AS A TRANS PERSON…

I get the argument, vis a vis fetishization and I’m certainly not unsympathetic to it. I think it’s worth considering in plenty of contexts when it comes to constructing characters/stories/et cetera.

It’s just odd for me to square it in THIS specific case, at least for the reasons stated. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal to me - I have removed the offending penis! - so much as a weird one. It’s a game where the primary thrust is ‘what if we just lean into the usual environment on cape games and acknowledge that people like writing smut’, with lax theme/continuity policies to accommodate such, so while there are definitely arguments to be made about fetishization, it strikes me that they by rights ought to apply pretty broadly here, shouldn’t they?

Or, to put it crassly: If I can do a series of scenes in which Wonder Woman sets up shop at a truck stop men’s room for funsies, and that is not disrespectful, inappropriately fetishistic, et cetera, then drawing the line at one of the sets of dangly bits aboard this hypothetical train being Hawkgirl’s feels weird, to me personally. It would probably feel LESS weird if it were not inherently a game where players are encouraged to fetishize a myriad of other aspects of comic book characters for the sake of titillation-- or even if the line was more along the lines of ‘don’t JUST shuffle parts around, put like five seconds of thought into it’, I would get it.

(For the record, ‘how exactly does this make sense’ was indeed part of my thought process, because I’m the kind of weirdo that likes to be able to tie her smut-writing to, like. SOMETHING tangible.)

Anyway, all that having been said, to reiterate: I as one of the affected parties am not ANGRY or whatever, so much as a little bummed/bemused. Nobody was banned. Trans characters are in theory appable, but given how few such characters there are, it’s a very tenuous theory. Pls don’t send hate at these people who I am charitably assuming made a well-intentioned but clumsy decision against the backdrop of being a small staff on a game that wasn’t expected to take off at the rate it did. Choices get made quickly sometimes under those circumstances, and they aren’t always ideal.

I’ve played Heroes Assembled off and on since late 2020 or so. My activity on it - as well as every other MU* - has been extremely sporadic; energy and moods are fleeting these days, and have been for years. My initial experiences with the game were, roughly, ‘fine’: I knew a smattering of people there; the game seemed inviting and friendly enough; the theme was absolutely hare-brained and ill-considered in many ways, but I was prepared for that, as I’d seen and briefly played with previous drafts of it on other, more private games that preceded HA.

This brings me to what feels like a necessary detour, and that’s the origin story of the game:

Once upon a time, there was a comic book MUSH named United Heroes. It was absurd in its design and infested with creepy, sex pest admins. Over the course of a few years, there were multiple exoduses of players caused by the actions of these admins. Some months after the first of these - caused by an event in which Prototart and some of her friends were brought into a room where the admins proceeded to ban Prototart for saying rude things about the staff in pages, really awful stuff like ‘ditko sexually harassed a player and i was warning another player’ - maybe a dozen, dozen and a half at most people decided to take a stab at starting their own MU*, having been burned not only by UH but by the little sandbox game they’d migrated to just to keep the connections and play going. Among these players was a person who played Captain America and commonly goes by Halicron.

Halicron had also left during that first exodus, and participated in the sandbox we’d all initially landed at, only as a theme admin. In that capacity, he produced the foundations of what was intended to be a comic book game theme; when the time came, he offered it up as the theme for whatever prospective new game we’d end up producing, and proceeded adding to it. Extensively. Aggressively. Haphazardly; the end result was fairly unwieldy and difficult to grok for the kind of crossover comic book game most people were looking for, and upon being told as much, he ignored the complaints and continued on for a while.

Eventually, this project petered out as Halicron quietly returned to United Heroes. At several points, he attmepted to shop his bespoke theme around to others making games, but found no interested takers… until yet another exodus occurred on United Heroes. This time, it happened because one of the admins initially involved in aiding, abetting, and covering for her sex pest buddies went on to be removed from the admin roster and… sexually harassed, by the staff, who were still the same creeps they had been all along. With a knot of players who were willing to put up with a game notoriously infested by sex pests and creeps forming the admin core and player base, Halicron had a place to install his theme, and so Heroes Assembled was formed.

Whew. Okay. Sorry about that tangent; it brings me neatly to my most recent stint on the game, however.

