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Showing results for tags 'I dont know'.
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Random question: What do you do when somebody comes up and tells you that another member is portraying something wrong, but you don’t have the experience/education/knowledge to actually know if that person is wrong? Couple of examples. Firstly, once long ago I had a member who made a gay character, and somebody complained about it for some reason I don’t really recall. There was a specific reason related to the character—I think the complainer had interpreted the character to be mocking gay people or something. So I acted upon the complaint and ended up scaring away the person with the gay character. In hindsight, I realized that I had not acted appropriately and that the person playing the gay character hadn’t actually been mocking gay people but had been playing that specific character appropriately for the situation/personality/history that the person had created. Oops. I had just been afraid to offend people that I hadn’t really thought about it. Secondly, I’ve had people who grossly misrepresent mental illnesses. Such as characters with multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder (MPD/DID) who switch back and forth rapidly, or the bipolar characters who are literally two separate people smooshed into one body. But back then, I knew that the characters were portrayed outright wrong. The problem was that had they been wrong but not so obviously wrong, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that they were inaccurate representations of these illnesses, so I wouldn’t have been able to correct the person. Which would mean that we’d end up with poorly written and potentially offensive characters on the site, which in turn may scare away people who might think that we knowingly supported a stereotyped or offensive character. I ended up banning all characters with MPD/DID because I couldn’t tell if they were really being portrayed accurately and I was tired of the people who played them very wrong and didn’t do any research. I remember once I ended up with somebody who made a rapid-cycling bipolar character, but I didn't realize that people could rapid cycle (because I had always heard that the dramatic switch back and forth was more of a myth), so I told her that it was wrong. Then she was like, "Er, no, this is what I have, and I rapid cycle." And I was like. Oh. If she hadn't been nice enough to call me out on it and just slunk into the shadows while dismissing the site because I was being "dumb," I wouldn't have ever known better. These are all things of the past and it’s not something I’m currently struggling with, but I was thinking about it recently. What do you do if you don’t know if something is wrong? How have you handled similar situations? What are your stories?