Smiles As Bright As Sunflowers

Hello hello !! This is a new ACTIVE RP masterlist blog for the South Park RPC, as all others are already inactive. Since were a very small RPC & it’s difficult to find RPers here (I know you all are hiding!) - this is the very goal of this blog, to bring every active roleplayer together and help everyone find people to interact with!  Please REBLOG this post and state the following in the TAGS in order to be added to the list:

your muse name

if you’re canon, AU or OC muse

single or multi-muse blog

if you’re an adult or minorfor muses from different fandoms that have south park verse, please add the fandom you’re in too.

please mention in case you’re interacting with 18+ / etc muns only.

Examples:   1.  Kyle Broflovski , canon , single , adult                      2. Pearl , canon , single , minor , Steven Universe (SP verse)                      3. Craig Tucker / Kenny Mccormick, canon, multimuse, adult, 21+ only

Thank you very much ! Feel free to contact this blog for more info, or just check FAQ!

Because I want attention and a full inbox lol (feel free to reblog tho so you can get some questions too!)

1. Favorite main character and why they’re your favorite?

2. Least favorite main character and why they’re you least favorite?

3. Favorite side character and why?

4. Least favorite side character and why?

5. List as many of the South Park kids as you can in order from fave to least fave!

6. Any characters you feel you can relate to?

7. Favorite adult and why?

8. Least favorite adult and why?

9. Any characters that you think deserve more spotlight?

10. Any dead/one-time characters that you want back?

11. Are you someone who has a lot of headcanons for SP characters?

12. Tell me a headcanon that you have for [character name]!

13. Favorite ship? Tell us why!

14. Least favorite ship? Tell us why! (But don’t tag it; that’s rude!)

15. List as many SP ships as you can think of in order of fave to least fave!

16. Favorite episode and why?

17. Least favorite episode and why?

18. Describe an episode you’d like to see happen someday!

19. To you, what’s the most meaningful moment in the show?

20. To you, what’s the most disgusting/worst moment in the show?

21. Do you enjoy episodes that have a focus on the parents/adults?

22. Do you enjoy when episodes/seasons have an overarching plot?

23. What’s the first episode you ever watched?

24. What’s your favorite South Park song?

25. How and why did you get into South Park?

26. Have you ever felt weird for liking South Park?

27. Have you watched every single episode?

28. Have you played any South Park games? Which ones?

29. How well would you say you know South Park trivia?

👑 - You intimidate me 🌹 - You fascinate me 💙 - I want to be your friend 💚 - You’re one of my best friends 💖 - I have a crush on you 🍦 - Your blog is great 🍰 - I wish we were closer 🍩 - I wish you knew I existed 👡 - You’re pretty 🎀 - You make me smile

💥 - I don’t like you ❌ - You have a bad attitude 🔥 - I wish you would delete

This is a very long post. Hit J to jump down to the end of it if you’re on a computer and don’t want to read the entire thing. 

As a roleplayer, I am struggling.  I think I am burning out.

I struggle with finding the muse to write. I get online and look at drafts and sigh. I know I should be happy, because I am one damned lucky RPer; I have great threads, I’m comfortable with my status as a multi-muse, and most importantly, I have some of the best partners in the world, including one who isn’t shy to ask my to pick up a muse I maybe haven’t considered before, and another who is always down to do anything because hey, we just might get a good story out of it. There is a lot of good in my RP life, but I didn’t find this comfortable place until too recently, and I am tired. 

So, I am struggling. 

I feel guilty when I restrict my queue and stop it from running for days at a time. 

I feel guilty for writing out of character posts when my actual threads are quiet because of me. 

I feel tired and worn out and stretched thin.

I don’t love it anymore – but I don’t want to quit. 

When I started indie roleplaying on Tumblr, I didn’t understand why so many people talked about their drafts as if they were difficult to get to. “If they don’t want to write their drafts,” I wondered, “then why are they even here?”

Now, a few years later, I’m the one who is slow as molasses. I struggle with finding the energy to write, the drive to sit down and do it, even when I enjoy the threads or the characters. And I use the word enjoy intentionally. Once upon a time, I would have said love, but now, unless I am being hyperbolic or trying to project more enthusiasm than I may feel because I recognize that the person I am talking to may not be as burned out as I am, love is no longer always an accurate word. 

