Keen observers of LARP have often been able to identify two games in any written work.  The game that actually ran, and described in a few characters, the game that would have run if only the GMs had more time, and in some cases been more uniformly literate.  A more subtle, cerebral game - but in some cases one less satisfying.

We know that Henrietta planned a Comedy of Manners, and that Marsden supported her on that.  Walker was of all the GMs probably the most literate.  He had largely "grown out" of dime novels (though even he didn't go so far as to repudiate them, and still read Argosy on occasion), and read the major authors of his day - Joseph Conrad, Jack London.  At Henrietta's second wedding, he is said to have been drunk (an occurrence not surprising in itself) and said that King, Bucher, and Marsden "ruined" Clarence by introducing a parade of "fantastic savages" by which apparently he meant the Dime Dreadful characters that make up the bulk of the game.

So it ever was with LARP.  Despite literary aspirations, most LARPers were born and bred in the mold of Science-Fiction and Fantasy (though it was not called so then), and in the end cleave to it.  As time compresses, and leisure for sublime writing trickles away, the tried and true plots of the "dime dreadful" pour in to fill a void.

And many would argue that is for the best.  The old plots still please, and no matter how jaded, we still thrill at the revelation of the vampire. 

Around Clarence there have formed two schools of criticism.  One, nominally inspired by Walker, has insisted that it was the influence of King and Bucher and the "Dime Dreadful," that "poisoned" LARP at the outset, with the genre only truly realizing it's promise in the bleak post-war realistic genre games of the late 50s and early 60s.  In this, the influence of the "Dreadfuls" and "Pulps" is seen as an antithesis - schlock plots and characters hastily thrown into a void in the interests of "completing characters" on a deadline.  These characters, say the critics, carried LARP away from mainstream literature and settled it as a sort of second rate cousin to Science Fiction for at least three decades.  Driven by the lynch-mob anartists such as Munger (notable for never having written a game of his own) LARP was held down by its Dime Dreadful roots, as a true artistic genre in its own right.

Other Critics disagree.  LARP was always a subculture, and LARPers were drawn from a community that was just dawning in 1903 with the publication of Argosy.  Adults who read pulp literature.  Likewise, they say, LARPers were drawn from the upper 10% of educated middle class citizens who read pulps because they were the only consistent source of interesting fantastic literature (Horatio King notwithstanding).  LARP was an escape, bred in the difficult first decade of the twentieth century, warmed by three nearly end-to-end recessions which made escape - and cheap entertainment - desirable.

LARPers, they say, want and desire the fantastic - LARP is not about play acting but about adventure and fantastic things - and roleplay is a medium to that end.  In defense, it can be maintained that most of the "literary" characters in Clarence are failures, eclipsed by the gadgets, special abilities and muscular Christian "derring do" of their Dime Dreadful rivals.  Whether or not they might have prospered in their own game, in a world free of electric elephants and flying submarines, we shall never know for certain. 

In the end of course neither party proved right.  In the end the art evolved beyond the Dime Dreadful, and beyond the bleak surrealist characters of the 1950s into a vast healthy genre which incorporated all of its roots, with of course occasional missteps such as the .  And in the end, it is difficult to tell if the shooting war over plot and character drove, or hindered, the development of the art.  Whether it did or not, it was a shaping fact that gave us LARP as it exists today.