My LARPing career...

With the ending of Open Gaming at Baldy Hall at UB North, I think my LARPing career in the general public is going to come to an end. It has been fun. I have really enjoyed it.

At the same time, I feel really uncomfortable with some of what is going on with the LARP community that I have been a part of for the last decade (approximately). The tolerance of the same kind of bickering bitchiness that I dealt with in high school repulses me. I am finding that there are many people who seem to feel that it is better to be a terrible person to someone rather then sit down and attempt to resolve the problems that arise like an adult.

Add to this that there are many people who simply whine until they get their way and I am finding myself having a hard time justifying my role play gaming fix. Some good friends of mine still do tabletop role play games. I'm probably going to go back to doing that. If I can't, I am just going to have to attempt to live vicariously through my characters.

One of the reasons why I actually liked the fact that the events were being held on UB was because campus security was easily accessible. The times where there had been emergencies, responders were there in minutes. And UB campus security are not your sterotypical doughnut eating rent-a-cops. They are state police.

To be perfectly honest, I don't trust ninety percent of the LARP community. I will smile, be polite, and be civil. I will not, however, consent to being alone in a room with many of them. Because their behavior has left enough subject to question that I honestly don't believe I am safe alone in their presence. And there have been people within the LARP community who have actively attempted to physically or socially intimidate me into doing something they wanted.

I can accept that you may be socially awkward. I can accept that you may even put your foot in your mouth a few times and really insult people. I can even accept that you may be an obnoxious, self centered bastard.

I refuse to accept that I should be meek, compliant, and generally go along with whatever is in the situation because of two things:

1. I happen to be one of the few females in the room.
2. I may not know the game dynamics/system as well as you do.

I'm sorry, but those are not grounds to demand my compliance. And there is a LOT of misogyny within the LARP community. When the feminists are bitching about the problems with how people behave at gaming conventions, these are some of the people they are talking about. And some of these people go beyond being misogynistic morons and leave me questioning if I would be safe if I met them in a dark alley.

So, with the venues for LARPs shifting from the controlled and well policed location of UB to potentially someone's home or some other location where I have less resources to assistance, I am probably going to be forced to give up LARPing. And that makes me kinda sad.

It was a great outlet for a lot of my angst. It helped me tap into elements of my psyche that I generally work very hard not to even look at. In a lot of ways, I used it like a therapy tool and within the context of my characters, I worked through past trauma. (Nothing's more satisfying then killing your rapist in effigy time and time again in as many creative ways as you can get away with.)

I think I'm probably going to be using my artwork as my outlet for that stuff now. I have been feeling the urge to paint again. So, I am probably going to be doing a series of abstracts based on this stuff. Who knows, maybe I'll have something good come out of all this.