LARPing, or, Live Action Role Playing, brings people together in the real world to act out characters by dressing up in costumes and improvising stories. Kiri Brasseur is the author of this article, entitled "Larp," who wrote this profile to recap the event at Patuxent Park in southern Maryland. The purpose of this article is to depict a community who is seen to be overlooked by the regular eye. However, Kiri Brasseur is the last person to do just that. She wrote this article to draw attention to this community of hundreds of foam fighting individuals who gather each year on August 15-17 in a four day long event. Her goal was to give the larp community a central location to get information and to create a tutorial to interest larpers. She wants this community to be inclusive and to inspire empathy and understanding for gender identity and oppression issues. Kiri’s desire and final goal is “to take the several smaller larp communities and make them into a national community.” Writing an article about a specific event where this community came together to share each other’s passion and interests recognizes and respects the obscure community.
Brasseur is able to accomplish her goal by explicitly stating all of the benefits of attending this event and being a part of this upcoming community. Kiri includes the Friday night activities by stating that “the adventure and event is opened to all of the players." She incorporates the rhetorical appeal of logos with her word choice “to all of the players” to persuade her audience that this community is inclusive of all different types of individuals. When Kiri states her goal, it touches on the platform and place of her frame. This community has smaller communities that Kiri refers to as “playing in your home Larp” all over the world; however, this article is able to touch on one event run by the Maryland based game Darkon, which drew 350 fighters over its course. Pathos is another rhetorical appeal used frequently through this article’s convention of a gallery of images. For example, the author provides the audience, who is anyone interested in joining a larp community or involved in one, with many images of the people who partook in this communities' event. The purpose of the images is to appeal to the audience's emotions of excitement and intrigue. The author wants her audience to feel this event on a personal level in order to draw them into the event. These images are able to depict Kiri’s frame of the people who are part of this community. Not only does it show many different people in costume from this event in the images of the battles, but she also states that the community consists of “both returning players, and those new to Darkon’s unique culture.” In addition, she develops this statement by providing an example stating, “You could find the games you already know like Poker or Blackjack, as well as Darkon specific games like ‘Keystone’ or ‘Poison Roulette.'” The purpose of this statement is to state that you do not need to have previously larped to understand all of the games offered at this event. The use of images also builds the frame of the interactions and activity between the community. The author uses specific language and jargon that only people of the larping community would fully understand. She depicts their interactions with statements such as, “another of Darkon’s countries, Nurgle, began their adventure with Gods and their disciples wandering with them through the party happily.” Kiri does this to display the cultural norms and language used within this community which builds her overall credibility of the event and community. This profile page builds its ethos through its accuracy of information, the appropriateness of the images provided with the article, as well as the appropriateness of the style and focus of this article. For example, Kiri Brasseur builds her own credibility by including an interview at the end of the article. She does this to depict her knowledge about the community by stating how she larps as well as writes stories as long as she can remember. She wrote this profile to raise individuals' awareness and even inspire compassion for diversity. This community exists to empathize with others and lead to kinder behavior and a more inclusive society. More people should read about this community because it can foster empathy among adults, who act out scenarios of real world injustices to discuss social or culture clashes.
3 Comments
Abby Fauss
4/9/2018 05:13:35 pm
Amanda,
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Howard Lee
4/9/2018 07:26:31 pm
Hey Amanda, I thought that your RAB on Lapring was very interesting as I had never heard of larping before and really enjoyed reading about it. I really like how you use the photos as part of the evidence to support the authors argument as i had not thought about that and would definitely start doing that. Something else I realized in your article is the mention of Pathos and how the author appealed to the audiences emotion which is something that i forgot to mention in my RAB. Overall, I thought that this article was very interesting and i learned a lot more on how to analyze a community through your RAB.
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Lexa G
4/9/2018 07:28:28 pm
Amanda! I thought this article was very interesting as I had no idea what Larping was.
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