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Post by supersonic on Oct 15, 2020 20:24:02 GMT
Y'know, I've been roleplaying for about ten years now. I had...well less "humble" and more "embarassing" beginnings on Gaia Online where I did some roleplaying before eventually finding out about formal forum RPing, which I absolutely fell in love with. It was cool: having a proper app with proper boards and areas to roleplay in instead of having to roleplay on one continuous feed. The whole thing was a wonderful little culture shock.
However, as I continued to grow, life got more and more hectic and I had a little less time to me than usual. Now, I find myself having time on my hands again and have been looking all over various resource sites and I gotta ask: did something happen regarding original fandoms and shounen RPs? Now this isn't a thread to say "F@*# PANDFANDOMS AND EVERYTHING THEY STAND FOR!!! LET'S DOXX THESE GUYS AND PILLAGE THEIR VILLAGES!!" or "CANON RPERS SHOULD EAT MY @#**$&#&$*@( SHORTS!!" No, no, not at all. I'm just asking this question as someone who's genuinely wondering why one form of RP has seemingly overtaken another.
There used to be a bunch of Bleach, Naruto, Dragon Ball, Kingdom Hearts, RWBY, Pokemon, Digimon, Superhero, Martial Art OC sites heavily inspired by either one or more of those subjects listed above or heavily action-oriented. Now, it seems that most sites are focused on 18+ fantasy, cyberpunk aesthetics or shoujo-inspired realistic fiction sites with a few superpower sites here and there or a plethora of panfandoms and canon sites in general. The only notable Pokemon site I can even think to mention is Hoenn. And again, I'm not hating on anyone. In fact, most of those aforementioned fantasy and cyberpunk sites have grabbed my interest and I'm currently at the stage of sorting out which ones I should pick because I'll be damned if I don't join any of them, they're interesting as hell and I need a piece of that roleplay >:^(
But I still wonder: is there a specific reason why this shift in interest has occurred? Did shounen just get boring or are there other reasons? I'm genuinely interested in what people think.
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Post by SPIROLE on Oct 15, 2020 22:31:01 GMT
Hard to pinpoint because everyone is different and have different reasons.
Just on an educated guess, a big portion of the 'old' RP community has grown up. Their interest changes and so does the material they want to write about.
You also have to factor the work and culture that comes from the old, classic type of Shounen sites. Those type of sites only exist if there are people there to create and maintain them. That's not even counting the next crucial step which is having a sustaining member base.
That also doesn't take into account that all of the series you mentioned were more popular while they were running.
You'll still see some Shounen sites that touch on more modern series. There's a Solo Leveling site that was released, as well as several notable MHA within the past year.
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phantom of the black parade
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silver and gold won't save my rotting soul
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Post by Kuroya on Oct 15, 2020 22:59:52 GMT
honestly, this is..... generally a topic i think a lot about off and on, and please keep in mind that i'm definitely not saying i'm 100% absolutely right, but i think i'm.... not entirely wrong either in regards to what i'm saying. i honestly think there's a lot of reasons why the rp community has gone the way it has in the last.... lot of years. i've said it before in other topics ( post 1 + post 2 of this thread specifically come to mind), but forum-based rp is.... largely on the decline overall in favor of mediums like twitter, tumblr, or discord - all of which have much lower barriers of entry for newer rpers (the former two because being ostracized out of one social group =/= being entirely shut out of the wider rpc on the platform, the latter one because it's more akin to chat rp, which never really died out in my opinion) while also dealing with the general consequences of seeing more people leaving forum rp than are coming into it. animanga in particular seems to be struggling with this more than real life since many of those "anime starter pack" fandoms that are good intros to rp have either ended or been much more in the decline while the next generation "anime starter pack" series of my hero academia or rwby are far less popular for sites to exist in, which is to say nothing for the very quick lifespan of interest in any particular genre (since, for example, the announcement of the new digimon series saw a good 4-5 sites pop up, but within a month or two, most of them died off as people moved on to other things). i also have noticed a trend of much of the community congregating on an increasingly smaller number of big sites, which i have.... mixed feelings about personally because while that does sort of help in regards to overall genre longevity, it has obvious effects in terms of the variety offered in the general community. to understand the fandom vs original divide, i feel like there's a few factors at play. some of it is just that fandom sites