... Okay, this got rather long and ranty toward the end. I'm gonna leave it in, but I'd just like to clarify at the outset that rantiness should not be mistaken for actual anger or anything like that. It shouldn't read as heated, but if it does, it's unintentional. Also, this is mainly talking about the conversation in this thread, not necessarily the story as a whole, since obviously I don't know what's in the story as a whole yet.

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To address the allegedly false dichotomy, if destruction is not the only means of change, but developing old stuff and adding new stuff doesn't count, then what does? Please explain.

Also, if change = "allow[ing] other people to write in a different manner," I don't see how destruction even counts. Destruction doesn't allow people to write differently, it forcibly removes options. Destruction is not change, either; destruction is the death of potential.

You've essentially decided that no one can ever again write for the Waterlily Commander or the Hydrangea. I'm not sure I consented to this. If I did, I think I'd like to revoke that consent now that I've thought it through.

Here's why I think this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth: by saving Trojie's NPC but not these two, you've made a judgement call that some people's NPCs have more right than others' to go on having potential. Trojie wrote a whole heck of a lot and her seat's barely cooled; her stuff is safe. Meg Thornton and Elvea Aure, though, they've been gone practically forever and didn't do as much, and their departments didn't catch on anyway; their NPCs are acceptable targets.

I don't know if that's your actual reasoning, but the implication still exists. I have a problem with this. If I get a life and vanish for two, five, ten years, and nobody else ever touches FicPsych again, should I expect to come back and find that someone has taken a flamethrower to the department and left everything I ever created there in ashes? When does my right to have left a piece of me behind in the world expire? What about yours, or VM's, or SeaTurtle's, or Joe's, or anyone else's?

Granted, not everything catches on, and that's a judgement call, too. The key difference is that choosing not to use something is not the same as choosing that no one can ever use it again.

So, the issue as I see it is not respect for the fictional PPC's right to change (and let's just keep our feet on the ground for a minute here and treat it as entirely imaginary and not really real), but respect for the real-world people who want to play in this sandbox. I believe the point of the moratorium on emergencies and destroying stuff was so that new people can enjoy the PPC more or less the same way their predecessors did, because that's what they've read about, and that's what they came for. If things change too much, eventually it's not going to be the PPC anymore; it's going to be something else with the same name.

And no, you don't have the right to make that decision for us. Tawaki didn't, and you don't, and no one does. If you want to make changes that affect everyone, you need to consult everyone. Surprise endings must needs take a back seat to respecting your fellows. If you want to write surprise murderdeathCHANGE scenes, that's fine, but this is not the place for it.

Now, the rest of the change in this story, the bit concerning the message, that DOES have a consent process built in. That's different. If it catches on (as it seems to be doing), that's all voluntary, and that's fine.

It's not okay to make decisions for people who aren't around to give consent, though. That's why killing off other people's NPCs bugs me. I don't think even the community as a whole has the right to do that. Ignore, yes. Destroy, no. Only the character's creator has the right to destroy it, whether they've allowed other people to use it or not. If I say you can use my apple tree, I mean you can pick apples, or sit in the branches, or maybe even take some firewood now and then; and you don't have to if you don't want to. I do not mean that you can burn it down, even if nobody picks apples from it for ten years. Right to use is not the same as right to destroy.

[/soapbox]

~Neshomeh, who needs tea now.