Quote:

Prometheus said:
Am I ever NOT serious?

Well...okay...yeah, most of the time, you're right. I'm not.

But, seriously, I wasn't around for the debacle (or, was I, and I simply ignored it? I sincerely don't remember) of the Psi-Unit. However, from what I have heard about it, I thought it was a group consensus that the MBL were the focus, and main team of La Perdita. And, therefore, the Psi-unit were killed off, seeing as their function had become obsolete when the Revolutionaries claimed the island as their home.

But, hey, thanks. This is the kind of clarification I'm talking about. But, I have to ask, if you were so against it, why didn't you "bring them back to life", or, "that never happened"-the-post? It is all fiction, after all.

Just curious...



There was no group consensus. It just sorta happened. One member was killed off by one random poster, another was killed off by another, and so on. I think (judging from what some of those posters told me afterwards) that it was just one of those situations where people just sort of assumed that it was okay to use the PSI-Unit members for death scenes -- there was no discussion about it until it was too late. Since they were dead, I can now no longer use them except in "Times Past"-style solo stories. And I've since moved on, I should mention, and have adapted the PSI-Unit deaths as part of Axel's background story, so it's not a specific situation that I ever want to bring up again -- just the general idea of respect for the creators of the characters is something that just WAS NOT THERE at the time and which NEEDS TO BE in order for something like this not to happen again.

As far as why I didn't just say "it didn't happen" and bring them back? Well, I guess that's part of my integrity as a writer -- I've never been someone to disregard someone else's story posts and I thought my bringing the team back to life would have looked really cheap and would have made the situation between the posters and myself even worse. At the time I was seriously thinking of leaving after issue #11 and was making plans to do so (Euro knows all about this, since he was the guy I bitched all my grievances to at the time), but then issue #11 became such a wonderful issue and the posters all began getting along with each other a lot better that I no longer wanted to leave.

Since then, though, I've been hesitant to introduce any new characters due to fears that someone will decide to use them in a way I wouldn't want them to be used without bothering to ever check with me about it (except after the fact). Thus, the 7th guideline is an important one to me -- I think it would be an important one to anyone who'd had the same thing happen to them.

Oh, I should also mention that, mostly due to the discussions about all this that I raised several times in the talk threads/chats, there has been a great deal of improvement in this area already. What I mean by that is that I've since had posters ask me if it was OK to use and/or kill off a character of mine in their story, and I've not yet encountered any problems since then. Still, a guideline such as this will hopefully keep the "courtesy call" in peoples' minds when this comes up again.

Hope that clears things up.