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Pet peeves when people play something without personal experience


omgwes
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So, I just had a conversation with one of my RP buddies the other day. We talked about how it was hard for him to get used to writing a female again after playing men for so long. He noted he wanted to avoid playing the stereotypical male-playing-female where the girl was seen as a sex object. I asked whether I was at all inaccurate or stereotypical in my portrayal of men, since I am female and play mostly males. I also just started playing my first Haitian-American character and I'm caucasian and have been trying to respect the culture via research and learning. I have a friend who RPs who is Haitian and willing to help look over my application. I also started playing my first Indian character and have been doing research on that, and getting help from one of our RPers who spent a few years living there. I feel like this has really improved my writing, but my ignorance might shine through sometimes.

 

Long story short, this conversation coupled by a lot of playing out of my comfort zone led me down a rabbit hole of thought, which I'll pass on to you... What pet peeves do you have about the way someone may portray a certain character, especially one they may attempt to play when they have no experience? Do you even think there are stereotypes or patterns to this kind of thing? Here, I'll start:

 

1) Police officers with no research into what the job entails, the criminal law in that state, etc. This applies to most specialized or professional jobs. 

2) Women playing men that are constantly over-romanticized as though they walked out of a romance novel and onto the page. There's no awkward sex scenes, they're athletic and talented at all things, and sometimes they are the bad boy a woman can change. 

3) Men playing women that are over-sexualized or objectified with very bland personalities. 

 

Obviously every RPer is different and I don't judge anyone for branching out and trying to play outside their experience, with full realization that sometimes they get it wrong. I know I do. But, I'd like this discussion as a way to learn, to avoid the pitfalls many may be making, to be more aware so that I and maybe others trying something new can improve. Thanks!!

Edited by omgwes
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Man, I love researching for new characters that I might be unfamiliar with. That's half the fun in my opinion!

 

I think a big thing that people forget when portraying a sex/nationality/whatever they aren't is that the character they are playing is still people. There aren't many differences between men and women, for example, when you boil it all down to it's basics. 

 

I'm with you on the cop thing. My bio parents were cops. My boyfriend is a correction's officer. I know that side of the legal system enough to roll my eyes at prison and cop shows. 

 

I have so many of these... I'm going to have to remember them all... I will come back to this one.

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This is an interesting topic!  I think anyone can write any character as long as they do the proper research and listen to people who do have that personal experience.

 

For me, it bugs me when people don't do their research about mental illness and write unrealistic illnesses.  It happens less with anxiety or depression, but happens pretty frequently with schizophrenia (ignoring the paranoia aspects and ignoring that visual hallucinations are rarer than auditory ones and just playing a "crazy" character who talks to themselves) and illnesses like dissociative identity disorder, which are now more commonly believed to be a combination of other disorders and illnesses, but are often played as a character with "multiple personalities" who's "crazy" and unaware of / doesn't remember the other personalities at all.

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Honestly, at this point in my RP career my biggest peeve is people being ultra knit-picky about stuff that doesn't matter. The longer I role play, the more I've come to realize that a lot of those annoying things are actually kind of reasonable when you break them down, or just not worth the time being irritated about. 

 

For example: 

 

  • In regards to cops - no one actually wants a highly accurate portrayal here. High accuracy, with certain professions, results in tedious and boring reads. I play my law enforcement characters as realistically as possible for the most part, but there are corners I cut and occasional unrealistic stretches made just because, trust me, nobody wants to have to slog through the real crap. Just to illustrate - for a one episode airing of COPS, the camera crew has to follow the three officers/teams in question for weeks at a time just to obtain enough footage to fill in 30 minutes and about 1/3 - often more - of that is just the officers waiting for something to happen. This is why cop shows and the like aren't portrayed ultra-realistically; because real cops do a lot of work, and they work hard, but most of it isn't exciting stuff. They deal with a lot of crap. The same goes for a lot of specialized professions. 
  • As for how female playing male and vice versa characters can look, people writing those characters are usually looking for smut or idealized romance; and those are the sorts of characters that attract that kind of threading. If that's what they're looking for, good on them. I'm not interested in that, so rather than get peeved about it I'm just not going to engage those characters much. 

When it comes to portraying ethnic characters, I only find it annoying when the writer is obviously relying on blatant, over the top and/or outdated stereotypes. It's pretty easy to tell when someone has done their homework vs are just blowing it all out their ass. Its okay to make mistakes here and there, and lets be real most people that aren't from said ethnicity/nationality/religion probably can't tell anyway. It's more important that the writer is branching out and expanding their horizons. 

 

I do get irked by romanticizing mental illness in characters. It is one thing to attempt to give a real go at portraying a psychological abnormality and falling flat - because lets face it, psychology is a soft science at best and even PhDs in the field can't agree on what constitutes psychological normalcy - but simply using an outrageously inaccurate portrayal to make a character "interesting" or whatever does bug me a little. That said, it also annoys me when people who only have what I call  "Wikipedia knowledge" of psychological disorders are critical of players who earnestly try to make characters with them. 

