User blog comment:GokūBlack10/A Message from Ten/@comment-13970942-20140504032638

I support the applications for obvious reasons. I'm not good at speaking in gentle terms- when I initially joined this fanon, it was a festering pit of rancid shit.

By that I mean, it was filled to the brim with godmod characters with shoehorned powers blatantly wholesale stolen from canon or even other series, copy pasted or worse, only having a single poorly-written, badly spelled and grammatically confused sentence to describe them. Everyone but one or two were making sharingan/madara clones with the same shopping list default powers.

It was the norm for characters to be nothing more than a list of powers.

I don't think you understand just how badly this was taken by the wider fanfiction community, and to this day, the site struggles to overcome its well-deserved negative reputation. People outright avoided this site. To even mention its name summoned feelings of embarrassment and disgust. Many of the characters that were housed here were nothing but childish power-tripping. They were the desires of children for power, manifested in the most primitive and basic way they can understand- by mimicking the power of others, and by being "The Best" at every category the writer can grasp or remember.

The application policies are GOOD for the long-term health of this community, because they help remove alot of the childish competition that would happen otherwise. They encourage writers to thoughtfully weigh the advantages of using pre-established canon abilities, or to create their own. They encourage creativity and innovation.

Characters that are nothing more than masturbation material for troubled children, should not see the light of day, let alone be posted in a public venue such as this. This is a community that exists to support creative writing- fanfiction. It isn't a place for people to vent their life frustrations by self-inserting into their god-like characters and defeating phantom enemies. Gaining a bizarre form of vicarious gratification from self-glorifying one's creations is... just pathetic.

It's putting a badge of pride on something that is ultimately judged not by its theoretical power, but the value of the writing and the interest it generates. Going back up to what I said above, a fanon community thrives based on the exchange of ideas and creative thought. Copy-pasta power trip characters are neither creative, nor do they possess much in the way of ideas.

I'd rather see the site continue on as it has. I think people are genuinely happier now that they don't have to make their character Madara clones to compete.