Hello readers! No apologies for the break, as you have more than enough material to read. Inspired by M and B's
LARPcast post, I have been working-- for quite a bit--, on the documentary film representation of LARP players. カンタンではないね！(It's not simple, is it? Sorry, I have a placement exam today, and Japanese is on the brain.) Although the good gentlemen of LARPcast reference both fictive and non-fictive cinema, my interest is, mainly, in documentary style approaches. Why? I find it much more interesting. Irregardless of your feelings on The Wild Hunt or Role Models, they, ultimately, exploit the LARP universe in order to tell an unrelated narrative. (In the first example, this film uses LARP to tell the story of a
Lord of the Flies type drama; Role Models is a comedy, and LARP is used to facilitate a story of nerdy-rags to geeky-riches via role-playing games. Both have merits and disadvantages.) Ultimately, the fictive narration of any drama relies on appropriation of a genre. This involves much simplification and over-generalization. And so? To documentaries we move.
As any viewer knows, documentaries are farm from objective. Documentaries are a painstakingly edited product that, like their fictive kin, attempt to tell a story. While they may hide behind the moniker of "Non-Fiction," most readers and watchers understand that, despite nons, the lines between the two are blurry.
I start my inquiry with
Monster Camp and
Darkon. For whatever reason, the latter has been more or less heralded by those within and outside the LARP community. While individuals argue its specific flaws, it has been congratulated as a decent non-fiction film. This is, perhaps, because it more closely resembles narrative coming from mainstream Hollywood. However,
Monster Camp has been universally panned as "milktoast dimdram abyssal sludge." While it is admittedly low-budget (and features, problematically, an almost entirely male cast that adheres to tired stereotypes), it is far from a simple piece of drivel. And so, I invite you, frequent and infrequent readers, to start commentary on
Monster Camp. This is, of course, part of a much larger project about characterization. Staying safe, I have actually started with
Darkon's Becca Thurmond, a single mother who plays an "Amazon," but I encourage you to start elsewhere. This is very nascent, and merely provides fuel for the fire-- so to speak. So, get going! Leave comments below.
