(04-11-2016, 05:02 PM)ArmachiA Wrote: 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.This is pretty much how I feel about RP. You dress your Barbie up, get her a fake house and a fake car and sometimes you rip her head off.
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.
...but only sometimes. Eventually you run out of Barbies.
I think a lot of the time people forget that this -is- the internet and this is a game. All you have to do is turn it off. If things are getting out of hand emotionally, just turn it off for a bit. Go cool off. If people are bothering you, go do something else, turn off the game, turn off your social medias (including your RP sites and tumblrs).
No one has to affect your OOC life unless you want them to. Yes, we're all people and we all have feelings, but we're also people who only talk through this medium. We don't see each other IRL, most of us don't even know the others' real names. To top that off, we're all playing imaginary characters in a made-up world in made-up scenarios. We turn it off, our characters stop. Once the RP stops being fun for you, it's time to turn it off. This should be no more serious than story writing, or playing music, or sewing or drawing.
I'll repeat what I said before: The only person responsible for your happiness is you. Do what will make you the most happy, if that also happens to make someone else happy, then kudos.
