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Hi!

I've recently finished watching Hawkeye and once again I bemoaned how LARPing is presented in a film.

In most cases I feel as if LARPs in movies were just a bunch of people incessantly hitting each other with foam weapons individually or in groups, stopping to catch a breath and then starting to hit each other again. There's no scenario, no individual goals, no role play, no diplomacy, no intrigue, no exploration, no background people like artisans, merchants or courtesans. Just a neverending free-for-all.

In all LARPs I've ever played (and it used to be a lot ) fighting was maybe 1% of the total playing time, because, surprisingly, people in a fantasy world don't want to die randomly for no reason too This of course excludes specific games like Alien (concentrating on exploration and combat) or indoor ones (which mostly had no combat whatsoever).

Most of the time was always spent by characters on talking (plenty of political intrigue in every game I remember) and also on travelling or just doing the things your character was supposed to do, like a herbalist gathering herbs or a merchant trying to sell his stuff.

Films dumbing down the live action role playing experience to just a big scrum of badly dressed fighters is kind of a pet peeve for me. But maybe it's what LARPs look like in other countries?

I mean you can say that about almost every single thing in media. Heck look at most "student goes to university" flicks and they present the idea that uni is mostly drink, sex, drugs and perhaps some study in the last week to heroic "gotta study hard and pass" music montages.



Films and TV often miss represent things by focusing on niche aspects of the whole; often because they only have a few minutes to show something; so whatever aspect they choose to show appears like its the "whole thing". Another reason is that sometimes they only want to show something enough to convey what the thing is to the audience. So larpers doing combat is the quick fire way to showing larping.

I wouldn't worry too much about it; in all truth showing things like larping in a positive or neutral attitude in more films makes it more "normal" and actually is likely part of the reason its helped grow the hobby as more people become casually aware of it and, of them, a tiny portion will look into it more; will take it up and all.