keep your shipping instincts sharp in the off-season

[paranomasias]

THE MURDERGAME SHIPPING MEME V1.2


This is probably too straight to accurately represent most murdergame ships but like. We take what the stock image industry gives us.

So, you've been put into a murder mystery game where you're going to have to fight for your life! Every week another body or two, surrounded by strangers- Wait, you knew that? You actually kind of have your bearings? Well fine, here's a different problem - see that person over there? Yeah, that one. Wouldn't it be a really terrible idea if you fell in love with them right now?

This is a meme for that sometimes most fun of bad choices in murdergames: shipping. Leave a toplevel with info that might be in your character's profile (recommended, so everyone knows what your character is About), maybe a murdergame title (optional but encouraged), and any extra info you want to give along with whatever your shipping prefs are, then either pick from the prompts below or wing it and go tag around! Profile code and some prefs options below, if you want a format to follow. Remember - unexpected murdergame ships are the best kind! Don't be afraid to tag out and across canons!


SETTINGS (note: absolutely not an exhaustive list)
1. Shopping Mall - Live your teen movie romance dreams! Sure, someone seems to get mcfucking murdered in the Starbucks every week, but that doesn't mean you can't go on a coffee date, right?
2. School - Live the... other party of your teen movie romance dreams! It's a little hard to be romantic when the only place for a dinner date is the cafeteria, but in fairness you are also constantly overcoming bigger problems than that here.
3. Generic Facility - Looking for romance? Try scenic Sealed-Off Building Full of Rooms! It's themed in some way - science, underwater - but the concept is the same. Surely there's some kind of bar or inexplicable amusement park in here you could use for a romantic evening, right?
4. Spooky Mansion - You know what they say about going on dates to scary movies, right? What if the scary movie was uh. The whole thing. The whole place. Where you live. And die, sometimes.
5. Romance Zone - I mean hey, maybe you're stuck somewhere literally built for both romance and murder! Pleasure and pain. Life and death. Smoochin' and stabbin'.
6. Musical Theater - Sing a love song! Whether you're playing from a specific musical or not, live your romantic duet dreams!
7. Other - If you can block off an area, you can put a murdergame there. Get creative!

PROMPTS (ship scenarios)
1. Confession (Fun) - Ah, the start of any good murdergame relationship. Maybe you've been dancing around each other for a week or two, maybe over the course of one thread and a lot of screaming your players decided you're gonna kiss. Time to figure out what these feelings mean while you're, you know. Here. Can be combined with some of the other prompts too, if you like.
2. Dating??? - Where do you even go to date in a murdergame? Is it even worth trying to hang onto this kind of normalcy when either of you could die any day now? It's probably fine.
2b. Dating+ - Can be combined with any other prompt, but somehow, some way, one of you is taking the lead in this date and getting a bunch of emotions in... because you're deathflagging. You're deathflagging hard.
3. Afterparty - Hey, that was a rough trial! Whatever it was! But you're both alive, so... better try to comfort each other, huh? Enjoy whatever kind of snacks you guys have available.
4. Confession (Unfun) - Oops, uh. One of you... seems to have confessed to murder. Better get whatever last moments in that you can before voting ends and one of you gets brutally executed!
5. The Couple That Kills Together - Okay, so maybe you did or didn't actually kill someone together. But at least one of you did a murder, and the body hasn't been properly discovered yet, so... time to talk this through? Make bad choices for love?
6. Deadland Romance - Maybe you've just reunited in the land of the dead, or maybe this is where you're trying to get your relationship off the ground. Either way, there's gotta be some weird emotions to "we're dead and trying to make it work."
7. Golden End Reunion - Great news! You beat up the mastermind (or befriended them, I don't know your style) and got all of the dead people back, including the other half of your ship! That's gotta feel good, seeing them again after however many weeks.
8. What now? - The game is over, it's time to go home. But... which home? If you split up, is there going to be a chance to visit each other again? Can you work that kind of long-distance?
9. Smut Option - Look. It's not generally onscreen, but hookups happen. Did you have to kick roommates out? Is this the fabled... you know, variant of option 5? Basically look, if you wanna use this meme for smut I'm not gonna say no, just tag appropriately.
10. Anything else! - Look, one of the fun things about murdergame ships is how many ways they can go in the emotional crucible inherent to them. I can't account for a lot of things ahead of the basics, so plot with your thread partner and have fun with it! Hell, maybe bring a good ol' murdergame polyblob into the mix, I'm not gonna stop you! Go with ur heart, assume other characters, live your truth!

