Development 16 - Survival OR Fetishizing Aesthetics (Patreon)

Larp has something I'd like to call a problem of Fetishizing Aesthetic. Blasphemy from me, of course, as someone who spent a lot of the past few years writing about the aesthetic power of experiences. But a lot of Larpers have a tendency to fall in love with the way things look and feel instead of, oftentimes, what they end up meaning. As a member of a lot of progressive Larp Facebook groups, I watch people get called out over it over, and over, and over. The first level, the one a lot of people with no experience in progressive communities tend to engage with, is where they recreate a historical or quasi-historical setting faithfully, favoring faux-realism (Game of Thrones-esque narrative choices) instead of actually ensuring marginalized people are comfortable. There's been a huge amount of documentation on that issue, so I'm not going to dwell on it here. My main frustration is the failure of people within progressive communities to take the next step - engage with the harmful material within these aesthetically "cool" time periods, and confront them. 

Whenever people talk about time periods (the 50s, the 20s, the Wild West, the South), there's a desire to "de-problematize them". The idea that we can take the appearance of that setting and strip away from it everything that makes that setting "harmful", we'll get some essence of "cool" that we can do things with. Below is a Facebook post that came up on my feed (whose author is anonymous, because it's really not their fault). I've bolded relevant sections. 

So I've been watching the second season of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime... And the view of 1950-1960s summer get aways to family resorts is so surreal (think dirty dancing). The activities, the cheesy entertainment camp counselor, the drama over families not wanting to sit with this or that annoying family at dinner and the idea of summer interactions going back decades....
It all seems so ripe for a larp.
You could even pace it with Thursday being the start of summer and Sunday bring the end of summer and compress it all into a four day larp, casting characters as clashing and interlocking families that go to the same resort. 

(albeit oh gawd it's so waspy. Would need fixing in actual larp if it became real.) 

It's so WASPy. How do you fix that? How could you actually go about taking a story about inter-family politics in 1950s suburbia going on Summer vacations and not have it be WASPy? It's intrinsically WASPy! Even if you tell queer people and PoC that it's okay for their families to be in the game also, it is still going to be WASPy, because the narrative is fundamentally one of white, anglo-saxon protestants engaging in heteropatriarchal family relationships. 

What do you get when you tell a story fundamentally rooted in colonialism, and then make it "diverse"? Well, you've still told a story rooted in colonialism, only now you've paid lip service to marginalized members of your community. Congrats! The narrative is still about whiteness, and straightness, and patriarchy, just reproduced using diverse bodies. You've captured the "pure aesthetic", the 'l'art pour l'art, and avoided the responsibility of thinking about the historical nightmare that was the 1950s. The fetishistic devotion to the look of it all is the great failure of spectacle Larps.

So then, why do you need to fix how WASPy it is? 

Why not tell a story about WASPs, engaging in their weird, toxic patterns, hurting each other through cycles of violence, and the ways people hide from it.

Is it because people are scared to be bad to each other? Are they scared to engage in their own complicity in a toxic society? We are not so distant from the 1950s, after all. In 70 years, our grandchildren will be dressing up like Boho hipsters and Larping coffee shop AUs and making Larps based around Grimes, Drake, Ed Sheeran and The Big Bang Theory. So is there no hope? Are we doomed to have to choose between reproducing the violence within a setting, or ignoring the violence within a setting, without changing the stories we're telling? 

What if instead, a Larp about the 1950s was about the toxic dynamics of the setting, but genuinely explored. What happens when we write Larps about survival, instead of about comfort? 

The Shape of Water wasn't perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that the main actress isn't mute was a mistake. However, the other ways in which the story addressed diversity were expertly done. If this movie was made under the first level of aesthetic fetishization, you would probably just not have any black people in it. Under the second level, we could expect Octavia Spencer to play someone in power, or someone who has escaped the racial dynamics that define the 1950s.

By making the very narrative of The Shape of Water be about the discrimination and colonial apparatus of Cold War - era USA, Guillermo Del Toro is able to appreciate the myriad of aesthetics the 1950s possesses, while also getting to talk about how those aesthetics have failed us. When we obsess over the fun parts of the 50s, we directly ignore the horrible actions of those families that we're so interested in. And so, instead of shying away from that, why not tell a story about it? Why don't we tell stories of queerness inside these environments?

One of the participants at Wayfinder is writing a Larp about a group of soldiers trapped on the coast of France during WWI. He wasn't sure how to handle the complexities of gender within a historically sex-segregated environment. I'm proud of all the advice I gave him, but the thing I'm most proud of was:

• Everyone should ideally play a character who appears to be a cis man. However, make it very clear that "appears to be a cis man" is radically, aggressively different than "is a cis man". There's only one way to be a cis man. But there's a lot of ways to pretend to be a cis man.

Is that too much for a 14 year old to bite off? Maybe. But I think it is an honest and powerful way for him to tell the story he wants to tell, while also making it clear that you don't have to normalize the patterns you're interested in. You can't tell a story about a group of men in the military confronting literal embodiments of their trauma and masculinity without thinking about gender. So why not let everyone else think about gender too, instead of hiding behind the notion that "everyone can be whatever". 

Note also, that this doesn't have to involve prejudice acted upon by the players onto each other. The pressure of the desire to conform means that breaking free could become a celebration! Maybe everyone's gay, and they've all been hiding it from each other. That's both more realistic and more honest of an emotional experience, in my eyes. Players clearly shouldn't be subjecting each other to prejudice. But players can be given tools to engage with their fears around survival, and tell stories of surviving, even when there isn't a clear manifestation of that cultural prejudice within the magic circle. 

This also becomes complicated when the writing team (especially for a larger event) aren't themselves diverse. I think it's pretty clear how to fix that, and plenty of words have been said. 

Thank you for reading all of this, it's kinda an explosion of a lot of feelings I've had. I have another 1,000 words to say about this topic (which I'll probably write at some point), but for now, here you go.

Also, just as one final thought:

As for the aesthetics of the 1950s, why is it always Norman Rockwell, and not the Highwaymen, or Romere Bearden?