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RPZip posted:This is a large part of the problem, yeah. You're defining The Realm as the 'normal'/human area, which is to say inspired by civilizations that called other people savage barbarians, and then defining the other as people who are actually not fully human. And also inspired by civilizations and cultures that have historically been denigrated for not being fully human. You could flip it around - Ferrinus's suggestion was a pretty good one - but you won't, so you may as well just own it. It's sort of insoluble without doing something like changing the way the Wyld works and removing things like Wyld mutation, which, as you said, we're not going to do. But this can hardly be placed at Holden's feet entirely.
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Jul 5, 2014 22:25
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Stephenls posted:The Empire of the Feathered Serpent has proscribed social roles based on race -- snakefolk are expected to be military while raitonfolk are expected to be scholastic. To the extent there's racial violence, it's directed at individuals who don't want to fit into that mold. (Also, god help you if you've got both snake and raiton traits, because that means your parents engaged in a forbidden tryst and now you're ritually unclean. At least you weren't strangled at birth to cover up your parents' crime, though.) You don't generally see snake-on-raiton or raiton-on-snake violence so much as you see everyone-on-anyone-who-wants-to-escape-categorization violence. Personally I'd just make any beastman-primary cultural location be its own thing, like Luthe or whatever, and have the Quetzal Empire or whatever just be a gently Nahuitl flavored human culture; if you need to meet a BEASTMAN QUOTA perhaps one of their temple traditions are done by a caste of beastmen who are held in high regard (and may be working for some elder Lunar or something - or at least, founded by her). I suppose that one emergent issue is that if beastmen societies are frequently and explicitly Lunar stalking horses (so to speak) that does tend to justify at least some prejudice against them, but that's a thorny issue in general. Perhaps it occurs occasionally but is greatly overblown, if used as an excuse by Big Momma Empress to keep the elk man down. Stephenls posted:It's sort of insoluble without doing something like changing the way the Wyld works and removing things like Wyld mutation, which, as you said, we're not going to do. But this can hardly be placed at Holden's feet entirely. My understanding is that beastmen are fully human, in the psychological and moral senses, if perhaps with novel challenges that come from being half-shark or half-duck. They reason and make moral choices, even if the context of those moral choices may be very different from "typical" humans. The Wyld may have been involved but only in the sense of making a duck-man in the first place; a duck-man is entirely acceptable to the normal laws of Creation. By contrast "Wyld mutants" are more like when some guy goes wandering out to the weird places and comes back as a duck-man with an unstoppable desire to accumulate a giant heap of wealth, as well as numerous business excellencies, enhanced strength, and berserker fury. The portrayal of "Wyld mutants" who have gone far enough around the bend to have that as their primary personal descriptor seems pretty consistent: They are creatures of living story who play out their role and do not make meaningful moral decisions unless somehow rehabilitated. Neither of these seem necessarily like immense moral pitfalls, in and of themselves. Beastmen may not be necessary but do not seem harmful in and of themselves, and "Wyld mutants" seem like a rich resource for various forms of monsters of whatever flavor. Nessus fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 22:36
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Also, just saying, being mestizo, I'm more into playing Benito 'I Had Fun Once, And It Was Awful' Juárez than a badass Aztec warrior. St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Zumárraga, Malintzin, Hidalgo, Sor Juana, Anzaldúa, Cesar Chavez, these are the people who speak to me as a chicano. Central Americans, South Americans, and the peoples of the Caribbean will have their own host of heroes that contribute to their own thing, like Bolívar and Louverture. Not that I haven't imagined decapitating someone with a macuahuitl every once in awhile, but who hasn't? But for realsies, if I want to play a Nahua or Mestizo-related character, I want to play someone who is struggling to fight a battle for independence and identity, not someone who's taking captives in a flower war to sacrifice with an obsidian knife later. What I'm saying is that I want to take up arms and kill all of these imperialistic bird-snake fuckers, and then kick the Realm in the face until their teeth fall out for trying poo poo after. The Nahua were both the Aztecs, and the people who killed most of the Aztecs who didn't die from plague, after all. BryanChavez fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 22:41
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BryanChavez posted:Also, just saying, being mestizo, I'm more into playing Benito 'I Had Fun Once, And It Was Awful' Juárez than a badass Aztec warrior. St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Zumárraga, Malintzin, Hidalgo, Sor Juana, Anzaldua, Cesar Chavez, these are the people who speak to me as a chicano. Not that I haven't imagined decapitating someone with a macuahuitl every once in awhile, but who hasn't? But for realsies, if I want to play a Nahua or Mestizo-related character, I want to play someone who is struggling to fight a battle for independence and identity, not someone who's taking captives in a flower war to sacrifice with an obsidian knife later. We consider it very important to support that mode of play. The bird-snakes are cool and you might want to play one for the same reason you might want to play a Dynast, but the people the bird-snakes are currently using to terrace their mountains are cool, too, and you might want to play them for the same reason you might want to play a dude who just punches Dynasts in the face all day as a matter of policy. (If I could produce an Exalted television show, it'd be a college drama set among the young scions of a Dynastic family out in the threshold, and the stories of their post-teen dramas and coming of ages, all very Dawson's Creek. There'd be hints of some sort of political thing among the servants running through the series but none of the main cast would notice. The last episode would involve some big event in the main casts' lives being interrupted by a slave rebellion in which the whole main cast of post-teens is killed.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 22:44