I still want to play, I still want to pursue exciting new things with new players and characters, but I don’t love it anymore. My love burned hot and bright, but now, it’s burning out.

I am burning out, and I don’t think I am alone here. Many role-players have probably felt this, or are starting to feel it. Players who have been here for a few years too long, or just had too many bad experiences. I asked people to send in the things that really kill their desire to RP, the things that make it difficult for them to want to get on here and write, and while I’ll go into some of them later an list them, what they all seemed to boil down to is this:

The benefits many RPers receive – such as the excitement or satisfaction of an amazing thread, or interaction with a good friend – do not reliably compensate them for the energy spent over a long period of time. Dedicated players will give all they can to this, carrying too much weight, perhaps, but eventually, their store of creative fuel will be depleted to the point where the fuel being given back to them by other people no longer feels like enough to sustain the fire, even if it does bring the occasional spark.

We get tired. We give and we give and we give of our creative selves, and we get tired. Not everyone, of course, and not everyone who gets tired is going to end up burning out, but plenty of us do, and it’s something worth talking about. It’s not like we have a handbook for this, after all; roleplay is a community and a community effort. Talking is the best tool we have. 

I am defining RP Burnout as getting to a point where the entire roleplaying experience has started to feel like too much work, and your ability to handle any stress or enjoy any positive things relating to it is compromised. Doing drafts is hard. You wince or sigh when a partner replies too quickly. Someone saves up their drafts and publishes them all at once, including a handful for you, so you go from zero to six drafts in a day, and you’re not happy about it. You feel overwhelmed. Once upon a time you might have laughed in delight and felt like you were rolling around in treasure, but no longer. Now, you just quietly swear under your breath and feel like you didn’t make any progress at all; you worked for it, and they kicked you back with a new load. Somewhere along the line, this shifted from experiencing roleplays to trying to accomplish them, and maybe you didn’t see the point where that shift happened. You don’t want to find new RP partners. You feel like nothing is quite right in RP. Maybe you make and remake your blogs, constantly rebooting yourself, always dropping every thread for a ‘fresh start.’ 

But there are no fresh starts. Not really. The only truly fresh start anyone can have is to begin again, to go back to the first day they started roleplaying–and I think a lot of people actually do pursue that feeling. They chase and chase it, they put themselves through hoops to try and attain it, but they never can, because there is too much memory, too much experience. 

You can’t start over fresh if you remember why you had to start anew to begin with.

THE RP BURNOUT PROCESS–

A mun starts roleplaying. It’s exciting and new. They have fun with it. They are meeting new people and coming up with new stories together. They are getting the stimulating feedback of going from zeroes – zero followers, zero notifications, zero interactions – to positive values. They are gaining things, receiving things, receiving energy. They have little energy invested in the idea of RPing yet, and are receiving a great deal of energy, in the form of positive stimuli, in return. Their RP life is imbalanced, but in a positive way. 

Time passes, they play. They become established and maybe develop a few core groups of people they like to interact with. They feel comfortable and stable. Things are fairly static. They have reached a point where they feel reasonably comfortable that they can get what they want when it comes to RP. The energy input is neutral – they have put in enough energy to balance out the energy the RPC gave them, but they are not losing yet. They’re happy. Things are good. They have a nice mix of OOC and IC interactions and never feel alone. Everything is in balance. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last for everyone.

Maintaining balance over time is more difficult than attaining it for a brief while. The bliss period ends. They begin to see that when they lose followers, they are not immediately replaced by new followers. They care about the number and let it indicate success/standing to them. If they post requests for people to interact with them – to send memes, or to send asks – they are ignored. People interact outside of just writing replies, but only in ways that do not require them to expend much energy. They might like or comment on a post, but they won’t start something new, they won’t send a meme, they won’t send an IC ask. The RPer begins to feel that they are now expending more energy than they are receiving, because they are now acting from the perspective of being on a peak, but their most important point of comparison may be that initial influx of positive energy they gained when they began receiving from the RPC – receiving followers, asks, getting traction so to speak. It’s easy to feel like you’re achieving something when you start from zero and go up, but from there, it becomes work.

