Crew Memorial

[Fyni]

With the recent deaths on Konyang, I thought it would be nice to have a crew memorial, with a list of names for those who died - not just there, but in other situations (against pirates and exclusionists). This memorial would be a plaque near the tree on deck three, or in a little nook near the chapel. Possibly names could be manually added to it when the HoS dies fighting a ninja or similiar - such changes would obviously not persist however.

[NM_]

We could give Patience a wonderful addition by placing it directly on the tree. Have a written list of the casualties starting from 2023, maybe earlier if folks are up for it. Have it updated with all future canon deaths.

Characters can walk right up to it and share some words, memories, etc. Would be pretty cool.

[dessysalta]

"THIS MEMORIAL DEDICATED
TO THE LIVES LOST
WHO WORKED FAITHFULLY
UNDER THE CONGLOMERATE
WITHOUT EXCEPTION
UNITED UNDER THE CAUSE
TO CARVE A BETTER FUTURE"

I think I'd cry if I saw a character I knew's name on something like that. I'd cry if I saw MY character's name on that, Jesus.

[Butterrobber202]

Make it a large stone monolith by the D3 cafe. Not because that isn't cool or anything, but so I can use my dead comrades as cover one last time.

[Fyni]

12 hours ago, NM_ said:

We could give Patience a wonderful addition by placing it directly on the tree. Have a written list of the casualties starting from 2023, maybe earlier if folks are up for it. Have it updated with all future canon deaths.

100% if the names from previous events could be gathered they should be added.

I think this is a great and fitting spot to add a variety of roleplay oppertunities alongside a consolation prize for those who die in events.

I'm already imagining memorial services before the tree....

[SilverSZ]

This is a wonderful idea in my opinion. Ideally we could include everyone who has canonically died since the start of the Horizon mission and tie it into that as being part of the memorial. A memorial dedicated to those died for the Horizon, the SCC and it's mission would be a nice thing to remember characters who did die and something other people can certainly RP around quite easily. I hope something like this goes through!

[Dreamix]

I do not want this, if it has names of actual characters who died.

 

I do not want people to OOC boast how many characters of theirs have died and were put in the memorial.

I do not want to see any kind of OOC or IC drama about whether someone deserves or does not deserve to be put in the memorial. After all, why would SCC want all deaths to be put in there? How about crew with anti-corporate views, or outright acting against SCC? Or people who died in volunteer missions where the danger of death was known ahead of time? Or really any death that wasn't strictly defending Horizon or SCC interests.

I do not think this would really promote any cool roleplay, and it'd mostly be just grim and depressing, given how many people have died and in what circumstances. It's pretty depressing to see SCC allow a memorial to people who have quite literally "died for the phoron company" and its interests. It would have a lot of names if it includes everyone, like 30 at least I'm sure, and that list will only grow as we go on with events.

I also think it would be intimidating and exclusionary for new players or characters, and only show them all the events that they were not part of. It's not easy now to introduce a new character to the ship, and a memorial won't make it any easier.

 

I could maybe be fine with this if it was just a memorial to anyone who died on duty, without actually listing out all the names.

Edited March 18 by Dreamix

[Fluffy]

I agree with Dreamy on the part of not wanting an endless list of characters that died (which can only inflate overtime) or discussions about which characters get in or get out of the list, I don't care if it's grim or depressing or not or whatever, it's just an annoyance to deal with even assuming we streamline it so that they only stay up to a certain amount of time to combat the list length inflation

Commendation reports are there to honor those who died valorously in the defense of the SCC's stock market shares value, and a thread somewhere on the forum can be created to list whoever else

We can then put a memorial stone or whatever, and in the description a link to said thread, I would be fine with that

[Flpfs]

I am against this PR due to it being contrary to the IC setting and OOC culture, in my opinion.

 

ICly, why would the SCC, who wants to incentivize participation in dangerous missions, agree with having an exhaustive list of all deceased personnel that died doing exactly that? It doesn't seem like a good idea for morale and we all have to remember that this is a dystopian megacorporation who'd lie and keep up a facade as it always does.

OOCly, I really dislike the direction that the server culture is going. This is going to be disliked but the LARP is getting too strong. You know what other servers have memorials of soldiers who bravely died fighting for an operation? CM and TGCM. People seem to be behaving as if the ship isn't a megacorporate vessel with civilian crew but rather some sort of military-lite mission.

Dreamix has made excellent points towards other OOC concerns such as alienation of newer players and the somber, unproductive atmosphere it will generate to RP. I don't want to see people drinking Himean mushroom vodka and smoking near the memorial acting like they're war veterans.

[Gem]

i second Dreamy and Flpfs and don't really have anything to add that they haven't already said in their posts.

