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Is the SCA a LARP (Live Action Role Play)?

11/29/23

That depends on who you ask (and many people only ask the question just to get a rise out of some folks). 

To answer more seriously, the SCA says "Your Persona is who you are in this game, what culture you came from. You can choose to be from any time period, and any culture, as long as it was known about by Western Europeans before 1600CE." This SCAdian would lean more toward describing her experience of "who she is" in the SCA from a historical perspective as Cosplay rather than LARP. 'Who you are' and 'where you come from' doesn't mean you are acting everything out (whether improvised or scripted). Portrayal of a Persona from a historical perspective can simply be research and dressing up. Nicasia the Persona has enough of a backstory written out where one could technically play her in a LARP, but as the SCA would like to lean toward attempts at historical accuracy, it would require a LOT of knowledge for improvised conversation to be historically accurate (forgetting the language and dialect being spoken). Nicasia the Persona as written can explain the medieval orthodox beliefs no longer practiced in our modern day across several different branches of Christianity from the 6th century. She knows the ins and outs of silk production from farming to dying to weaving/embroidery to running a business across an empire and is skilled in various forms of weaponry and styles of fighting from her travels. She is also ballsy enough to commit imperial espionage. Nicasia the SCAdian is none of these things, so while she thinks she wrote up a pretty cool fictional character based on the real Byzantine history she's read, she knows she can't improvise a historically accurate conversation as her own Persona. 

Nicasia the SCAdian dresses up and goes by the name of her Persona, but her life in the SCA differs drastically. "Who you are" in the SCA is just as much defined by what you do in the Society as by your Persona's chosen time and culture. Byzantium interests this SCAdian greatly but it is not the only thing she reads about. She continually studies American Sign Language in her pursuit of becoming a Silent Herald in the Society. She researchees monastic signed languages and historical evidence of hearing loss as well as the historical cultural practices and lifestyles of people with hearing loss. She picks up rattan to bond with friends, develop her physical health in a fun way, and challenge herself in the sport whereas the Persona as written ended up picking up the sword with guidance from her father to escape child marriage (see the Persona's full backstory below) and to protect monks while scamming China out of its silk monopoly.  Nicasia the SCAdian researches the 'what if' question nobody else was asking of "could medieval Byzantines have had 'chocolate' bars, pastries, or or hot 'chocolate' using carob?" while the Persona was escaping a life of domestic duties to pursue knowledge beyond the walls of her sheltered childhood home. 

There are aspects to the Society that make a true LARP impractical in that it could not allow for true role play (acting as the Persona) unless it made room for many intentional historical inaccuracies. Nicasia the SCAdian interacts with other SCAdians that have Personas of other time periods and cultures whom her Persona would never have met in a historically accurate way. Nicasia the SCAdian with a 6th century Byzantine Persona is dating a man with a late 16th century Polish Persona and is squired to a man with an English persona (unclear on the century of the persona, though he often says his garb is of the early teen centuries). How would a historically accurate LARP work between the three of these Personas without factoring in fictional time travel? 

The bigger concern is that a LARP could open opportunities for excuses to express hate. The Society doesn't allow Swastikas because, while they are historically accurate pre-Hitler, they have a modern-day connotation with Nazis. Seeing a Swastika today, or even many Celtic or Norse symbols, can become a "Schrödinger's Medievalism" situation, it can mean either or both the modern-day or/and the medieval origins until you get the context from the person wearing it, and still you may not know if they're being honest when they share with you. One such example of this was a royal couple in the SCA that stepped down in 2018 after making a fashion faux-pas wearing historically-accurate 5th century trim designs that featured swastikas and paired Hagall runes on their royal garb. If we cut out obviously appropriated symbols like Swastikas and other symbols that are still used in our modern day (as we should), what historically accurate cultural practices would be right to cut out of role play? How much history would be removed from a culture if a big "no-no" event was decided to be not socially acceptable to include in a historical LARP? A line drawn to some may seem like it still allows people to go too far whereas others may feel that the line would leave too many limitations. Role play of the religious and/or racial tensions of a time past is not something that would interest this SCAdian (in addition to not being interested in seeing what would happen with the mixing of these sensitive subjects between two or more cultures that would have historically interacted let alone two or more time periods that never would have interacted in a real historical way). This SCAdian thinks that, whether intentional or not, acted social situations with these subjects could allow for scripted or improvised Schrödinger's Medievalisms that could make long-time SCAdians or new people uncomfortable. This SCAdian thinks that if the SCA were to become a true LARP, it could allow for the possibility of louder expressions of both historical and modern-day hate than a simple poor choice in garb ever could.

That's a long-winded way of saying this SCAdian doesn't believe the SCA is a LARP, and that when people may jokingly ask "Is the SCA a LARP?" this SCAdian tends to actually think about these things in detail and the consequences of "what if?"