Frances

@FinalVerdict I believe the main point on which we're disagreeing is that you're treating all of the complaint's elements as isolated incidents when I think they are really worth more as the sum of their parts. As I already explained several times, yes, most of these traits as single, isolated incidents would probably make ground for healthy IC conflict as long as the character was otherwise properly balanced, but you're looking at a character with 99 issues (all of which scream "furry self-gratification and wish fulfillment".)

@Sierra, I don't think my position is really too hard to understand. I don't care if you're a furry. I don't care if you like Tajarans. Conversely, I also don't think regular HRP SS13 is the place to pull furry shit. There's a difference between a furry that enjoys regular roleplay, and a furry that tries to make regular roleplay furry.

Well, my initial impression was that Safiya was doing a poor job as a geneticist by acting unprofessionally (while still signing the forms, yes. It's not because you sign a form that you should have the right to do whatever stupid thing over and over.) From contributions of other posters and my own reflection, however, it seems clear that the issues surrounding Safiya have evolved beyond poor conduct as a geneticist, and could simply be qualified of poor conduct in general. I could update the disclaimer, if you wish, as it might be getting misleading at this point. Though saying "guys, the issue you're talking about isn't the one we wanted to talk about so let's ignore it completely" isn't a persuasive way to win an argument.

As a final (triple) post, because keeping up with this complaint in realtime without writing extremely long posts is hard, the reason why I put a disclaimer at the beginning of this thread is because whenever a complaint is made against Tajarans, Tajaran "defeners" will accuse it of being a personal attack. Stuff like this is absolutely ridiculous. I'm not even sure where people are getting the idea that wanting to discuss the quality of roleplay coming from a character is actually the result of an internalized persecution complex against a fandom, but you're missing the mark by far. And this is essentially devolving into "pulling a fictional, made-up and entirely nonexistent race card without any valid points".

No. You should read the thread again. I already wrote an explanation for this a page ago.

I don't have a personal agenda against TheFurry. I believe Safiya is acting like the most stereotypical snowflake, and I was under the impression we tried to curb extreme snowflakiness to reasonable levels. I mean, you have a character who: -Modifies her genes for keks, while always following the same routine of pink fur + TK -Self-antags by picking up a syringe gun with chloral because people were complaining she was mauling them to half-death with punches -Yes, turns herself fucking pink -Regularly hits on people and brings up lewd topics, regardless of her player's insistence that she does not -Strips down to take "cat naps" in various places -Acts like a stereotypical furry/fursona, complete with murry muzzleglompnips, cuddlepiles and erogenous ears -Displays a complete disregard for Tajaran lore, ignoring most traditional Tajaran norms of social conservativeness and repression -Is a Tajaran which is basically an anthro cat (this wouldn't be terrible in itself if it wasn't combined with the above list, but in this particular instance, it's no saving grace) You can certainly justify some of these traits in an otherwise healthy character (I wouldn't mind if Tajarans took off their jumpsuit tops because their fur made them overheat if, say, they were roleplayed properly instead of acting like pink sexbeasts), but the combination of all these extravagant traits together makes for something outright terrifying. I'm also not sure what to think of "furries defending furries" and the whole outcries of fursecution that happen whenever Tajarans are put under scrutiny, but it makes me sad that people would forgo proper roleplay in favor of imaginary furry hugboxes. As I already said, I don't mind if you're a furry, and I don't mind if you enjoy roleplaying anthro catbeasts within the general spirit of the server lore. What's being done here isn't that; it's delving very, very far from the initial implementation of Tajarans to create something I'd expect to see in Furcadia rather than SS13.

I mean, I understand the want to defend Furry because you see him getting picked on. But you need valid substance to defend somebody, either evidence or at least good knowledge of them, to the point that you could claim "I've spent a lot of time with this person and I'm highly surprised they would act this way, something's amiss there". It's not because you've seen TheFurry a few times and he hasn't done anything bad during that time that it precludes him from doing anything bad at all. And I'm not gonna go into details as to why a geneticist rolling down their jumpsuit to be completely topless and then just chilling that way is ridiculous, because it simply is, doubly so when combined with the rest of Safiya's behavior.