This time around, rather than bounce off of the game in a depressive haze, I’ve stuck around for the better part of eight months or so-- and while my activity remains somewhat spotty, I made much more of an effort to involve myself in things there, especially in the first few months.

Unfortunately, while I could roughly handle working around the boondoggles that an extensive, yet slapdash theme constructed by a person with passing knowledge of, or even interest in comic book narratives to try and come up with things to do and characters to play, it only took so long before I began to notice that - despite boasting hundreds of approved characters and a dozen scenes a day - there weren’t all that many things for a person to jump into without being a member of one of a handful of select groups. This was both because a majority of the scenes posted to the public scene board were specifically locked to members of specific teams (or, in several cases, just specific individuals), and because the scenes that were leftover tended to social gatherings (which I don’t dig), one shot adventures (of which I did a handful), or obvious TP scenes which… were consistently booked up with the same small subsets of players occupying the groups which dominated the rest of the +scenes board. The nadir of this trend was a months long Justice League Dark TP which briefly spent a spell as an all-comers plot, every scene of which offered 6-7 slots, of which 90% were taken up by some combination of JLD members, their alts, their friends, and people who otherwise were signed up for every other scene in this stretch of the plot. Despite it involving a host of Abrahmic angels descending on Manhattan intent on resetting reality, Dr. Strange was, for some unfathomable reason, not allowed to participate whatsoever for fears that he would somehow break the plot.

Similar to Prototart, I had a handful of friends playing the game who I apped a handful of characters to do things with – and by and large, those players have quit. One of them - @Popes, above - cited his reasons. Another was simply fed up with the lack of interesting RP opportunities to pursue, on top of being barred from apping Two-Face as, well, Two-Face because a player two years ago decided to bring him in as DA Dent, only to drop before ever getting anywhere near having his face scarred up; this was, according to Halicron, because it would be so much more fun and interesting for him to write out another person’s idea of a good story instead of the one he wanted to tell.

Most recently, the player of Superman and the Joker who had been fairly steady there for the entirety of my time made the critical mistake of butting into a conversation on Discord in which a handful of Titans players (including Halicron, who’d taken specific care to center his character Caitlin Fairchild as one of the core members of the group in the game’s backstory) were discussing why Raven and Beast Boy being a couple in the comics was weird, wrong, and downright immoral, owing to its obviously parasitic nature which was occurring for the fifth or so time in the span of a couple weeks. For the sin of wondering aloud why these players seemed so defensive and judgmental about something that was not in any way a factor in their RP and suggesting that it wasn’t particularly appropriate to cast judgments on people for liking an innocuous comic book relationship, he was briefly berated in public, then subjected to DMs from the players of Vorpal (a serial OC obsessed with everything Titans, especially Beast Boy) and Beast Boy, in which he was told to ‘stay in his lane’ and ‘worry about why the Metropolis and Daily Planet spheres are dead before commenting on what other teams talk about amongst themselves, on discord servers which are publicly available to the entire MU*’. Several days later, Superman and the Joker idled out because the player stopped logging in entirely.

All in all, my experience with Heroes Assembled has been that despite being the product of a group of people principled enough to walk out on a game infested with sex monsters when and only when one of their own friends were affected, It is a game in which the quality and transparency of admin communication is inconsistent. It’s a game where the most vocal and visible member of the staff can and will tell players that they should, or cannot play certain characters if he personally believes it to be a bad idea, whether or not those characters violate any rules of the game, have previously been played, and so forth. It’s a game which one admin routinely insists is ‘close’ to comic canon in spite of its actual theme deviating wildly in ways which render it actively confusing and/or frustrating to those who come in expecting recognizability – a feature which would be absolutely fine if not for what is, I think, an entirely innocent misunderstanding rooted in few, if any people present on the game knowing, or even particularly caring about the towering Jenga of thematic nuts and bolts thrown together by Halicron over countless fits of manic inspiration.

It’s United Heroes cast in a Vote Blue No Matter Who liberal image: it says all the right words and makes all the right motions to suggest something of notable quality, but under the pomp and circumstance, it’s mostly a clubhouse for a few in-groups of individuals who sometimes throw scraps of consideration to the teeming masses… and what are they gonna do about it, play at one of the OTHER highly populated comic book games?