Eventually, after they discover they cannot maintain the balance of energy where things felt good – because it is impossible to control the input level of other people – they start trying various things to recapture that feeling of newness, maybe without even realizing it’s what they are doing. They drop all of their threads so they can start over. They find little projects to do that don’t actually have any immediate benefit in terms of their problem, such as redoing all of their tags, giving their blogs a ‘facelift,’ et cetera. Sometimes, they completely delete their blogs and start over again, gaining the temporary excitement of seeing the follower number tick up from zero. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t care about follower numbers, or say they don’t – for a lot of people, it’s still going to be a positive stimulus, to feel like receiving something, receiving gifts, and it might bring them back to that feeling of newness… But it won’t last. And when they realize that, they get discouraged. 

Or, and what is probably more common, maybe they don’t really try to recapture the ‘good times,’ maybe they just accept that things are what they are while getting slowly more discouraged. I know this is something I do. For example, I know that if I ask for people to send asks for my characters? It won’t happen. If I post a muse that isn’t obviously a sexually available one, or available to ship, nobody cares (which I imagine is because shipping is gratifying, it gives people a sense of connection, some sense of return on their investment of time and energy into the RPC; in short, it is fun, but when it becomes the only source of fun… well, that’s another topic we can get into another time). It’s discouraging, and when I feel like people don’t care about me, it makes me care less about others in return. If people can click like on my personal posts but don’t want to interact in any way other than the occasional RP reply, it feels like they don’t care. I try not to fall into that trap, but it’s difficult to completely avoid. I’m one of those folks who will often send memes or IC asks to the people I follow – often on anon – because I know it makes people happy. I understand that I won’t receive a return on that energy, but understanding isn’t the same as being happy about it; it still hurts. 

It always does. 

When I asked people to send me reasons why they lose the muse to play, things that just discourage them or leave them wondering why the hell they’re here, the one unifying theme for almost all of them seemed to be, although nobody phrased it like this, the imbalance of energy. By and large, people feel like they’re putting more energy into this hobby than they’re receiving from it. It drains and discourages them. They want to make meaningful connections but either feel they are unable to sustain them or can’t find them at all – maybe they feel like the only one doing any work to keep friendship or threads going, maybe they just can’t get any initial foothold at all. The reasons vary, but the message seems to be the same. 

I thought about it in terms of someone I let back into my life a few months ago. Originally, I had RPed with them fairly heavily before realizing they had – intentionally or not – used me as a stepping stone to get to other RPers. I didn’t meet anyone new through them, but they met quite a few other people through me. Now again, when I tried to make a group verse, I included them in it because I knew it was something they’d enjoy, and they messaged me with an excited your friends are following me!, while also ignoring or just laughing off my mentions of wanting to do group stuff with this great RP server they kept talking about. It was a tough realization to see that I had been duped yet again, but in a way, it also really helped to crystallize my focus for writing this article because I was like this is it, right here: I expend a significant amount of energy and personal vulnerability and receive nothing in return other than the vague feeling of being used. This is not an equal exchange of energy. 

I’ll write up some of the reasons people cited me as what caused their lack of muse, or what discouraged them from answering, but won’t post or discuss all of them since there were over sixty. (Thank you by the way, guys!)

They don’t care if I have a new muse/blog. 

The expectations of others make this feel like a job even when everyone says that it shouldn’t and people reblog those ‘take your time’ memes

People constantly dropping all their old threads because they want fresh things; how are we supposed to get to anything meaningful?

Constantly dragging my ships/fandoms

Muns with unreasonable expectations about how many of their blogs I follow will get mad if I don’t, and it’s exhausting 

If we can’t talk OOC, it stresses me out and I get anxious 

I like their starter calls and send them things, but they never write the starters and never answer the asks. If I post a starter call or reblog a meme, they like/send, but it feels like they are expecting me to do all of the work. 

