream at them. It's as if they've never, ever bothered to listen to a German native speaking English. They've never seen the newer "Inglorious Basterds," or even "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." They have taken what they assume is the legitimate accent, and trashed it all to fuck.

To wit, they use "du" in place of "you". NOT KNOWING THAT THE PRONOUN GOES THROUGH CHANGES DEPENDING ON TENSE. But no, no. Every fucking time, it's "du this", and "du that", never once a "dich" or "dir". Never mind the formal you, or the plurals, or anything.

Do you know how long it took to me to go to my favorite German language educational site (dict.leo.org), and look up the German versions of "you"? About FIVE SECONDS. There are EIGHT versions of "you".

Let's not delve into how they spell words they want to make sound like they're being pronounced by someone who's primary language is of the Germanic family. I don't have any examples on hand, and I would rather not trouble you all with the travesty.

You know one really easy way to give your character a German accent? Replace your V sounds with W. Words like "wall" become "vall," and "would" becomes "vould". There. German accent, and it sounds good, AND you're not offending anyone you're playing with. It's correct, not a bitch to carry out, and you still get the bennies for trying to give your character some interesting quirk.

Other offenders abuse Russian and French accents. They don't seem to realize that the Russian language, like several others, don't have the same "subject-verb-adjective" structure that English does. My favorite go-to for accurate Russian accents in the film "Eastern Promises", as it has several non-Russian actors executing appropriate accents. Hell, Viggo Mortensen reportedly went to the region in Siberia his character came from, just to listen to what the accent was like. Mickey Rourke spent time working on his accent for "Iron Man 2", and he sounded good, right?

For French, find anything with Jean Reno. Aside from being an excellent actor, he's generally speaking in French-accented English.

Take fifteen fucking minutes out of your day, hit up YouTube, and find the appropriate goddamn accents. Here, let me even make it that much fucking easier for people:

THE GERMAN ACCENT, as provided by Christoph Waltz

THE RUSSIAN ACCENT, as given by Vincent Cassel and Viggo Mortensen

THE FRENCH ACCENT, given by Kevin Kline

INTRO - Sort of

You may or may not know who I am. I'm all right with that. The main purpose of this little corner of the internet is to allot me my soapbox of rage regarding all things role play.

In the context of this blog, it relates to events of table-top, live-action, and online mediums, whether they be forum, journal, or massively-multiplayer based.

And no, it's not the sexual fetish version of role-playing. I'm sure there's plenty of blogs on that particular subject already. I'd be a flailing Muppet of futility on that topic anyway, so it's best it remains a nugget of mystery.

What makes me a voice of anger?, some may ask. That's fucking easy enough to answer -- and do get accustomed to profanity, it'll happen a lot. I'm raising my poster board sign of protest because I'm old, set in my ways, and of the opinion that there are just some people who shouldn't RP. People can always get better, sure, but they seem steadfastly determined to sit in their pile of rot and belch out awful RP.

You don't have to agree, or like, or support anything I say. I'm just hoping that in the course of events, you the reader may see something and commiserate. Given my target audience are role-players, I'm sure they've run across the same issues with the same sorts of people.

That being said, sit back and enjoy my ramblings. Or not.