OOC - Ramblings
Spent an hour or two looking over some old threads between Gabriel and Michael at stillasoldier 's journal. I really miss that RP. It was dark and gritty and perhaps a little depressing, but I loved the plot and the characters and everything. I loved tackling those themes in my characterisation of Gabriel there, which was greatly helped by stillasoldier -mun.
It started out as SWS threads and logs at various character journals, then we had the synechist comm - though we weren't able to do too much before OOC drama crap happened - and damn_divinity never really got a head start. But the premise and the earlier threads and everything... I loved the darker Apocalyptic plot and the fact that with God MIA, the angels were all struggling to hold on to faith. Some demons wanted redemption, some angels wanted destruction, and there were shades of grey.
I enjoyed having Gabriel struggle with holding on to his faith and hope in that setting, with God apparently not wanting to be found, with his family falling apart - Uriel insisting on choosing neither side, Raphael missing (until much later), Michael Fallen - and it was challenging but interesting to write. Gabriel and Michael would have these conversations about humanity, about faith, about their strategies and hopes regarding the Apocalypse, and rereading them made me long for more RP in that verse. Plus, it made for some awesome threads with others like the wonderful divine_tempest and grace_descends . We even had a God player later on, sacredtrinity , and those threads certainly did a lot to renew Gabriel's faith and hope.
I really love lt_safe_house , the players and characters and the interactions there, and I'm looking forward to future things in it. I particularly loved the nightmare plot, because there was a lot of psychology and characterisation involved and having the characters struggle with overcoming their worst fears appealed to me. Writing Gabriel's nightmares was tough, but rewarding for me. And the final confrontation with Primoris was awesome, in my opinion, especially considering our RL deadline. I loved playing Primoris and writing study pieces for him and I enjoyed that final showdown. And I'm looking forward to the next plot that our mod Ricky is preparing - the initial, mysterious threads are already in place and little hints she's dropped about the preparation have me excited.
I just... It's not that I don't enjoy lighthearted RP - I love it. angelofawesome /stillnotfallen , sunflower_mynah , misterbkeele and I spent over a year parodying anything and everything through RP on AIM, to the extent that the last time I watched The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe I kept thinking of our spoof of it and giggling. The crack threads where Gabriel blows things up in Uriel's kitchen or the AIM conversation when Belial and Uri had a little Cold War of their own in Hell that started out with leaving confetti in each other's beds still make me laugh out loud when rereading them. Even in the darker Apocalyptic verse of synechist , we had lighthearted moments like this. And this. Crack is essential and I really do love it.
But I miss plots. Especially darker ones set in a dystopian not-so-distant future with Armageddon imminent. I miss signing into AIM and getting IMs telling me that there's a battle going on in this SWS thread, or preparations for one, and Gabriel's presence would be nice. I miss the opportunities I had for character development in a world where God was not present, the lines between friend and foe were blurred, and the world was hurtling towards destruction. I miss those conversations on the nature of faith and hope and sin and humanity. I'm not insisting on every detail being copied, but I would really love to tackle something Apocalyptic. I want to see how my Belial reacts to a verse like that. I feel like I'm stagnating, a bit.
I wouldn't mind some sort of epic mythology-based plots, either; I have two Egyptian goddesses, felineprotector and shewhoscrivens , though Bast is the one with the stronger voice right now and Seshat's account is kind of just there in case I feel like doing something involving Egypt that needs someone else for Bast to talk to (and I consider Seshat awesome since she's the patron goddess of libraries). And the initial reason for creating Bast's account was so I could poke at more of Gabriel's backstory, which does feature Bast at times as he visited Egypt quite a few times, and have them interact. (and in case I wanted to poke at anything involving ancient Egypt)
Mostly, though, I kind of really want to do something with the Apocalypse. angelofawesome , sunflower_mynah and I had been planning to start a little RP of our own just for that but the plotting seems to be going nowhere. And I know it'll still be a lot lighter in tone compared to the synechist verse, but still. I guess that one of these days I'll just have to grab them on AIM and try to get the creative juices flowing. It's not going to be a Synechist-substitute, I just really want to try another Apocalypse.
But as I said, though, I really do miss RPing in the Synechist-verse.