In Defense of Trad LARPing

The three-piece suit and bowtie. The Tradwife sourdough aesthetic. Pipe-smoking. Dress wearing. Door-opening and street-side protecting.

The Latin Mass. The curtsy and the bow. The cringe attempts at chivalry and the “may I court you my fair lady” relics of a bygone era.

Don’t listen to the haters1 – Trad LARPing2 is actually a good thing

Idealism and Hope – The Crisis of Our Time

There is a crisis in our faith, in our politics, and in our relationships. Because of this crisis, we can be tempted to despair, the battle against which is one of the defining battles of our time.

A battle in which victory requires hope. And idealism.

Anyone wasting time arguing against LARPing is missing the deeper impulse behind the urge, for the LARPer has his heart in the right place. His zeal should be encouraged and developed rather than mocked.3

Better a cringe-worthy “Retvrn” to the past, inspired by hopeful idealism and then modified overtime by experience, than to take the present as your baseline.

At least they didn’t chemically castrate children in the past. At least they actually believed in the teachings of the Church4 in the past. At least they actually got married and had kids in the past.

We should not let our current dystopian present prevent us from attempting to create a future our ideals can be proud of. Even if that future sometimes looks like a parodied attempt at recreating the past.

So yes, homesteading chicken-coop 18/1950s apple-pie LARP is cool.5 Men should obviously LARP as Tolkien while women LARP as the main character in their favorite Jane Austen, sighing to each other about why do men keep (insert complaint) instead of just behaving exactly like Mr. Darcy.

And we actually do need a new crusade, so that’s not even a LARP.6

The Principles Behind the Form - A Brief Critique

The solution to the supposed problem of Trad LARPing is not to stop to LARPing, but to LARP better by investigating the deeper principles behind the traditional form. Once the principles are understood, the form can be better implemented as well as modified when necessary. Consider the following two examples:

Suppose a man is walking with a woman on the sidewalk alongside a busy street. Which side should he walk on? The LARPer knows the answer - it’s the street. But consider the principle behind this text-book answer. The principle is that a man should protect a woman, and be watching out for her.

But what if, instead of street puddles and dangerous cars the sun is shining, traffic is slow, and there are homeless people near the shops? Part of the principle implies that the side on which a man should walk may change. And the principle was always designed around a woman who trusts a man to protect her, and a man who knows what he’s doing and can take the lead. It’s not designed for a woman to take charge and instruct a man how she thinks he ought to protect her, or for a man incompetent or untrustworthy.

Another example is opening doors for women. The LARPer knows that a man always opens a door for a woman. The principal behind this courtesy is chivalry, which afforded women certain privileges as a sign of respect.

But these acts of chivalry were always understood to be freely given from a position of power, indeed greater power. They were roles-based, not entitlements. In fact, to put it delicately, these days it may sometimes be good and necessary to remind a woman of this, so that the principle is not lost in the form.

And yet, despite these critiques, on the whole there is much to be said for LARPing our past, even if we do not fully understand it. Those who critique the LARPers often aren’t much more historically literate themselves,7 and think they know far more than they do.

They can throw stones all they want, but rather than denigrate attempts to recover a past clearly superior to our own in many ways, we should look to our past and our heroes and seek inspiration from them. We should judge our own era harshly and the past charitably, not the other way around – just as we judge ourselves harshly and others charitably.

Because it is for our own time and for our own selves that we will be held responsible, not for others or the past.