Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

The present ethnography of live action role-playing explains how consumers return from extraordinary experiences and how this process differs depending on consumers' subjectivity. The einic term "bleed" captures the trace that extraordinary frames and roles leave in everyday life. The subjective tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary intensifies bleed. This paper examines the challenge of returning from extraordinary experiences in the context of live action role-play (LARP), an extraordinary experience during which consumers explore fantastic frames within which they assume the roles of invented characters. Since frames and roles characterize what consumers detach from when returning to everyday life, these Goff-manian concepts enable us to unpack the emic term "bleed" as the process through which consumers' experience in the extraordinary seeps into the ordinary, like dye colors bleed into one another.