What is your view on RP or ERP and why is it so taboo within the community?

[TouchandFeel]

I have no problem with RPing for the most part, it can be very fun and add to the immersion of this or other games.

ERP is not my thing but I don't really care if others do it.

However there are a few things that I have personally encountered multiple times that makes me not always look favorably on portions of the RP community.

First are the people that try to force or engage others in their RP or ERP wantonly , often to the detriment of others' experience. There are the people who randomly try to elicit "sexual" interactions between their character and yours. There are the people who join groups of random other players who did not consent to RPing and then hinder those people's experience, for example I had a person in a DF dungeon once that role-played an "explorer" so they would constantly stop and slowly walk around rooms doing inspect and lookout emotes because they were "looking for hidden treasure and secret passages" even though they knew there weren't any.
These people are very rare and a small part of the RP community, but they leave quite an impact when you run into them.

Second, there is a lot of bad and incredibly unimaginative rp out there, the kind that would make a tween fan-fic live journal seem like Shakespeare. These are the rp'ers that have created backgrounds and personas for their characters that are overt rip-offs of other pop culture IP's, like various Anime, and are utterly lore breaking. These are the Naruto Targaryens, the orphaned love-child of a fox spirit and a dragon born in the form of a cat-person. Okay, I may be over exaggerating a bit, but honestly not by much.

Lastly, there are those that RP that equate playing a role as being extremely theatrical and overly dramatic in their rendition. They lack subtly and artistry to their implementation and instead strut about as if on a stage overacting even the simplest of things as if they need to make sure that everyone knows they are RPing. If you are constantly announcing yourself and your actions in overly flowery prose of questionable quality, you don't come off as an integrated and believable part of the world, you come off as a loud fool that actually is breaking the serenity and immersion of those around you.

While these critiques are undeniably harsh, we all must keep in mind that those that perpetrate such things are a very, very small part of the RP community. However they are by far the most visible and memorable members because well done RP flies under the radar, making it seem like more of the community is like this than is actually the case.

In a ways, this is very much the same as the negative outlooks on other groups within the community, such as the "hardcore" players, the "speedruners", the "casual" players, etc. People let the few bad apples determine their perception of the group as a whole and then they let this ill-conceived perception paint their interactions with anyone they determine to be of that group.

In the end I just compartmentalize the groups into RPers (the quiet majority), which I have no problem with, and bad RPers (the loud minority), which I prefer to avoid as much as possible.