rpanons | It's raw you donkey

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

CONCERNS | RESOURCES

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi. I figured I might as well give you the mod-approved reasoning.

The reason Cherubs are not app-able at this very moment is because there is not enough information on them while at the same time there is a very reasonable expectation that canon is going to fill in this information at some point. (which is what seems to be happening now to some degree) They have a bigger, focal role than ancestors/dancestors/guardians, whose roles in the story mostly seem played out or at best very minor. The chance of any of our current information on them getting jossed in very minor. Whereas before two days ago we weren't even sure if Calliope/Caliborn's situation was unique or common for their species and we sure as hell didn't know about the very possible mpreg hate babymaking.

Basically, it's like... we would allow someone to app a character from a one-shot episode when it is clear that the character in question will not have a bigger role in their canon. Because that means that the chance of canon suddenly make a big twist out of them is not very present. But at the same time, we wouldn't allow someone to like... app the main character of a new show based only on the information shown in the first episode. Because you can be sure that the show will give us more information on that character in the eps to come. We would ask an apper in that scenario to wait as well, as we are currently doing with the cherubs. Now that Hussie is giving out more actual information on their species and way of life, they will probably become appable some time in the near future. ~~once we figure out what to do with the body issue~~

Edited 2013-03-09 21:12 (UTC)

ok I understand your explanation, but these updates? they don't tell us anything in regards to caliborn and calliope's character. they tell us how they were born and that cherubs turn into giant snakes when they mate, but how does this give us anymore insight into calliope and caliborn that we didn't already know? we knew caliborn and calliope were polar opposite personalities, that they had a maturity process where one personality predominates and merges into a whole being and that caliborn was stunted in maturity because he jumped the gun and predominated ahead of time. yes it's cool that we get some insight into how cherubs mate and how they came to be, but this is information more relevant to readers than to the actual characters.

let me give you an example. dirk and roxy are from the future, but people apped them in ahead of time without realizing it. when it got revealed, it was a huge jossing moment because people played with the presumption that the two came from the same period of time like jane and jake. that is a huge thing to take into consideration when playing them. now lets compare that to the recent updates. everything being said here are things we already knew or things that calliope and caliborn don't know themselves. they never met their parents and never will so why does it matter they were born through two snakes getting it on? it doesn't contribute to their character because they don't know that themselves. the stuff they do know are things that we as readers have known for months now.

so my question is this: why does it matter that caliborn and calliope were born from snake mpreg in regards to an application to an rp game? vatheon isn't a sex game so who gives a fuck? none of this information tells us anything more about their character, only about their origins. and considering a ton of characters in homestuck don't have complete and whole origin stories (including a number of the main characters) why does it matter that calliope and caliborn do? i'm not trying to criticize you, i'm genuinely curious.

First of all, the updates are not yet complete so we don't know yet what sort of things will be revealed about Calliope and Caliborn on the whole. Yeah, there is the snake-mpreg thing, which likely would never come up in a game, but until Aranea is done talking, we have no idea what sort of other things she will be revealing and whether or not those things might affect the playability of the cherubs in game. And while you are correct in saying that they do not know these things about themselves, that does not necessarily mean that there isn't the potential that these things won't influence their actions. Say, something crazy, we learn in this update that every cherub, within two weeks of obtaining a full body for themselves suddenly sprouts feathers. That is not something either of them would know, but that doesn't mean it isn't something that would come up while playing. I mean, that example is far on the silly side, but something similar to it in spirit could crop up. You are right in saying that not every homestuck character has a full origin story. Which is fine. We would accept Calliope and Caliborn without a full origin story too, just as long as we could be very reasonably certain that it wouldn't be getting any more canon attention. Which is not a certainty we had at the time of making that rule.

Hussie has a certain way of telling character stories that leaves a lot of room open for later reveals that are new info to the audience, but were actually known to the character already just not yet referenced. (Dirk and Roxy living in the future, Vriska being godtier, Gamzee being the most important character ever) Which actually made it very easy to realize that the Alpha trolls were going to be very minor characters. Because they (apart from Meenah and Aranea) got all their development/history/story crammed in one update. But going by the pattern and the fact that Calliope and Caliborn had very mysterious introductions, it was basically a big old honking sign of NOT WHAT THEY SEEM, THERE IS GOING TO BE A REVEAL. And it is hard to judge exactly what the reveal is, if it has been done already (was them being cherubs the big reveal, being in one body, him murdering her?) or if it is still to come. Trust me, it's a pain. I've often wished I had the whole of homestuck in advance just so I could 100% no fail figure out where the markers should be set for appable vs non-appable. Sadly, I don't so it is just kinda of a make a choice and hope for the best routine.

The thing is, we have a big cast. Meaning that if ret-cons are going to be needed, it will inevitably affect a lot of people. Add to that that Calliope and especially Caliborn seem pretty powerful (they have the strongest sgrubs classes, remember, what does that mean even?) which makes things particularly delicate. Which all in all leads us to taking a very slow approach to allowing them in. And yeah, there is a big chance that afterwards we realize, hey it was all overdone and these characters could've been apped in months ago with no problem. At which point, I guess all we can do is shrug and them's the breaks. Apping a character too quickly has a bigger chance of affecting the game and our current players than people maybe being asked to wait a little longer for their game time fun. So on the whole of it, if it comes down to that, we'll always go for the option in which potential instability to already present cast is minimized. Does that mean we can always foresee the best decision? Nope, but all we can do is try and hope for the best.

I hope all of that makes sense. I'm just heading off to bed but wanting to respond to you before I did.

This kind of waiting to app a character isn't a new thing for Vatheon either, anon. It was true of the Alpha kids too! Vatheon waited several months after the Alpha kids had been introduced to allow them to be appable- I was the first to join the game with Dirk, and he only got brought in around July.

So we didn't have the problem with having to figure out what to do with Dirk and Roxy being from the future, because we already knew that by the time they could be brought into the game.

It's raw you donkey

Re: RESOURCES & DISCUSSION

Re: RESOURCES & DISCUSSION

no subject

no subject