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BryanChavez posted:Also, just saying, being mestizo, I'm more into playing Benito 'I Had Fun Once, And It Was Awful' Juárez than a badass Aztec warrior. St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Zumárraga, Malintzin, Hidalgo, Sor Juana, Anzaldúa, Cesar Chavez, these are the people who speak to me as a chicano. Central Americans, South Americans, and the peoples of the Caribbean will have their own host of heroes that contribute to their own thing, like Bolívar and Louverture. Not that I haven't imagined decapitating someone with a macuahuitl every once in awhile, but who hasn't? But for realsies, if I want to play a Nahua or Mestizo-related character, I want to play someone who is struggling to fight a battle for independence and identity, not someone who's taking captives in a flower war to sacrifice with an obsidian knife later. Yeah, as a South American guy from the Rio de la Plata, stories like Don José de San Martín's and Simón Bolívar's speak way more to me than the Inca, Aztec and Mayan people, because I have no connection to them for the most part. It would't even be super hard to base something on their histories, even - the former patriot was even known as The Sword Saint and he co-liberated a continent, his story is pretty ready-made for Exalted. I'm sure someone from Brazil would prefer stories about the amazonian tribes and the extremely unique spirits of that land than being lumped in with the Central American cultures. And so on and so forth. You have no idea how disheartening it is that when people think 'Latin American history!', it's always the Inca, always the Aztecs, always the Maya. I'd love some representation of, well, everything ELSE.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:07
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Transient People posted:Yeah, as a South American guy from the Rio de la Plata, stories like Don José de San Martín's and Simón Bolívar's speak way more to me than the Inca, Aztec and Mayan people, because I have no connection to them for the most part. It would't even be super hard to base something on their histories, even - the former patriot was even known as The Sword Saint and he co-liberated a continent, his story is pretty ready-made for Exalted. I'm sure someone from Brazil would prefer stories about the amazonian tribes and the extremely unique spirits of that land than being lumped in with the Central American cultures. And so on and so forth. You have no idea how disheartening it is that when people think 'Latin American history!', it's always the Inca, always the Aztecs, always the Maya. I'd love some representation of, well, everything ELSE.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:16
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Stephenls posted:It's sort of insoluble without doing something like changing the way the Wyld works and removing things like Wyld mutation, which, as you said, we're not going to do. But this can hardly be placed at Holden's feet entirely. Oh, I don't think it's just Holden's fault. I mean, there are other designers working on this game, right? Not every bad thing relating to this game is just his fault, there's collective responsibility too. E: SKR has his Jason Bulmahn.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:44
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I've brought up before in this thread that I studied Ancient Greece a lot, and I'm very comfortable understanding "Barbarian" as "Not Us", or as a gradient that gently touches on "Similar Competitors" but mainly refers to people with very different social customs and values. Having the Realm think that most everyone else is a Barbarian and the people most different from them are truly savage barbarians generally only fit for the lowest social positions, makes perfect sense; It's transposing a critical component of Aristotle's Ethics verbatim into the Realm's doctrine, and I think a pillar like that is necessary for a society that approves of its own imperialism. I get it, and I don't think it's especially difficult to pull off if you understand what I'm talking about and don't have your head up your own rear end. But let me introduce a sticking point for me. While Stephenls is talking about this, there's been a lot of material that seems to suggest that the Lunar Exalted, and to a lesser extent, anyone touched by the Wyld, have the UNDILUTED METAPHYSICAL ESSENCE of the TRUE AND HONEST BARBARIAN. This didn't go away in the 3e Kickstarter Leadup and even StephenLS has affirmed it in some small ways. I think this, at best, is contradictory to Barbarism being a socially-constructed designation, and, at worst, seems to justify the Realm's imperialist worldview when there are Ur-Forms of Barbarism out in the wilderness with their rape camps and baby eating buffets. There is a serious philosophical contradiction when you have the Barbarian Exalted while claiming Barbarian is an arbitrary cultural signifier.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:48
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:But let me introduce a sticking point for me. While Stephenls is talking about this, there's been a lot of material that seems to suggest that the Lunar Exalted, and to a lesser extent, anyone touched by the Wyld, have the UNDILUTED METAPHYSICAL ESSENCE of the TRUE AND HONEST BARBARIAN. This didn't go away in the 3e Kickstarter Leadup and even StephenLS has affirmed it in some small ways. I think this, at best, is contradictory to Barbarism being a socially-constructed designation, and, at worst, seems to justify the Realm's imperialist worldview when there are Ur-Forms of Barbarism out in the wilderness with their rape camps and baby eating buffets. There is a serious philosophical contradiction when you have the Barbarian Exalted while claiming Barbarian is an arbitrary cultural signifier. Holden's big essay on barbarism, the one everyone hates and points to as evidence of how much of a racist he is, was a big declaration about how we're not doing that this time.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:50
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Stephenls posted:Holden's big essay on barbarism, the one everyone hates and points to as evidence of how much of a racist he is, was a big declaration about how we're not doing that this time. Okay. I will reread it carefully before saying anything else about this.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:51