[JeffMomentRed]

I agree with Dreamy, as much as I might enjoy memorials to specific crewmates, like the one which was removed from Konyang. There is just too many cons for it to be healthy.

[EJJ]

Going to echo the others before me, I think the intention is sweet but nothing stops people from making a page on the forums, relay or something else for tracking this rather than making it something in-game.

[Jasorn]

I think a middle ground could be had, no names to be mentioned, but it could list important events such as "memorial to the lives lost on: event x, y, z" just to give a name to the event people had died on

[Fyni]

The concerns raised by multiple people I think are legitimate. Still, a generic memorial would still be nice.

15 hours ago, Flpfs said:

ICly, why would the SCC, who wants to incentivize participation in dangerous missions, agree with having an exhaustive list of all deceased personnel that died doing exactly that? It doesn't seem like a good idea for morale and we all have to remember that this is a dystopian megacorporation who'd lie and keep up a facade as it always does.

Though I disagree with this - you may as well ask why most countries in the world have military memorials and memorial days.

[Dreamix]

1 hour ago, Fyni said:

The concerns raised by multiple people I think are legitimate. Still, a generic memorial would still be nice.

Though I disagree with this - you may as well ask why most countries in the world have military memorials and memorial days.

IRL military memorials and memorial days (I would think) usually are either to military personnel dying while serving their nation, or civilians who died due to an invasion or war.

Horizon crew is neither. Horizon was never really fighting some heroic war and protecting freedom of the spur and its people.

It makes no sense for SCC to put a memorial on Horizon, cause it'd only be a reminder to other crew that they are all expendable and can be sent to die to protect company interests.

The same company that can, and has done it in the past, cyborgify you if you act against it.

[N8-Toe]

would a tacky "crew appreciation plaque" in the D3 garden or chapel be on brand than. Give a spot for characters to RP about their friend who died, but also sorta reinforce the corporation is a souless entity that does not care for their lives. Or is that even drifting too close. Or does having just the chapel already fill that niche of RP venue 

[ben10083]

1 hour ago, N8-Toe said:

would a tacky "crew appreciation plaque" in the D3 garden or chapel be on brand than. Give a spot for characters to RP about their friend who died, but also sorta reinforce the corporation is a souless entity that does not care for their lives. Or is that even drifting too close. Or does having just the chapel already fill that niche of RP venue 

Then just chapel then, why even have it public? At most I can only see a chapel plaque that said "in memory of those who died for the phoron company"

[Rabid Animal]

Having a plaque, even if it doesn't name anyone, memorializing those who died for the company seems in character for a dystopian mega corporation. It's obviously meant to appeal to all the people upset about it, without being a real commitment to righting any wrongs associated with those people's deaths. The average spessmen would fall for it, it's just what they're all conditioned to expect at this point. Beyond that, the old station had plaques all over I don't see why the SCC would be against doing something like that.

 

Let people do their pity rp?

[Evandorf]

You could give the chaplain the tools necessary or the ability to customize a memorial for themselves. I think people do a good job of improvising with what we have available (flowers on the altar, offerings, ect) but there’s already a need to help chaplains personalize their worship space so giving them the agency to create a memorial for the fallen would fit their niche and it wouldn’t be a corporate initiative. 

[NG+7 Gael]

I think this sounds like a pretty neat idea, personally! Sure there are some potential negatives to do with maintaining the memorial, but I think some people are worrying too much about things like "alienation" and "server culture." I really don't think people who are new to the server are going to see a memorial and be alienated by that of all things. They're already hopping into a universe with a long history, tons of lore, and plenty of both new and established characters (some of which have literally been around for years), I doubt a list of canonically dead characters is going to be the thing that breaks them. I also don't think most people are going to be purposefully killing off characters just to get their "characters named on the memorial" number up. Additionally, memorials are not a military-only thing; it's not unlikely that people aboard the ship would want to push to make one either, given that these are people they care about, so like Evandorf said, even if you wanted it to not be a corporate initiative, there's an easy way to solve that. Also, we already have canon announcements from the SCC listing the names of the dead, so it's not exactly like it's unfitting.

If maintaining the list is too problematic because of the scope of it, then you could even narrow it down to only be event deaths. That would be significantly easier to maintain, make the list far shorter, and offers much less risk of people making characters just to die on them.

Honestly, unless this would be something that is excessively difficult/annoying to maintain (I can't imagine it would be, but idk) I don't see much reason not to add it. It offers a new location for people to RP at, and while the RP offered by it may not be upbeat, why does it have to be? More ways to get RP is always a good thing. People can choose to engage in the depressing RP or not. Just like everything else, it's not being forced upon them.

