Post by Midnight on Feb 14, 2014 21:58:40 GMT -5
Short version: MAKE YOUR CATS' HISTORIES VARY RATHER THAN KILLING OFF THEIR FAMILIES IN EVERY APP, AND IF YOU KILL THEM ALL OFF, AT LEAST DO IT IN DIFFERENT WAYS.
Long version: Alright, so I've noticed a trend with histories in the Warriors fandom.
Disclaimer: I AM NOT POINTING FINGERS AT ANYONE. I FEEL IT'S PRETTY SAFE TO SAY THAT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS MADE HISTORIES LIKE THIS BEFORE, SO DON'T FEEL BAD, YOU'RE DEFINITELY NOT THE ONLY ONE OR I WOULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN THIS.
Most of them contain cats without family.
This is understandable on a roleplay forum where family must be roleplayed, adopted out, etc., but on AWRP, we kind of encourage you not to do that because it just creates more cats that probably won't be used because the roleplayers don't want to tread on the original creator's ideas and overall mindset for the family members in question.
Once again, that is not the case on AWRP: you do not have to roleplay family members nor do you have to adopt them out. Also, we strongly encourage you not to name family members in applications unless it is an important application (such as for a high position, but those really won't be made anymore with our new system in most cases anyway). This is to avoid confusion with the names in question. If your cat has a Poopheart in their history and someone roleplays a Poopheart, a new member may read the application, notice that a cat is roleplayed with that name, and assume that your cat and Poopheart are related when this is not true. Also, as a side note, I hope that there are no Poophearts in Warriors fanfiction or roleplay. I'd be extremely disappointed if there were.
Either way, moving on...
It's not even that these cats don't have family - it's that 90% of the time, their mothers died of greencough shortly after they were born, they were the only kitten in the litter or their siblings died soon after birth, and their father was either never around or he died soon after their mother.
Why? I don't know.
Do you guys read others' applications? I have a feeling a lot of you, especially the newer members, don't take a gander at the other roleplayers' applications to get a sense of what character biographies are like here, so half the time, you don't know that your character's history is... well, not going to sugarcoat it, overused - very overused, in fact.
People wonder why the staff don't check applications very often.
Have you ever considered that maybe your app is just like the hundreds of others we get and we don't want to read the same thing over and over and over again? Probably not.
I think it's safe to say that in my three years of roleplaying, I've read at least 500 applications, and I can say that most of them are pretty much exactly alike in the history.
Also, the histories don't seem to have any impact on the characters. That's a bit unrealistic. Why is your cat a happy, bubbly little thing when her family died when she was a kit or apprentice? Kits I can understand a bit because they don't have as good of memories, but an apprentice should probably be at least a little traumatized, and not in the Bluestar way (if you don't know, I'll try not to spoil it too much, but some things happen in Bluestar's Prophecy and she becomes repeatedly depressed, she gets over it, and she's the same as she was before. No actual character development really occurred). Things that happen to us in real life change us a bit, right? If someone we love gets in an accident, we often times (not all of us, of course) become extremely protective over that person, and at least for some time, see and appreciate life more, yes? Why aren't these kitties the same?
I'm not saying I want the cats with tragic stories to be constantly mopey, but unless they have reasons, I'd say that these histories should change them in some ways. Do they try harder in their work because of what happened? How did they deal with those deaths? Take my Mintpaw of SunsetClan for example: Her littermate, Pebblekit, died when he went after something during a badger attack that was precious to Mintpaw. He was stupid, yes, but when he died, Mintpaw shut it out. It shows that Mintpaw deals with death by pretending it never happened and the cat never existed. Of course, this type of thing is more important for a medicine cat (in a way) because they have to deal with death differently than a warrior because it's usually their treatment of the sick/injured that failed and the cat died as a result.
The point remains, though.
Okay, I think I've gone on long enough. What have we learned today, kids?
1. Quit killing off your cat's family in every application's history. One or two can die and it's fine, because that makes sense, but not every cat is an orphan.
2. If you're going to kill off a family member, please, for the love of the Warriors series, don't do it by whitecough, greencough, or blackcough. I swear that this is the most common cause of death in histories.
3. Tell us about how this/these death/s impacted your cat. Did their personality change in any way, or maybe their feelings about certain situations changed? Could they possibly have a phobia of water because they watched their sibling drown? Hell, maybe this character has some sort of PTSD type of thing where seeing something causes them to freeze up and sort of watch the memory again in their head.
