Okay, all jokes aside (because I’m sure some of you know I’m a rather joking person by the headassery I post here on the daily), I’ve never been stolen from. Thank goodness no soul has ever put me in that situation because I’m an absolute coward and don’t like altercation. But I saw someone mention before on this thread that public admonishment for theft, whether it’s coding, graphics, or what-have-you, is really… stupid? Not to call anything or anyone out, but this site is still brand spankin’ new and we’ve already had two cases where people were publicly trying to call someone out for stealing and/or thievery. And whilst it is good to let the public know, there’s a line to cross between informing the public and simply just shitting on the other person. I’m not protecting anyone nor and I speaking on anyone’s behalf but my own. Besides, I get very cringey and secondhand embarrassment from threads like those. Let’s not.

I remember on Wicked Wonderland there was a huge altercation between a rather famous (or should I say, infamous, for those who know of this person’s reputation around the animanga community) rper who had thought they had content stolen from them by someone who they thought to be a friend. At first they said they were trying to “cordial” but it quickly went south the more people participated in the thread. And by the time the accused person got around to commenting, the entire situation was a full blown fight, where everyone was taking sides and people even lost friends for simply being involved. Now that, my friends, is a bad way to handle an already bad situation.

And while thievery was talked about in different genres before my post, I am going to focus on the fact of the matter of theft in the rp community at large.

Usually when someone is accused for theft in this community they are immediately blackballed and they usually drop roleplay in general. We all come to roleplay for different reasons, different strokes for different folks, but mostly we do this as an escape from reality — because life is stressful and difficult, and we meet like-minded people that simply want to do the same thing. Isn’t that just wonderful? I thought that when I first started roleplaying at age twelve. I’m twenty now, and I’ve seen people come and go for similar and different reasons, and I’ve come to learn that there are definitely some problems with thievery here. Problems I’m not going to go into, but at the end of the day, I think we should all handle situations like this privately. Contact said person on Discord, and if they’re on a rp site, contact the staff and go from there. Anything is better than causing a scene and breaking this community further apart. What happened to trusting one another, openly talking about problems that bother us and trying to reach a sort of compromise? As people with similar interests (i.e. anime) we should be standing by each other, not bickering over who stole this bracket of coding or if this person’s work looks a little bit too similar to mine.

That’s my two cents, at least. Thanks for listening ♥