You can't legislate emotional control. People also aren't exactly calm and collected when calling people out either. Its a 2 way street. Players can come off as assholes to players they suspect, whether that is the intention or not, and players will respond in kind. You can tell people to be respectful, but not always going to happen. You also have no idea what can set someone off. What is fine to you isn't fine to others. Its a community of diverse people.
And yeah I know the point you're trying to make, but it is beyond tone deaf because you don't know everything about everyone and you never know how someone will respond to something or what might actually upset them.
You legit have players who goal is to set people off emotionally and be as abrasive and assholic as they can get away with, unless you're going to police how people call people out, asking people for more "emotional control" is going to fail.
And yeah I know the point you're trying to make, but it is beyond tone deaf because you don't know everything about everyone and you never know how someone will respond to something or what might actually upset them.
You legit have players who goal is to set people off emotionally and be as abrasive and assholic as they can get away with, unless you're going to police how people call people out, asking people for more "emotional control" is going to fail.
I think people can be awful to each other and phrase things in a horrible that is designed to upset people. I also think, as you'll have to bear with me on this, that people can engage with someone in a confrontational way like that in order to press buttons to get a read on them, and generally I want to give room for that to be able to exist here, as long as it doesn't cross the line. No racial slurs, sexism, transphobia etc, and also not overly personal. "Your argument is fucking stupid" might be rude and even get someone upset, but I am okay with that sentence and would allow it. "You're fucking stupid" is a different sentence and entirely more personal, that I don't want to see.
Holistically, what I want to really get to is for people to be able to be confrontational with each other, without it being personal. So afterwards, they can leave it there and not have to mend bridges or pick up the pieces. I think it's a really tough line to be honest. To use the last game as an example, I do think there is an element of people engaging with Flower in a way that they know will upset her, because they want to make a point because they dislike, I dunno, her whole approach to the game. That, I would say, is not great. But I can't make rules or legislate that. As long as it's relevant to the game, and not personal in nature, it's fair game, simply because if I do create a rule against this or that, if gives too much room for things that can or can't be covered under it, and then the whole game just falls in on itself. I'm trying to be very careful about what precedents get set.
Now, the easy answer to that is to say "Flower, just don't let it get to you". And I do think, on some level, it gets to her too much, and her reaction is disproportionate, and goes too far. But there's what I see, and what she sees, and those may not be the same, right. So my answer is not to tell Flower that she just needs to control herself better. It's to try and remove the personal angle from all of this - so that in future, maybe Flower can be better equipped to deal with it better, and similarly, her interlocutors can engage with her properly, and not try to play wind up to get what reactions they want.
That's the goal, anyway. That's what I'm really getting at with "people just need to have better control over their emotions". I'm applying that statement to both sides of the equation here, not just the side that it seems more apparently aimed at, if that makes any sense.
I will give you a gift if you pull that off

