I'm talking about LJ roleplaying (RPing). If you haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, the roleplaying tag will have some explanations (that leads to my blog, since I've only just got an updated LJ crossposter that posts my WP tags to LJ tags, rather than my WP categories).

The character I started off playing first was a version of Harry Sullivan. I've written quite a bit of fic with him in. He's become the Elrond of Doctor Who fandom for me - I came at him through Sarah Jane Smith and ended up loving Harry. So I've seen all his episodes, read all the books with him in, and all but one (I think) of the Big Finish short stories with him in. And I remember a lot of it as well because I've seen a few of those episodes more than once. It helps that he was only in a few.

At the moment Harry is the only character I have in more than one prompt community and I have a whole load of his history worked out and his future, and this is fine. Once rebooted I went on to play canon Harry there, although manage to confuse myself on a regular basis by playing him from a few years ago. In my head his future is a few years in the future, even though what I've written is in his present. You should see the length of the notes I have on where his future's going.

And then I blame entirely for playing a younger Sarah and me having a couple of threads with her with a younger Harry. Mostly, I much prefer older Harry, he's more interesting and you can get interesting relationships between him and older Sarah and him and younger Sarah.

But I felt guilty at not having him in (reasons to follow when I come to talk about Jo), but I always thought that older Harry would be so focused on leaving that he wouldn't be any fun to play in an RP set on a tropical island you can never leave.

In all fairness, this is now the fault of Robert Dick, who wrote a short story called Mutiny in Big Finish's Defining Patterns. It's really short but just the most fascinating thing I've read about Harry. It's set not long after Terror of the Zygons and is about how travel with the Doctor has changed him and how he now considers the idea of questioning his commanding officers. Which made me think that actually, that's a really interesting period in Harry's life.

Having ummed and ahhed about putting him in , I asked , who plays the Sarah there, and she got excited about the idea, so that clinched it. Currently the application is sitting on my hard drive for a month so I can go back and rewrite it to make it better. And consider what might be in his pockets.

So I'm happy about Harry - which makes a change because I spent ages wondering what to do with him and ended up with a whole load of prompt comms (which I then ended up having to cut down on), but wanted an RP comm and now I have that.

Then there's Jo Grant. She's doing quite happily in both and and occasionally I think I should write prompts for her, but mostly that's as far as it gets. We don't know anything about her and the only thing I get interested in exploring is her relationships with the Doctor and Cliff and there's only so much you can say about that without repeating yourself.

The problem I have with her is I don't know her canon nearly as well as Harry's. I'm constantly having to look stuff up and there are episodes where frankly anything could have happened. Which makes me question whether I should play her at all. I should probably rewatch everything and see if that makes a difference. The trouble is some of her episodes are really not that great and a lot of them involve the Master who I just can't get excited about at all (and I prefer Roger Delgado's Master to any of the others).

At which point we come to Ian Chesterton, who I've now been playing for nearly a year. The trouble with him is that I made an effort to get all his episodes in before going to Romania last year and then found, when I played him, that he's not that different from Harry. Jo was a great counterpart to alt!Harry's angst because in the year and a bit I've played her she's angsted twice, and the second time wasn't for very long.

But Ian and Harry are both gentlemanly and intelligent and inclined to miss subtleties. Harry's hard to play because he has a specific way of speaking, which is hard to get right, and Ian's hard to play because he doesn't so it's hard to differentiate him from anyone else.

The extra trouble I have with Ian is that when I introduced him into he clicked with Adric and spent a lot of threads with him. Then he had a good long one with Nyssa. He didn't meet many people than those, apart from the Christmas dinner he had with Susan and C'rizz in January (it was January for me, Christmas Day for him).

So now that has had a shake-up of characters, he's happily staying in the British TARDIS (the muns in it are the Brits in the game). He is slowly meeting other people, so it just feels like I have a new character even though he isn't. And I put him in , so he spoke to the First Doctor briefly and to Barbara, which was great because I've written Ian & Barbara, but never played them.

Now Ian's canon I remember quite well (in terms of episodes) but unlike Harry and Jo I have no idea where he's headed, what he's doing, if I want to put him anywhere else, and even if I want to continue playing him. I like Ian, but I just wonder whether he's causing me more trouble than he's worth and whether I should stick to writing him in fanfic.

The last character I have is an open secret (by which I mean a lot of people know about him but he's not listed on my LJ profile and I'm not mentioned on his) is Gene Hunt. Back when Ashes to Ashes was on I thought about playing him in . So I created his journal and put him in a prompt comm. Then someone else came along and played him instead (with my blessing, I should point out, and I'm glad she did for multiple reasons).

So now I'm not practising him to play I'm squeaking by on participation requirements for the comm he's in, not helped by me thinking that might not be the best one to have him in anyway. What makes Gene Hunt interesting is that although he's a complete bastard to criminals, he's a very good people person. In Life on Mars he got more information out of a witness than Sam did, and he treated a rape victim to more truth than Alex did in Ashes to Ashes.

It doesn't help that I haven't watched Ashes to Ashes for ages, and perhaps I need to pull an episode up on my PVR (I kept them all) and remind myself of him, because when I think about him I really want to dig deeper into Gene (not literally). I just don't know where's the best place to do that or how to go about it.

That turned out to be longer than I expected. To anyone who's read this far, if you are one of the few LJ RPers on my friendslist and you want to offer suggestions, advice, sigh and think I'm crazy, etc, feel free. Or anyone who's not, you're not excluded. But I feel better for having written it all out in words. It might have allowed me to think about it, if not made a decision about any of it...

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