Many of us have struggled a great deal IRL with the question of the “melting pot” versus the “salad bowl” (and some folks just want the “pudding dish” anyway). This issue has raised its head for well over a century in the United States, and some folks in Europe have suddenly run into this issue and haven’t even begun to come to grips with it. But the core question, both in large societal issues and Internet spaceship roleplay, comes down to the same thing: do we all have to do the same thing, in the same way?
If one person or group gets well-known for a particular take on something, that certainly does not preclude others from doing their own take. I’ll say publicly what I’ve said privately many times: I’m not fond of Electus Matari’s approach to Minmatar-ness. So what? They do what they do, Ushra’khan does what they do, and the rest of us do what we do.
Not even the Amarr and Minmatar RPers are in a single alliance or bloc. Look at U’K versus EM versus a hundred other smaller groups, for example. Those with similar views and styles will eventually gravitate to each other. And I imagine that Federation RP (and Caldari RP and, I dunno, rogue drone RP) has tremendous amounts of room in it for different approaches.
To take one of many RL examples, consider Christendom. You have fundamentalists, Catholics, the prosperity preachers, people who claim Jesus was gay, people who claim he was black, people who get very irate with the previous two groups, die-hard “the universe was created in 6 24-hour days” creationists, creation-thru-evolution-ists, people who claim that the Kingdom of God is a condition of the heart, people who claim it’s Heaven, people who claim it’s coming in 2012…
But, despite all these things, you have groups who believe they have the correct understanding and everyone else is wrong. You have groups who take the whole thing as literally true, and others who take the whole thing as literature, and every imaginable shade in-between.
Sounds a lot like every RP and fictional universe community in which I’ve participated. Unity? Way overrated. The fact that somebody already has their own RP going in a given direction shouldn’t stop somebody else from doing their own. In the best case, you both end up feeding off each other and playing together. In the worst case, just ignore each other and do your thing.
I can’t imagine a more trivial subject of controversy than whether one roleplays a transhumanist Internet spaceship pilot correctly.
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