are generally easier to build and market for the simple reason of "you don't have to write every single scrap of lore and world-building for your magical school rp and then hope people read it if you're just a normal harry potter site". some of it is definitely related to the fact that the lifecycle of sites has just... grown shorter in the past decade, which definitely gives a leg-up to fandom sites over original sites for that same reason. but i also do think it's a divide in fc medium - because by and large, the lion's share of sites that i see in the real life community are original site premises, with the two biggest rp genres being the supernatural creatures / modern fantasy genre and the realistic city/town genre (the third big genre i see is probably harry potter and the fourth the general umbrella of marvel / dc, and both of those have been declining in the past year or two). and while i do personally speculate on whether or not part of the reason why fandom is so scattered on real life relates back to that animanga had such a strong following behind certain specific fandoms that are waning where real life didn't (since imo vampire diary / supernatural / game of thrones sites still exist but they've been through the bulk of their "the series is over" cull now and never got the domination that we saw with the naruto + pokemon sites back in the day). in regards to panfandoms specifically, i've again addressed this issue specifically here in this post, but the tl;dr is while animanga does have more fandom sites, they actually have a very glaring lack of places hospitable to playing canon characters period, which means that panfandoms are one of the few current rp genres that animanga has where you can see a lot of sites pop up specifically because xyz claims are taken or people disagree with abc site rules. (that and they obviously take in any refugees who might be interested in super niche fandoms that would otherwise not get traction as an overall site concept just because animanga does not have a viable sandbox option to bleed them off onto.) (pokemon i also think is just..... dealing with issues that come from a lot of older fans growing disenchanted with the overall fandom since the last two gens have been very hit or miss and since it's mostly older members in forum-based rping, most pokemon sites tend to be really old or really young, which is another detractor to them, but that also might just be me putting my personal opinions into the discussion there as a former pokemon rper / staffer, so take that with a grain of salt.) also as spiral mentioned and i've gone into before in this thread, a lot of those plot-heavy shounen sites tend to be very hard to run, both in terms of maintaining staff enthusiasm to do it and in terms of finding a memberbase actually willing to participate in it. i know i've also had problems in the past with shounen sites attracting a lot of min-maxers and rules lawyers and powerplayers and metagamers and just generally toxic rpers that weren't fun to rp with as a member or moderate as a staffer. staff burnout is also understandably more common in shounen sites so. yeah. just. there's a lot of reasons why things have come to be where they are now. i'm sure i didn't catch all of them, but i think i got a lot? and maybe i'm dead on for some things and wildly off on others but. imo nothing happened in a vacuum and a lot of it is kind of just... the consequences of things that were set in motion years ago.
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Post by SPIROLE on Oct 15, 2020 23:35:43 GMT
Heavy disagree. Pokemon sites see a resurgence, however small, every time something major comes out. Sword and Shield and even their DLCs saw an uptick in Pokemon sites being advertised.
There are plenty of detractors in why Pokemon sites don't last but I want to say the biggest factor is their staff members not being to stay up with the uptick. A majority of Pokemon sites focus on the catching, leveling, and traveling mechanics for the games. This puts a heavy emphasis on staff having to spawn Pokemon and track transactions for leveling, learning moves, and evolving. All of this is work and you multiple it per mon, per character. It adds up and can be very time intensive.
And that's just the basics. People love adding complicated systems and rules just to create artificial barriers for them to follow instead of running them on their own accord. This, while fine, adds to the work load and requires people to sustain it.
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Post by Skyfather on Oct 15, 2020 23:43:33 GMT
Yeah I personally think that a big part of the problem is, as spiral mentioned: interest is really hard to maintain. Shounen sites can still work, they just, well, they need to be on air. You want a Dragon Ball site? Well you can for sure make one, but you should wait until the Dragon Ball series comes back, they make the Broly movie sequel or they drop a new hit game. Naruto has Boruto but until Boruto reaches Shippuden levels of popularity, you're better off staying away from that. Primetime for Kingdom Hearts passed once KHIII dropped off a while ago, Pokemon spiked again with SwSh and the expansions, Bleach has the new anime so you should definitely keep your head on the swivel for that, and so on.
