#i never got into creative hobbies that much anyway i mostly felt heavy frustration over them and some sort of hatred for everything i did

[sunrise-on-the-shore]

i remember when i had fun writing. wild times.

[orihara-infobroker]

Ranty rant rant about stuff because this cat just needs to vent.

So I've mentioned this before a few times though I don't really talk about it all that much. One of my on-and-off hobbies is role-playing. Tabletop, live-action, or narrative writing, I pretty much enjoy them all. For similar reasons to why I love writing stories. I like creating characters and worlds. In writing I do all the heavy lifting but role-playing has the unique experience of collaborative storytelling and that adds an element that can be very fun. Also, sometimes it's just fun to play in someone else's sandbox for a change.

Some time ago, a friend invited me to check out a Harry Potter rp site. The site itself is pretty decently setup and it seemed like it could be interesting. I'm not a huge Potter nerd but I've seen the movies and I'm a sucker for fantasy settings. But this isn't the first time I've dipped my toes in the HP universe so I thought that instead of doing the standard Eurocentric character, I'd try something different.

I admit, I'd been working pretty heavily on Shadow and Light at the time so that was strongly influencing my mood insofar as what I wanted to play with. So I submitted the idea of a Japanese character who had grown up in Japan but recently moved to London (thus why I'd be attending Hogwarts). The character's parents were onmyoji, part of a branch family of the Tsuchimikado clan. This clan is somewhat famous for its relation to Abe no Seimei who is arguably the most famous onmyoji in Japanese folklore. I also requested that the character be a metamorph which is a wizard who can change their features. Basically a kind of shape-shifting. Tonks was a metamorph, for reference. In requesting this, I was asked to explain why my family had a metamorph. So I wrote a piece where the character's mom told him the story of Abe no Seimei's mom being a fox that his Dad saved and that there had been stories told of how Abe no Seimei could change his appearance. (Not into a fox. Just change his appearance.) And how sometimes people in the clan would be born with the same ability.

Note that everything I incorporated into this character's backstory is based off actual Japanese mythology and not Harry Potter universe. Harry Potter universe doesn't actually address anything about how magic is done in the East. (And if Rowling ever comes up with anything it'll probably be hideously racist anyway but I digress.)

All of this is important, I promise.

So I was a Japanese pureblood kid raised to become an onmyoji only to end up at Hogwarts by pure misfortune. I thought this would be fun to play, basically a foreign exchange student completely out of his element, not understanding how Western magic works, struggling with having to learn English on top of magic, etc.

Well.

Apparently my idea set all sorts of fires under the admin staff of this site. They were opposed because:

1. They didn't think I knew what I was talking about when I suggested being onmyoji (wherein I proved that I actually know more about onmyoji and Japanese mythology than them.)

2. They didn't have lore on the East therefore they didn't want me making stuff up because it might not mesh with what they might eventually get around to creating somewhere down the road. Even though they had no current plans to develop the Eastern setting. (Yeah. You read that right. I was told... in a role play game... not to make stuff up... which is ironic given that I didn't actually make anything up, just liberally stole from actual Japanese mythology. Further, my character was going to Hogwarts so all of this was just backstory and flavour.)

3. I CANNOT BE RELATED TO ABE NO SEIMEI HE IS LIKE THE JAPANESE MERLIN!!!!!!! (Oh yes. Please. Make more ignorant racist comments at me. From now on I shall refer to Merlin as the English Abe no Seimei. -_- Abe no Seimei, while unlikely to be as mystical as he was made out to be in the stories, was a real person. Merlin was never real. He was always a fictional creation. Further, I never claimed to be related to Abe no Seimei. I claimed to be a branch family of the Tsuchimikado Clan to whom Abe no Seimei was either a member of or the founder of, depending on varying stories. So. Apparently they don't understand how Japanese clans work? Or branch families? No? OK, great. GREAT.)

4. They claimed that my story about the kitsune wasn't appropriate because kitsune were a type of mythical creature and metamorphs are completely human so I can't be "half-fox". Further, one of them claimed I wanted to be "half-demon". (Which is both a grave misinterpretation of what I wrote *and* a completely incorrect assumption on what kitsune are. They are not any kind of demon. And I didn't want to be any kind of half demon or even half fox. It was a story told from a mother to a child, using a classic myth to convey a possible reason why their family sometimes had metamorphs. That's it. Which, if they had understand that whole BRANCH FAMILY thing, they should have definitely realized. But apparently I wasn't clear enough? Ok. Fine, maybe I was too fucking subtle. Still never asked to be half fucking anything. Asked to be a metamorph. That's it.)

5. Labeled me as a problem because of all of this. Which occurred over the course of two conversations and a handful of days. Yeah. YEAH. I'M A FUCKING PROBLEM BECAUSE I TRIED TO BE FUCKING CREATIVE IN THEIR FUCKING SANDBOX AND HAPPENED TO ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT THE FUCK I WAS TALKING ABOUT WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE THAN THEM.

And it's so frustrating because I was looking forward to playing with my friend on this site and I genuinely felt like they were targeting me because I didn't choose a basic bitch character and I had the nerve to ask questions when they tried to contest it. Like, it wasn't a genuine conversation where two sides explained their opinions. It was literally me trying to propose something and being treated like a child when I was repeatedly trying to explain where they were misinterpreting the things I had written because they didn't know Japanese history/mythology.

I've been a gamemaster/storyteller for games before. Over the course of my time role-playing, I've run four Larps, a handful of tabletops and hosted a couple online rps. My Discord server is technically a role play server that I moderate ( currently its mostly just chatting, not a lit of rp but it was designed to be rp lol). I know how these things work. And that just makes this more frustrating because my impulse, as a storyteller, has always been to work together with players to create engaging stories. I've always been willing to accept the potential of new ideas because the whole point of fucking role-playing is getting to exercise your imagination and tell stories together. So from my perspective, I'd be more than happy to work with them on this. I'd be more than happy to share what I know and talk about what could work or not work. But they don't seem to want to engage in that way and it makes me sad, frustrated, disappointed. Especially because I had really been looking forward to playing with my friend and now it seems that this whole thing is doomed to failure.

All because I got creative and asked questions. :/