User blog comment:ZoshiX/Character Ownership/@comment-3126873-20150831231200

Okay, so we're bringing this back now? Potential in coherency ahoy but I'll try my best:

A lot of characters here, prior to being "claimed" by users, have been severely augmented from the intended uses and purposes belonging to each person within their own mind. It's how a lot of the characters ended up the way that they do now- heck, if you told me Kuipter was gonna be a DM from the get-go I would've argued a lot more than I ended up doing. It's how a lot of the characters have grown on this site. But it's certainly something that needs to stop.

If you take a look at the comment directly below me, LAT is trying to reclaim one of their own characters by splitting him into two separate beings- one from LAT's original intents, and one changed by others. Because Stickbeard has a settled role in canon, this, as of now, can't be done, and that makes me a bit miffed, and probably makes LAT miffed even moreso. (Unless they're over that idk) That sort of mentality is also why I've been trying to push away ownership of certain characters that, though I was responsible for, have had no involvement in their development since then.

Ownership is a very tricky issue when we all have, in our minds, a different mentality of what a character should have been rather than what they are currently. There needs to be a very intense redux on what is canon with a character and what is not- and not just by ownership based on the most work done, but by seeking out the original creators and going down the chain of edit command. If the creator wants to pass it down to the next person in line, that can be done. If they want to keep a character as they stand now, that can also be done. If they want to change everything from top to bottom, we have to stop pretending that it "can't be done" and reach a reasonable compromise. The stories are in a wreck as far as an organized canon goes and, no matter how much I love 'em, they always have been. Overhauling yet another pivotal detail should be considered something that must be done in order to better the stories, not something that we should avoid doing because of "convenience". (You wanna look back and tell me how many times Revelian is called DMS? How many times Zach is called ZX? You wanna call that "fixed"? Nah.)

I'm not in the best position to type this at the moment but I hope it's coherent enough to get the main point across. At some point I'll start laying down the law about the characters that I own, the ones that I "own", and the ones that I feel like I should own, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. (And I'm only "encouraging" it because I can't command it, and I only can't command it because not everyone who has had a hand in story development is here.)