Been seeing more and more art credits. That's great. But in case you need to hear this:

Please do not link to Zerochan/Danbooru/Pinterest/Other Image Aggregate sites when crediting your artists.

Artists need impressions, likes, site traffic to grow their online presence. When Nintendo's looking for an artist to draw art for their Fire Emblem Heroes gacha game, who do you think will be noticed sooner?

It's kind of like when you write a story and post it to your site. It's a good story. 200 people liked it.

One of them liked it so much, they copied and pasted it to a story aggregate site. 5,000 people liked it there.

You post a new story. It's better than the last. 220 people liked it because your own site's audience has hardly grown, and people will instead wait for the story aggregate site to get updated with your new story.

If you don't even know it was posted to the aggregate, you can't even bask in the feelgood of having so many people like your stuff.

So when crediting and linking to artists, link to their social media, their sites, their Pixiv pages instead. It only takes a little more effort now that image aggregates often credit the artists.

Clearly you should write while walking.

Must be an exhausting way to live. Embrace Buddhism.

Maybe I just lack empathy but I just cannot understand why people in the roleplay community are sometimes so obsessed with ascribing malice where none exists.

I probably didn't explain my point eloquently enough, so I get where the confusion comes from. One of the mindset differences we have is that I consider most roleplayers to come from a place of inherent goodness, i.e. they do not set out to change the entire setting to their needs, but they may introduce details that you hadn't thought of.

From that point, if you create vagueness in a setting, you either have to run a tight ship, or just accept that writers collaborating means new creative ideas get introduced. There's nothing wrong with that. If I create a fictional town and don't specify it doesn't have a bakery, I shouldn't be upset if someone writes a bakery into the setting.

Exceptions to the rule are the lifeblood of many stories, so it's not weird to consider there are roleplayers who will introduce exceptions to the rule as their focal character.

You can either take a prescriptive approach ("you can only write what is specifically in the setting"), or you can just...chill out a bit, assume some good on people, and let them introduce new things to the setting or bend things a little. If all nobles are spellcasters, let someone play the magicless noble. If monsters are ferocious demons, let someone have a monster that's docile for some reason. When everyone woke up with a super power on 17 July 2025, what's the harm in letting someone wake up with them on 21 July 2025 instead?

If it's important, define your setting, explain why a particular detail is set in stone. All nobles are spellcasters because the king immediately confers nobility on anyone who can cast magic, and he has a magic device that pinpoints magicians. All monsters are ferocious demons because they are the embodiment of chaos and are driven by this singular force of destruction. People woke up with their super powers on that specific day because aliens unleashed an experimental device that modified people's genes on that exact day, and its effects are instantaneous.

Most sites don't have an overarching staff-ran plot anyway and run with "character-driven" (i.e. we provide the setting, you provide everything else) plots.


It's fine, you know? Trust other writers.

Yeah, honestly, I should stop arguing these things when I have no skin in the game. I already get to use my favourite FCs, and my favourite FCs are all blasts from the past.

At the same time, we have so many things we do in roleplay that are "a given", as a contrarian I cannot help but question the status quo and examine whether we really should be perpetuating some of these habits.

At this point I kinda want RP anarchy

I mean, interpretive differences exist, you know? What kind of nose does Goku have? Does he have thin lips? Double-lid eyes? Is his hair thick or thin? Is his do au natural, or do you use a lot of product, and does it make his hair greasy? Are his eyebrows well-kept or kinda bushy? Is his skin flawless? They don't have to describe them different to credibly look different.

Outside that, let's say there are three people using Mid Yuan as a faceclaim, because MiHoYo is popular right now. Is it weird to assume they all look distinctly different, but share similar hairstyles and body types? Is it even credible you'd wind up writing with all three Mid Yuan FCs, and even if you do, would that be a problem?

There's a reddit sub that finds similar looking people, so it isn't like it's unrealistic that people could look really similar at a glance. 

