re: inclusivity (and a callback to the other discussion about """cliquey""" sites)

personally, i think sites should be trying to be welcoming rather than inclusive, both because it's just a generally healthier model and because it's just. the better thing to do.

to put it another way - i think it's a bad thing for a site to be "too inclusive". both in terms of some of the examples mentioned earlier, about how it's not a good thing to, say, allow a homophobe to just exist in a community that's full of lgbt+ players, it's just not, and in terms of a more general concept that someone who posts maybe once every other month is probably going to cause a lot of frustration for everyone on a site where most people are posting once a week or so. to put it simply, sites tend to have... a little less drama + headache when you have a bunch of people who all have compatible rp preferences as opposed to a wider range with little to no labeling (the major exception being those super huge "rp what you want" sandbox sites but animanga doesn't have those so we don't need to touch on why it's an exception to the rule). which. y'know. probably this point is a bit of a "well duh" moment but sometimes you just gotta say it out loud because it's easy to lose track of the big picture for topics like this.

in the different vein of the original point, being welcoming is, well, largely what it says on the tin. in my experience, it's become far more the exception than the norm these days to have a community that's normalized reaching out to new members and making an effort to try to include them within that community if that newbie isn't already friends with one of the big friend groups on the site and/or isn't making a character that someone's actively requesting (whether as a want ad or as something that ends up becoming a smash hit). and like. i get it. i do. it's really hard to be welcoming because imo we all have limited time + energy on this planet and sometimes, no, i do not have the ability to try to get invested in a newbie who's coming in with some random character that doesn't have any immediate connections to mine and will likely be gone in three months' time. i can't commit to a bazillion threads because then i will actually reply in a timely fashion to none of them without resorting to favoritism. (heck, i even get that a site being welcoming is really hard to be consistent about since, for example, if i'm joining a site with a bunch of people who play final fantasy xiv, that week or two after the new expansion is probably gonna be largely a dead zone since the community's focused on the game + by the time they come back, i'm "old news" and don't get investigated.) but on the flip side, i also get why people are so flaky these days because good hecking grief, it is so hard to actually muster up the ability to give a singular crap about a site when it feels like you're constantly fighting to get even the vaguest kind of scraps and the experience has little to no likelihood of changing in the remotely near future.



tl;dr to all of that. in my opinion, inclusivity shouldn't be the goal of a site, it should be being welcoming, for the simple logic that "i should be ~excluded~ from a site because i love shipping and this is a site for extensive political intrigue or combat threads, not because i joined without an rp friend already existing on the site and no one had a want ad i liked enough to pick up instead."