Some loosely connected rambling about SL roleplay

This weekend I was going to put myself up for a RP slave auction in a sim I've been checking out, but I was too late learning about it and registering and all of the spots are gone. Slave auctions were something I'd never have said yes to at one point, I hate not having any control over who I'm playing with... But the last, and probably only time I got talked into an auction, it turned out really well: I met somebody great and it opened up a lot of RP. If there's something I've learned about roleplay, bondage etc, it's that you regret the risks you didn't take a lot more than the things you tried that turned out badly. (Online at least. I don't really regret declining any invitation I've had to visit somebody's house alone.)

So here I am with my plans changed, telling myself maybe I avoided a painfully awkward experience, maybe I'll find something better to do.

I've been trying to get involved in the "urban" sims again. To be honest I'm still not really sure where I stand on former obsession with a particular superhero character and right now I feel like maybe I said the last thing I needed to say and finally got over it, so, I'm kind of taking a break from superhero RP in general. Maybe the whole thing is kind of weird and regressive and unhealthy, and as far as superheroine-in-peril RP in Second Life goes, anything but one-on-one scenes has been a failed experiment.

And so I come to something I've probably ruminated on before: I'm not sure what's left for me in Second Life RP. A couple of times in the past I had a foothold in a sim via a really good boss/employee relationship with somebody. Those people have all stopped logging in, and I'm sure they had good reasons, but it makes me wonder if Second Life itself is over as a roleplay environment. A lot of sims have closed, and some of them were long past their time, but some of them served a distinct niche and nothing is replacing them.

What I keep thinking is: Maybe people are abandoning SL and doing great RP somewhere else and I just don't know where that is? Seriously, I feel like there's somewhere online people are still doing kidnap/peril RP and I'm just really out of the loop.

Is roleplay just a kids' thing and people grow out of it? I mean, sorry guys, I've seen what passes for roleplay on DeviantArt, and it's just people posting "i kidnap u". (And this comes under frequently asked questions: "Do you roleplay?" Yes, but not on here and probably not how you're thinking.)

And yeah, there are still people on SL, I've still got friends. I can pretty much do a one-off scene whenever I want. But it's not one-offs I'm really looking for right now, I want to do things that matter in terms of a consistent setting.

And maybe this is all just self-pity because obviously there's still kidnap roleplay going on because there's a slave auction going on, I'll just never know exactly how in tune with my interests it would have been.