“Furthermore, just because someone wants to be called something doesn’t mean they should be…” Ok, have it your way. For the sake of simplicity, from now on I’ll just refer to you as troll93, because I don’t view the “troll” name in the same way as you do, and it’s a utility thing for me and confers no intentional disrespect.

@ Cthulu93 – In the interest of saving time I’ll be blunt. There aren’t hundreds of different groups in Home. And even if there were, I rather doubt you have trouble distinguishing the hundreds of people you’ve come across in Home, and the dozens of people you undoubtedly have on your friends list. Or do you expect us to believe that you call all your friends by the same name too? Perhaps it’s just the idealist in me, but I’d like to believe that someone who has read Lovecraft isn’t quite that mentally deficient.

Suppose I were to decide that all avatars in Home are essentially the same, and started calling everyone Cthulu. I take it you would have no objection, correct? After all, we wouldn’t want to start treating people differently, now would we? And it would make things so much easier not to have to remember all those pesky names…

As sealwyf rightly points out, words have commonly accepted meanings. The word “fam” for example, as used in Home, has some pretty definite connotations, most of which do not apply to the Homelings. So by persisting in the use of a term for the Homelings which is clearly misleading, while ignoring their own chosen term which is more accurate and descriptive, you are not only being intentionally disrespectful but also betraying a definite agenda.

The reason for this is that he wrote “The True Believer: Thoughts On the Nature of Mass Movements” — one of only about five or six books I’ve ever read that actually *changed* my life, as opposed to merely enriching it.

One of the core tenets of the book is that the fundamental underpinnings of nearly all mass movements — the people who create them, the people who sustain them, the people who follow them, and what methods are used to maintain cohesiveness — are basically the same. It’s simply a matter of what *ends* the movement strives to achieve.

In our day and age, we have a negative predilection towards the concept of a mass movement; it conjures up too many scary images. In practice, however, many of the most successful business entities, sports leagues, and even societies within virtual reality demonstrate the same fundamental structure and patterns.

The Homeling Collective, to me, tends to exemplify many of Home’s best social qualities. Hence why HomeStation proudly supports the Homelings. Though no group is without its missteps, it’s been my personal observation that, on balance, the Collective is populated by some truly talented and *interesting* people with good hearts.

So it matters to us whether people call us “cult” or “fam” or “club” or “group”, or our chosen description, “collective”. Each word carries its own weight of emotional baggage, its own implications.

I wouldn’t mind calling all Home groups “groups”, but it does lose some emotional resonance, like calling all people “individuals”. What kind of group are we? We consider ourselves a “collective”. “Fam” has gotten a bad rap in Home because of the kind of people who adopt it. A “fam” implies power, guarding territory, and a strict hierarchy of rank. “Collective” implies a more egalitarian structure. I think it describes us better.

Which may sound odd coming from a Homeling General, but the rank carries no particular power other than the right to wear smexy black outfits and participate in certain confidential discussions. I can’t boss anyone around. My Subcommander in Training still teases me in public about how hard she works starching my socks.

I, for one, am quite happy being an ingrediant which makes up that pie

I kind of like that.