dissertation-sized curiosity you say? aw man, if you just want to summon me, you can just @ me next time-

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okay so. uh. i guess i'll start off with the uh. "plot twist" so to speak that honestly, there's not half as many panfandoms as people like to play it up as.

don't get me wrong, they're probably the second biggest consolidated staple subgenre of animanga rp in the way that harry potter + supernatural creatures + realistic city/town sites are for the real life crowd..... but for context, there's currently 26 original sites and 35 fandom sites currently advertised on pixel perfect (which is far from a comprehensive listing imo) as animanga-only; i just recently did a sweep of panfandoms, so i feel decently confident saying that there's only three or four currently active panfandoms that are animanga faceclaims only (since i only know of zugzwang, ephemeris, and phantasma but there might be another one somewhere). by that math, that would probably place panfandoms at at most 7% of the overall animanga rpc (since 4 panfans divided by 60 sites comes out to 6.6 repeating percent). also, for additional perspective, there are currently 36 marvel/dc sites and 60+ harry potter sites currently advertised rn on cttw, which is honestly a little depressing to think about in terms of "man animanga really is small compared to the overall rpc" but also really helps with that perspective.

moving on from that cosmic readjustment, uh. i've mentioned it a few times before on pixel perfect in similar veins, but tl;dr, animanga is not really a welcoming place to people who want to play canon characters. outside of panfandoms, i've really only seen like.... final fantasy, dragonball z, and kingdom hearts sites actually allow series canons to be apped on the sites as concepts. and well. this obviously has consequences since now everyone who wants to play, say, zhongli from genshin impact has to compete with literally every other person who wants to play zhongli (which is actually part of why panfandoms have such cutthroat reserve setups, btw, because popular fandoms really have more demand than supply for those characters and it's a problem, but i digress).

it's also important to remember that unlike an original character, who can be picked up and fairly easily reworked into a new setting, canons just simply can't. or well. at least, you can't without people getting really snippy at you for "gods, if you just want to play zhongli, go join a panfandom" (which like, buddy, i'm trying, but when there's 5 panfandoms and all of them have zhongli taken, i kind of don't have options here). which is also a whole different conversation in and of itself but the end result is that it's kind of understandable that a lot of panfandoms are largely similar in concept since imo rehoming a canon is an entirely different animal from rehoming an oc.

which starts getting us into just. why do the panfandoms exist like mysterious, gigantic monoliths of the ocean who move beneath the waves until they one day wash up on the shore, dead as a doornail.

obviously, every site founding is different. there are definitely some sites that are founded because someone's looking to play a popular canon that's already taken everywhere else. but i also know through my own painstaking searching that the site setups for panfandoms are..... varying degrees of absolute nightmares (i say this with love and hate in my heart). a lot of the "better quality" sites, so to speak (with all the bells and whistles on the skins and giant communities) tend to be fairly strict in terms of what they will and will not accept (case in point: the fact that phantasma allowed me to app kaname kuran from vampire knight in spite of his ~problematic canon~ was an instant selling point for me) and a lot of them tend to have pretty in-depth apps and an exhaustive reservation process. a lot of the "lower quality" sites are generally much looser in those regards, but imo, you sacrifice a lot of that polish for freedom, and they tend to stay smaller because they don't have all the bells and whistles and their communities tend to be a lot more hit or miss (since imo it's a lot easier for me to find some corner to vibe in on my own in a gigantic site than a smaller one).

it's also important to keep in mind that 90% of panfandoms tend to be on jcink - which makes it tons easier to skin for. while i am generally all in for #jcinkmasterrace, this is actually less about my personal opinion on how easy or hard it is to skin jcink vs proboards and more tied to the fact that jcink has a lot more coders available for skinning commissions, meaning that it's a lot easier to get a skin with a lot of bells and whistles (and actually, this doubly checks out since a lot of the panfandoms have skins that fit more with the coding trends you see in the real life rpc where, surprise surprise, jcink is the preferred platform of choice as well). which uh. obviously is definitely helpful in terms of getting a site off the ground with a super pretty custom skin even if you're not super good at skinning, which sadly often pays off in dividends for recruitment purposes.

as one last way to hedge your bets for a panfandom being likely to stick around for a while (not guaranteed since imo i've seen more than my fair share of panfandoms burn out in a month when the staff move on and shutter the site).... imo, just as people tend to associate certain name + fc choices for ocs with certain rpers (like i'm sure anyone who saw me back in the mid 2010s who saw "alexi kain" with sasuke's fc knew it was me regardless of what name i was using on the site), since people tend to default to the same "core rosters" of canons, it's really easy to figure out if you've shared a site with someone before (like i'm sure anyone who sees sephiroth + cheshire + mello knows "oh it's this idiot again"), which is sometimes a blessing for reconnecting with people but can also be a curse for if you rack up a rep for being flaky.

honestly i could probably ramble for another few thousand words' worth of meta-analysis about panfandoms but. i'll stop here before i end up going full guy with the conspiracy whiteboards tbeh-

edit also big shoutout to Sharp for summarizing my entire first paragraph + what i've been trying to yell for years now that "panfandoms really aren't that big of a genre when you actually put them in proper context, y'all are just mean"

honestly, the only time i've actually seen nsfw channels become a problem for #toohornyonmain is when the community itself is #toohornyonmain, which is obviously more of an issue with the underlying community than a shortcoming of having the channel in the first place. (and like... real talk, i've never had an issue moderating them and i've had one in the server of every site i've run and/or been part of since discord became a thing, even with them being something you can only see via adding a self-sortable role to yourself and with me keeping the channel muted 24/7 because people know that if they @ me, i will appear there to do what must be done.)

personally, i tend to feel more uncomfortable with a site that doesn't have it by this point that one that does (yes, even in communities where you can't post mature content on the site itself) - both because of that "i really don't want to get in trouble because i clicked on the art channel and someone had posted a comic of lucina getting brushed off when she's asking about how her parents fell in love (their support convos are the two of them walking in on each other bathing, thanks fire emblem: awakening) and someone saw it on my screen" and because i tend to view it as a red flag that the community is probably going to be.... at best, a bit uptight about stuff and at worst, judgmental about me venturing anywhere near anything "too suggestive" just in general.

but i say that as a jcink rper who has spent a few years in the real life community (both of which tend to have older demographics + more chill attitudes towards general nsfw content) so different strokes for different folks.

okay but to briefly play devil's advocate for your members here-

a nsfw channel does not necessarily mean that it's going to be porn or smut or gore or what-have-you. in fact, on the servers i run, i've actually explicitly put up the disclaimer in the channel description that "this is not for porn" - because the thing is, there's a lot of middle ground between that explicit stuff and stuff i would be okay with having my boss / professor / fellow student / coworkers / a complete stranger seeing up on my screen with 0 outside context. (like as an example, the last thing i posted in a nsfw channel was a piece of fanart in the format of the meme with the guy downing a bottle of wine mostly naked with his crotch area covered by someone holding up a glass of wine because like.... imo it's definitely not porn but i would definitely not want that to be something i have pulled up on a publicly accessible computer for obvious reasons).

if you still insist on not having the channel, that's fine, and i definitely respect that, just. like i said, i wanted to play devil's advocate because sometimes i'll find stuff i wanna share that's definitely not something entirely inappropriate for me to share in a public server but is also not something i'd feel comfortable posting up in a general channel with no ability to opt out of it, y'know?