PROFILE CODE (pilfered from the general murdergame meme):
<center><b>Name:</b> NAME | <b>TITLE (Super High School Level, Ultimate, Champion, etc)</b> <b>Age:</b> AGE | <b>Species:</b> SPECIES | <b>Occupation:</b> OCCUPATION <b>Likes:</b> LIKES <b>Dislikes:</b> DISLIKES <b>Traits:</b> A HANDFUL OF NOTABLE TRAITS <b>Trivia:</b> A PIECE OF TRIVIA</ul>

PREFS CODE:
<small>[ <b>What's On The Table:</b> Can just be a bio, but feel free to expand in a ship-specific direction! What's your character like in a relationship? Are there any tragic twists or secrets you want to play with? Spoiler tag as appropriate for anything major, but help others get a sense of what's up! <b>Looking for:</b> What are you looking for, oocly? What kinds of characters do you think yours would mesh well with? Think more guidelines than hard rules, just to keep it open for people, but this is where you can put down anything you really want to do! ]

Comments

[glhf]

[ so i heard you want to ship ryoko with well-meaning interferey types,

any prefs on prompt for this mess ]

[nmc0204]

[ i'm indecisive so i rolled RNG a few times and got 1, 3, 6 or 7 in a generic facility!! so i'm down with whichever one of those scratches your brain itch best ]

3-6 it is!!

[glhf]

[ The facility has been... well, Miko is actually pretty used to places like this, considering her line of work, but it was still A Lot for A While. Ryoko was a bright spot in that, mostly! They made a good team, is what Miko liked to say before she realized there was anything more to it. So, after an awkward week or two of dancing around it, there had been a confession! It was very cute. The game discord went wild.

One week later, after barely having the time to hold hands, Miko had turned up dead. Oops.

She's been hanging around deadland for the last week or two after that, full of... a lot of feelings? She has spilled a lot of them on her replacement bff, poor Utsumi Sho, but he's not around when uh. Suddenly, on the dead side of things, Ryoko is here too, in whatever capacity you deem fit to have her arrive.

Miko blinks, and offers a hesitant, but emotional: ]

Wh... What's the deal, baby seal?

[ Nailed It. ]

[nmc0204]

[ Much like she did in the actual murdergame we were in, Ryoko spends a good few weeks fucking around so it's perhaps unsurprising that the time has come for her to find out. What is a surprise is whose hands she'd done that finding out at – Ryoko doesn't trust adults easily and while she hadn't exactly trusted Camellia, she'd at least been reasonably certain that she wasn't the violent type. A smile and a knife in the back later and she's here, too dazed by the immediacy of it all to really begin processing any of it.

So don't take her total underreaction personally, Miko. The girl is just going through it, is all. ]

... Miko. [ She sounds a little winded and a lot disbelieving. ] I'd ask if it really was you, but...

[ Who else is going to come out with a line like that at a time like this? ]

[glhf]

Everyone here is pretty much who they were when they were... well, before this. Unless that changed really fast at the last second there, but then they're still that.

[ There's Always One.

... That does, however, prompt Miko to take a step closer and, shifting into the shockingly rare Emotionally Serious And Genuine version of herself, say... ]

Am... I a total huge dingus jerk for saying it's nice to see you again?

[nmc0204]

Ah...

[ It takes her a second to respond – the question catches her off guard, not for any slight against her feelings, but... ]

Well... if that's the case, it makes two of us. I was actually about to say the same thing to you.

[ Her lips don't quite make it all the way to being a real smile, but her expression looks just a little less wan and lost than it was a moment before. This whole situation is still monumentally awful, but at least she's not on her own. At least Miko's here. ]

This might sound stupid, but... are you alright?