 

 

Edited by Dragon
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1 hour ago, Sunchance said:

[...]illnesses like dissociative identity disorder, which are now more commonly believed to be a combination of other disorders and illnesses, but are often played as a character with "multiple personalities" who's "crazy" and unaware of / doesn't remember the other personalities at all.

Except, that's roughly what it is. They're down the right pathway, just perhaps a little over-dramatised. I've rarely ever met a DID multiple system that has clear, obvious lines between one personality and another (and yes, many  people with DID never become a system), more often they're fragments of a whole that occasionally express somewhat independently and can alter the general personage of the whole, but this can be exceedingly difficult to express well in a role-play. What they do one day may not be the same thing they do in the same situation the next, and rarely will you find someone with a solid grasp of characterisation that is also comfortable outright messing up that characterisation at the drop of a pin, and can also do so without making the character come off as though they have no personality at all. It is far more easy to portray it as that clear definitive separation, because then you can view this as this is an entire different character and wouldn't do the same thing as this other one. I understand why this sort of portrayal happens more frequently in media. It is also very common for any given personality within a DID system to be unaware of another, thereby not remembering or being unaware of another personality in the system is rather quite normal, and technically correct, albeit there will be at least a few that they are aware of, even if they aren't aware of what they are. This is, however, very dependent on the individual system. Some never are really aware of the rest. Because this is pretty much the point of dissociation - separating, and yes, sometimes the boxes we separate into are very separate.

(Sauce: I am a DID multiple system. So are many of my inner circle of friends. I've seen most of the ways it can manifest.)

 

Personally myself, I would rather someone try, and screw up, than never try at all, and Dragon is right, sometimes you don't want it to be 100% accurate. This almost kind of circles back into, is it better to have correct visibility, or visibility in general? Personally, I'm in the latter camp, so I don't really have any pet peeves, so to say, in relation to this. I feel like messing up is what makes us learn, so you can't learn if you aren't ever wrong. Research is also fun to me, and I know I'm not the only one, it seems to be a commonly shared trait among RPers, at least, maybe a third of them. It may annoy me when someone portrays something in a way that I know is wrong, but I also know they won't learn about it if they don't try, and I recognise that sometimes the 'right' way isn't the fun way, and we're all here to have fun, not agonise over borish details that really don't change the story. The truth is, it's all people, and things like mental illness in particular is very difficult to call black or white, right or wrong, on, because mental illness manifests differently in each person it affects, and unless it's obviously actually a different disorder they're portraying, I don't feel like anyone really has a right to say it's wrong. It's like the DID thing up there - yeah that's rare, but it does happen, and many people think it doesn't because it's just rare. Similar thing with rare drug side-effects, some people get all the rare ones and none of the common ones, some people have side-effects that have never even been heard of for that drug. It's much easier to be annoyed when there are cultural differences that aren't being portrayed right, or at all, but then it's kind of like -shrug-. Why raise a fuss about it? If it's not blatantly offensive or hurting anyone, what's it really matter?

 

There is one exception to this, and it is very specific, but it is the sort of RPer that portrays things offensively incorrectly, KNOWING they are offensively incorrect, because it's more dramatic when it's offensive. You can be dramatic without being a little offensive pissant about it. Ignorance can be remedied. Bigotry is a whole other game.

Edited by Arceus
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I agree with the cop thing 100%. We have RPIT on our site (a branch of the police department that handles supernatural crimes and whatnot) and we've made it clear in the guide that detectives in this unit should have backgrounds as cops. 

 

The one thing that bugs me to no end is when people get medical stuff wrong. Maybe it's because I spent most of my life wanting to be a surgeon so I've always researched stuff and been interested in the medical field. Here's the thing: I'm not going to get all pissy if they get some random thing wrong that's really obscure. My issue comes from things that you can find out in a google search in 30 seconds (like the mortality rate of skin cancer).

 

When it comes to mental illness I just don't like it when the illness defines a character and when there's no growth. I've never denied an application or a concept because of a mental illness, but it irks me when I see the illness being the only thing the character is.

Edited by Samantha
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As weird as it is, because I love to play the plots and personally cut corners myself, Pregnancy/infancy shit between pairs. Pregnancy is unique per person (I should know, my pregnancy story from birth to birth is different let alone from my pregnancies to other peoples pregnancies).

 

A lot of shit I read is "life is normal but bigger belly" which is wholly inaccurate. My first pregnancy I couldn't stand up for more then 10 minutes at a time without getting dizzy (taking showers while sitting in the bath... oh yeah!) my skin always felt like someone was brushing me with a Brillo pad and all I could eat was subway, Mexican and grilled cheese sandwiches and all I wanted to drink was chocolate milk. My second pregnancy a lot more normal, no issues standing up but I did love me Mexican and grilled cheese still.