As a final note, I don't know about the other staff members, but personally, I'd be much more interested in reading applications more often if they had more imaginative histories. Be creative, guys, that's a lot of what roleplaying is about!
Long version: Alright, so I've noticed a trend with histories in the Warriors fandom.
Disclaimer: I AM NOT POINTING FINGERS AT ANYONE. I FEEL IT'S PRETTY SAFE TO SAY THAT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS MADE HISTORIES LIKE THIS BEFORE, SO DON'T FEEL BAD, YOU'RE DEFINITELY NOT THE ONLY ONE OR I WOULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN THIS.
Most of them contain cats without family.
This is understandable on a roleplay forum where family must be roleplayed, adopted out, etc., but on AWRP, we kind of encourage you not to do that because it just creates more cats that probably won't be used because the roleplayers don't want to tread on the original creator's ideas and overall mindset for the family members in question.
Once again, that is not the case on AWRP: you do not have to roleplay family members nor do you have to adopt them out. Also, we strongly encourage you not to name family members in applications unless it is an important application (such as for a high position, but those really won't be made anymore with our new system in most cases anyway). This is to avoid confusion with the names in question. If your cat has a Poopheart in their history and someone roleplays a Poopheart, a new member may read the application, notice that a cat is roleplayed with that name, and assume that your cat and Poopheart are related when this is not true. Also, as a side note, I hope that there are no Poophearts in Warriors fanfiction or roleplay. I'd be extremely disappointed if there were.
Either way, moving on...
It's not even that these cats don't have family - it's that 90% of the time, their mothers died of greencough shortly after they were born, they were the only kitten in the litter or their siblings died soon after birth, and their father was either never around or he died soon after their mother.
Why? I don't know.
Do you guys read others' applications? I have a feeling a lot of you, especially the newer members, don't take a gander at the other roleplayers' applications to get a sense of what character biographies are like here, so half the time, you don't know that your character's history is... well, not going to sugarcoat it, overused - very overused, in fact.
People wonder why the staff don't check applications very often.
Have you ever considered that maybe your app is just like the hundreds of others we get and we don't want to read the same thing over and over and over again? Probably not.
I think it's safe to say that in my three years of roleplaying, I've read at least 500 applications, and I can say that most of them are pretty much exactly alike in the history.
Also, the histories don't seem to have any impact on the characters. That's a bit unrealistic. Why is your cat a happy, bubbly little thing when her family died when she was a kit or apprentice? Kits I can understand a bit because they don't have as good of memories, but an apprentice should probably be at least a little traumatized, and not in the Bluestar way (if you don't know, I'll try not to spoil it too much, but some things happen in Bluestar's Prophecy and she becomes repeatedly depressed, she gets over it, and she's the same as she was before. No actual character development really occurred). Things that happen to us in real life change us a bit, right? If someone we love gets in an accident, we often times (not all of us, of course) become extremely protective over that person, and at least for some time, see and appreciate life more, yes? Why aren't these kitties the same?
I'm not saying I want the cats with tragic stories to be constantly mopey, but unless they have reasons, I'd say that these histories should change them in some ways. Do they try harder in their work because of what happened? How did they deal with those deaths? Take my Mintpaw of SunsetClan for example: Her littermate, Pebblekit, died when he went after something during a badger attack that was precious to Mintpaw. He was stupid, yes, but when he died, Mintpaw shut it out. It shows that Mintpaw deals with death by pretending it never happened and the cat never existed. Of course, this type of thing is more important for a medicine cat (in a way) because they have to deal with death differently than a warrior because it's usually their treatment of the sick/injured that failed and the cat died as a result.
The point remains, though.
Okay, I think I've gone on long enough. What have we learned today, kids?
1. Quit killing off your cat's family in every application's history. One or two can die and it's fine, because that makes sense, but not every cat is an orphan.
2. If you're going to kill off a family member, please, for the love of the Warriors series, don't do it by whitecough, greencough, or blackcough. I swear that this is the most common cause of death in histories.
3. Tell us about how this/these death/s impacted your cat. Did their personality change in any way, or maybe their feelings about certain situations changed? Could they possibly have a phobia of water because they watched their sibling drown? Hell, maybe this character has some sort of PTSD type of thing where seeing something causes them to freeze up and sort of watch the memory again in their head.
As a final note, I don't know about the other staff members, but personally, I'd be much more interested in reading applications more often if they had more imaginative histories. Be creative, guys, that's a lot of what roleplaying is about!