It’s the fever dream of a man with more time than talent, more ego than genuine concern for creating an environment for others to enjoy. It is a towering monument to hubris and mediocrity, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that I am not PERSONALLY aware of anyone having been sexually harassed by any of its staff members on THIS SPECIFIC game.

Overall: 4/10

@GF said in Comic Games Are Fun!:

And what does this have to do with HA?

Just a few days ago, there was a lounge convo in which people were agreeing that, OBVIOUSLY, it is a villain’s job to fail and be beaten by heroes in scenes, with the most generous take being ‘well of course I’ll find a way to let them escape… unless they push their luck!’. Months ago, a pick-up scene with Lara Croft and a couple of mercenary villains looking for pieces of an artifact was minorly derailed by Lara’s player insisting that because she’s ‘the hero’, she would obviously have to be the one to end up with all the pieces in the end.

I can’t speak to HOW representative these attitudes are of a game as large as HA, but given past experiences with superhero games, I cannot - as you allude to - help but think that they are fairly indicative of what people tend to expect.

@Roz said in Comic Games Are Fun!:

…probably doesn’t feel great to receive, but I don’t see an issue with the actual sentiment? It reads to me like “this particular concept would require particular time and investment from staff to work through to reach something that fits the balance of the game as it exists right now, and if we’re going to do that, we want it to be with a player who has more history on the game.”

I just wanted to butt in here to say that, like-- while there might be SOME validity to this sentiment on other kinds of games, the sort of comic book free-for-all which Heroes Assembled is just is not one of them.

‘You can’t play this character because you aren’t active enough’ makes sense in the context of someone wanting to play a vampire noble on a WOD game, or the head of a great house on Arx, or one of eight available FCs on a Star Wars game where FCs function more as quest givers and narrative support than PCs in their own right… but this is not in any way one of those games. This is a game where Prototart or ANY OTHER PLAYER, including brand new ones; including ones who cannot manage more than two garbled lines about how awesome they and they alone are per pose; including people who will or already do log in expressly to do one scene/month with a single other buddy then log out for the next 21/28 days to skirt activity rules could grab:

• Franklin Richards (superpowers: can do anything)
• Blue Marvel (superpowers: Superman, only with anti-matter powers and no kryptonite)
• Carnage (superpowers: completely irredeemable murderous sociopath with body horror knife bullshit)
• Ikaris (superpowers: Superman, only for some reason he also teleports and has the organic supercomputer the New Gods use which, itself, confers a ton of EXTRA abilities; no weaknesses except radion, which is extremely rare, and ‘running out of energy after a few hours of being Superman’)
• Spiral (superpowers: interdimensional teleportation, witchcraft, and bodymodding; completely nuts; no weaknesses)
• Black Adam (superpowers: Superman; no weaknesses except for, I guess, ‘saying his own name’; antisocial with a god complex)
• Exodus (superpowers: omega-level telekinesis, which means his is more powerful than any non-omega-grade telekinetic’s could ever possibly be; telepathy, teleportation, energy vampirism; yet another villain)

from the game’s roster and have them approved inside of about two minutes without having to submit a single word of any kind of application. ‘This particular concept doesn’t work for our game’ is one thing, and it’s perfectly valid; ‘this particular concept would require time and effort from our staff to suit game balance and we do not want to expend it because you are not active enough’ is ludicrous to the point of insult. It’s a hurdle that simply does not exist for anyone else on the game, and wouldn’t (by rights; Chaucer/Halicron has absolutely tried to decree who 'tart can and cannot play based on his own estimation of what’s right for her, which is why there is a genuine question as to what she, specifically, is allowed to app, as her experience shows that the answer is apparently not the same for her as it is for anyone else) exist for Prototart had she just grabbed a roster character; in fact, she only attempted to write up the character she did because the one she WANTED (Selene (superpowers: telepathic immortal vampire witch who has credibly fronted as a goddess; irredeemable sociopath; zero weaknesses)) is, in fact, currently held by a person who… logs in once every 28 days to do exactly one scene with the same one-two people which does nothing to generate or move RP for anyone else.

