when sacrifice isn’t the answer
This week I signed up for a Fabula Ultima taster session and I'm still hung up about how this one shot ended. Now I get why Luffy (One Piece) is so adamant about Law (One Piece) not dying at Dressrosa. When you're in that moment, watching someone you care about ready to throw their life away, all you can think is: what is the point?
The people who truly care about you—they wouldn't want you to sacrifice yourself. They'd want you to carry on. To live. Maybe it's my own politics, but I believe it means more to escape when the odds are not in your favour. To pick your battles and be tactical about the whole endeavour, it doesn’t mean defeat so long as you’re still alive.
It hit me like a punch to the gut at the end of the one shot where I saw a character choose to sacrifice themselves. In the player’s words “She’s in too deep to see another way out. It’s either the armour goes down or she dies here” (paraphrased based on how I remembered the scene). The moment of realizing you're totally useless. I mean we tried, me and the other player we rolled to grab her and run away but our rolls weren’t enough. There wasn’t much we could do other than stay and hope for a miracle. I remembered wishing for a Luffy character to exist in this story and punch his way out of this mess.
Now I understand how Luffy must have felt, that heart-sinking feeling of absolute powerlessness when his loved ones are killed, so he pushes himself to grow, to be strong enough to protect everyone.
Blair, the princess character I played — naive, book smart, socially awkward but well intentioned —they’re caught in this moment of total breakdown. They know it’s their duty to do the right thing and yet here is a truth about her family that she has to reckon with. Even if Blair is ignorant, there’s this weight of culpability.
I'm learning something about myself roleplaying these characters. All of the characters I play, at their core they are searching for the truth. And one truth I’ve learned from this one shot is that your idealism will only bring you so far, you have to fight for what you believe in for it to matter.