I appreciate this concern, and I want to clarify what I meant, because I think I created the wrong impression.
My concern isn't about the importance of these communities or their interests, that was never the intent. Fans of Star Trek, Tolkien, and Genshin Impact represent millions of people, and their enthusiasm for these works is genuinely valid. I apologize if my framing suggested otherwise. The core issue, though, is institutional and legal, not a judgment about the value of these communities. Unicode cannot standardize scripts that are copyrighted intellectual property without explicit permission from the rights holders. The Tolkien Estate, Paramount, and miHoYo all retain legal control over their fictional scripts. Unicode standardizing them without consent would expose the consortium to genuine litigation risk -- something that holds regardless of how many people want these scripts, or how passionate those people are. This isn't a unique position. Unicode wouldn't standardize a proprietary technology font system either, not because font designers don't matter, but because copyright exists for a reason. The constructive path forward isn't for us to debate whether these scripts "deserve" standardization. It's for fans to petition the actual IP holders. If fans of Genshin Impact, Star Trek, or Tolkien's works believe these scripts should be Unicode-standardized, the argument to make is directly to miHoYo, Paramount, and the Tolkien Estate -- not to Unicode. Those companies have every right to grant permission if they choose. If they decline, that's their decision to make about their own intellectual property, not Unicode's gatekeeping. The legal constraint is real and immovable. But it's not a comment on whose needs matter. On Sunday, 31 May 2026 19:41:41 Central European Summer Time Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote: > On 5/28/26 3:16 PM, Michael De Roover via Unicode wrote: > > While the fandoms of each of these franchises are > > enormous, their conlangs' usefulness does not currently extend beyond > > those > > fandoms. > > That's kind of true of everything: nobody uses X, except for X's > users. (I was trying to explain what Unicode was to someone once, and > said that they make the official emoji lists and everything, and he said > "yeah, but who uses those?" Um, millions of people, every day. "Yeah, > but aside from them?" Indeed, aside from people who use emoji, nobody > uses emoji.) This is a No True Scotsman argument. > > But to the extent this argument isn't circular, it's really > offensive. The implication is "well, nobody outside of the fans are > affected, so it isn't really so important." Which is to say, the fans > are not important. Why is it okay to say this about fans of conlangs > (or anything else)? It isn't okay to say it about "Africans" or "Deaf > people" or "Yezidis" or "Meroitic Scholars", is it? That's the whole > complaint about the "hostility": the implication that the needs of fans > or nerds are somehow less important than the needs of other > people. That's bigotry, plain and simple. > > Now, I know this statement was made in the context of pointing out the > legal difficulties, and indeed Unicode shouldn't be expected to expose > itself to legal liability for Africans or Yezidis or scholars either, > but the fact that it seemed okay to say "well, it's only fans, so it's > okay" is disturbing. > > ~mark -- [Met vriendelijke groet] [Best regards] [Michael De Roover] --- --- --- --- [Mail] [*@nixmagic.com] [michael@[email protected]] [Web] [https://michael.de.roover.eu.org] [Forge] [https://git.nixmagic.com] [Weather] [Antwerpen] [13:00] [23.7°C] --- --- --- --- [0] [2026-06-01 13:21 CEST] [~] [[email protected]] [$] [/usr/bin/sign-mail] [>_] --- --- --- ---