Avatar is another example. Once the series hit Netflix it was site after site after site. Hell, even I made an Avatar site! Point is, shounen RP comes in and out, it just depends on whether or not that content is on-going and popular as opposed to panfandoms and the like that don't rely on these needs because anyone can be who they want to play regardless of what's popular and what's not.
Even with my own site I'm taking a risk as there are no Marvel or DC products flying about, OPM Season 2 ended a while back and The Boys also ended. With sites like these, it really is all about timing.
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phantom of the black parade
3,000 posts
bits
she / her pronouns
silver and gold won't save my rotting soul
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Post by Kuroya on Oct 16, 2020 1:17:59 GMT
Heavy disagree. Pokemon sites see a resurgence, however small, every time something major comes out. Sword and Shield and even their DLCs saw an uptick in Pokemon sites being advertised. There are plenty of detractors in why Pokemon sites don't last but I want to say the biggest factor is their staff members not being to stay up with the uptick. A majority of Pokemon sites focus on the catching, leveling, and traveling mechanics for the games. This puts a heavy emphasis on staff having to spawn Pokemon and track transactions for leveling, learning moves, and evolving. All of this is work and you multiple it per mon, per character. It adds up and can be very time intensive. And that's just the basics. People love adding complicated systems and rules just to create artificial barriers for them to follow instead of running them on their own accord. This, while fine, adds to the work load and requires people to sustain it. as i said in the original post - i've been out of the pokemon rp game for years (my last pokesite was back in 2015), so i definitely know that i am not perfectly up to date on the exact nuances of what's going on with pokemon sites... but i also feel like i'm not 100% off the mark either in my original assessment.
i do agree with you that the staff-heavy nature of pokemon as a genre makes burnout a giant problem for pokesites in general, especially since a lot of sites do tend to have overcomplicated mechanics just for the sake of it, and that staff burnout is probably the number one reason why pokemon sites tend to die off. because yeah i think you're right there. (same as i do that y'know what, probably the fairly formulaic nature of pokemon rps being almost exclusively a trainer journey at their core is getting a bit stale in a growing portion of the rpc.)
but i also think i'm not wrong when i say that there really isn't a lot of middle ground in the genre between "established sites that have been around for actual years" and "brand new sites that are trying to get their feet under them" and there really hasn't been for a good while either. which is also a trend i've been noticing in the general animanga community at large, to be fair (which i honestly don't think it's healthy there either in the grand scheme of things but i digress), but it's something that really stands out in pokemon for the exact reasons you mentioned with capturing + leveling exacerbating that issue for... obvious site power level extrapolation reasons.
sure, maybe it is some of my own personal disappointment with the direction nintendo has opted to go in with the mainline pokemon games in the past few years that has worn off a lot of my nostalgia, but i also don't think i'm entirely alone in my grief with the games. and i think it's not entirely fair to completely dismiss the relevance of that since uh... like you said, interest in the genre matters, so imo, losing solid fans of the genre because they're unhappy with the wider fandom is not a good thing for that genre's rpc (the same thing is going on in a larger scale right now with harry potter in the wake of jkr's.... everything, so i'm not talking 100% out of my rear with this point).
(honestly i probably could have summed up the last two paragraphs as "while yes you're not wrong that pokemon sites see a resurgence with new game releases, i don't think i'm crazy when i say that it feels like those resurgences have been increasingly smaller in more recent years and while some of that is likely from the overall community shrinking, i also think some of it comes from there being less of a hype for pokemon overall because of more people falling out of the genre than are flowing into it, either from a staffing end or a member end, and i could not tell you which just because i'm not as widely knowledgeable of all the pokemon sites out there as i used to be" asdfjkl;)
like i said in the op. to a certain extent, take my opinion on it with a grain of salt, but i also don't feel like i'm entirely 100% wrong in it either. |
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praise the cats!
