Roleplaying fail.

Prompted by a Livejournal post by my friend Fusebox_Ellen about some RP in City of Heroes, I have decided to add some more thoughts.

As it should be obvious, I know the player and character to which she is referring, and it is a particularly reprehensible bottom-milliner who shall remain nameless.

For anyone who hasn't read that, this particular player claims to be autistic (in fact, isn't shy about declaring it), and is playing a several-thousand-year-old half-demon who also claims to be autistic.

Now, I'm no doctor. My speciality is astrophysics with a lively interest in cosmology and particle physics. My understanding of the autism spectrum is that the external signals are a lack of desire or interest in social interactions, coupled with narrowly focused repetitive actions. Within the realm of their condition, people with autism are frequently brilliant at the subject of their focus, but lack many of the skills deemed necessary to interact with the wider community.

Now then, we come to this player and his character. I'm going to call him "T". T's social skills are severely lacking. By which I mean that he has no concern for others.

In an online RP community such as City of Heroes, where you have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, the cardinal sin is God-moding - dictating the actions and/or effects of actions on characters that are not your own. Different people react to it in different ways, and the same person might react differently depending on the characters involved - for example, I have very few qualms about many of my characters' friends spontaneously giving them hugs, but if a stranger did it, I would react strongly and negatively OOC. The preferred method of approaching this sort of situation would be something along the lines of "Richard moves over to give Annette a hug" - I've not stated that he does give her a hug, just that he's intending to, which affords the recipient the opportunity to avoid it should they choose to.

Fortunately for me, I have never been on the receiving end of T's actions, so I've not had to deal with them. God-moding avoidance can easily escalate into e-peen measuring contests, and at the end of the day, I am not going to let someone else dictate to me what my character can or cannot do, or has happen to them. With the sole exception of a GM'd plotline, which is highly unlikely in the setting.

Further to the God-moding issue, there's also the thing that actually winds me up more than anything else, which is that T's character (I'll call him "Y", should I need to) is meant to be a superhero. Read that again, just to make sure you have it straight in your head. A SUPERHERO.

Superheroes, except certain particularly dark anti-hero types, generally do not threaten (not "pretend to threaten") to kill people in bars for not letting them queue-jump, and nor do they chase a villain onto the road and then stand there and laugh when said villain gets hit by a truck. HEROISM DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, to borrow a phrase.

Now, to give him the benefit of the doubt, this hero makes no claim on being an ultimate paragon of virtue, but Y is not a villain pretending to be good so that he can live amongst heroes - he claims to be an honest-to-God, bona fide, hero. A hero who interacts more with villains than other heroes, who laughs at people who get run over by trucks on the street, and who loses his temper so easily that unless he can get to the front of the queue for the bar, he threatens to kill the people in his way.

That is not the way heroes behave, in my book.

The character explains away this social ineptitude by proclaiming loudly and often that he is autistic.

The player then defends his character's social ineptitude by proclaiming loudly and often that he is autistic.

Autism is being used as an excuse, it seems to me. An excuse when actually none is needed - the player is roleplaying after all, so it would be a simple enough matter to actually make the character a socially inept, rude, obnoxious sort. But the player doesn't seem to want that. He wants the character to be liked. And yet does things that make it almost impossible to actually like the character.

Perhaps an inability to learn is one of those things I don't know about autism. Could well be.

The character is despised by a sizeable fraction of the RP community in CoH, and the player is the subject of many a rant in certain circles. I don't know if that's unfair, and if the player autistic, then it probably is unfair. But I am still left with the nagging feeling that someone who truly was autistic would play a non-autistic character, and just quietly let people know that they struggle in social situations, so the character's behaviour might be a little off-centre... and that's only if the player is even capable of RPing at all, due to the underlying social nature of the activity.