To me, it is kind of surprising since I really see all this as playing with Barbie Dolls. Yeah you can have your barbie fall in love with someone else's Ken (Or Barbie, whatever) but eventually you put down the plastic dolls and the relationship doesn't bleed over to real life in any way. If there's a strong emotional investment, to the point where IC bleed is occuring, it IS a bit of a shock since it shouldn't be that way at all.
As someone said above, I understand feeling empathy and an attachment to the characters and their life together, but regardless of human emotion we know going into this it's fake. We all know this is pretendy times, people don't get to act super emotional with ooc bleed when they know what they were getting into. That's almost a betrayal of trust in and of itself. People shouldn't suddenly act like it's real when they KNEW going in it was fake.
So yeah, it can be surprising.
But it's also why I have a lot of walls before I rp romance with someone, since you learn the hard way it happens SO often that it becomes unsurprising.
As someone said above, I understand feeling empathy and an attachment to the characters and their life together, but regardless of human emotion we know going into this it's fake. We all know this is pretendy times, people don't get to act super emotional with ooc bleed when they know what they were getting into. That's almost a betrayal of trust in and of itself. People shouldn't suddenly act like it's real when they KNEW going in it was fake.
So yeah, it can be surprising.
But it's also why I have a lot of walls before I rp romance with someone, since you learn the hard way it happens SO often that it becomes unsurprising.