Welp I'm sorta late to this thread, but this topic is something I've been through a couple times so I'll drop my two gil.
I'll start by saying I don't think you can ever truly separate IC/OOC 100 percent completely as I believe our characters are, at the very least, a fraction of our greater psyche as individuals. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm under the belief that we can't ever escape ourselves completely. At the end of the day, it is still you making those choices for your character. To say that we can all create a completely different persona a la Tyler Durden would make us all crazy, right? Or maybe I'm just crazy. So with some RP topics, such as romance, there will always be a little spillage from OOC to IC or vice-versa. Like other people have stated in this thread, some of us make the conscious decision to reach out to someone and deny them OOC'ly. Others try to make up for their lacking lives IC'ly by seeking out relationships and situations they couldn't find elsewhere. This doesn't excuse people who actively seek to manipulate and destroy relationships, but I think those cases are in the minority with this particular topic. There's always two sides to a coin and I think it's a bit silly to expect someone to be able to have a 100 percent distinction between IC and OOC. Honestly, I didn't always hold these opinions. In fact, what changed my perspective was my experience with someone who became my RP partner.
I used to think you could have IC and OOC completely separated. And that's not to say that I don't think you can step back and say "I'm not my character." Because we're not our characters. But we all are humans - a lesson I learned the hard way. In the MMO I previously RPed in, I had two characters who I RPed quite frequently. Very different characters from each other and both went through this type of drama from opposite ends. One character, I'll call her Annie for the sake of privacy and yada yada, found herself one day in a relationship that had happened very "organically" (quotes because we talked about the possibility a couple of times in guild chat) over the course of 4 months with a guildmate. We were good friends OOC wise and I knew that my guildie was married happily to his wife IRL. At this time, I had the believe that my IC actions would have no consequence in the OOC side of things but boy was I ever wrong.
So Annie more or less had the mind of a child in an adult body as that's how her race worked in the game. She didn't have any sort of grasp on the social complexities of human culture and courtship. Playing into this, I had Annie cheat on her boyfriend with someone else who started coming on to her. And by cheat, I mean just an embraced kiss. Lo and behold when my gulidie found out OOC'ly and then IC'ly, he was miffed to put it lightly. He felt like I was throwing all the development Annie and his character had been through out the window. That was not my intention. The fact of the matter was Annie, the character, didn't understand what being a "girlfriend" really meant. I, the OOC Annie, didn't have a child-mind in reality and tried telling him that I wasn't trying to throw away the relationship. He didn't really like my answer and him and his wife ended up never talking to me again and leaving the guild.
Now, who was in the wrong there? My guildie who felt like I betrayed him and effectively put a dent in the relationship we had built? Or me for making that naive decision for the sake of my character OOC'ly even though I had an inkling deep down that it might have repercussions? Aren't IC and OOC supposed to be completely separate?Â
While all this Annie craziness was happening, my other character, let's call him Paul, was in the midst of a relationship with a character played by someone who had become my closest friend in that game. I met her out of the blue one day and we started RPing. I invited her to my guild and from there, our relationship grew both IC and OOC-wise. The IC relationship had evolved from a mercenary partnership to Paul finally popping the question several months down the road some time after the Annie Incident went down. Little did I know that Paul's fiance had taken a liking to me OOC. In retrospect, I should have saw the signs earlier. There was a period of time where we did everything together - from lvling to sitting around in town idling to even doing AH stuff together. She had also reached out to me outside the game with MSN (back when that was a thing) and we would talk for long periods of time. But much like an anime protag or video game character, my whole life I have been quite oblivious to romantic advances people make toward me. So it wasn't until one day when she got mad at me for giving her space (something that she herself had asked me to do like a week before) that I started to realize something was off. Finally, a mutual friend of ours revealed to me one day that she was deeply in love with me - something that dumbfounded me because she had told me plenty of times about her girlfriend she had IRL. To this day, I still don't know how I really felt about her. What happened was it turned out that IRL-wise, she was a savant with severe bipolar and depression mental ailments. Our last conversation was her confessing to me that she always thought her character and Paul represented the IRL version of us in-game and that she thought I knew that. She then was committed to a home a few days after we talked last.Â
Was I supposed to reciprocate her feelings? Did I make the mistake of doing everything together with her? I would like to think the answer is no to those questions, but I did sort of enable her in a way. I could have made the effort to keep ourselves more distanced, but I did genuinely enjoy her company.
I had tried to keep IC/OOC separate and by maintaining that mindset, I feel like it destroyed these relationships I had. Maybe my stories are extreme examples. I mean, Paul's fiance was literally crazy. However, Annie's boyfriend was very sound of mind and happily married. IC and OOC had managed to leak into each other with both scenarios. We're not our characters, that completely true. But what I realized is that we are still humans and despite how hard we try to not let IC decisions to affect the OOC side of things, you can't completely wall it off. Otherwise, we would readily let all of our characters have permission to be killed and die off.Â
Despite all of the above, I haven't written off RP romance. But I'm definitely much more...selective and cautious about it now. It is not one of my goals and it wasn't back then with those characters either as I use RP as practice for my own writing. But I think if I learned anything, it's that RP romance is like reaching into one of those hats with lots of pieces of paper. You don't know what you're going to pull out, but for whatever reason, you hope it's something good. RP isn't supposed to be a dating service. The people who RP just for relationships, I don't think they realize that it won't fill that void in their hearts. Your character will most likely end up very one-dimensional and the relationship, if they get one, will not last. Sorry for the long-winded rant and thanks for reading.