Okay, lemme try to explain why I think this should be an OC complaint rather than an IC one. You have a character. Her name is Virgilia Aetherlux. Virgilia is 28, 7'8, has long, flowing green hair, mechanical eyes that are color-changing depending on her mood, and her entire body is covered in tattoos, face included. (Sorta like this.) Virgilia is addicted to opiates and has been known to suffer psychotic episodes. She's also the captain of the NSS Aurora. Now, consider the following: -Virgilia is 7'8 because she has been raised in a low-gravity environment. People raised in low-gravity (such as lunarians) are known to be abnormally tall and suffer from a variety of physical defects due to the body's inability to cope effectively with growth in low-gravity environments. -Virgilia has mechanical eyes because she lost her biological ones in a dramatic accident. (Can't make up anything for the color-changing bit, sorry.) -Virgilia dyes her hair green because she likes it. Ain't nothing really stopping her. -Virgilia's entire body is covered with tattoos because she follows an ancient Lunarian religion. -Virgilia is addicted to opiates as she was once prescribed them following her eye accident. She's able to keep buying them on the black market thanks to her salary as a captain. -Virgilia suffers from PTSD from the time she served in the army, and from being the sole survivor of her previous unit which was killed in a bloody war against the Vox. She only really snaps at people who are jerks anyway, so as long as you're her friend you don't have to be afraid. -Virgilia is the captain of the NSS Aurora because she's just damn good, which caused the brass to overlook regulations and allow her to become a captain two years early. This isn't really extraordinary seeing as competent people can get to important positions early on irl, and it's really not that big of a stretch. She's not a 17-year-old captain or something. Does this make Virgilia a good character? No. Yet I've provided a valid and believable reason for every single of Virgilia's traits. Yet, Virgilia is still fucking ridiculous. It's not something that needs to be dealt with IC, because it's not ingrained within an IC problematic. And you're shitting me if you're telling me TheFurry, a player who complains on a constant basis of metagrudging and people unjustly hating him and his characters, is turning himself pink in an effort to stimulate healthy and interesting IC conflict. He just, well, wants to be pink. If a complaint were made, DOs would look at it for half a second and either go "yep, that's a person not doing their job" or "well, we don't really care", but either way, they simply wouldn't be able to address the heart of the issue.

The story of the naked catnapping on brig desks was reported by Inverted_rectum, I'm not sure if Safiya simply had her jumpsuit rolled down (I assume so) but Inverted doesn't tend to make up stories so I'm assuming it happened. Anyway, you can make up a ten-paragraph essay that explains in details your justifications, it doesn't change anything from the fact that Pink. Naked. Telekinetic. Cat. idk what the creators of HRP had in mind when they made it but it probably wasn't this. And I'm gonna be fully honest with you here, if you're getting tired of people making complaints against you you should probably cut down on the over-the-top furry stuff. You can get pissed and curse a lot but it won't turn the tables around or make the argument go in your favor simply because "people like to pick on you a lot". Some of the complaints against you were indeed founded, and those that weren't you weren't punished for (afaik), so you shouldn't have to worry on that aspect. Edit: I'm not sure what the deal with the jumpsuit is but I observed the round for a solid 30-40 minutes and Safiya had it down the whole time, as she walked throughout the entire station to visit various departments, up until the time she was stabbed to death by an angry diona with an esword in maintenance.

@Skull This isn't an issue of a character making questionable choices or acting in an unlikable fashion, imo. This is the issue of a character breaking roleplay conventions of common sense to embody their fursona. It does create conflict, as any ridiculous situation would, but is it actually the kind of ridiculous situation we want to see happening? (And yes, the pinkening is semi-regular, to the point that it's become a running joke among several people, and I've seen it happen several times despite not playing on the server all that much.) Edit: Another consideration I'd like to bring up is that the robosexual roleplay happened as a one-off, shameless parody of doubtful canonicity, much like most of the other weird "happenings" (which is something I really don't mind.) In contrast, this seems to be a permanent action, and one that Furry seems to want us to take seriously.

