I really need to use this blog more often, and not just when I'm experiencing a brain meltdown (see last post) or ranting to the small portion of the Internet that might actually stumble across this little haven (like this post). But I digress.
Gather around, my younglings, and let me tell you a tale. A long time ago (like, two years back) there was a forum. And it was a nice forum, one that was growing and changing every day. Stories were born every hour, characters (and their writers) formed loves and rivalries, and there were always shenanigans going on. Hey, none of the stories would have met a canon muster (it was a fanfic roleplay forum) but when you're having fun, that's just a side detail, right?
But then, some people on the forum decided they were going to push things too far with their characters in terms of canonical feasibility. And then they got upset when the staff on the forum said that it couldn't be done, and both the members and the staff refused to listen to any suggestions otherwise. The members gathered sympathetic staff members to their cause, and created a dreadful rift in the forum itself. Most of the members stayed with the old forum in the aftermath of the schism. Others, like the ones who had pushed canon too much, left the forum and went elsewhere. Still others fell through the depths of the schism and were never seen again by either side. A very few members did their best to stand across the rift and maintain contact with both sides, and these few members are now permanently stuck doing the splits, if they have not retreated to either one side or the other.
Our tale today, children, does not concern the ones who deviated from the forum's norms and went their separate way after the schism- or perhaps it does, but very indirectly. Our tale turns now to the staff of the side that had stayed behind. Seeing that the forum was now much smaller in size, and there were so few stories being created now, the staff decided that it was time to enact drastic measures. Let there not be any more extreme deviants! Instead, all of the stories would be closely watched to make sure that there would not be any more members wishing to cause division and rivalry within the forum. And the rest of the staff (including the members who had been promoted to fill in the gaps left by the rebels) agreed that hey, this new system of monitoring stories was great, and let's do it. With that, the new system of grading all of the stories to make sure they were canon-accurate was implemented, and for a time all seemed well.
But such things do not last. The staff, paranoid of seeing the forum torn in half again, did not allow for any divergence from a very set criteria of rules. Only a few stories were accepted as canon, while countless others were discarded as rubbish fit for the Twilight fanfiction archives. The chore of the staff assigned to grade the stories went from keeping the rules to exiling stories based on writing style and grammatical correctness (as well as sheer bullshittery). Instead of becoming an easy pass/fail system, the canonizing system became a monster, one that devoured all traces of creativity and turned the hairs of the canon-judging staff to grey. The staff overseeing the forum decided that this was the way things should be and did not wish to listen to the words of caution from the canonizing staff. Fearing to be devoured by the monster and its admin masters, the members discarded their own seeds of creativity, saying that it was pointless to keep the seeds when the monster would smother them all. Canon did not allow for creativity. And so, instead of growing as hoped, the forum withered and began to shrink even further- for there was no deviance, but there was also no new life.
What happens next, dear children? That remains to be seen. Perhaps you can tell me if the staff recognized the monster for what it was and changed the system to cripple it, or if the forum died completely. But make haste with your answer, my young ones! For see there- those are the fine cracks of another rift on the ground, and the forum cannot live through another split.
Do I think that the forum recovered from the first schism? No, I do not. The old forum, dear ones, is dead, and it will never live again in the same way that it used to. And I do not know if its legacy will live on as we hope. Perhaps the forum will eventually thrive again... but if it does, it will have to fight through months of death and decay to live again. It is possible, to be sure, but I fear that the canonizing system is preventing it from growing. A young organism bound in a tight box cannot grown to its full size.
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