There’s nothing to protect, no effort required on behalf of staff beyond what is required to read an app: game balance simply is not a thing on a fully consent-based superhero game which includes fully powered Kryptonians, Green Lanterns, Jean Grey as the White Phoenix of the Crown, Dr. Doom, and characters like those listed above as fully playable, immediately accessible options; the truth of it is that a Spoiler who simply did not want to sell anything for anyone is equally as capable of ruining a scene with twinky behavior as any ‘overpowered’ character. There ARE games which make a conscious effort to ratchet down character power levels across the board, preferring a lower powered environment, and while there are places in the news files which suggest players ‘don’t app at the height of their powers’ to ‘preserve a sense of growth’ (paraphrased) there is no overarching ethos of trying to maintain a more modest power scale for the entire game; neither the staff nor the majority of players seem to have taken that idea to heart at all, here.

So.

All that said: for someone to submit an app for a character they’re interested in at least ATTEMPTING to play – a villain character, which the game has relatively few of – with a detailed explanation of what she means to do, proof of her reaching out to other players to coordinate with them, and how she means to work the character in a way which limits her ostensibly high power level; receive an enthusiastic concept approval; then a day later be told that actually, no, the character is just too powerful and would somehow unbalance a game full of characters heroic and villainous alike who are similar to or vastly beyond what she is capable of… it’s a bizarre whiplash to say the least. For a staffer to arbitrarily decide that this is the antisocial villain character who’s so antisocial and villainous that someone who clearly has a plan for how to play her and with who is not capable of doing so is bizarre. To try and frame these things as the result of Prototart not being interested in enough in sustaining the game through RP is bizarre. To suggest that she’d present a uniquely heightened degree of investment from the staff is bizarre.

To do these things immediately after a player had the temerity to question the judgment of a man who has a history of condescending to others and trying to force them to follow his idea of what ‘good roleplaying’ is, well. It’s hardly the rudest, least polite thing which has ever happened in MU*ing, or which has been posted on a WORA-like forum even, but it’s pretty inappropriate; it is pretty clearly not the act of an objective, unbiased actor who deserves the benefit of the doubt. It’s blatant nonsense to anyone who is familiar with how games in this particular circuit operate, and indicative of Heroes Assembled’s inability to define, then consistently apply standards to its apping process.

Prototart’s someone who takes no shit from anyone and is happy to call out what she sees as bullshit in turn; she has an acid tongue and prestige levels in holding grudges. She is also a creative and generous player who deserves better than to be talked down to by someone whose idea of compelling roleplay is ‘what if The Wasp was a pillhead sociopath who thought it’d be a cool idea to fight crime by getting into the illegal drug trade’ in the course of an already-questionable app denial.

So, beyond the sins of HAM itself - of which there are clearly many! - I think it’s important to bear in mind that it’s just another link in what is swiftly becoming a chain of games created exclusively to house the right abusive staff and player figures.

Like Prototart said, Heroes Assembled MUSH was the result of the very same people who aided, abetted, and participating in sexually harassing and/or emotionally abusing others on United Heroes MUSH objecting to no longer being allowed to do so with the same impunity, or guarantee of safety from the same treatment they visited upon others. Crucially, its main driver - the aforementioned Chaucer, AKA Halicron around these parts, I believe - was someone well aware of the kind of place that United Heroes before finally leaving in protest-- because years prior to doing so, he’d already left in disgust and protest due to the entirely unrelated scandal in which Ditko’s abusive tendencies, and the rest of the United Heroes staff’s apathy towards the same was initially exposed. In doing so, he began nurturing the seed that would eventually bloom into his beloved thicket of a theme, but not without facing obstacles. Among the moderately sized group of players his morals apparently drove him to leave beside, the sentiment that his theme - which at one point attributed the entirety of the fictional African superstate of Wakanda’s technological prowess and bloodline connection to the special herb that empowers its rulers to the presence of a race of (predominantly white) alien colonizers crashing there in ancient times and interbreeding with the local populace, uplifting them into a hybrid race capable of fully accepting their gifts, alongside a host of other bizarre additions driven primarily by his simultaneously disdain for comic books and blind confidence in his own abilities - was in fact a confusing, unwieldy mess that would prove a detriment to incoming players not already familiar with its bare bones from previous exposure (or willing to overlook its egregious flaws due to kinship or other such factors) almost immediately drove him directly back to United Heroes for the run that would ultimately culminate in-- leaving, in disgust, because the same people who had already proven to be abusive shits were still abusive shits.

