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3:03am May 3, 2014

lichgem:

That’s the first PSA I’ve seen about abuse in roleplay communities.

Most of the roleplay communities I’ve been in were rife with abuse, which is why I don’t roleplay anymore, except on an individual basis.

In one community, people were constantly and rigorously scrutinizing people for “realism.” I still have intense anxiety when roleplaying with anyone new for that, especially because I am not good at judging or quantifying certain things in roleplay.

There was one girl who made it her job to constantly monitor her best friend’s roleplay and criticize every little thing she did. Those two were definitely in an abusive friendship. When her abuse affected me, and she finally got called out on it- very gently! (I remember my exact words were, “Sometimes you criticize people too much.”) She EXPLODED. She said, “I wish you had stabbed me in the heart, it would have hurt less.” It took HOURS to get her to calm down.

I’ve also done roleplays with other women where we had an arrangement that we each played our OCs, and each other’s favorite character, as a sort of trade off. And when I refused to take those roleplays to sexual places, they both became hostile and aggressive and started bullying me.

I had another friend who constantly criticized my roleplaying, telling me I was being “unrealistic” and “stupid,” even when I was exerting huge amounts of energy to trying to do things “the right way,” and it gave me lasting insecurities about my ability to think and write.

I’ve never been much in role-play communities.  But when I was 15, a ‘friend’ took me to a party at his Vampire: The Masquerade role-play group. We walked into the room.  Everyone turned around and looked at me.  Everyone in the entire room burst out laughing.  At me.  It was horrible.  My 'friend’ did nothing to stop them, and paraded me around as an example of his 'Ventru manipulation skills’ that he could get an underage kid into there and not get kicked out.