RPGs as mythic objects vs. literary objects
When tilotamma and I play RPGs together, I've noticed I have a tendency to feel nervous that she isn't taking the game seriously. Even though I KNOW she is, I feel jittery about it, like something isn't quite right.
I think my wish for her to be as serious about them as I am comes from always being so uncertain in the past whether people think I'm ridiculous for putting so much emphasis on them. I'm afraid people will think I take them TOO seriously, so I want all my friends to take them as seriously as I do. Logically this doesn't follow, because I know Anne isn't quite as serious as I am with them but she thinks it's perfectly fine and acceptable for me to be, and I should be okay with that. I think I just have this fear, because people have been unaccepting of that too many times in the past. I've had too many people who were important to me tell me that I shouldn't get so worked up over "just a game." I've had too many people make "humorous" jibes at me about my being too obsessed. I've had it happen with people I trusted and people I didn't expect to be that way, over and over, and NOT just a long time ago, but recently too. So I'm very sensitive about it. I'm scared.
But what nagged me was: if Anne is sitting there taking a game perfectly seriously and being emotionally attached to it, why should I sit there and feel like something is wrong, as if there's something she's still not doing emotionally that I want her to do?
First, I thought that it might be just habit. In the past I've had a lot of nervousness about playing RPGs with friends, because I've mostly only played with people who have never seen an RPG before. In those cases, I was always trying to introduce people to a game and trying to convince them that games like these could be deep and emotional and serious, because I'd had some early instances where friends came over and dismissed the game as "just some funny thing where you run around as funny-looking little guys and do silly melodramatic quests." So when I sit down to play an RPG that is old and beloved and canonical for me, something I played and loved as a child like FF6, my first instinct is to remember all those old times where I was trying so hard to convince others, and to feel like my big burden is to get them to appreciate how the story can be really serious and moving. With Anne, however, this should not be an issue, because she's played RPGs for a long time and she already feels how moving they can be and she cries at endings and so forth. There's something else at stake here, something that nags me even when I remember that she's serious about RPGs; I somehow feel like she doesn't quite perceive them with the degree of gravity that I hoped she would.
I thought for a while it was the fact that she makes fun of the characters the first time she plays the game. I do make fun of them too, but there's a difference because I tend to make fun the second time through, later, after playing through once or twice taking them seriously-- I have to be serious the first time, or else I'll never be able to take them seriously at all. I can't start out with my impression of someone being a big joke, or else that joke will overshadow everything else about them. I have to be serious and come to respect them, and later on be able to make fun. Anne just goes ahead and makes fun of them and respects them at the same time. But because I know she does this, because she's assured me that she really does take them seriously even while making fun, I believe her when she says making fun won't spoil it-- and I even sit there making fun of them right along with her, something I would NEVER have done with friends I was trying to introduce to a new game in the past. I already know she likes the game and she feels its gravity and I can trust that yes, she really does see the serious side, and isn't just claiming she does in order to satisfy me while inwardly feeling like it's just a joke.
Neither of these reasons seemed to make sense, and it bothered me, because I will get agitated while playing, as if there were something I needed to say or do in order for her to make the emotional connection that I wanted her to make (whatever that was.)
Finally, though, after thinking about this, I realized what it was. It's the age difference. Anne started playing RPGs in her late teens, by which time she was already the same age as most of the heroes, and now she's older than most of them. She sees the heroes the way she'd see a character her own age: interesting people, but not by default assumed to be wiser or more mature or capable than she is. Naturally she'll pass judgment on them. She'll roll their eyes at them in a way that I wouldn't have done. And she cares about them, but she behaves towards them as she would to her peers or to someone younger. They are her lil'uns, often laughed at for their quirks or neuroses or funny habits. They are her lil'uns, capable of being nice people and also of being humanly fallible, but not generally capable of being scary or awestriking. They are her lil'uns, the characters she's cultivated (perhaps it is no coincidence why she gets attached to her save slot and wants HER save that SHE has built with HER time, whereas to me all saves are interchangeable if they're at the same place and the same levels.) And I can totally see this in the way she acts towards them: a laugh, a sigh, "Oh, Locke," said in a tone of voice that says "we should have expected you to act that silly way."
Now, when I started playing RPGs, all of these heroes (save the few "token" child characters, like Relm or little Rydia) were WAY older and WAY cooler and WAY more mature than me. They were Grown Ups. I was not even remotely considered a grownup by any stretch of the imagination. They were SO FAR ABOVE me that they were like gods. Now, I'm not saying that I always thought they made good choices (any more than I'd agree with every choice of Zeus,) but rather that it wasn't for me to judge that. It wasn't something I would or even could pass judgment on. It was something to learn and memorize and accept and feel the way I felt about, say, Cinderella. All the people in the stories were these legendary figures, and it didn't matter whether I thought they were acting foolish or not because I wasn't called on to make that decision; they were grown up and far away and doubtless had their grownup reasons no matter whether I understood them or not. They were automatically assumed to be cooler and better than me. (This is why, as I keep telling people, I never really hate characters in old RPGs. They were just so far above me, on a different plane or something, that I can't put myself in a position to decide that they're bad.)
The result of this is an overwhelming sense of epicness: it's like watching fairy tales, really. You can LIKE one hero-god better than another, but you never really go "dude, that hero-god has their head screwed on wrong." (Well, you do if you're all literary and analytical, but you don't if you're acceptingly enjoying the fairy tales the way that you did as a child.) Or like being told Bible stories when you're a little kid: you're just told that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and you nod and go "okay"; you don't think "man, Jonah was a sucker" or any other judgment that you might later pass down from an adult perspective of regarding him as a potential peer. You don't regard them thinking: "hey, these are fallible human beings just like me." You regard them as story people operating on their own logic, but a plane removed, another sphere entirely in which you have no place and no judgment.
The thing is that since I have kept early RPGs in my heart as these personal myths, I tend to still view them that way. I don't approach them (as Anne does) from the angle of "now these are people my age, peers, fellow fallible humans." (It could be suggested that my Rydia fics could only have been what they were if they were to retain any of the feeling of my early years whatsoever: taking the child-character, whom I was capable of seeing as a peer, and keeping the child-perspective to view the others as Infallible Hero-Gods.) I'm more than willing to regard those old characters as fallible ordinary people for the purposes of writing, but fanfic aside, I feel like the way I want to approach these early works as a whole is with an air of reverence, looking up from down below, in order to perceive the Grand Epicness of the whole. And I think that is where the distinction lies: Anne wants to view them as on-the-level stories in a literary way, where I want to view them as epic-cultural-myth stories in a worshipful way. And that's why I feel like she isn't being as serious as I am with them: she isn't treating them like the Holy Objects OMG that they are to me.
I wonder whether the shift in whether we love RPGs as literary or mythic objects is generally correlated with the age we played them, or whether it's just a totally individual thing or a frame of mind or what-have-you. I know I haven't been able to completely submerge myself in one that way for a while, but I suspect that at least part of it is just jadedness from having played 30000 of them in the past, which is a different matter from age.