Once a Stranger

we concluded my Exalted essence game because two characters wanted to go in too divergent directions to continue

I'm not entirely unhappy to have ended it because i was starting to be stumped about how to continue anyway, but I wish we had a finalized version of the rules so I could start a new game with an all Dragon Blooded cast instead (taking inspiration from Fire Emblem Three Houses).

It has suddenly dawned on me that Dresden Files rpg may be the right system to adapt Coldfire Trilogy (and its fabulous magical system).

Wish I could try out FATE somewhere >_>

McGone a fait des fiches éditables pour Victoriana en pdf.

So, I'm setting up a Mage : Sorcerers' Crusade : Pirates of the Caribbean game for soon. Characters creation set up for in 14 days; and thankfully yesterday I finally got into the mood to work seriously at it. At least when I get Mage inspiration, it's very inspiring as always (bad for my sleeping habit though). So far I've mostly meditated on the system/charsheet, following some of the previous thoughts I posted on the journal some time ago (*checks* Hmmm one year ago; how time flies):

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Today after a roleplaying game, where the GM surprised us with informing us that we were playing, in the cyberpunk & urban fantasy world of Shadowrun, two laboratory mice who were set to try to conquer the world (I was Brain; we ended up stunning everyone and the power in Seattle then firing a shuttle to the Zurich Orbital station using potato power) I ended up showing a few fanvids to my friends; including one of my fave "Your Man" by charmax, at which point one of them observed that Lesbians seem to do a lot of kissing through glass. Of course then I tried to show them "The Glass" by thingswithwings but I couldn't cuz it's not up on streaming. But it also made me think of Star Driver :

( to wit, illustrated with screencaps )

Do you think the creators of Star Driver are familiar with Henry Jenkins? It wouldn't even surprise me if they were.

Also should I be posting this on abymage instead of here? *ponders*

I was wandering RPG.net as usual when I've suddenly happened onto this piece of information : There's a Vorkosigan saga sourcebook and roleplaying game come out next summer!! How come I didn't know that? On scale of meh to fucking awesome, this is very close to fucking awesome. That's not yet the Coldfire trilogy and This Alien Shore rpg I've always dreamed of, but I might have to try myself at GURPS.

Yesterday we played Ars Magica. And we discovered my character is a fetch. As, in, a Changeling the Lost fetch, that is to say a replacement for a human being made of wood, water and mud and shaped into the human it replaces with faery magic. And that I had been so for years. In between, my character has had two children, one mariage and many adventures. And all this time, the 'real' character was up in that faery kingdom I had travelled to. Yeah. My GM is an evil genius XDDD

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I have a new layout!

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Meme stolen from a_white_rain and apapazukamori

Tell me of a fandom you know I know of and I'll tell you :

1. The first character I first fell in love with
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now
3. The character everyone else loves that I don't
4. The character I love that everyone else hates
5. The character I used to love but don't any longer
6. The character I would shag anytime
7. The character I'd want to be like
8. The character I'd slap
9. A pairing that I love
10. A pairing that I despise

Yeah, it's that good old meme :)

Yeah so I'm deeply obsessed with Avatar. Sadly from what I've seen so far, the fandom appears to be totally nuts. Shipping wars galore, and bashing, and CAPSLOCK humour (capslock humour is indeed funny... for all of 10 minutes. Okay, the Atla capslock community still appears to be best things for discussions on Atla) and I won't mentionned the jokes based on BUTTRAPED LOLZ. And finding good fics has been difficult (but not entirely impossible). Thankfully there are a few sane people here and now (and I started friending those people. Hi!)

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So I'm reading RPG.net, which is a big and quality board about roleplaying games, and someone raises the idea of "Harlequin Romance... the RPG" as a possible licenced RPG to touch a previously untapped market. So I miggle in the discussion, and mention my view about the similarities between RPGs and fanfics, and freeform RPGs within the fandom community, and their potential as a RPG market. It's an interesting discussion.
Then there's this guy that comes and mentions the game he publishes, HeartQuest, which a game meant to simulate the Shoujo manga genre. Cool. Very fitting to the discussion. I google quickly the game (because I didn't know it before, does any of you guys do?) and find a blurb description (very cute) and a list of the writers :

Written by: Michael Hopcroft, Robert Pool, Dimitri Ashling, Ewen Cluney, Robert Boyd, Robert Bain, Ismael Alvarez, Travis Johnson, and Douglas Larke.

