thread: 2006-01-17 : Hurt and Abandonment
On 2006-01-18, Levi Kornelsen wrote:
Okay.
The first story here was deliberate. The second two stories are "accidental", as it happens; the groups weren't pushing on purpose, they just hit when and where they did by random chance. I'll go from lightest to heaviest.
..................
Story #1: Discomfort
Playing in a happy, silly little LARP, I made the odd mistake of getting involved in a romantic subplot with another character - it was decided at the end of one session that her character and mine had become lovers between that session and the next.
The player parked me at the start of the next game, checked if I was cool with holding hands, kissing, all that. I was boggled, and quite interested. She looked me in the eye, laughed, and stated that she wasn't interested in me in real life - but she was here to play it out, and she didn't want to get into some kind of jealousy thing.
So we played it out, including a single, passionate kiss.
Then someone lied to our characters in the game to put a wedge between us. It worked - we argued, we screamed, we yelled, we broke up. There was a duel between my character and her character's former lover.
At the end of the game, she thanked me, I thanked her.
I was a little uncomfortable the whole night, but, damn, I learned a lot about women right there.
..................
Story #2: Catharsis.
Once, playing in a game, which was basically a cobbled-together house-rules thing, we hit on an abusive molestation situation. One that was pretty similar in some ways to something a friend of mine had gone through, for whom I had been the cry-on-the shoulder guy; this was something I had some serious lingering anger over. The GM noted that I was suddenly looking at them funny, and 'just happened' to call a break. As usual, we jabbered a bit about the game, and I mentioned this strangeness.
The group was all "Oh, should we just gloss this over?" and I was hot to play it through. So I told them, look, my character is in this. He's in it hard. Let's play it through.
And we did. I got my rage on, and tore down the abusive father - found what he cared about most and took it apart in front of him, leaving him alone, broken, and publicly shamed. I did this without breaking even the sligtest bit of character, and it felt great.
That was catharsis. A little hurt, a lot of acting out.
...........
Story #3: Serious hurt.
My father died of a heart attack. Three weeks later, I was gaming again. An ongoing vampire LARP, in this case. A pretty lame one, overall, but I was part of this whole fully-developed large group and wanted to go somewhere *else* for a bit.
At that game, someone killed my character's "sire" - the vampire that made him. In front of me.
The two people at the game that knew what was up with my personal life, both standing just across the room, saw my face screw up, and both started to move.
There's no real catharsis in this story. I just plain broke, and they walked me out.
Now, if I had trusted that group and they had trusted me, if I had been on one page with them, and that page was "I Will Not Abandon You", that would have been different.
We *might* have had one hell of a scene, right there. We might have had something else. I'll never know.
..................
Now.
"Nobody gets hurt"?
Most of the time (not all, but most), that's for wusses.
This makes LBK go "Now, that's ONE kind of hurt."
Mark W is talking about another kind, in the post just before this. I've seen and played through that stuff, too. And both can be good, when the group is with you.
When the group isn't, it's just plain awful.
This makes BR go "Thanks for sharing that"
Lots of things to think about in there. Thank you.
This makes LBK go "All good."
Not sure if it's *all* exactly applicable to what we're on abut, but I'm pretty sure some of it is.
