The Big LARP

The Narcissism Orchestra of America is well into day 8 of its multi-day live-performance premier of "Symptoms for Charlie Kirk" an intermedia live-action role-playing game. 

The ambient sound wheezes on.

The LARP unfolds before a parade of  official characters who, more or less inspired by Wagner, are built around rage motifs and follow one another to stage center in order to shout and look angry in their assigned ways, 

interspersed with chyrons and orchestral breaks and choral bits about radical left lunatics.

LARP players have by now already chosen their characters and modes of dress and have been developing them and the alternate reality they inhabit by moving through the steps of the game:

acquiring a narcissistic injury by replaying the long Zapruder footage moment edited per previous instructions to include final moments after the bullet of talking on the phone to Stephen Miller, focusing on shock and grief as would be felt by someone who had followed the great man for years

followed by Aversion Rituals a kind of collective brain rinse that eliminates sentences actually uttered by Charlie Kirk while also being angered by having done so,

which leads directly into The Rage Work, where one invites the activation of the aversion by continuously demanding proof when things Charlie Kirk actually said are mentioned by enemies of the people in order to generate the resulting affect and mold it by degrees into a rage-emotion,

which is then funneled through The DARVO Machine which directs the rage toward a range of acceptable fantasy targets and lets the players go shopping which only makes the characters more angry because outside the LARP they expect to be told what to think.

But this opens onto one of the innovative innovations of this game, the convergences between the players and official characters in which they mime each other---Day 7 saw millions of players recreationally inhabiting JD Vance miming his self-righteous anger and incoherence, savoring how much fun it is, and his angry incoherence was rendered all the more for it while other characters who had chosen the sidelines this time cheered them on,

and together the LARP generated a blast of warmth and color in television lives made even more monotonous by slow-unfolding of the LARP, through which the players had preserved, each thinking “This dullness is OK, it takes time to get to the good stuff, the imaginary enemies. the kill kill kill” or “It's something to do.”

And the ambient sound wheezes on.