Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
*snip*
I believe a history lesson in order to help bridge some of the gaps.

All the way back in ARR, there was only one RP community, mainly located on Aether, that NA and EU shared together. The reason for this was, for some reason, the Chaos datacenter was located inside of North America, not Europe, until 2015. Back in those days, the rules regarding fantasias in the RP community at-large was, for the most part, unified and fantasias were largely not canonical in the slightest, mainly due to lack of clarification from the devs and the amount of trouble fantasias would introduce into RP, particularly if they were considered common. The only thing regarding fantasias the players got from the devs at the time was this:

“Fantasia works in a unique way. It can’t simply turn you into whoever you want, or people could get away with anything. Crime would be out of control. Even on Earth, people have the opportunity to change who they are – cut their hair, get a facelift, find a new career or a different spouse – but we often aren’t willing to make those drastic life changes. Fantasia gives you the courage to make the changes you’ve always wanted to make. Maybe you are Lalafell trapped in a Roegadyn’s body, it’s time to break out! And all you needed was that courage in a phial!” - 2014 London Fanfest Q&A
The big issue here would be that since it doesn't either hard confirm fantasias to be real or not real, it didn't really move the needle as to how RP was viewed back in those days. This largely continued to be the view all the way through HW, as no extra clarification would be given and, while Chaos was now located inside of continental Europe, there was no incentive to move since the NA DCs were still located in Canada.

This changed in 2017, when the Crystal DC was created and the NA servers were moved from the Montreal, Quebec, Canada to Sacramento, California, US. Large communities of people were cut from each other due to the Crystal DC being formed out of servers originally on Aether and Primal, chiefly among them Balmung. Adding insult to injury, the EU players in particular would now also have massively increased ping due to the servers moving across the North American continent. As such, a large chunk of EU RPers elected to transfer from NA to EU, thus splitting the RP community into now EU RP and NA RP. Finally, the last time the devs said anything about fantasias would occur in 2019, during an interview with the localization team.

“While the Fantasia potion has some in-world flavor text, it’s mainly meant to be seen as a meta object. For example, you wouldn’t see it’s use, or reference to its use in storylines since in effect it doesn’t actually exist.” -Localization Team Interview 2019
Much time has passed since all of that, and while the EU players largely stayed the same, NA players changed which I will go into briefly below. Do note these are generalizations and do not reflect any given individual inside of a specific RP community. If you assume I am saying this about all RPers of a specific DC region, you would be extremely wrong.

EU RPers tend to prefer the structure of having characters that are extremely grounded in the lore, thus anything that is not canonical would be generally frowned upon in their respective communities. EU RP also tends to be considerably more closed off compared to its NA counterparts, preferring to organize their RP sessions inside of various Discord servers and FCs dedicated to the subject. Open RP is not as common as it is on NA DCs. Based on what Hallarem is describing, it would seem he is likely someone who RPs on EU DCs, where things tend to be more organized at least compared to NA and their aversion to fantasias in RP is indeed common among EU RPers.

NA RPers, unlike their EU counterparts, tend to use a lot more creative freedom within their RP. As such, you tend to encounter things that are not as strongly grounded inside of the canon of the setting, if there is any grounding at all in some cases. For NA RPers, this means items such as fantasias are not as significant of a problem and thus, there tend to be few issues involving fantasias inside of NA RP. In addition, while I do know organized RP does exist on the NA DCs, it is not as prevalent compared to EU where it is the main form used and NA tends to be more open, which is extremely obvious if you go to Limsa Lominsa Aetheryte Plaza, Balmung's Ul'Dah, or any of the large venues that exists where you can RP with people you may have never encountered before. Note you can encounter open RP on EU DCs, but it is not the main mode RP is done on those DCs.

And herein lies the problem. Comparing the two communities, significant differences exist between EU and NA RP in a host of different ways. Fantasias being allowed or not allowed being one of the contrasting points is one of them, and as such why you can encounter people, particularly EU RPers, who do not like the idea of fantasias being allowed.

Now that the history lesson has concluded, please note anything above that is describing a specific RPing community is a generalization. You will be able to find contradictions to the generalization were you to look and I am very much aware of this. If you ask me, RP should be a rather consensual affair where parties agree with what they find acceptable inside of RP and what they dont find acceptable inside of their RP, and ultimately this is what makes people enjoy RP is having fun with other people and their various ideas inside of some form of sandbox, where the sandbox can have as many rules or lack thereof as the people inside the sandbox want.

Finally, while I know the person you were talking to had their moments, it would do you some good to escape the bubble-universe you seem to inhabit. You would be a lot more enjoyable and a lot less miserable to talk to if you stop being as aggressive (particularly when you are wrong) and try to understand where the other person may be coming from.