#god I miss being in good RP communities

[hamtigers]

So for some reason I woke up today thinking about an RP community I used to be a part of for awhile years ago. So I just wanna give a shot out to anyone who used to be a part of the KH RP board Kingdoms Unleashed awhile back, especially before they shut it down and re-opened it. I tried to come back once after it reopened but I just... couldn’t stay inspired enough for threads with the character I returned on and the fact that they didn’t allow OCs anymore honestly killed a lot of the appeal in the forum for me. And during typing this I just noticed my bookmark for it still exists, but the board itself has been deleted. So I suppose I may as well delete the bookmark.

more specifics about my feelings (and info about the board for anyone uninvolved but curious) below the cut because I am going to ramble A LOT. Like... this post is gonna be hella long, so I’m sorry if read-mores don’t work on mobile still. Also sorry if this shows up in people’s searches since tumblr picks words out of the whole body and not just the tags.

I honestly feel like I’ve made a post like this once before in the past but I still... want to make it again, because I’m feeling incredibly nostalgic about it. Kingdoms Unleashed was a KH-centric RP board on proboards that I lucked out and got into very early on in its life thanks to @highly-radioactive-nerd stumbling across it. I know a few buds from the board also were mutuals on tumblr, but I don’t know how many of you guys still use this site. But anyway, the big draw of the board was that you could bring in characters from outside of KH as long as they “fit the feel” of kingdom hearts, which they ruled as being: from a disney property, from a videogame, from an anime/manga, or from a similiarly styled media(as the catchall for allowing characters from, say, avatar the last airbender in despite it being a western-made cartoon). This was before the big starwars and marvel mergers, which is funny to me because western superheroes were a given example of what wasn’t allowed. Every character (whether they were from KH or not) had to go through an application process, and it was the main way they screened for quality control in RP and so that they could make sure no one was bringing in any super overpowered characters (the quality bar wasn’t like, elitist or anything, you just had to show a basic grasp and consistency on the character’s personality and that you weren’t gonna post a bunch of one-liners) The minimum required activity level to keep a character was pretty lenient too, you just had to make sure you made a post like... somewhere around once or twice every two week period, with activity checks being made once a month? Unless you gave notice of an extended absence. (common reasons included travelling w/o internet access since smartphones weren’t common yet, computer problems, health reasons, and needing to study for classes and exams)

But on top of all this, they also allowed OCs and fan characters under some small stipulations. The big ones I remember are: -No keyblade wielders to avoid an over saturation of keyblades -No vastly overpowered characters. This applied to canon characters too though. Like... one person got to have a touhou character only because her powers got stripped down a lot and they had already proven themselves as a long time responsible RPer on the forum. -No pre-existing ties to canon characters. They could know OF someone if it made sense for their background! But they couldn’t have already met them personally. Anything that develops in character after that is free game of course, but if a canon character got dropped then picked up by someone else, they had no obligation to pick up where the previous player left off. This bullet point is gonna be super important in my later talking! -This is kind of a sub-thing of the last one, but nobodies also couldn’t (officially) join org-XIII under any circumstance.

 One of the GMs even admitted in the forum chat at one point that they were on the fence about allowing OCs to begin with, but they were glad they did because of the quality of OCs that got brought in.

The place ended up flourishing into a VERY healthy roleplay forum, with the  rare drama cases either being resolved or with the instigator getting thrown out if they didn’t settle down. My favorite part was that unlike other RP places I’ve been on, there wasn’t a massive posse schism or canon/OC schism. No, people RPed canon characters with OCs and fancharacters and characters from different games or anime constantly, to the point where several canon characters ended up in romantic relationships with peoples’ OCs.

I loved it. My characters never ended up among those dating canon characters, but it made me so genuinely happy to see a forum so openly embracing fan characters and OCs to that degree. I was used to people only wanting to facilitate ships they already had in their minds, or making fun on FC/canon ships in other places that it just genuinely made me happily astounded to see the forum grow into a place where that was common and other RPers would actually like... get invested in and follow these romances they weren’t a part of despite not knowing the OC.

I still occasionally wonder, however, if the forum’s overall activity hadn’t dwindled down, if I would have landed a ~dream ship~ with a canon character and my own fancharacter. A bunch of people had been recently bringing in FFIV characters (which is my fav FF not counting XIV) so I decided to take a chance on bringing in my fan character, Ayletta. This was shortly after I had lost inspiration for Rydia and dropped her so that another fan of the character could have her instead and hopefully do her more justice.  Ayletta is a physically disabled girl (can’t stand or walk for more than very short periods of time) that relies on her Chocobo to get around and dreams of having her own chocobo ranch. What didn’t get included in her profile or mentioned by me anywhere on forum was that I "secretly” ship her with Kain.

Guess who just happened to be the only person that joined my first thread I started as her was? I was immediately ecstatic, even more so when I saw how quickly they got along even with someone else controlling him. What really got me and left me wondering what ~could have been~ is what they included in his described thoughts, but not in his spoken words. The RPer drew parallels between Ayletta/her chocobo and Kain’s father/his dragon to the point where he immediately was in awe and respect of the bond between Ayletta and her bird. This was a facet I had never even realized or considered between them before then, and only added to the fuel of my own thoughts. The thread was fairly short lived, but there was definitely plans for them both to meet up again later on which unfortunately never got to happen.