The Grand Relicensing

For a while now, I've had a somewhat complex permission statement on my site (which you can see archived on the wayback machine, because it will be changed as of this article). The long, barely-readable screed is no more! The majority of the pages on this site are now licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Check the footer and see! The specific license varies from page to page because there is such a wide variety of things on here, from character profiles to free to use art to guidebooks and short stories, so I couldn't license my entire site under a single license without having to constantly outline exceptions. Per page was just easier.

I've always liked the idea of others taking inspiration from my work. Back when I first made the nebulisae and mettalus, I labeled them as "open species." The intent there wasn't to create a collaborative adoptable community, but to tell people they could play with my creature ideas if they liked them. So, 'open species' was a bit of a lacking term, but it was the only way I knew to describe my desires at the time. However, I never put them under a free license. I just said people could use them.

My permission statement was concocted to allow people to use my stuff, but I had some reservations. What if someone tried to paywall art they made of my OCs? What if someone tried to resell my art? So I tried to limit commercial use for specific things, like my stories and characters, while leaving my general world-building concepts free for others to use.

But then I started thinking of exceptions. Would I be okay with a pay what you want listing with a minimum price of $0? Would I be okay with a creator accepting donations on the page? Would I be okay with someone printing a bound copy of one of my stories and selling it? If someone included one of my shorter stories in an anthology and sold it, would I be okay with that?

The answer to those questions was yes, albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm. My true concern is one I would never have to worry about anyway: someone fully locking down my art and concepts without my permission (which they would never receive for something like that!). This is why I had a clause in the page specifying that derivative works needed to be released with the same level of freedoms or more afforded.

But this custom pseudo-license had drawbacks. I had no idea if it was enforceable. I wouldn't be surprised if others had trouble reading it. In theory, I could revoke it at any time. If I didn't like what someone was doing, I could take their stuff down anyway. For people wanting to take inspiration from my work, that was a source of danger. A series of asks sent to my Wafrn account (which resulted in a cool post) made me rethink this approach—not because they were directly about my permission statement, but because they got me thinking about how obnoxious that statement might be to parse. For existing licenses, there are plenty of guides. For my little statement? None.

So, I decided to relicense everything under Creative Commons licenses. They're widely used, well known, and one of them has compatibility with GPL. Licensing something under them is as simple as adding a statement somewhere on the page. But which one?

For the original species and world-building concepts, it was obvious: CC-BY. I want people to have full freedom to create anything with them and even sell it, but I still want ownership of my own works. Then, I ran into a wrinkle: my characters.

Nebulisae originated from Rhett. As one of my original characters, Rhett wouldn't be free to use. But Rhett is part of their religion and culture. If Rhett couldn't be used, a key part of nebulisian society was locked away.

My original statement restricted commercial use of my characters (well, it specifically restricted paywalling them). So, a CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-SA license would work for them, right? But my thoughts wandered back to what I mentioned earlier about commercial use. My main concern wasn't people making money, it was people locking my creations up. CC-BY-SA requires that derivative works be distributed under the same license, and permits the breaking of DRM. I would still retain full rights to my works. That takes care of both of my concerns: my works cannot be locked away, and if they are, people are permitted to free them.

Allowing commercial use made me hesitate at first, but the more I thought about it, I realized there was little to lose. I have made a grand total of zero cents on Redbubble. I share my art for free. I haven't taken a commission that wasn't for family or a friend in a few years (mainly due to being too busy). There is, at present, no commercial market for my art. I'm not certain if there ever will be, since I am distributing it for free.

So, CC-BY-SA for my characters it is. This keeps them from being locked down while still allowing a wide range of freedoms. There are a couple of exceptions to this, like my sona, Renookie, and Problemeowtic's mascot, Trouble, because letting those characters be freely used could cause confusion. But the majority of them are CC-BY-SA.

This way, anyone just taking my world-building concepts can do almost anything they want. If they use my characters, they have to distribute their creation under CC-BY-SA or a compatible license. CC licenses are irrevocable, so I can't just change my mind one day and take it all away. My world-building, stories, and characters will be usable for everyone and can't be locked away.

So, the tirtenverse is now under Creative Commons licenses! But what exactly is the tirtenverse?

The Tirtenverse

The tirtenverse is, in the simplest way to put it, the shared multiverse my stories take place in. It's named after what originally started as an early version of tirnuk's word for "being." So, the tirtenverse is "a multiverse of [all] beings." The species of tirten actually got their name from this, rather than the other way around. The tirtenverse is the sum of my creative output—my non-fandom output, at least.

It began as the Robinverse, named after a specific character who has long since gone unutilized. Back then, mettalus were called Skralfs (pronounced ghz-kralfs), because the language I made up for them back then was a cipher I called Skralfabet ("scrambled alphabet"). This is where the earliest words of tirnuk, like rnouki (meaning 'friend' or 'comrade'; this would later become renookie and be used as the name of my sona) came from. Back then, nebulisae did actually live in space. Only the lenetae—called planetary nebulisae back then—lived on planets. Nebulisae originally had five kiste, then called tribes. One of the tribes could shoot lasers for some reason.

The main plot of the Robinverse revolved around the conflict between a cat named Robin and my sona at the time, Anura. Robin wanted to rule the multiverse, and Anura wanted to stop him. The plot was very simple. It was everything else around it that changed.

They started off as cats, became Skralfs, then became mettalus. Originally, Skralfs were the result of an experiment where domestic cats were placed on a planet. The entire planet was populated by creatures descended from cats. Then, I added humans back into the mix somehow, and the Skralfs became genetically modified creatures instead. But the evolved from cats origin stuck with me, so I returned to it eventually.

When I began working on Clowders & Claws back in 2020, I didn't intend to write the prehistory of the tirten and mettalus. I would have to check to see if they were even called that back then. But as I developed things, it was natural to tie everything together. The mettalus came from katen, which came from the Clowders & Claws cats. It just felt right.

Tirten were a bit of a wilder idea. I've always found the high number of humanoid looking "alien" species in science fiction and science fantasy to be irksome. Of course, humans look human, and budgets aren't infinite, so it's hard to avoid them in live action media. But why does this happen so frequently in animated media?

It would be a bit hypocritical to create a species of my own that looks so much like humans with that in mind, but I get bored writing regular humans. I just don't find that interesting. But I already had a lot of human-looking characters and didn't want to change them too much. So, I had a thought: what if they looked human, but weren't human at all?

Tirten only look human when you see them fully clothed. And even then, there are discrepancies. I draw their eyes the same way I draw cat eyes. They have fangs. Those can be dismissed as stylistic choices, but some of the anatomical choices beneath their clothes cannot. Their biology and behavior is different, such as smiling meaning something different to them than it does to humans or them not being able to drink coffee.

I don't remember when I renamed it to the tirtenverse. It may have happened back when I started developing Tirtenian. I just know that I stopped using Robin and it felt weird to have the multiverse named after some guy that wasn't even part of the plot anymore.

I consider anything I make to be the tirtenverse, but that doesn't mean all of it stays the same forever. The latest version of everything will always be on here. But my older drafts and concepts still live on elsewhere. While I don't have the time nor energy to go back and change all of those to use CC licenses, I am still okay with them being used. If someone finds my older ideas more charming than my current ones, they're free to fork my multiverse.

Above all, the tirtenverse is a playground. Go silly bonkers.