Hum? I think. I'm not sure about Travis and Ewen because I'm not that good with American names, but all of the others are very, very male names. That's an overwhelming majority (at least) of male writers to write a RPG to simulate the Shoujo genre.
So in the discussion I mention I'm surprised by that, and the guy asks me why, so I elaborate.

Quote:
Why should that shock you? It isn't like all shoujo stuff is written by women, nor is it's audience all young girls (despite being marketed to them). Just like the fact that all romance novels aren't written by women either.

Well, that not all shoujo is written by women or read by women is all well and good, and what percent of it is written and read by women? I'd be surprised if there wasn't a very big majority of women involved there, but I could be wrong, I only have my personnal experience to judge by.

I assume you've done market researches about that game? That you have some data about Shoujo audience in the US? The profile of people more likely to be interrested into that kind of game? With this game, I assume you're trying to tap onto shoujo readers (that's why you mention the next ed in manga form, no?)
I'm a shoujo reader. I'd especially kill for a game that'd let me play an unholy alliance of Shoujo Kakumei Utena and Princess Tutu complete with meta-narrative tools and fairy tale on crack ambiance. I'd probably also love to play X1999 RPG.

However I also remember a French amateur RPG which was called "Lycéenne" which was plain horrible. Shoujo seen by males and full of ill-adviced stereotypes at its worst. So I'm suspicious. And I'm Roleplayer so I know how sexist the average RPG scene can be, so I'm doubly suspicious. If I see a long list of male names as authors, I get even more suspicious. Doesn't seem like something for me. Seems like something for guys who are already into RPG and who wants to play shoujo for exoticism's sake, the kind who think Hina Love is a shoujo.

I don't know anything about the game, as I told you, I just googled it. And that's my first impression. Maybe I'm not typical of the market you're trying to touch either

Then the guy gets angry :

I find charges of sexism against my products made by someone who has not read them to be incredibly offensive. While the HeartQuest line was written before I owned the company, I still stand behind them 100%. I also find charges that they weren't written by knowledgeable individuals to not only be offensive but you are also veering into personal attack territory because at least two of the authors are members of this very board.

As a publisher I take allegations against my products very seriously and I strongly suggest that you rescind your comments, as they are based out of a lack of knowledge of the books. I do welcome anyone checking out the HeartQuest line but I find your comments to be ill-formed and offensive to both myself and the individuals who wrote these books.

I tell him he missed the point.

So he starts getting on how shoujo is totally not about women, and gender is irrelevant about discussion on RPG adaptations of Shoujo.

I don't see that shoujo or romantic fiction as being a gender issue. I don't think one gender "gets it" more than another, any more than I think that is the case for any other genre. Saying otherwise does a great disservice to those individuals, male or female, who are interested in those sorts of things.

And that's where we are.

Apart from the part where he's trying very hard to intimidate me, I find his exhuberant outrage very funny.

I had a long week end. 1st of May is Labour Day and a Holiday in France, and my work had given us the Monday free to make a "bridge" (not a free, free day, it's a free day among a specific number of free day we're supposed to have anyway); and I'm depressed because I didn't manage to do anything much during this time.

I went to the movie theater, though. We went to see "Life of Others" which was really, really good. Though I found it was slightly self-indulgent in parts, and I was a little bit uneasy about the thing about women, but overall a great movie.

By the way, the Earthsea movie was just as bad as expected. I didn't hate watching it as much as I should have because I read the books so long ago I was half remembering throughout without being able to compare, and because I love watching animation even when it's subpar, but it was really not that great.

And Sunday, I missed out Bog's game because I was trapped at a friend's house by a thunderstorm, but we finished watching all of Slayers : Next, which was great. (I'm in Xelloss withdrawal as I speak ^^)

While looking for Slayers fic to remedy to my withdrawal, funnily enough, I found a Snupin fic by amanuensis1 (of all people), and an mpreg fic at that, and I loved it, and I'm not a big mpreg lover.
Here it is : Random drabble
Read it and then don't kill me.