That might be where we fundamentally disagree. I don't think there's much room for people to act like stereotypical furries on a regular SS13 HRP server. There's furry servers, and furry roleplay communities, but outside of that "furry" behavior is generally widely ridiculed, and for a good reason. I don't care that he's a furry. I don't care if he wants to play a cat character because we already have cat characters. But I do care about him turning a non-furry game into a furry extravaganza. So are you disregarding the part where she gives herself telekinesis, turns herself pink and strips down before taking naps on desks in front of the brig, or is that considered professional behavior? It probably would. The argument "people are just trying to lay meaningless accusations on him because they don't like him" can only be used after the accusations are proven to be meaningless.

There's honestly a lot in TheFurry's conducts which reflects all of the stereotypically "bad" aspects of the furry fandom (and don't tell me it's a Tajaran thing because I didn't see any Tajarans roleplay this way until recently. The whole notion of nuzzleglomps and hot cat-on-cat full body contact is a new thing.) However, there's no rule such as "don't be a stereotypical furry" so this is a tricky situation to tackle, as much as it's a silly one. I believe rules should be enforced in an effort to maintain a modicum of the general "spirit" of the server. I'm pretty sure this spirit involves an absence of using the genetics system to turn your character into your ideal fursona, though I'll try to get the Tajaran loremaster in to confirm.

A geneticist hanging around with their jumpsuit down and completely topless is still a rather silly visual. Doubly so when they're pink and furry (why can't they at least just behave like a normal scientist?) As for the sex crazedness, it's omnipresent and has been brought up in many complaints. Travis Davis' obsession with hitting on Tajarans has reached memetic levels, and Safiya also likes to mention sex fairly constantly. As a whole, though, I'm hoping this complaint is easy to understand. I'm just arguing to not have this place become fursona central.

It's a server that supports a variety (up to 20+) of anthropomorphic beast races, with a variety of customization options, and for some reason, vore. It's basically furry sex central. You have everything from flying pink foxes to two feet tall squirrel people or 10ft. slime taurs. And they're all sex crazed. Most of Furry's characters are equally sex crazed, and seeing a semi-naked pink cat person with genetics powers just running around is setting a worrying trend, if it's not bad enough in and of itself. There could be a simpler explanation, which is that TheFurry's behavior could actually be problematic. Furthermore, I'll add that all that Safiya has done has been within IC regulations, so genetics is honestly not the problem.

As much as circumstances can provide insight (they'll also show that other characters from Furry are going to ridiculous lengths to hit on Tajarans and that Furry is, well, a furry), I think the effective result of these actions is what should be examined first and foremost. This is literally the closest Aurora has ever had to a Citadel Station character and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it.

I don't think the rule is being actively enforced seeing as a ton of unrelated or semi-related people have made contributions to complaints without seeing them deleted lately. And the rule should basically be, "if you have something meaningful to add, feel free to". In this spirit, if you want to defend Furry (or oppose whatever point of view you expect the admins to take), go ahead. If the admins don't actually want to discuss things here (and would rather two separate threads be made for whatever reason), they're also free to tell me, I guess.