The main difference, of course, is that the second time around, he was happy to bring along some of the very same untrustworthy personalities who’d proven themselves abusive or supportive on the first go 'round, because this time they were his friends.

On Heroes Assembled MUSH, Halicron’s ~decade long pattern of being a player and occasional admin characterized primarily by narcissism neatly tucked beneath a veneer of personability reached what felt like a zenith. Beyond the behavior which Prototart outlined - his love of treating people who were interested in taking inspiration from comic books like idiots; his willingness to directly insult the ones he didn’t feel like processing apps from - he made a habit of refusing character claim requests (read: requests for the passwords of previously created character objects, so that players could go through the app process on those objects) from people who he felt ‘shouldn’t’ play those characters for whatever reasons he deemed fit, including feeling that they should ‘branch out’ and try someone in one of the two or three fiefdoms of the game he felt were worth exploring.

His takes on long-established women characters like Janet ‘The Wasp’ Van-Dyne seemed to stem primarily from his own natural ignorance of the source material combined with barely latent misogyny: Janet for example, a character mostly depicted as a fiesty, big-hearted and ballsy heroine with an empathic streak became a bitter billionaire drug addict with sociopathic tendencies under Halicron’s pen, a take which he was not only deeply proud of, but insisted was the only logical understanding of a character who dates back to 1963, despite it not lining up with any version of the character published between then and now.

When confronted - multiple times - with the news that two of his good friends (Vorpal, a player who inspired a generation of comic MUs to ban original characters for the express purpose of keeping him from bringing yet another iteration of the tiresome self-insert he has been playing since 2013 or so; and Wolfs, a player notorious in comic MU spaces for trying to coerce strangers into engaging with their latex fetishes) were responsible for bullying a long-standing player off of the game, his initial response was to get angry at me for bringing it up (publicly, granted); his subsequent response was to close an official complaint on the matter roughly five minutes after its submission with a tepid promise to look into it which was never again followed up on. Whether this is because he’s friends with these players, he disliked me for making A Problem out of it in the wrong way, he disliked the person being bullied, or some other, unforeseen factor, I obviously can’t say; I was never given any indication that he did indeed care, take the issue seriously, or say a word about it to any of the involved parties, though.

Why bring all of this up in a long-ass reply to a long-ass post venting about someone who has already flounced away from a game and inspired his cronies to do the same, poisoning the well as they go? Because like Prototart said, they’re gearing up to do it all over again. If there’s anything you take from anything that’s been said about this game, these people, and their future endeavors, please let it be this: do not indulge them. Do not waste your time and energy on a space that exists to give abusive people a fresh hunting ground. Do not confuse a game with explicit carve-outs…

Each player may have one character on +reserve. When a character opens or hits +idle, reserves are processed on a first come, first serve basis. The first player in line has one week to claim the character. At the end of a week, or if the player declines, the reserve goes to the next player in line. If no one claims the character, they are set Open and are available to app.  There is a 24 hour window after opening to allow any interested party a chance to pitch for the recently opened character. 

The original player must wait one week before they can put a new +claim on the character. 

To +claim a reserve:

*Player must not have any idle characters on their account.
*OCs and NCs have a +kudos in the last 21 days.
*Player must have sufficient space in their roster for the new character.

+Interest

Players may express interest in up to three characters at once. Reserves take priority over interest. Players may check to see if their character has any +interest flags. This means another player is potentially interested in playing the character. If these flagged characters start having issues with their activity or +kudos requirements, staff will approach the player to discuss whether or not the player wishes to retain the character. EFCs and MFCs must submit a plan of action to improve their activity in the next 60 days. This is primarily a tool for Staff to gauge interest among players in writing the character.

-----

One of the things that will impact this system is how we're going to kind of overhaul the +idle system. Things are going to be handled on a case by case basis, and we aren't going to just reap a list of characters because they've hit idle and have a reserve.

While I can't necessarily give any hard numbers yet, if someone has been playing a character for a long while (or alternatively, have been playing characters plural for a long while) without any issues, we will at the very least want to talk with that player before opening the character.

