Problems in the Fandom

So it seems that lately, some Homestuck fans have taken it upon themselves to send pictures containing things like gore and mutilated babies to Gamzee roleplayers.



This is really unacceptable. If you are attacking real life people because you don’t like a fictional character, then there is something seriously wrong with you. People want to vilify Gamzee RPers and Gamzee fans, but they’re not the ones going around harassing people and sending them disturbing pictures.

Many chats forbid Gamzees and Makaras from RPing in them. This is all part and parcel of the same problem. If you don’t want characters to engage in certain kinds of behavior, then that’s fine. Make that a rule. But forbidding a character outright in a way that promotes an environment of intolerance and hatred in the fandom community, especially when that bleeds over into harassment of real life individuals, is not okay.



As such, when the newly coded version of MSPARP comes out, if a chat is perceived as promoting this kind of hatred, intolerance and harassment, we will be removing it, deleting its logs, and possibly banning its creators and moderators permanently.



So far, Gamzee is the only character that seems to inspire this kind of behavior that seeps over from the fictional world of roleplay into the treatment of real people. This is why he will be treated as a special case. If you happen to not want Mindfang or Karkat in your chat because you don’t like those characters, that’s different since people who roleplay those characters aren’t being systematically targeted as real life individuals.

I really hope this helps some people to think about how they treat real people because of their feelings over characters who do not actually exist. Terezi is not a real person. She is not actually suffering. But when you harass someone for roleplaying Gamzee, there is real person who is getting hurt. A fictional character doing bad things in a story is not bad. A real life person attacking another real life person, even if it is just over the internet, is legitimately awful. If you can’t make this distinction between fictional worlds and the real one, then instead of roleplaying, you should be seeking some kind of therapy so that you can learn to distinguish fantasy from reality.