The longer I go on playing Taylor in this Vampire: the Requiem game, the stranger it gets, because the deeper in character I get. Slipping into the accent and the swagger. Developing the laugh and the grin. Finding the right subtleties of expression. All the actions and reactions, all the phrasings and witticisms, the quirks and neuroses, the delusions and derangements. Loving and hating all the right people. Bringing it all together and being unafraid to let it out. It's an art I'm still learning, and one I'm not sure I'd be good at in a professional capacity.
But I think there comes a point when one goes beyond acting.
Maybe I'm just discovering what method acting is indirectly, which I suspect is the case, and it's how I explain what I'm doing to people who don't get the concept of roleplay, anyway. It's improv. It's me getting into character and not getting out. (I'm finding I'm having a harder and harder time getting out of character lately, but that's probably because I'm in so deep in the first place.) It really is a lot of fun, and I always love the opportunity to stop being me for a little while.
But it kind of worries me sometimes when I react in unexpected ways when I'm in character. It means I'm in the headspace of someone I don't fully understand, and that never fails to catch me off-guard. The character is in my head, fully formed, and we're suddenly switching places and I don't know my way around in theirs as well as they do in mine. It normally doesn't bother me that much, because it just means I'll be writing and go "oh, hey, I didn't know that about this character," and I'll keep writing. But in roleplay...it means that someone can say a passing word that falls like a rock in my stomach, or I'll start shaking, or I'll start laughing, and it feels like I'm not entirely the one in control, because I don't know why this is happening. It's the character fully taking over.
Tonight at roleplay, the final act of the game was that my character was handed an envelope, presumably from the woman who is basically out to kill him. In the envelope was a picture of this woman torturing the girl I had just slept with the night before--someone who reminded me far too much of the woman who had been the mother of my child, my baby girl. (You see me slipping into first person here.) Now, what startled me about this is the fact that when our storyteller described to me what was in the envelope, in very simple straightforward terms--no description of the torture, no real description at all, in fact, I'm only assuming that she was being tortured, because I have no idea--I felt as though someone had poisoned me. Lightheaded, stomach knotting, knees weak. I felt the colour drain from my skin. My hands started shaking. I had to sit down. I did not know Taylor would react that way. This girl...the one I'd slept with, and the one I'd been with way back when (before I was a vampire), I thought they didn't mean anything to him. Not much. I didn't realise he was so tied up around this girl. And now I'm wondering if she really left him, or if maybe she died. Or was killed. Taylor won't tell me. Or he doesn't remember, one, but it still is a little disturbing to me that I'm having this powerful physical reaction in character when he obviously would expect to react this way in this situation and I don't. And I couldn't shake the feeling after I got out of character, which is kind of strange.
The point of all this is that I was entirely too in-character tonight for it to be healthy, probably.
Mind, this is all vampire!Taylor. The Taylor I speak about in the canon (the one where he's not a vampire) is a different person than vampire!Taylor is becoming. Which in itself is odd to me. Even Dameon didn't change this much when I played him as a werewolf. Then again, I did give this version of Taylor a much more traumatic backstory. That's probably all it is.
I don't know. I have a headache from roleplay tonight. And I love the storyteller for doing this to me, it's great, I like tormenting my characters, don't get me wrong. It just throws me off when they're so deeply affected by things that I did not know would screw with my head this much. The sacrifices we make for our art, really. Or the bizarre twists of a game.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
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1 comments:
um. Hi? Hope this is okay.
... I get like that too, and it helps for me to Very Specifically delineate what's in-character and what's not. It doesn't make the reactions I don't expect less odd, but it helps with the bleedover, so... maybe it would help?
When I used to act, we basically had a guided meditation, to get into character. It was called 'getting into focus,' and in theory, any time you're focused, you're in character. Then, afterward, we had a guided meditation-type-thing to get out of character again. And even without the 'guided' part, taking a couple of minutes to meditate has always helped me a lot, with that.
(Writing gets to me too, but when you write, all you have to do to break character is... stop writing. If you're acting, anything can be in character.)
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