… to create exceptions to its activity rules for the benefit of staff and staff’s friends to either hold onto their own characters in circumstances when inactivity should lead to losing them, or claim desired characters from others on the grounds of expressed interest for one that is in any way conducive to cooperative storytelling. On at least two occasions, Chaucer has personally seen to it that players who claim characters played by one of his friends when they fall idle under Heroes Assembled’s similar ruleset for activity are banned soon after doing so; in one case, this meant ignoring multiple accounts of a player being a sex pest until they had the temerity to claim a character and post that they were new to that character, and planning to depict her in a gentler way than the previous player did, at which point the sex pestery was suddenly exposed and used as grounds for banning.

These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity, and Halicron in particular has demonstrated a complete inability to serve as an unbiased, approachable, or even particularly useful staff member on every occasion he’s attempted it. I realize that this is not an audience that’s all that high on comic book games to begin with, but for any lurkers, or any occasional 4 color fiends out there: do not go there. Do not go. Break the chain and let it dangle uselessly until it rusts away.

@Pavel Why do people play shitty WoD, Star Wars, or any other game in this hobby?

Because there aren’t any better options, their friends are there, and they intend to avoid as much of the shittiness as possible. This is not remotely unique.

I mean, listen, we can debate the merits of where precisely the lines should be drawn in specific real or hypothetical situations like this one all day. That’s fine and fair.

But divorced from all of that, my gut feeling is that Rogue is some kind of weirdo chud or consciously covering for the feelings of one, so while I’m happy to not get wildly political in public, I am also never not going to find it funny that her knee-jerk reaction was to clutch her pearls over the very controversial statement that Alex Jones Is Bad, Actually.

I’ll also note that there are players who have cart blanche to whine about how sensitive people are nowadays, and how there are too many genders, and pronouns are hard - all of which feel like more inherently political dog whistles and/or statements than acknowledging that a lying scam artist is a lying scam artist - so while I do appreciate the value of not talking about certain subjects because they can cause friction, it’d be nice if that standard was applied more evenly.

@Prototart It’s absolute dire, and the funny thing is that several of the already meager list of options are off the table because they’re villains.

Like, having had more time to sit with it: it’s a tacit ban on trans characters. OCs are not available; outside sources offer a handful of extra options (most notably/readily offhand: Viktor from Umbrella Academy) but are subject to approval. So maybe?

I don’t want to ascribe malice, and, I don’t, but this is not a well-reasoned policy at all.

Westworld went from a beautiful and intricately crafted show in s1 to a parody of itself in s2 to a weird action-oriented side story in s3 to-- I mean, this current season has some potential, but the magic is long gone.

Once the showrunners decided that what people liked most and wanted more of was alternate time lines and identity-based twists, the show became entirely about those things for a spell, to its detriment-- and then attempted to simplify, missing the point in the other direction. I just want a pretty meditation on free will and the evils of capitalism guys, plz stop making me feel dumb for continuing to give you chances to provide

@Pacha Part of why it stands out so glaringly here is that it is pretty commonly accepted on comic games in GENERAL that people are gonna hook up how they’re gonna hook up, and canon pairings don’t - really, CAN’T, given the myriad of logistical/interpersonal headaches it would cause - ever be assumed to stand. This includes slash-y romances: FC orientations fly pretty wildly, and for the most part nobody cares.

So to see a game in this genre that probably ought to be even more lax, more open to experimenting with orientations, relationships, and - yes, bodies, up to and including sexual characteristics/gender identities - leaves a strange taste, compounded by the flimsy nature of continuity there meaning that nothing is actually ‘lost’ long term in the sense of changing a character beyond a point of being appealing to hypothetical future appers. Opening OCs would help solve the specific issue of there being nearly no viable trans characters to app, but not the greater break with the norms of the genre or the inherent disappointment of being able to tweak a beloved FC to fit personal tastes in a dozen ways EXCEPT one fairly significant one.

@Pacha Part of why it stands out so glaringly here is that it is pretty commonly accepted on comic games in GENERAL that people are gonna hook up how they’re gonna hook up, and canon pairings don’t - really, CAN’T, given the myriad of logistical/interpersonal headaches it would cause - ever be assumed to stand. This includes slash-y romances: FC orientations fly pretty wildly, and for the most part nobody cares.