I have to make all the decisions when it comes to plot actions and just wish they would put the same effort in

having to take care of my partners’ emotional issues even though I am not their therapist, I just want to RP

It feels like they rush me for my replies even though I just did one 

When my RP partner and I have written together for ages, but they let their threads with me stagnate while they fawn on another RPer who has my same muse 

When it’s obvious they only want a ship, they don’t care about either of our muses having any growth or meaningful stories 

When they just mirror my post, basically summarizing everything I wrote in my reply and then acting like I am supposed to do something with that; I don’t know how I can always move the plot along if their muse doesn’t even have reactions of their own 

When my partner starts going in circles with their muse. For example, they could be having a panic attack and won’t snap out of it no matter how many replies we exchange, so at a certain point there’s nothing for me to do and I just feel like why am I even bothering when I want to get into a plot/story with them that involves the reasons for the panic attack, but they just want the comfort and not to spend time on anything more 

My own insecurities. It feels like people move on without me and I don’t know what to do when that happens, it’s heartbreaking 

I get very invested in writing and it seems like people never care about the story beyond the ship, but I want to love all of it 

When they won’t communicate with me OOC, it makes me feel used 

When muns act shady towards each other

Lack of time

The majority of that, along with the other anons, IMs, and asks, and two submissions I received about it all seemed to say that unless the problem is interpersonal or about a lack of time to RP, a lot of the problems people have with their desire to RP are, as said above, because of a lack of returned energy. Partners aren’t curious about them or their muses, they don’t interact in more ways than one; maybe they don’t share the responsibility of taking initiative, or it just feels like the investment of time, emotion, and creativity is a one-way investment. 

Roleplay is stressful. It’s not always a bad kind of stress, sometimes just the opposite, but all the same, there is always stress. There are always posts to write, memes to answer, little tasks to do, plotting conversations to have. As soon as someone gets their tasks done, more come in. It’s a constant ebb and flow of things that require vast amounts of creative energy that, due to the nature of RP, comes tied up with our emotional energy. You can never fully relax and think my job is done!, because that’s not the nature of what we do – but it is important to remember that can be tiring. It’s also important to remember just how personal RP is. This is a highly personal hobby that has the potential to be highly intimate – not just when we are writing romantic or sexual scenes, but simply because of the nature of what we’re doing. We’re sharing our minds; it’s natural and okay to want someone else to put as much of themself into that experience as you do. 

There can also be a feeling that one must behave in accordance with the expectations of the greater roleplaying community, but no matter how much someone puts into that, they’re unlikely to receive the support and acceptance of that community in return, beyond small things, because from a certain point of view, the community doesn’t exist. There are no real standards, there are no arbiters, there are no borders. It lives in all of us, and so the community itself is always in flux. It shifts and changes and breathes and has moods because it’s made of people. No one can gain absolute approval or absolute censure, no one can fully belong – or be fully alienated – beyond their clique, because the community is only what we make of it. The community is the individual experience.

Which is where the good news comes in. Because the community is what we make of it, we have the power to help ourselves and to help other people. If you feel like maybe you’re burning out, stop and ask yourself, How much control am I giving other people over my RP experience? And all of this is so much easier said than done, of course, but if you’re giving someone else control over your experience? Stop. Talk to the people who are causing you problems, and if they aren’t willing to work with you about it, stop interacting with them. Find your limits, find your needs, and recognize that it is okay to want to have those needs fulfilled…

But there’s more to it than that. 

Yes. You should be here for you. Yes, you should cut off the people who aren’t doing right by you if they don’t give you any reason to believe they will. Yes, you should look at what your basic needs are as an RPer and ask, am I reaching beyond those needs and suffering more disappointment because of it? Am I failing myself? 

But the rest of it? 

Take care of your fellow RPers. 

Take care of your fellow RPers. 

This is a community, even if it is only bound together by ideas. We only exist in the interactions we have and the content we create. One feeds the other. So if there are things you can do that might help not only you be a happier roleplayer, but help the people around you? Do them. I’m not telling you to go out and try to fix anyone else’s problems – some people are narcissists and will just suck up everything you give them and never give anything back – but I am suggesting that you care. If you are starting to burn out, there are a lot of things you can do. Pick just one day of the week to write for a couple of months, maybe try a different way of RPing (Discord, tabletop, larping), or just limit what kind of content you’re putting out or how much you reblog. 

One of the biggest things we can all do, I think, is to be more mindful of what we’re doing. 