587 posts
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accidentally fell in love with hawks and i now can't get out please send help.
Summer Bingo Completionist
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Post by utter hawks trash. on Oct 16, 2020 1:32:11 GMT
i might be repeating some points and i don’t have anything too long to say, but i think shounen-type rps, whether fandom or not, all suffer from that issue of staffing. period, what i’ve seen and experienced is that in rps w lots of systems like that of many shounen rps, the staff will inevitably burnout, not be able to keep up w staff requests - and since they usually are pretty essential to the core systems, it tends to end w the site dying out bc everything just moves too slow for ppl.
i’m gonna use endorrain as an example. that site had a fuck ton of system shit going on and don’t get me wrong it was lots of fun. the staff figured out pretty quickly that they wouldn’t be able to deal w all the staff work as it were so they let players gm their own encounters so that the site would be able to stay viable. but there was still so much staff work, lots of system overhauls and changes because things needed to be balanced, tested, and plenty of player complaints abt certain classes being too op/ underpowered. all of that accumulated to staff burnout and endorrain lasted maybe six or seven months
honestly, this is just a general thing of sites but it’s likely more prevalent in shounen type. and i do think there is a certain weariness that comes w realizing that complicated systems are long term commitments, and if u have experience before, u may not necessarily have the energy to commit as well as when u were more fresh faced |
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Post by SPIROLE on Oct 16, 2020 7:42:04 GMT
To clarify, the point I disagree with is that:
Pokemon (RPC) is dealing with issues that comes from older fans becoming disenchanted with Pokemon due to the last two generations (Sun + Moon, Sword + Shield).
I also slightly disagree with the age skew being an issue but I'm not confident enough in knowing everyone's age to really counter that.
Technically, you could say that this is an issue, but it's so minor in comparison that it doesn't even warrant addressing when looking at the issues that roleplaying, and Pokemon specifically, is facing.
I would safely wager that very few people who used to roleplay Pokemon, and still roleplay, are deciding that due to the last two gens. Their interest may have waned from Pokemon, but rarely does it factor in on a region. Most them do not even take place in the regions. The most popular place for them to take place in are either made up regions or some of the older ones, such as Kanto (gen 1).
Many of the newer mechanics never get touched on and I've yet to see a place that locked people onto the newest gen of Pokemon only. The plot of the generation never really get borrowed either, with most them strictly borrowing the setting and raw concepts that always translate into RP. Team Rocket are bad guys (crime; good guy vs bad) or Magma vs Aqua (faction based).
The issues the Pokemon community face are the same issues that RP in general face. People may also lose interest in Pokemon itself but that carries more to the general thematic and environment that setting creates versus the actual influence of either game.
Personally, I think Sword and Shield hyped the base up much more than most of the previous gens.
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amorphous blob
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Post by ulla on Oct 16, 2020 14:01:58 GMT
i don't have much to add, just an aside to concur with what SPIROLE is saying: as someone who has run a spin-off pokemon site with relative consistency since 2014, every time a new pokemon installment comes out there is a very noticeable uptick in traction / interest / activity no matter how successfully or poorly it was received by the greater pokemon fanbase at large. |
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phantom of the black parade
3,000 posts
bits
she / her pronouns
silver and gold won't save my rotting soul
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Post by Kuroya on Oct 16, 2020 15:33:14 GMT
SPIROLE ullathis is the last post i'm gonna make about it because honestly this is going in circles and is kind of derailing the original point of the thread. i never said that pokemon rps didn't have a bump in interest with new releases - in fact, i explicitly said exactly that in my second post. the original point i was trying to make is that wider fanbase reception matters from the perspective that former fans of the series who have decided to reduce their consumption of new content for that series are obviously less likely to be influenced by that relevancy hype following the release of new content; this also has the consequence of potentially eroding away at that underlying base of any given rp genre for players that are interested in the concept outside of those relevancy hype periods. that's it. that's why it matters. is it the only factor for why the pokemon rpc is how it is now compared to six months or six years ago? heck no. i honestly don't even think it's one of the major factors since i think there's a lot of wider general trends that explain things far better. but i also don't think it's something to entirely dismiss out of hand either since it does have consequences and offers some explanation for what might be going on in the background underneath those bigger reasons, as it were.