So to see a game in this genre that probably ought to be even more lax, more open to experimenting with orientations, relationships, and - yes, bodies, up to and including sexual characteristics/gender identities - leaves a strange taste, compounded by the flimsy nature of continuity there meaning that nothing is actually ‘lost’ long term in the sense of changing a character beyond a point of being appealing to hypothetical future appers. Opening OCs would help solve the specific issue of there being nearly no viable trans characters to app, but not the greater break with the norms of the genre or the inherent disappointment of being able to tweak a beloved FC to fit personal tastes in a dozen ways EXCEPT one fairly significant one.

@Prototart It’s absolute dire, and the funny thing is that several of the already meager list of options are off the table because they’re villains.

Like, having had more time to sit with it: it’s a tacit ban on trans characters. OCs are not available; outside sources offer a handful of extra options (most notably/readily offhand: Viktor from Umbrella Academy) but are subject to approval. So maybe?

I don’t want to ascribe malice, and, I don’t, but this is not a well-reasoned policy at all.

AS A TRANS PERSON…

I get the argument, vis a vis fetishization and I’m certainly not unsympathetic to it. I think it’s worth considering in plenty of contexts when it comes to constructing characters/stories/et cetera.

It’s just odd for me to square it in THIS specific case, at least for the reasons stated. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal to me - I have removed the offending penis! - so much as a weird one. It’s a game where the primary thrust is ‘what if we just lean into the usual environment on cape games and acknowledge that people like writing smut’, with lax theme/continuity policies to accommodate such, so while there are definitely arguments to be made about fetishization, it strikes me that they by rights ought to apply pretty broadly here, shouldn’t they?

Or, to put it crassly: If I can do a series of scenes in which Wonder Woman sets up shop at a truck stop men’s room for funsies, and that is not disrespectful, inappropriately fetishistic, et cetera, then drawing the line at one of the sets of dangly bits aboard this hypothetical train being Hawkgirl’s feels weird, to me personally. It would probably feel LESS weird if it were not inherently a game where players are encouraged to fetishize a myriad of other aspects of comic book characters for the sake of titillation-- or even if the line was more along the lines of ‘don’t JUST shuffle parts around, put like five seconds of thought into it’, I would get it.

(For the record, ‘how exactly does this make sense’ was indeed part of my thought process, because I’m the kind of weirdo that likes to be able to tie her smut-writing to, like. SOMETHING tangible.)

Anyway, all that having been said, to reiterate: I as one of the affected parties am not ANGRY or whatever, so much as a little bummed/bemused. Nobody was banned. Trans characters are in theory appable, but given how few such characters there are, it’s a very tenuous theory. Pls don’t send hate at these people who I am charitably assuming made a well-intentioned but clumsy decision against the backdrop of being a small staff on a game that wasn’t expected to take off at the rate it did. Choices get made quickly sometimes under those circumstances, and they aren’t always ideal.

@bored

@bored said in MU Peeves Thread:

From the other thread I get that you’re a squad and I have no interest in litigating shit on those games I had no part in,

I dunno, man, you seem pretty invested in uncritically taking serial liars who you don’t know, at their word about a situation you weren’t involved in, involving someone else who you also don’t know, for being uninterested in litigating shit you had no part of.

@bored You’re crossing streams or something, because I can pretty safely say that Tart’s biggest ooc room crime is posting lots of panels of her characters. Unless ig she ONLY behaves this way when I am not in her presence, which is possible? But feels unlikely?

Let’s be clear: She was banned from HAM because she sent a complaint about Chaucer.

Why did she send a complaint about Chaucer? Because he enthusiastically approved her pitch for Miss Sinister, saw a sheet that placed her at ‘pretty powerful; limited by extreme inexperience and not actually being Essex’ on a game where Jean Grey is fully integrated with the Phoenix, Kryptonians abound, and Selene is freely avail, then promptly denied the app and told her thar she was not sufficiently worth his/the game’s time to warrant going to the trouble of revising.

Oh, and prior to that, he refused to let her pick up Titania because he felt that she should branch out from what he felt her norms were.