Are you reblogging twenty ask memes at a time, but ignoring someone’s post on the dash where they request people send in some IC asks? If so, why? What good is that doing you? In a sense, you’re really burying other people’s posts on the dash under your flurry of activity, you’re not going to get much, and you just may leave them feeling that much more ignored. Why do this? There’s someone right there who wants interactions. Why don’t you go poke them and say hey, I’ll send you some asks if you’ll send me some, let’s have fun with this! 

Are you reblogging and posting wishlist items that nobody ever seems interested in? If not, why not just look at your mutuals and read up on their characters and their preferences. If it looks like the thing you want to play is something that one person in particular might be interested in doing, go talk to them about it. 

Talk to other people. 

Take initiative. 

Bring plots to your friends directly rather than just hoping they’ll see the post and decide to come to you about it. 

Don’t interact with people who can’t behave OOC, because that’s an investment of your energy that is never going to get a worthwhile return. 

I know people like to hide behind their anxiety and to all claim they have a terrible fear of each other, but here’s the thing that may be an unpopular opinion: roleplay is a social activity, and you need to push yourself to socialize in meaningful ways if you’re going to not only get a good return out of it, but be a good partner for other people. It may not be easy, especially for those who struggle with anxiety, but the more you try, the stronger the relationships you forge, the more other people will be able to support and understand you.

Strengthen your relationships with other people. Invest time in your partners; ask about their new characters when they mention them to you, talk to them about the things you know they are interested in. Demonstrate that you care, build trust and loyalty between you, be friends. (Side note: this is why multimuses are superior to a dozen single-muse blogs, in my opinion, because it is a lot easier to connect with a person when they are on one blog than to try and keep track of all their different blogs and still interact with them in a meaningful way). If you have to write less in order to make sure the time you’re spending here is doing more not only for you, but for your partners? That’s okay. Write a little less. What matters is that you end up happy – not just that you always have short, empty, maybe meaningless little interactions to toss around that will die in the next few exchanges and leave everyone looking for their next hit of interaction. 

Recognize how much energy you put into RP, how much energy your partners put into RP, and then do whatever you can to make that a more meaningful exchange for everyone. You don’t need to burn out, and if we all do what we can to be there for each other, to support each other, and to connect each other, maybe we’ll do a better job of retaining the talent we all want to see in the RPC. Maybe we can all feel like we belong just that much more. Maybe, if we invest time and energy and caring into a handful of individuals who are doing the same for us, and for the others in their lives, we’ll all get the one thing that, because we are all just slightly evil muns, we so often deny our muses –

Be kind to veteran RPers. Especially if you are also one. You’ve both been doing this a long time. Long enough to develop your own ways of writing that work for you. You have spent your time differently and their differing writing style shows how unique each of your portrayals are. We all develop differently. No one is doing it “wrong”. 

Be kind to new RPers. Don’t chase new writers out of the community because they don’t immediately meet your standards. Don’t put them down because they’re learning. Don’t shun them because they haven’t learned to make their own icons, graphics or themes. If they make a mistake, help them to learn. Don’t isolate them for being the person we all were at one time. Your seniority is not an excuse to be rude or hurtful. No one has been at this “too long to be nice”. No one’s “too old to have patience”.

Be kind to RPers of all skill levels. Don’t mock those who use flowery language or purple prose in their threads. They are writing what makes them happy and if their partners are okay with it then what is the harm? Don’t mock RPers who need extra time to write long replies because they’re not used to writing. Don’t send hurtful anons to writers threading with popular blogs about how they “aren’t good enough” to write with their partners. That is for their partner to decide, not anyone else.

Be kind to RPers who have firm rules. They are that way for a reason. Maybe someone hurt them before and that’s why so many rules on their blogs are necessary. You don’t know. Don’t attack others for having a lot of rules. And be kind to RPers who are very lenient in their rules. Don’t take advantage of a person’s lack of hard boundaries. 

i don’t support that at all.

so basically, if you don’t mind that your partner may drop threads or not reply/maybe forget to reply to a starter, please reblog this? its so unhealthy for someone like myself who gets afraid to drop threads on the chance that my partners may think i don’t want to write with them, or worse BECAUSE i dropped it they won’t want to write with me.