Another Larp Post
So one time I watched the film 'Titanic'. Because American Airlines have absolutely no sense of irony, I watched it on a transatlantic flight while several thousand feet over the same freezing ocean in which the film is set. Or to put it another way, in which the tragedy occurred. I felt really weird watching that film, because while it was a long time ago it was still a thing that really happened. It felt somehow disrespectful to the people who were actually there, even though they were dead. If it weren't for the fact that I was in the centre front aisle and really prone to motion sickness, I would have preferred to give that film a miss.
I get the same thing when I try to watch war films. My grandparents didn't tell me a lot of war stories, because war is completely god-awful and they wanted to keep me far away from all the horrible things that they lived through. There were some things they couldn't avoid mentioning though, like the reasons they were deaf or sore or jumpy about certain noises. I can't even watch the beginning of the Narnia film without remembering my Grandma telling me about chewing holes in the little cross she wore round her neck whenever she was in an air raid shelter. So yeah, history messes with my head.
I'm not completely normal in this respect. I mean, Titanic was the best selling film at the time, to say nothing of how long Celine Dion went on at the top of the charts, so its fair to assume that nearly everybody else didn't feel horrible and ghoulish about going to see a re-enactment of a maritime disaster. And it wasn't really a film about the disaster as much as the fictional characters they stuck in there to have an implausible romance. Still, that didn't make me feel one bit less uncomfortable.
Most larp has a pseudo-historical setting, but it isn't really history. It's Tolkien, or Pratchett. It has bits that look a bit like history, but they're hidden under the elves and the orcs and the magic and the giant badgers. I can cope with that. I particularly love the settings where they explicitly jettison all of our history, and deliberately work against our bizarre cultural traditions. Where they reject sexism, racism, religious persecution and compulsory heterosexuality as things that just never happened. Those are the larps I'm most comfy at. I've never booked for a proper historical larp though. I can't settle my bizarre and oversensitive conscience into pretending to be alive at the same time as my ancestors, and pretending to deal with the same stuff they had to live through. I can handle zombie Nazis, or future Nazis from outer space, but the actual ones that tried to kill my Grandma, not so much.
I can't even handle the 1950s larp that is out there. Mostly because that's even closer to home. The people who lived through the '50s are still all around me and loudly judging my life choices, which makes even aliens and ray-guns and those big froofy skirts not enough to tempt me to pretend to be there even for a weekend.
I even feel a bit weird in the only slightly historical larps. I can just about play Victoriana, with it's steampunk setting of dirigibles and fairies and magic. But there are some times when I'm in the drawing room, and I can't help rolling my eyes and feeling sorry for my great-grandmothers. I can't really remember them; but I can imagine their eyeroll pretty well. I assume it's the same one my Grandmas and Great Aunts inherited, and then perfected every time someone went on about 'women drivers' and they graciously refrained from mentioning that time when nearly every single driver in the country was a woman and they managed beautifully thank you very much.
So yeah. This is mostly to apologise to all of my friends who are running Historical Larp games that I am flagrantly and studiously avoiding. It's not that I don't love you, and it's not that I don't think that it will be a great game. Its only that I'm odd, and I can't play comfortably in the past. Set a game in the future and I will be there like a shot! Pretty please :)