[wowzewow]

This would probably have a lot more meaning if it wasn't just possible to create a disposable character for every canonical event and running into danger to kill themselves.

[Kintsugi]

I like this idea but I feel that the responses are proof enough that it's just one of those things that people are too skeptical of to completely accept, even if in practice I think the concerns being raised are extremely unlikely to ever come to pass. There are certain ideas on HRP servers that people seemingly can never stomach: canonicity where characters exist beyond just existing is one of them. The fact of the matter is that despite Aurora placing such a focus on canonicity, people are deeply concerned with the idea of characters ever being recognized in any way, and more than that people really do not like it if characters are given any form of treatment that isn't negative or the exact same form of attention being given to every other character.

 

How often do you see people bragging about IC accomplishments of their characters in OOC, or even IC for that matter? How often do you actually see people bragging about how their characters died in events? Because to be frank, most people I see who lose characters in events are upset or completely happy to move on. Player and especially character turnover on Aurora is huge: characters simply do not last more than a few months typically, which means that there's very few people developing a strong enough attachment to their character in the first place to treat them as this OOC achievement to be paraded around. And here's the fact of the matter: if this seems exclusionary and intimidating to new players, the whole server will seem that way. If people are being turned off of Aurora because there's a rock somewhere with some names on it because of event arcs, they're going to be turned off by the fact there's hundreds of thousands of words on the wiki that they have to read to know about these arcs and the lore as a whole and that we have these event arcs constantly. Is the expectation that we're going to hide Aurora's past arcs and things from new players in order to not scare them off? Because if that's what we have to resort to, we have a serious problem, lol. I'd actually like to make the argument that showing a new player that their character *could* matter and that things that happen to their character *could* matter would be a huge draw for people.

Anyway, it might seem like I'm trying to target a specific argument or someone's specific arguments, but at the end of the day I've been seeing this same sort of apprehension for as long as I've been playing HRP (It was so strong on Bay that they avoided canonicity completely in general for many many years). I think this is just how a lot of people naturally feel about this sort of thing, and too many people feel this way for it to ever be accepted on the server.

 

For what it's worth, I think in practice nobody would actually care much. There might be a few rounds after event arcs where people go RP with the rock, but I think in the long term it'll just be a half-forgotten decoration, like Patience would be if it wasn't in your face 24/7. And that aside, I think concerns about a tonal shift are unfounded. There's a whole lot of things that are going to shift our tone before *that* does.

 

 

Let me close with this:
Not many people seem to remember this, but the Aurora had IC memorials to dead crew as a result of the serial killer arc. It included their names and how they were murdered by a serial killer. There were multiple memorials around the station. Do you know how often these memorials existing caused problems?

Well, I can't be sure they didn't cause issues at any point as I only started playing here in 2019, but I can say that I never saw anything, and I haven't heard of anything happening either.

And last Christmas we had an event where some characters were ICly given medals and high honors from the SCC, because of their actions during the Dreary Futures 2 finale event. This is supposedly the exact sort of situation everyone is worried about - characters getting recognized above other characters for their actions. And yet? I don't even think any of those characters still exist, a bit more than a year later, and when they did exist I sure never saw any problematic behavior like people worry about, IC or OOC.

Edited March 27 by DanseMacabre

[OolongCow]

On 19/03/2024 at 10:46, Evandorf said:

You could give the chaplain the tools necessary or the ability to customize a memorial for themselves. I think people do a good job of improvising with what we have available (flowers on the altar, offerings, ect) but there’s already a need to help chaplains personalize their worship space so giving them the agency to create a memorial for the fallen would fit their niche and it wouldn’t be a corporate initiative. 

I 100% agree. I sentimentally support a memorial, but if it is added it absolutely needs to fall under the chaplain's authority. It's already one of the most unmaintained, unsupported, no-hooks roles on the ship. Giving it literally anything would be nice.

[Triogenix]

The current LTA has the position that no specific character names should ever be mentioned in official lore; we allow things like non-CCIA given medals and awards, but characters can't be mentioned in articles/on the wiki, and those medals/awards cannot be in-game items(CCIA follows different rules for their awards). As this is related to lore events, I believe that the LTA's authority, and therefore this position, extends over it. It can be brought up that it was done before, however, to be honest, I don't care. That was the decision/position of that LTA, the current one is different, and future ones can be different as well. However, while I am loremaster this is not something I will likely compromise on - ever.

 

Something awarded to the Horizon crew as a whole, or to the Horizon as a ship is fine, and with the event arc now over, this is something the synthetic team considered. Time will tell what their decision was after consideration.

Therefore I'm also voting for the dismissal of this suggestion.

[greenjoe]

A memorial without names on it, perhaps

Also i very much think that ruling on awards and character naming is very silly