I think most would want to use a unique face either way, so at best you'd get a small number of people get to use their favourite face without having to compete for it. It's not like everyone writes with everyone, so depending on site size, it's entirely possible you could have six Goku's running around without them ever meeting each other or even the same people.

How common is it actually that someone has “hoarded” a face you wanted to use for your character? Can’t we just make faces non-exclusive? I mean, if there are two people using, say, Goku as a face claim, is it really a big problem?

Maybe it's a mindset difference, but some of the arguments come across weird.

I totally get wanting to limit character applications if your argument is limited staff time, and you don't want to spend that time on approving characters for people.

But I'm kinda scratching my head at arguments like, to help you keep pace, or teach you how to manage your time, or because you think the dopamine from making a new character is unhealthy. That sounds patronising.

Keeping pace and managing time are personal skills to develop, not to have dictated to you by animanga roleplay site staff members. I certainly don't do roleplaying so I can have someone tell me I can't have another character because you think I need to learn how to efficiently spend my time.

Not everything has to be a race of perfect efficiency, and wasting your own time on your own terms shouldn't be a problem at all. If you, as staff, think approving someone's characters is a waste of your time, you probably shouldn't be staff. (Alternatively, learn how to efficiently use your time to approve characters.)

Likewise for the idea that it's unhealthy to move on from one character to the next. It's great if you're able to maintain focus on one thing and that keeps you happy, but other people suffer shorter attention spans and need to be constantly challenged with something new to maintain that spark. It's fine if you think that's unhealthy, but let's not put ourselves in the seat of mental health professionals and make health decisions for people.

I don't even write many characters, often sticking to one main character and at best two extra characters. That has mostly to do with that the first character will be written to fit many threads, and if I find there's stories I can't tell with that main character, I'll add another one that has a specific other direction to go in. Because those are necessarily more limited in scope, the number of threads I'll write with them will also be considerably less.


The way I see it, if you're concerned with the time it takes to approve a character, maybe try to streamline the approval process to make it easier on staff members and limit the time spent on that. For example, you could ask people to answer two questions in the biography section: "Who was this character before they arrived at location X?" and "What motivated character to move to location X?"

Then you could either ask people to keep the biography strictly to those answers, or as staff just skim the biography to find the answers to those questions and consider mainly those.

"But Traveller, I'm worried they'll write things that break the setting!" Then you either need to define your setting better so people know where the limits are, or you need to let go a bit and accept that, once you throw other writers into the mix, some stuff may need to bend a little.

It's not like staff are infallible: I've seen staff members introduce characters that conflict with site lore or that don't make sense internally. Like the time I saw an admin introduce a character that was homeschooled in their home country, not knowing that homeschooling in said country is a crime.


Addendum: If you want to limit characters, then please let it be for logistical reasons like limited staff time, or because there are limited slots for specific roles, or because lore-wise there shouldn't be that many people. Don't use character limitations because you fancy yourself a head master here to teach people lessons through limitation.

Is people making characters a problem to be solved, though?

In happier news, I watched Delicious in Dungeon (in glorious dub, Marcille's VA is great, don't @ me) and good lord have I missed a good anime that made me laugh and sit at the edge of my seat for more. Can't wait for season 2.

I didn't expect too much but the cast is genuinely amazing and lovable.

Desmond Miles CEL ulla
Thanks for the kind words.

I know it's best for myself to cut ties. It isn't so much that I'm upset by the behaviour itself, but I guess what stung the most was that after all the years of knowing each other, they somehow found it a credible enough accusation they didn't think there was a good excuse for it.

I've actually gotten to see the evidence now. Disappointingly, it was an out-of-context quote of me after the fact complaining to the (ex)mutual friend:

"Kinda sucks we have someone in the group who went"
"Lemme just go report this dude to his employer lmfao serves him right"

Well, you can guess what our oh-so hilarious prankster friend shared with the others.



Oh well! All pains pass. I wish I were a big enough person to forgive them, but ultimately I'm kinda petty and resent them for not at least giving me the benefit of the doubt.