i hereby apply for supreme leader of halo

Disclaimer: The role of this complaint is to bring about discussion on the proper use of genetics. I do not wish to see the player concerned here punished, but would rather simply like to see people deliberate on whether such behavior should be allowed or forbidden. Edit: An additional purpose of this complaint would be to discuss Safiya's behavior holistically, and not simply for her position as a geneticist. BYOND Key: FFrances Player Byond Key: XXTheFurryXx Staff involved: None Reason for complaint: Approximate Date/Time: Multiple instances, dating back to at least September I believe most of us are acquainted with Safiya Isra - the station's current resident geneticist. She also happens to be a pink, glowing, telekinetic cat who has been known to appear in various states of undress. In my experience, these are not ideal conditions for a geneticist character to be found in. My complaint is as follow: most of Safiya's (recurrent) genetics modifications appear to be for the sake of "snowflakiness". Sure, I actually appreciate that she's bringing genetics outside of the testing lab and giving more players a chance to interact with it, but she's also pink. And glowing. And shirtless/naked. I was fortunate enough to encounter Safiya during one of my rounds, and asked her why she was pink and glowing (the naked bit didn't come up, as she thankfully was wearing her jumpsuit in its entirety at the time). The justification she gave was "complex genetics testing", which I would understand if it was something that happened once or twice, because science can be about extremely fucky things like filling a room with monkeys and setting them all on fire. However, this just seems to be her usual routine, which brings about the question of the player's intent: is the scenario of a pink glowing Tajaran a wacky happening intended to be presented to the station as a one-off episode, or is this simply how the character rolls? Because I've heard several reports of Safiya's pink, fuzzy antics, and I've ran into them a good 4-5 times in the past month or so, which would lead me to believe (unless I've been incredibly unlucky) that this is regular behavior for the character. And if you don't want to consider the intent, do consider the result: one of the station's regular characters is a pink, naked telekinetic cat.

what are we applying for?

I honestly prefer to ignore balds (when roleplaying seriously) rather than accept them as part of the gameworld. That said, this is still hilarious.

You guys need to relax. (Furry, Nibbles, Delta, everyone else.) This seems like a simple misunderstanding. I'd think Dea and Valkrae have been polite in bringing up their issues, and the claims of this complaint being a personal attack or completely needless are just turning it into a shouting match. This could have been solved in a few posts, but I hope you realize you're effectively turning it into the extensive argument you don't want it to be.

The "official" stance on this is no, but the reason for this rule was to prevent metagaming against the cultists, nothing else (after all, it wouldn't really be fair for them if they were arrested the moment they started to mention Nar'sie because everybody knew cultists were out to destroy the universe.) If you want to pretend to be a cultist in your free time, imo, who really gives a damn? As long as it's done covertly and away from prying eyes, I really, really doubt it would cause much harm. You'd just have to make sure the people you talk to the cult about are cool with it, cause not everyone might want to play that game. Anyway, you want to wait for word from an admin/loredev to be sure, but that's my take.

Oh, yeah, for the record I'm totally for making synth limbs harder to break, or not explode, as long as the brute reduction isn't readded. I didn't say the opposite, but things might not have been fully clear.

Well, like what? If you've ever worked with electronics, you'd see that most robots that aren't six-axis industrial arms are relatively fragile. Assuming IPCs aren't combat chassis, there'd be a lot of electronics, sensors, cables, plastic parts and fragile joints to break with carefully aimed grabs and punches. You don't break an IPC's underlying structure, just as much as the point of hand-to-hand human combat isn't to break a person's bones (although, well, SS13 does have bone-shattering punches lmao). It is, though. CQC is what everyone relies on the moment Plan A fails, or when there is no plan at all. I've seen a lot of nasty situations. Security IPCs used to be walking tanks during regular rounds, and I've seen IPCs screw over both nuke ops and ERT squads with the brute resist. And is there any fun in this? Is there any fun in being caught in situations where you can either one-shot IPCs, or are completely powerless against them? So the question I'm proposing we ask is: what fun could this system of strengths and weaknesses bring for players?

Well, the problem is that if you make them hard to take down, but with specific counters, you're likely to fall into one of two situations: -Everyone begins abusing counters to take down IPCs, to avoid the frustration of having to fight them Or -Counters are too inconvenient or difficult to use and IPCs remain OP I'd argue that SS13 isn't a game where counterplay is very present in combat. Sure, if you're dealing with a sole antagonist (i.e. wizard) you might have a chance to study their strengths and weaknesses, but otherwise most of the combat follows the formula of "you bring your gear, your opponent brings their gear, and the best prepared wins". Sadly, an EMP isn't something you can improvise mid-fight if you don't already have one, and if you give an anti-IPC countermeasure that's easily accessible at all times you can be sure people will simply rely on it to make IPCs useless. If you see any solutions to this problem that would allow IPCs to retain their "robot" identity without being frustrating to fight, though, you're welcome to suggest them.