I'll start by saying I don't think you can ever truly separate IC/OOC 100 percent completely as I believe our characters are, at the very least, a fraction of our greater psyche as individuals. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm under the belief that we can't ever escape ourselves completely. At the end of the day, it is still you making those choices for your character. To say that we can all create a completely different persona a la Tyler Durden would make us all crazy, right? Or maybe I'm just crazy. So with some RP topics, such as romance, there will always be a little spillage from OOC to IC or vice-versa. Like other people have stated in this thread, some of us make the conscious decision to reach out to someone and deny them OOC'ly. Others try to make up for their lacking lives IC'ly by seeking out relationships and situations they couldn't find elsewhere. This doesn't excuse people who actively seek to manipulate and destroy relationships, but I think those cases are in the minority with this particular topic. There's always two sides to a coin and I think it's a bit silly to expect someone to be able to have a 100 percent distinction between IC and OOC. Honestly, I didn't always hold these opinions. In fact, what changed my perspective was my experience with someone who became my RP partner.
I used to think you could have IC and OOC completely separated. And that's not to say that I don't think you can step back and say "I'm not my character." Because we're not our characters. But we all are humans - a lesson I learned the hard way. In the MMO I previously RPed in, I had two characters who I RPed quite frequently. Very different characters from each other and both went through this type of drama from opposite ends. One character, I'll call her Annie for the sake of privacy and yada yada, found herself one day in a relationship that had happened very "organically" (quotes because we talked about the possibility a couple of times in guild chat) over the course of 4 months with a guildmate. We were good friends OOC wise and I knew that my guildie was married happily to his wife IRL. At this time, I had the believe that my IC actions would have no consequence in the OOC side of things but boy was I ever wrong.
So Annie more or less had the mind of a child in an adult body as that's how her race worked in the game. She didn't have any sort of grasp on the social complexities of human culture and courtship. Playing into this, I had Annie cheat on her boyfriend with someone else who started coming on to her. And by cheat, I mean just an embraced kiss. Lo and behold when my gulidie found out OOC'ly and then IC'ly, he was miffed to put it lightly. He felt like I was throwing all the development Annie and his character had been through out the window. That was not my intention. The fact of the matter was Annie, the character, didn't understand what being a "girlfriend" really meant. I, the OOC Annie, didn't have a child-mind in reality and tried telling him that I wasn't trying to throw away the relationship. He didn't really like my answer and him and his wife ended up never talking to me again and leaving the guild.
Now, who was in the wrong there? My guildie who felt like I betrayed him and effectively put a dent in the relationship we had built? Or me for making that naive decision for the sake of my character OOC'ly even though I had an inkling deep down that it might have repercussions? Aren't IC and OOC supposed to be completely separate?Â
While all this Annie craziness was happening, my other character, let's call him Paul, was in the midst of a relationship with a character played by someone who had become my closest friend in that game. I met her out of the blue one day and we started RPing. I invited her to my guild and from there, our relationship grew both IC and OOC-wise. The IC relationship had evolved from a mercenary partnership to Paul finally popping the question several months down the road some time after the Annie Incident went down. Little did I know that Paul's fiance had taken a liking to me OOC. In retrospect, I should have saw the signs earlier. There was a period of time where we did everything together - from lvling to sitting around in town idling to even doing AH stuff together. She had also reached out to me outside the game with MSN (back when that was a thing) and we would talk for long periods of time. But much like an anime protag or video game character, my whole life I have been quite oblivious to romantic advances people make toward me. So it wasn't until one day when she got mad at me for giving her space (something that she herself had asked me to do like a week before) that I started to realize something was off. Finally, a mutual friend of ours revealed to me one day that she was deeply in love with me - something that dumbfounded me because she had told me plenty of times about her girlfriend she had IRL. To this day, I still don't know how I really felt about her. What happened was it turned out that IRL-wise, she was a savant with severe bipolar and depression mental ailments. Our last conversation was her confessing to me that she always thought her character and Paul represented the IRL version of us in-game and that she thought I knew that. She then was committed to a home a few days after we talked last.Â
Was I supposed to reciprocate her feelings? Did I make the mistake of doing everything together with her? I would like to think the answer is no to those questions, but I did sort of enable her in a way. I could have made the effort to keep ourselves more distanced, but I did genuinely enjoy her company.
I had tried to keep IC/OOC separate and by maintaining that mindset, I feel like it destroyed these relationships I had. Maybe my stories are extreme examples. I mean, Paul's fiance was literally crazy. However, Annie's boyfriend was very sound of mind and happily married. IC and OOC had managed to leak into each other with both scenarios. We're not our characters, that completely true. But what I realized is that we are still humans and despite how hard we try to not let IC decisions to affect the OOC side of things, you can't completely wall it off. Otherwise, we would readily let all of our characters have permission to be killed and die off.Â
Despite all of the above, I haven't written off RP romance. But I'm definitely much more...selective and cautious about it now. It is not one of my goals and it wasn't back then with those characters either as I use RP as practice for my own writing. But I think if I learned anything, it's that RP romance is like reaching into one of those hats with lots of pieces of paper. You don't know what you're going to pull out, but for whatever reason, you hope it's something good. RP isn't supposed to be a dating service. The people who RP just for relationships, I don't think they realize that it won't fill that void in their hearts. Your character will most likely end up very one-dimensional and the relationship, if they get one, will not last. Sorry for the long-winded rant and thanks for reading.
