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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8994813" data-attributes="member: 6801252">There's an expression that Collville turned me onto "The Map is Not the Territory" where it emphasizes that while a map is useful for navigation it doesn't necessarily describe the perfect reality of what it is attempting to depict. Collville was discussing how rulebooks and forum discussions can fail to capture the essence of what's happening around the table and can only approximate the game as actually played (which is itself different territories between tables) but I think what makes that idea so interesting is the way it intersects with the broader realities of how we discuss artistic movements in a critical context as lenses through which to examine particular works, commentaries, people, and their ways of thinking.To my mind the difference in intention is important because it actively suggests a difference in culture, because why we did something is often more important than what we did-- when we talk about the romantics as a literary movement we talk about what they did (create a fictional and pastoral image of the past), but we also talk about what they thought they were doing (reaching back to a heritage that they believed had been lost as a salve for the emotional and spiritual death of contemporary life) because contextualizing their decision-making with their intentions can reveal much more about them and their art than defining it for them based on their results. If the goal of the discussion is to understand the movements themselves, we need to understand their underlying causes, what motivated them-- because that can actually show us parts of the process that happen internally, we can let our subject teach us how to read it.But in a more brass tacks way, you're right about the fact that the communities experience bleed, in the context of those teenaged messageboards there was definetly an undercurrent of sexual tension between a couple of the participants, but that was very much a matter of  (I have no idea if they were actually ERPing, but the people I'm thinking of were also like 12-16 at the time, thinking across a number of years, so that could easily go either way.) But the primary emphasis was often off of bleed, toward community, self-expression, and other considerations like narrative, or even skill in writing.I think there's something to be said for the fact that people were looking for this kind of expression before the era outlined in the essay (like, I think 90's VTM larpers are most likely neo trad before this era), but that's also largely true of literary movements, so I think demanding that degree of precision is missing the forest for the trees (in the sense of missing the overall arc that there's a distinct movement being discussed) or missing the trees for the forest (in the sense that bleeding Nordic Larp into what we're discussing could actually prevent us from understanding what was unique about these other examples that make them worth considering separately) in other words, it might dilute the point of having a map at all, and I think when discussing what are essentially just lenses through which to examine different mentalities toward roleplaying-- its ok to accept that the lens we're using is imperfect, without disqualifying it, something special was at any rate, happening during this era.</blockquote>

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