 

I've got a laundry list of reasons for it (cravings are actually my top peeve for this shit) but I tend to ignore it and just let people fucking play shit. We're all here to have fun.

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11 hours ago, Sunchance said:

This is an interesting topic!  I think anyone can write any character as long as they do the proper research.

 

This is my belief too. Not "write what you know", but "write what you want to learn about." And research. :) Otherwise, keeping to what we know would be very limiting. 

 

I stay away from the part with "personal experience", though, because personal experiences are different. Two people are not the same. One can say "that is wrong, because I am that ethnicity/ I have that illness/ I have grown up in that city/ I have researched and learnt that...." And while it is a legitimate opinion to see the differences between the other's writing and his own experience, that doesn't make the other one wrong, unresearched or never experienced by anyone. 

 

You can be that ethnicity but born in a family with different values and experiences. You can have that illness and manifest in a different way, with different symptoms, still the medical tests confirm you have it and those symptoms are possible but rare/ possible when that is mixed with another condition/ etc. You can have grown up in the same city but in another neighbourhood/ time/ specific conditions. The things the other is describing might have happened indeed three streets farther, but you had no idea.

 

You have researched (and this is especially true for us writing historical fiction) but what you have read in the books you have read, available in your country/ the foreign language of your reading choice, might not coincide with what your writing partner has read in the books available in his country/ in the language he had read (as not many people do read in several languages). And if you join at a table three historians with advanced studies in the field, be ready to bring a boxing refferee after a while... even if you don't provide any alcohol. Contradictions in this field are always plenty, and historical theories. And we can't timetravel to check, we can't resuscitate some bones or practice spiritism to have direct, unbiased answers from several sources from x year, of different political opinions and social castes... 

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2 minutes ago, Elena said:

You have researched (and this is especially true for us writing historical fiction) but what you have read in the books you have read, available in your country/ the foreign language of your reading choice, might not coincide with what your writing partner has read in the books available in his country/ in the language he had read (as not many people do read in several languages). And if you join at a table three historians with advanced studies in the field, be ready to bring a boxing refferee after a while... even if you don't provide any alcohol. Contradictions in this field are always plenty, and historical theories. And we can't timetravel to check, we can't resuscitate some bones or practice spiritism to have direct, unbiased answers from several sources from x year, of different political opinions and social castes... 

 

This is definitely true!  

 

I think if you research and don't rely on stereotypes, you should be fine. And keep researching, learning, etc. 

 

Mistakes happen in writing. Not every character that is written is going to be a perfect portrayal. 

 

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@Gothic, even stereotypes are fine as long as there are a few, not all, and they aren't all which defines the character. I believe in cliches and stereotypes. Often they are so, because... they exist in a great number of cases (more or less).

 

My Irishmen can prefer whiskey, can react violently if insulted of their national origins, can gossip in between themselves in Gaelic. But it is not everything they are, and each one has a specific story, experience, other preferences, etc.

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@Elena I meant stereotypes as a full package and nothing else. Normally only including offensive traits associated with the group. I don't think there is anything wrong with having some stereotypical traits so long as they are fleshed out in other ways. 

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To say somebody is playing a character "Wrong" because their experience is different from you expect it should be is a very counterproductive stance to take when it comes to RPing. Akin to telling a black girl she can't cosplay as Sailor Moon because of her dark skin, or telling a white guy that his favorite Marvel hero can't be Black Panther because his White Privilege is contributing to the misrepresentation* of African culture by glorifying and appropriating cultural stereotypes (*I've noticed that a single piece of fiction in the arena of social media can simultaneously been seen as making breakthroughs in representation and be criticized for "mocking" a culture by portraying it wrong with an overabundance of stereotypes and cliche`s. So in this example I'm using the latter argument, as expressed when some Internet people claim that people not part of their community are forbidden to touch anything relating to it) .

 

As long as you're trying to portray something to the best that YOUR PERSONAL LENS CAN MUSTER (As that's what art and writing are, the lens of the author looking at the world around them) you should be fine.

 

As a funeral director, I would NEVER dream of telling an RPer that their classical Lurch-as-a-Used-car-Salesman approach is wrong (even though I get extremely insulted when people accuse myself and my colleagues of being money-grubbing vultures) because the last thing I want is to stop that person from branching out and exploring new concepts. That, and, well, there IS the rare funeral director that's a jaded jerkward and only cares about their bottom dollar (Its still an exaggeration, but the concept came from somebody's honest perspective and it would be wrong of me to deny that fact). 

