Shoggoth on the Roof wrote:<new mystic NPC>
Here's the elephant in the room that no one's addressing. FS has no overarching story or narrative. It is a collection of various people's sexual fetishes represented by the various NPCs in the game and paid for by people who want their fetish represented. I don't mean this in a bad way. It's just a fact. FS is a collection of sexual fetishes.
Nermine's important as an NPC has grown out of a desire from the writers to try to establish some sort of order to the chaos of sex that exists in FS. The writers want a narrative where none exists and Nermine is the outlet through which that is projected. She is an NPC with power over they mystical in the same way that Zephyr and Trevor labs have power over the technological. When someone commissions magical content, it's natural that Nermine becomes involved because she has become the defacto arbiter of magic.
Is this a problem? Possibly, but not necessarily. The issue really comes down to the nature of the game itself. The setting for the game is, by design, vague. It allows for a lot. The issue is that, through commissions and various writers, something more concrete has been called for. As far as i'm aware, there's no FS bible. Establishing a concrete story is, in some ways, against the best interests of the game. It's paid for by people who commission content. Establishing a canon story is in many ways counterproductive because it will necessarily limit the stories people can commission and thus, pay for.
Personally, i'm against the introduction of an additional "mystical" npc. I like my stories to have some rhyme and reason to them. The introduction of an additional mystic NPC represents a
Kludge even greater than Nermine. It doesn't address the issue that there's no real framework established in the story for magic, or anything else for that matter. I may be a jerk for saying this, but i'd rather see some sort of attempt to draw all of the various content in the game together rather than further expansions in random directions.
At some point, I think that's a decision the writers will need to make. As it stands, there hasn't been any "meaningful" progress toward the development of the setting for a year or more. There has been plenty of "lateral" development, with new NPCs and story lines, but little "vertical" development expanding existing plot lines or characters (there are, of course, exceptions, Alexandra being one). I mean, again, i'm all for hot sexual content. At the same time, however, it's not like there's a shortage of that on the internet. I'm attracted, in part, to the setting and story. I feel like that's been neglected, and that the "overuse" of Nermine is a symptom of the lack of development on that front.
I might be wrong about all this. I don't want to step on anyone's feelings. I'm just expressing my opinions as someone who has played a fair bit of FS and read way too much of the code. My opinions are based on what i've gleamed from that knowledge. If there's a greater plan at work, I hope I have made it eminently clear that it is not obvious to us "consumers". In any case, it's not like I don't enjoy the game; It's far from it. I'd just like to see some effort made to sanitize all the various content so that all the various characters, npcs and plots actually work with each other.