☞ The Principle of Participation ☜
“To stand among comrades, one need not wear a crown—only a cause.”
In every golden age of shared imagination, there arise twin forces: the architect and the sentinel. The one builds, the other bars. And in fandom, as in empire, the question ever remains—shall we raise halls of welcome, or walls of exclusion?
The Order of Vulgarian Knights, and the Rocketpunk Space Patrol before it, were born of a simple oath: that participation shall never be hostage to adornment.
In our earliest ventures—as Klingons and captains, medics and marines—we observed a pattern both familiar and quietly cruel. Time and again, we saw fellow voyagers left behind for lack of a uniform. Recruits made to wait. Volunteers passed over. Rank denied not for absence of action, but of apparel.
Yet fandom is not a masquerade alone. It is not merely a gallery of finely stitched garments or a parade of precision. It is a theatre of the soul, and the soul does not require costuming to take the stage.
Thus we proclaimed: let there be no velvet rope about the holodeck; no turnstile at the edge of the map. Let every participant—be they a scholar of lore, a digital tactician, a chronicler of tales, or a silent observer—be given their berth.
We hold fast to this philosophy not as protest, but as principle.
Our starships have welcomed the costumed and the casually clad. Our ranks have been formed not merely of those who appear ready, but of those who are ready—to play, to serve, to dream together.
No one is lesser for lacking a seamstress. No one is greater for bearing epaulettes.
This is the principle of participation: that we do not measure devotion in thread count, nor worth in wardrobe.
To create is to belong. To show up is to serve. To imagine is to be worthy.
Let that be the uniform of all.