as i've gotten older and lost a lot of my energy, honestly, i've found that i basically like brainstorming world-building stuff + systems and doing the "debugging" for them, but i get really tired out when i'm having to do all the write-ups for that kind of stuff. and while i absolutely love doing a lot of the stupid little maintenance stuff like updating claims and handling shop transactions and giving out pixel awards, i honestly get so exhausted handling apps within a month or two (mostly because i end up so exhausted by the more tedious pending notices that it takes the mickey out of me) and in general dealing with drama.

tl;dr i'm a quality-assurance tester and a systems maintenance staffer at heart, but unfortunately for me, this is not the path that i have chosen to walk or the one that shiva has permitted me to in order to have nice things, so instead, i must suffer

i resisted the urge to make an entire dissertation on this so uh. yeah.

leap's right about this - outside of the handful of outliers of kink sites (which yes, do exist, albeit almost exclusively in the rl community), the vast majority of jcink sites that allow explicit content (which isn't all since imo the free version of jcink doesn't allow it and not all premium sites do either) actually aren't any more #hornyonmain than any other rp site.

the only real difference is that you don't have to worry so much about where the line is, if you want more than just a "disney romance" out of your rp experience, and there's a lot more support for making sure people can't "surprise sex" unsuspecting other people (since imagine if there was a recent posts option on jcink on a site where explicit content - of the sexual or violent kind - is being actively posted). there's also some stories that i really wouldn't feel comfortable doing outside of a jcink premium site anymore man, younger me had cahones trying to pull off escorts on proboards sites so. yeah.

(but also real talk, that kind of assumption is....... really rather harmful in the long term. both in terms of being rather dismissive of / offensive to people who do actually like to rp more explicit content and in terms of getting into the same kind of negative discourse you see around "fandom purity culture", as it were.)

proboards? yeah, it's kind of dying, which honestly isn't a surprise since it's not really a popular platform outside of animanga, which is really small compared to the rl community (as in the entire animanga community is probably about equal to their second or third biggest subgenre of rp), and animanga seems to be slowly shifting more in the direction of jcink so that's not helping it tbeh.

jcink? not really. there's not a lot of skins offered for jcink in the animanga community, but that's a combination of "a lot of coders don't offer premades anymore period due to time constraints + the shift towards commission work" and "animanga doesn't have an actual jcink resource site so proboards tends to get the lions' share of the resources in the animanga rpc". if you actually venture into the wider rl community, jcink skinning is thriving. (probably the closest i would come to saying jcink skinning is dying is "the difficulty curve to learning to skin jcink is a bit steep if you aren't comfortable working with css + html, so you see fewer people who have little to no coding knowledge end up learning to do it, especially when skin commissions are thriving for jcink tbeh" but that's... still a far cry from saying it's a dying art imo.)

but also, real talk, like..... animanga is a pretty small section of the forum-based rpc, all things considered, so it's quicker to feel the squeeze from a shrinking community competing against discord's growing popularity (which that shrinking probably isn't helped by the fact that animanga gets kind of a bad rap from the rl crowd so you don't see a ton of crossover out of them either). so. technically the answer is also "yes, forum-based rping as a whole is being beaten out by discord" but that's a whole different minefield tbeh.

honestly i could go into a ton more detail about all of this but i'm trying not to whip out a dissertation into critical rp theory so uh. yeah.

honestly this entire context is hogwild for me as someone who literally hasn't been on a site even remotely balanced for gender demographics, never mind favoring female characters, in almost a decade of rping with the sole exception of any disney personified site (since, y'know, disney princesses are popular)........... but real talk, this entire paragraph was a trip and i think i will be incorporating "murderhobo" into my rp lexicon from now on, thank you for this beautiful gift.