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bits
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Post by shanimal on Oct 16, 2020 16:17:09 GMT
There used to be a bunch of Bleach, Naruto, Dragon Ball, Kingdom Hearts, RWBY, Pokemon, Digimon, Superhero, Martial Art OC sites heavily inspired by either one or more of those subjects listed above or heavily action-oriented. something that stands out to me-- besides these being series some of us were into when we were younger and might not be anymore-- is that when we were younger the barrier of entry to a lot of these series wasn't nearly as high as it is now. comic books have always had a high barrier and i would argue that pokemon is still relatively newcomer friendly, but bleach, naruto, dbz, kh-- those series were ongoing, some of them concluded yes, but they're very long series, so if you want to incorporate everything those series have to offer... well, you're left with the die hard fans rather than just those with a passing casual interest.
bleach and kh particularly stand out as examples to me, as i was a casual bleach fan and quickly lost interest after the soul society arc, but i am sure bleach rps would probably like to incorporate things from hueco mundo or things even later on in the series that i'm just flat out unaware of. on the flip side i am a diehard kh fan, i have played every game, sunk a stupid amount of time into the mobile games, you name it. a lot of kh rps that came out after kh3 incorporated lore from the long running mobile game or were post-kh3. at the time kh was at its most popular when i was in middle school... there were three games. that's not the case anymore.
but even if you make it accessible to people with a casual interest, i think a lot of us are just into different genres of manga, anime, and video games. sure, i still love kh, aqua is one of my favorite characters of all time, but my love for the series has admittedly waned and i'm more strongly invested in other things. i'm sure a good kh site would make me very nostalgic-- but i personally can't say i'd stay there.
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Post by BONNIBEL on Oct 18, 2020 11:40:47 GMT
don't forget one of the bigger issues i don't think ?? anyone has mentioned yet
but people are lazy.
they don't want to read your fighting systems.
they don't even like systems anymore.
look back at some of the posts made here about
how people see sites, think its interesting but
they have too much information
they have a system they don't like
or a system that's too wordy
or its just not 90 - 100% of what they want
so they dont join
and for the system/ info threads
you might think: than just simplify it.
so you have staff try to make it simple
but now its just too little
people don't get the point of even having a system
some people even exploit it to make op characters because they can
or even, staff start to think: hey  maybe we shouldn't even do this
because they can't figure out a way to make it work for the public
and cover as many bases at they can
its a lot of work
for what?
the average life-span of rp sites in 2020
which is like ... a month or two???
sure you have the exceptions but typically
sites die around that time
give or take
and some people who have experience:
being staff
coding
etc
just
rather
not |
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Post by wolfe on Oct 20, 2020 22:00:23 GMT
The number of people both willing and able to create/maintain sites has gone down in most of those genres so you have a few long runners with a lot of seasonal ones that are created and die within the span of 3 months. Or at least that was my experience with MHA and now RWBY.
Every new season that comes out we get like 4-5 new sites that have a very short life cycle and the existing sites get an influx of new people that you need to maintain enough of to survive until the next season basically. Can't imagine running a fandom site of a series that has no active updates, honestly.
Just noting with the system/info thread bit above, I really think it just comes to actually having a target audience and not caring that you'll alienate some people. A lot of people with X out of your site for any reason or no reason, and you can't plan around them magically deciding to join. Find a niche and aggressively market towards that niche so that the people who do join actually stay for long periods as much as possible. While my own site has definitely had seasonal players and I love when they get involved and make a mark and do something super cool before going off to the next project, a large chunk of my current member base has been around for over a year at this point.
I lost some seasonal members to retain and market my game towards the long haul to try and keep people engaged for that long, and that's a sacrifice I'm happy to make every time to be honest. Focusing on seasonal influxes is also perfectly valid and you can sustain a site that way too, this is just the way that I chose and noting that you can absolutely do a long haul with that mindset as well rather than trying to cater to everyone and appeasing nobody.
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maybe we shouldn't even do this