Forums » RP Discussion » Struggling with the loss of a character

Edit/Update: thanks for everyone's advice. I told her how disregarding Kurt and Marcos relationship was hurting me and that the only way I could continue the au we are doing is if we tweak the past, erase everyone but Kurt from the RP and replace everyone. She's okay with it obviously, it still hurt me for a few days but now I'm better and am enjoying the RP again.

And I don't exactly mean loosing interest in your characters. More like loosing control, like when you are RPing with someone as an AU to a normal timeline you've made and they just go completely nuts with it and don't give you any time to return to your original timeline and recover. My best friend is doing exactly this with 3 of my characters in the same story/timeline, especially one I'm very attached to.


When I become disheartened with my characters because of someone else, I become incredibly depressed and eventually write a short story where they commit suicide or are murdered and then completely drop all RP's they're in, abandon all characters they are connected to and just...disappear for a while to sulk. Its a terrible, horrible and selfish habit of mine but its my only way of letting go and eventually moving on. My way of stepping back. Sometimes I can rubber band back and treat the suicide as an AU and get back into the OC. It's happened to Mattias 3 times.

But I really love Kurt and Marco and I JUST made them less than a month ago. I don't want to loose them at all, especially so soon.

But I can't complain further. She is my best friend, I know she'll become incredibly upset(at herself) if she finds out that she's hurting me this badly and I don't know what to do. When she asked me if the story she was writing was what was making me upset, I couldn't bring myself to tell her it was the cause, because I knew it would discourage her from writing or RPing at all for a long time, longer than it would take me to recover.

I just really don't know what to do right now.Please tell me I'm not the only one who's gone/going through this. T-T

Instead of dropping the RP, are there not ways that you can suggest that it gets back on track to what it was intended to be?

I'm honestly not sure how to backtrack it, I've let it go on so far already.

I'd suggest telling your friend you want to start over, and that you aren't too comfortable with the way she's taking your characters. And as a way to avoid this in the future, I wouldn't let anyone else hop into control of your characters. Hell I don't let anyone hop into control of my characters in an rp. And you did say that that was an AU. Just keep the canon separate from the AU. That might help some.

This will probably sound horrible, but you can't live your life and base all your choices on the comfort of others. As much as it's a nice thing to look out for your friends, it's NOT your responsibility to sugarcoat everything to maintain their happiness. Your own happiness matters first. While it sucks to be told you're doing something wrong, it's also one step forward to learning how to fix or prevent it from happening in the future. Your friend needs to learn to deal with this. By avoiding dealing with the issue, you're basically constantly reinforcing the idea that what your friend is doing is acceptable and desired. After all, you keep picking up stories with them, so they must be doing something right?

Don't neglect your own needs just because of something like this. You're not responsible for what your friend does when they're asked to change something. I get what you're feeling, but you're obviously miserable with how things are right now, so SOMETHING has to change. If your friend is not told what you want, nothing will change and you'll be stuck dealing with this for a long time to come.

We also tend to think things will be worse than they really are. I'm sure if you purpose a change in how stories will unfold rather than saying "you're doing this and it makes me unhappy" she won't have a bad reaction at all. Phrasing is half the battle in these matters.

I'm with Sanne here.

Being selfish is awesome, enabling your best friend to hurt you constantly is a bit less awesome.

You've already realized what's done is done, so any change you make will be on a going forward basis. Make it palatable but firm: "Now that we're older, I'm finding my preferences have changed from what they were when we started RPing 5 years ago, such as ____________". Leave out the bit where you've been tricking her into making you feel terrible for god knows how long, she doesn't need to know.

Burying the past and focusing on the future is the best way to reconcile the bad way you've been selfish before with the good way you ought to be selfish from now on. If she's your best friend she'll understand, good luck.