User blog comment:1hs444/Further on canon confusion/@comment-24750690-20141028043900/@comment-24750690-20141029022048

@ Field Marshall: Agree 100% (Tho I was one of those scrubs who started Elder Scrolls with Skyrim. hmph. Lettuce does not approve) I will reiterate what I said above.

The way I see it, we have an overarching narative of THDF attempting to overcome the Chat. Intersperesed in that narative is all of the other stuff. The battles, the episodic adventures, the forged and broken alliances, the stories of love and betrayal, the minor characters, the weapon specs, the starship classes, the smaller RPs. That's all important, but it shouldn't detract or derail the overarching narative - not without serious direction and support by admins and people interested in the canon. My point is that we should have all that awesome stuff that makes THDF THDF, under the hood - where it can really shine.

If we don't, we wind up with Kingdom Hearts syndrome. Stories and interactions between characters are amazing, well written and acted with enough passion to overlook how bad it sounds - but every single minor character winds up screwing the "overarching narative" beyond recognition. Everyone the games every intoduce swing the entire plot arc of the franchise in a completely different direction. No sub-plot is self contained. The elevator pitch of the franchise is something like:

So there's this thing called the keyblade and a long time ago there were alot of people that had one and they had a big war but enough about that there are these two guys and one girl who are trying to learn how keyblades work and they meet this dude named Xehanort who's a really big jerk and most of them die or worse but there's also this kid named Sora who gets a piece of one of the guys in him somehow and his island gets destroyed by darkness but thats okay because he has a keyblade too and he kills heartless which are different than nobodies which are when someone becomes a heartless the nobody is formed also...

...and did I mention DISNEY!?

A good story has a basic idea. The characterization is designed to deliver that idea to its conclusion. Too much out of control characterization and the story becomes cluttered and un-focused, much like the scenario above, to the point where the subplots and little things become outlandish and unrealistic. Too little, and it's boring and rigid, a story that no one in their right mind wants to read or participate in. I don't think THDF will ever suffer from the latter. We have British Dinosawrz for crying out loud.

TL;DR: RP's...or at least a newcomer's RP...should be self-contained and not have enough intertia to derail the central idea of THDF. The problem is that we have to map out what the central idea is - and we need to be consistent about that, right?