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3 hours ago, CovertSphinx said:

As a funeral director, I would NEVER dream of telling an RPer that their classical Lurch-as-a-Used-car-Salesman approach is wrong (even though I get extremely insulted when people accuse myself and my colleagues of being money-grubbing vultures) because the last thing I want is to stop that person from branching out and exploring new concepts.

 

Yeah, if you're doing something completely new for the first time, you are going to suck. When I first started roleplaying, it didn't matter what I wrote, it was 9/10 times trash.

 

A novice has no basis and lacks the tools to navigate what they need to, they're going to take information from anywhere. If you take the example of someone learning an instrument, ears will bleed in the beginning (and without a teacher, they'll be fumbling in the dark most of the time) but the more the person plays/practices and learns about the instrument, the more they mature as a musician. For most people, they mature in their depictions of things as they write and learn more. 

 

If you're not a novice, it's frustrating to watch, though. It's like knowing the answer to a question that someone else is struggling to answer. But I find threads like these helpful in pointing out what to avoid/things to consider. I wish more people would read them :P 

 

I am far less patient with people who should know better (i.e. have the experience that they're writing about). It's those ones that scare me. 

 

 

13 hours ago, Samantha said:

The one thing that bugs me to no end is when people get medical stuff wrong. Maybe it's because I spent most of my life wanting to be a surgeon so I've always researched stuff and been interested in the medical field. Here's the thing: I'm not going to get all pissy if they get some random thing wrong that's really obscure. My issue comes from things that you can find out in a google search in 30 seconds (like the mortality rate of skin cancer).


I'm not a doctor but I work/study in the medical field. If you're getting it wrong but it's clear you've put a lot of thought/work into, I'll be impressed, especially if you have no educational or professional background and do it in your own free-time.

 

It's when you're pulling from Hollywood because "it sounds cool" that I might roll my eyes. I don't ask for intense realism, just plausibility.

 

What really gets me are the ages of characters in certain professions I've seen. This includes doctors. This could depend on a lot of things but if I'm not given a plausible answer, I scream. There's a lot of young successful people out there for sure who have it all figured out but when I see droves of prodigies, I start to wonder if they bothered to see what the career's climate is actually like. And even worse are characters working a job that barely covers their cost of living in an expensive city. One of my favourite characters I've seen was a 25+ year old living at home, saving up to move out. 

 

Edited by Kullervo
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14 hours ago, Arceus said:

Except, that's roughly what it is. They're down the right pathway, just perhaps a little over-dramatised. I've rarely ever met a DID multiple system that has clear, obvious lines between one personality and another (and yes, many  people with DID never become a system), more often they're fragments of a whole that occasionally express somewhat independently and can alter the general personage of the whole, but this can be exceedingly difficult to express well in a role-play. What they do one day may not be the same thing they do in the same situation the next, and rarely will you find someone with a solid grasp of characterisation that is also comfortable outright messing up that characterisation at the drop of a pin, and can also do so without making the character come off as though they have no personality at all. It is far more easy to portray it as that clear definitive separation, because then you can view this as this is an entire different character and wouldn't do the same thing as this other one. I understand why this sort of portrayal happens more frequently in media. It is also very common for any given personality within a DID system to be unaware of another, thereby not remembering or being unaware of another personality in the system is rather quite normal, and technically correct, albeit there will be at least a few that they are aware of, even if they aren't aware of what they are. This is, however, very dependent on the individual system. Some never are really aware of the rest. Because this is pretty much the point of dissociation - separating, and yes, sometimes the boxes we separate into are very separate.

(Sauce: I am a DID multiple system. So are many of my inner circle of friends. I've seen most of the ways it can manifest.)

 

What I meant more by that is that they villify DID / treat the character(s) as a tool rather than a character, and hype up how ~"craaaazy"~ they are.  It's definitely hard to portray things like DID totally accurately, and misunderstandings will happen, but it should still definitely be treated with respect.  Not all people do what I'm describing, of course, but I have seen it, and it does bug me a bit!

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I've been on the receiving end of having someone tell me my portrayal of a subject matter that I am extensively familiar with and educated on was "inaccurate" so my instinct is usually to give these kinds of things the benefit of the doubt. There are a lot of life experiences out there that aren't cut and dry or only realistically played one way. @Morrigan  is spot on about the pregnancy being unique thing; when people have shared their real life pregnancy experiences with me, I don't think I've ever heard the same story twice. And like @Dragon said, I think there also has to be some leeway/artistic licence for the sake of engaging storytelling.

 

My pet peeve is when a characters are said to be something and then it is never actually played out.

 

A writer that was on a site I was on many years ago had a character with a specific learning disability. The only reason I knew the character had this learning disability was because it was constantly referenced as the character's defining trait (and not with person first language - but offensive narrative is, perhaps, a whole other topic). Never once did I see this character show a single characteristic might be meant to portray the disability. Never once did I see this character engage in any kind of action or speech that would suggest they had the learning disability. It was so frustrating to read.

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