you see me rolling up, pops, you step aside

So, western RPG fandoms do a lot of things that I don’t understand. Chief among them is the overwhelming amount of shipping fueled character hate. Shipping-fueled character hate obviously isn’t at all foreign to fandom, in general, but it continually boggles my mind in RPGs because the narrative of a roleplaying game is inherently mutable. When you’re talking about romanceable non-player characters, each and every romantic option for the player character is both equally canon and equally optional. You can complicate things in various ways if you really want, but it all remains fundamentally down to your choice. If you want to construct a story in which your character has only ever loved this one specific other character and they are OTP OF THE UNIVERSE, you can and all of the other characters continue to exist and slot themselves into non-romantic roles.

In this situation, when all things are equal, there’s just no reason for that special kind of WHY AREN’T MY INTERESTS/PREFERENCES BEING VALIDATED IN THE TEXT LIKE XYZ comparative resentment because… they are.*

So I’m left eternally trying to figure out WHY. Is it just that people need a villain, no matter how ill-suited for the role or, indeed, how unnecessary such a role is at all? Is it that people legitimately can’t ever just LIKE a thing on its own merits without setting up an unnecessary dichotomy in which the thing they like is GOOD implicitly because this other thing is BAD?

I mean, I could write (and have…) essays on why I really, really hate certain characters because I find them problematic in various ways. I could explain at length why the romance options with yet other characters just don’t appeal to my own personal preferences and interests.

But it’s not comparative. It has absolutely nothing to do with the characters that I DO like and I don’t see any reason that it should. When everyone can have their own toys and take them all home, why would you ever care what that kid over there’s toys look like? How does convincing yourself that their toy sucks make your toy (the one you got to choose yourself) better?

Of course, then there are those instances of character hate growing out of bitterness and resentment directed at the character in question for perceived slights, which is often a whole other level of bogglement for me.

@cloudsinmyeyes thinks, and I tend to agree, that many times it’s related to the fact that RPGs are so id-based and trade entirely on you identifying heavily with the character you’re playing. The entire world and everyone in it revolves around your player character, however you’ve chosen to construct them, and the entire world tends to be worshipful and generally bend to the power of your badassery and shape itself along your impulses. So, whenever a character does something that isn’t what you want them to do, it’s unacceptable. The fact that this is, ultimately, a story and that they are all characters within a story — people with established feelings and personalities and priorities — falls entirely by the wayside as people identify so intensely with their character that they become completely incapable of considering any of the other character’s points of view or motivation.

And then people write 9000 weird revenge fics to punish the character?!?!

WHERE WAS I GOING WITH THIS ALL?

Oh yes! 

1) RPG fandoms are really myopic about the narrative they’re supposed to be engaging in, which I guess is true about most fandoms, but has a special troubling edge in RPG fandoms because the audience is a key component in the construction of that narrative.

2) I will never, ever, ever understand the extraordinarily distorted ways in which people manage to parse things like Horizon in Mass Effect 2. (Or Morrigan’s Offer in Dragon Age, while we’re here.)

3) In keeping with my with my intense and unapologetic Good Boy Complex, I WILL STAN KAIDAN ALENKO 4 LYFE, half because I really like his character and legitimately find him compelling, layered, subtly drawn, and interesting and half because 95% of Mass Effect fandom seems to have failed to consider anything about his character AT ALL outside of going  a) OMFG HOW DARE HE EVER BE ANGRY WITH ME FOR EVEN A SECOND JUST BECAUSE TO THE BEST OF HIS KNOWLEDGE I WAS FAKING MY OWN DEATH FOR TWO YEARS AND THEN TURNED UP BUDDYING AROUND WITH TERRORISTS AND FLIPPANTLY ASKING HIM TO LEAVE THE MILITARY AND JOIN ME. WITH THE TERRORISTS. and/or b) OMFG THAT ASSHOLE HOW DARE HE BETRAY ME BY ALLOWING HIMSELF TO BE BADGERED INTO GOING OUT FOR DRINKS ONCE WITH SOMEONE ELSE AFTER TWO YEARS OF ENDLESSLY MOURNING ME AND HAVING NO PERSONAL LIFE TO SPEAK OF.

Look at your life, ME fandom. Look at your choices.

*Within the confines of the specific characters that are romanceable that is. SINCE AS WE ALL KNOW IF YOU ARE PLAYING CERTAIN GAMES AND WANT TO PLAY A QUEER CHARACTER, FOR INSTANCE, YOU’RE SHIT OUT OF LUCK.