Discovery is a community dedicated to roleplaying imaginary fantasy characters. Members of this community gather large amounts of happiness and enjoyment when roleplaying their individual character. These are characters who have often been meticulously crafted, and even if we're too proud to admit it, a lot of us have personal connections with the characters we create. While there are extreme cases, I think it is fairly dangerous to tell someone their character's story or interaction is better or worse than another person's, considering we're mainly here for our own enjoyment and this really only amounts to bullying. So there is a significant harm to an individual in censoring their character.
However, I do understand Discovery is a roleplaying server which means that we are interacting with other people. If there are characters whose roleplay consistently decreases the enjoyment of other players, then those characters should not exist. However, if the roleplay is consistent with discovery's interfactional politics, and the material referenced on the server is relatable and understandable, then we shouldn't be destroying the enjoyment of community members by censoring characters simply because they have backgrounds and roleplay that exists beyond the current discovery universe. There have been incidences where expansions of the discovery universe by individuals has been constructive, like the consortium, and many enjoyable roleplaying sessions came out of some community members extensive imagination. Besides, discovery has been importing characters and stories from other universes its whole life.
So do these characters significantly and consistently decrease the enjoyment of all players that interact with them because their RP involves things that nobody knows about, completely disregards the rest of sirius, or is just generally difficult to interact with? And do these characters keep you up at night so much that it warrants destroying a community member's hard work and happiness?
On another note, There was also a comment about someone who's background wasn't good enough and therefore they clearly aren't a good community member and aren't dedicated to RP. That's just ridiculous. For me, along with a lot of other community members, I can't be bothered to write pages upon pages of backstory because I find that boring and tedious, and my personal enjoyment from discovery comes from RP interaction with other players, which I like to think is comprehensive. I should be able to exercise this right to do what I enjoy most, and not be forced by the community into doing something I don't like if it's not directly harming the enjoyment of other community members.
In the future where the limits of technology are boundless, I know a lot of people who would opt to have animal features and maybe even create some weird whacky hybrid. We can have imaginary fantasy robots and imaginary fantasy ailens but not imaginary fantasy human cross animal things. Some imaginary fantasy characters are okay, and some are not okay. Realistically, I don't know why we can't evaluate which characters directly harm other people's enjoyment on the server and which don't on an individual basis.