And I tried writing, but I don't think I managed to write more than two lines in one specific fic. No very much inspired.
I've been looking at all files of half-finished fics too. It's amazing the number of started-never-finished fics I have out there. (well not amazing, I s'ppose, but given how ot prolific I am...). I even found a Kotori fic that looked finished, and a Salazar/Godric preslash fic. And lots of other stuff I never finished... it's a bit depressing.

I didn't even manage to clean a bit. My sink is getting so dirty molds have civilizations building skyscrappers in it. I shall not mention my bathroom.

Otherwise I've been reading The Princess Bride. Wached the movies many times, but had never read the book before. It's pretty good. I like... how he talks about the way we look back at stories from our childhood. How they become mythical, you know. Filled with some sort of glamour and meaningfulness, but then if you look back at them later on, they're often not that much (or they are, sometimes, but you have to squint a little bit ^^) I've got books like that, of course. Well I had the Last Unicorn, except not the book, the movie, except not even that. I had a postcard of the movie, with the castle and the redbull and the unicorn and the big wave with little tiny unicorns on it. It belonged to m sister. I don't know - don't remember - if I actually watched the movie when I was little, but probably not. Even though I was obsessed with that postcard, with the story I wove from it. I was drawing unicorns everywhere (i know, not that's outstanding from a little girl), and to this day I feel this is part of the reason why I got into fantasy, science fiction, and mythology, and everything (it was much later when I was a teenager that I actually watched the Last Unicorn and realized I hadn't dreamed the whole thing! before nobody else had even heard of it, and TLU? doesn't even need squinting). There's also all these cartoons I used to watch younger (we ha some real good cartoons in the 80's in France, mostly Japanese and a couple of Franco-Japanese ones), stuff like the Mysterious Golden Cities, and Ulysse 31 (space opera + greek mythology, two great tastes that go well together), and Les Mondes Engloutis, and Cobra (not the one from GI Joe), and many others. Loved these stuff, growing up.
What was your own mythic story when you were growing up? The one that still fills you with nostalgia?

It also got me thinking (okay, this is going very very far from The Princess Bride), about one trope I've always loved, the one about the relationship between a young kid and an ambiguous adult figure, one who's half a mentor or a protector, and half an ennemy. You get that in the Mysterious Golden Cities, with Mendoza (who's one of the most kick ass ambiguous character from a children's cartoon ♥) and Esteban, and you got that in that Japanese cartoon version of Treasure Island (I don't remember if it was as strong in the book) with Long John Silver and Jim. And I was wondering how it related with the Snape/Harry ship. Because it's not relationships I particulary wish to sexualize, generally speaking, but I do find them pariculary fascinating, and I remember really loving them as a kid. I wonder, is it at least a little bit of a trope, generally speaking? Does it play a role about why I like Snarry (when I do like it)? Anyone has any imput about these kinds of relationships (wether sexualized or not)? (ASOIAF gets that in a way, with Arya and her various unsavory protectors : Jaqen H'Gar and Sandor Clegane, and Yoren a little bit. Arya really got a "boy's story", I think, I love that about her).

Anyway, to go back to the Princess Bride, I loved how the book played - even more than the movie - with the way we interprete things that we read. There's something very fanficcy about it. Take the good parts, and write around the missing ones, y'know. Except of course the aesthetics are very different.

There were some stuff I didn't like in the book, but they were mostly the stuff I didn't like in the movie, except in a way even more disturbing in reading them. You know, Buttercup's general uselessness. Part of the parody, but still get me meh. Did love the additionnal background about most characters though.

Oh, and, last Changelings : the Lost soon to be released cover. I'm so excited!

snatched from masqthphlsphr

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Bought two books by Charlene Harris, as recced by generalblossom, and am currently reading "To say nothing about the dog", which has too many dogs but also has cat, luckily, and is funny, not in the way I most like my funnies, but very funny still.

Started playing at the Clamp Campus RP community (bounces excitedly)
Failed to watch the Village today, as my friend had got the time for the seance wrong, but we shall try again tommorrow. Instead spent much of the afternoon discussing Mage the Ascension with Nicky, who's planning on GM it. Mage is my favourite RPG. It's so open, so adaptable, so based on interpretation. I just love discussing about it like no other games. Of course, I don't even GM it, at least, not on a regular basis. Strange how some visions are so perfect in your mind you are not able to reach for them in reality because you fear disapointement.

Watching France - Israel football makes my mother racist. Is a depressing thought.