So she complained, left when nothing was done, came back months later to try again with friends, and then was banned upon picking up a character (played by one of Chaucer’s friends in the sense that a dog plays with the drool-saturated, shredded and discarded doll it remembers it left behind the couch once a month or so, and on the idle list as a result) due to her past disagreements with him.

As for the thing about trans characters, that had nothing to do with her. I wanted to play Wonder Woman as (probably??) trans on a game where the central premise is that it is a sex positive environment to the extent of it being a free for all of posting ts logs to the wiki, and canon is otherwise extremely loose and improvisational. I was told that a ruling had been made that characters would need to be adapted according to their canonical gender/bio sex traits; I am going to change it at some point today when I get to a keyboard. She posted it bc I vented to her about the situation and she had Feelings about it.

@Roz She isn’t staff, at least, so that’s something.

I mean, listen, we can debate the merits of where precisely the lines should be drawn in specific real or hypothetical situations like this one all day. That’s fine and fair.

But divorced from all of that, my gut feeling is that Rogue is some kind of weirdo chud or consciously covering for the feelings of one, so while I’m happy to not get wildly political in public, I am also never not going to find it funny that her knee-jerk reaction was to clutch her pearls over the very controversial statement that Alex Jones Is Bad, Actually.

I’ll also note that there are players who have cart blanche to whine about how sensitive people are nowadays, and how there are too many genders, and pronouns are hard - all of which feel like more inherently political dog whistles and/or statements than acknowledging that a lying scam artist is a lying scam artist - so while I do appreciate the value of not talking about certain subjects because they can cause friction, it’d be nice if that standard was applied more evenly.

The context for the Alex Jones stuff:

<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Alex Summers wishes he was a telepath, he’d fix the world.
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “I wish I could forget that Alex Jones exists.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “Eh, well.”
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Anyone for arpee?”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Probably best to just realize there’s a lot of people in the world you probably would like not to exist.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “Is it with Alex Jones?”
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Fair enough Rogue.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Talia Wagner says, “I listen to far too much Knowledge Fight, which started out as two comedians tearing down his bs and making jokes and now one of them made a deposition at one of the sandy hook trials and is regarded as the foremost expert on his grift. It’s still hilarious.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane says, “Some people just shouldn’t be allowed to have platforms, alas”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Lets talk about something else.”
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Dongers?”
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “I went to an edible book festival earlier and made myself sick. I got Bookitis :(”
<Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane says, “I don’t think ‘people who deny horrific tragedies and encourage others to hate minorities’ is controversial, but sure!”
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Really?”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Poor Doug.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane says, “*are bad, even.”
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter hugs Lorna
<Xaviers-OOC> College S. Patty Sloan says, “>.> This is why books are a nasty habit to get into :p”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “See, Lorna, you turning it in to that, is what I’m trying to avoid.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane just sips on her tea and writes her pose.
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Excellent plan.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Betsy Braddock grins and protecc Lorna with her alt.
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Betsy Braddock says, “Since apparently Bishop can’t handle Philly girls.”

And then, a bit later that day, I made a petty crack in reference to it:

<X-Men-OOC> \/// SNIKT Logan says, “I’m going to this UN thing. Any other X-Men want to pretend we’re part of the world and come with me?”
<X-Men-OOC> GreenPeace Lorna Dane says, “Sorry, I just got done fight Hydra outside. :(”
<X-Men-OOC> GreenPeace Lorna Dane says, “Not to get too political by talking about fighting nazis or anything”

Making a remark about it wasn’t really the best choice, I don’t mind owning that. It’s still really strange to me, though, for the reasons outlined by @Apos/the reason I tried to get at: Alex Jones is pretty objectively a shitty, fucked up person. It’s weird that just saying that much is controversial and considered political, because one would think that if someone is now legally proven to be an entertainer/liar who makes shit up to scare people into paying him money, acknowledging it ought to be fair game.

But it’s not my monkey or circus, so, whatever!

@Roz It was in the post that I, uh, deleted after getting enough perspective to feel uncomfortable with dumping a large quantity of barely contained spite directed at one person, in public.

(thank you, @bored!)

I’ll edit this post with that snippet when I’m at a keyboard though. Sorry for the confusion.