I side-eye the hell out of people who ship purely to vicariously experience their ideal romantic relationships and live second-hand through their characters instead of a wider variety of reasons (exploring interesting narratives, seeing how characters develop off each other, etc)

RP is normally just casual fun exploration of stories with friends. When you're missing something you deeply want in your life (love, power, validation) and you use RP to fill that hole, the dynamic of the hobby changes in a way that's potentially really unhealthy.

It's not just your pretendy fun times hobby anymore, it is the ONE PLACE in your life where you go to feel romance or power or validation. It's importance is dramatically elevated and ripe for disaster if you have a player who also happens to feel entitled to have what they want.

I feel like that's where you get all these stories of RP creeps who jump into romance RP and then get extremely pushy, demanding, or controlling over their RP partners. Or people who get upset if the romance RP doesn't unfold exactly the way they want in their fantasies.

They haven't put in the work IRL to find love and nurture themselves, so they use their Romance RP partner to give it to them and fill that massive void. That is a tremendous amount of pressure to put on someone who is just there for pretendy fun times.

This isn't to say there's perfectly nice folks who ship primarily to experience love vicariously through their characters - just that the risks for things getting weird is much higher when it's way more than just two folks collab-writing a fun story together.

The reason why I mentioned power and validation is that I've absolutely seen people RP characters to live our their power fantasies over people and get controlling over that as well.

When RP is just a story, your character behaving however they want is no big deal. When RP is someone's only source of something they desperately want, but can't get IRL? Your character behaving however they want can suddenly threaten the one place a person gets love or power.

Anyway thank you for coming to my ted talk. A lot of us have used this hobby to cope and survive things, but if you realise you're using it to fill a void, either try to find healthier ways to fill it IRL or be constantly ready to check yourself to prevent harm.