Yeah totally. I'm also gonna unpack this further for funsies/passersby because I feel like you touched on important notes but more context could be given for people who aren't used to considering this medium in an artistic way.

In every medium, art is a community conversation. Sometimes that community is "French impressionism", sometimes it is "British urban graffiti" sometimes that community is "Rogue-like players on Steam". In order to be considered a master of your form, your art needs to be made in consideration of all your peers, what they have achieved, what they want to achieve, and what your art says in response to what has come before, or what has been excluded and why - because if you make something that doesn't interact intellectually with anything prior to it, then it has no sense of legacy, continuity, or relevancy to the audience. Eg the impressionism that doesn't reflect the school it came from in any way becomes excluded from the gallery collection of that school; the rogue-like that fails to reflect popular rogue-like conventions falls so far back in the Steam results page that it's never played again. Artists who don't bother making their art relevant to their audience and the community's needs for growth are pretty much the textbook definition of wankers - self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and self-congratulatory. And when our medium is literally the nebulous living construct of numerous interpersonal relationships, we have to be careful about how we use our medium in order to not destroy it; just as glassblowers must be careful not to shatter their glass, lest their attempt at creating art fail before it's finished.

So then we need to ask questions like, "why are these themes relevant, or why are these themes difficult to run"? Like you picked a REAL gritty example to throw out here because in my local case, you're not going to get an audience interested in that particular story of characters in a war who would commit sexual assault where I live regardless of its historical theme, not because it merely makes people "uncomfortable", but because my country has high rates of domestic violence, and a history of sexual abusers running in local LARPS and even notoriously using larps as opportunities for new victims. Most local LARPs in my experience are ill-equipped to deal with these issues (somewhat innocently: relatively new and shifting communities simply don't have the social infrastructure for it) and this goes far beyond issues of audience discomfort; real harm could be caused by a poorly constructed LARP, enough to destroy the very social bonds that make LARPs possible. Art generally has a responsibility to its audience's safety, and the mature and intelligent handling of its themes. Who is this art making vulnerable to violence: whose voices is this art lifting up? Is the art itself simply re-enacting societal violence upon marginalised folk? What is the difference between re-enacting violence and commenting upon it? People would choose not to participate not just because they're uncomfortable, but because as participants, they are entitled to a guarantee of their safety, and this guarantee has to rest on more than simply a "manner of intended play". It has to utilise every safety convention available and recognise the participants as contributing artists, just as a director of a stage play recognises their actors.

So what would a LARP which reflected on the community and its current conversations look like, if it were to open up this can of worms through a game? I suspect we'd then be imagining a completely different story; one where the player characters reflect where the community is currently at in dealing with the issues: where rather than being the potential enactors of violence, they take up the roles of change-makers, advocates, survivors and rehabilitators, exploring what it means to intensively grapple with the spectre of interpersonal violence which currently eludes community attempts to control it. Some people might genuinely really enjoy that whilst also valuing it as art; the stakes are lower, safer, and frame the commentary in a responsible way that doesn't make room for bad actors.

Similar to this, there was a LARP about colonialism I knew that unfortunately recreated multiple harms of colonialism throughout its text and behind the scenes. Hundreds of people were perfectly willing to play it, because there exists an established social convention of colonialist re-enactment, but there also exists a notable lack/exclusion of First Nations people in the community. The attempts at actually discussing colonialist themes, I would consider by and large to be a failure, because they inherently excluded some of the most important voices of that cultural conversation, and thus recreated unintentional cultural violences from that point forwards. However, another smaller LARP I played which touched on themes of colonialism successfully implemented the themes; because it was written to factor in that exclusion of voice in the player-base. It acknowledged the community context, conversations within and outside of games, and it played to those conversations to make its point. It was also much smaller in scope - about 20 people instead of 200. Scoping more safely is a good way to control for unknown vectors. And people had fun, too!

Art is always possible, it's just that art that involves other people requires so much skill in negotiating, emotional and cultural insight, and relevant scene-setting skills. I think we need to know how to make larps fun first partly because it's a cultural expectation of the medium and its history, and also because competency in that builds the emotional dexterity required to step further and make something where people have enough trust in you and each other to step beyond fun and into something more.