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Stephenls posted:Holden's big essay on barbarism, the one everyone hates and points to as evidence of how much of a racist he is, was a big declaration about how we're not doing that this time. Where's his big essay again? I remember reading it, but I can't remember where.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:52
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RPZip posted:Where's his big essay again? I remember reading it, but I can't remember where. Here.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:54
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In retrospect, that thing is pretty wince-inducing in a few place. It doesn't really acknowledge the full variety of culture, technology, and aesthetics that one tends to find across all the various peoples that have been called barbarians by expansionist imperial powers within the last few centuries.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:58
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I mean, the assumption is sort of built into Exalted's very metaphysics that all-dissolving chaos lurks outside the walls and threatens to spill in and destroy everything the very moment we stop vigilantly defending and/or expanding our infrastructure.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:03
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Ferrinus posted:I mean, the assumption is sort of built into Exalted's very metaphysics that all-dissolving chaos lurks outside the walls and threatens to spill in and destroy everything the very moment we stop vigilantly defending and/or expanding our infrastructure. Yeah, it's a common problem with fantasy settings, which is why you just have to own it. "What if the Nazis were doing things the right way because reasons", "what if barbarian cultures really were just mindless hordes bent on destruction of Everything We Hold Dear", "what if empire really was the right way to do things and was definitely not inherently evil", "what if the Roma really were exactly like we say they are". It's abhorrent, but if you're sold on using that as a setting concept it's not something you're really going to be able to soften. You may as well just accept that it is what it is, and realize what you're reinforcing for your audience as part of the price of doing business.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:17
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Stephenls posted:In retrospect, that thing is pretty wince-inducing in a few place. It doesn't really acknowledge the full variety of culture, technology, and aesthetics that one tends to find across all the various peoples that have been called barbarians by expansionist imperial powers within the last few centuries. Yeah, while rereading it did make me feel better versus when I wrote my original comment, there are some issues, with the biggest being that "political barbarians" are painted as having a lot more in common than they actually do. "Resource-poor hunter-gatherer societies bullied by developed agricultural groups" is a fairly small subset of "cultures designated barbarians." I do think it's possible to say that Lunars are generally organized around the periphery with cultures that have fewer resources and manufacturing, but I think it would be best if this was explained as a historical consequence of conflict with the Terrestrials and Heaven's regime combined with Immaculate propaganda about what Lunars can and have done. I think it's great that Holden mentions China and Britain mutually sneering at each other and calling one another barbarians, because that's getting to what I consider the crux of the issue, that "barbarian" groups aren't inherently resource-poor or less sophisticated. I think the essay misses a fair number of the implications of this event and all the other times Mutual Accusations of Barbarism have occurred. Egypt v. Rome, Greece v. Persia, Christian Europe v. Islamic Caliphate. The essay seems to miss that Lookshy probably considers the Realm debased degenerate barbarians while the Realm considers them the murderous children of hidebound traitor militants, and these are both as good grounds for the "Barbarian" label as any. Ferrinus posted:I mean, the assumption is sort of built into Exalted's very metaphysics that all-dissolving chaos lurks outside the walls and threatens to spill in and destroy everything the very moment we stop vigilantly defending and/or expanding our infrastructure. I would probably advocate for aligning the Lunars closer to the Raksha if the authors want to draw on Lunars a lot as an Enemy At The Gates for the Realm. It would also make getting Lunars on board for Solar PC schemes more interesting.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:19
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Ferrinus posted:I mean, the assumption is sort of built into Exalted's very metaphysics that all-dissolving chaos lurks outside the walls and threatens to spill in and destroy everything the very moment we stop vigilantly defending and/or expanding our infrastructure.  style. Really that was one of the subtle things I like about the game's metaphysics, it obliquely says that a fully realized and humane society (for a very wide expression of 'humane' of course) will ultimately be stronger than a grimdark warrior cult when faced with things like the Wyld.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:22
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Nessus posted:See I'm thinking they need to work in a culture well situated for liberation struggles - possibly several in close proximity even, if you want to riff off the American experience as well. Fun for all children of the New World! My only worry is that it'd be almost too easy to make the revolutionaries a 'hero faction', what with the whole 'one thousand candles, slowly snuffed out by the great power until only one remains' thing that more or less happened in the south american continent (broadly speaking, of course), and the fact that the revolutions had a remarkably 'clean' history, much cleaner than Exalted usually likes. On the other hand though, that might be a good thing. There were an innumerable number of atrocities committed in South America, but the fact that it happened AFTER people got done fighting for a noble cause (again, broadly speaking, no big revolution was without its unforgivable crimes) is a great well of untapped potential for Exalted, which tends to favor the 'everybody is a shitlord every time, all the time' approach, instead of letting good people fight for a noble goal and face the risk of being corrupted by power they come into possession of. So I dunno. It's something that would require some effort, but probably worth doing.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:23
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Just get rid of Beastfolk, including centaurs and minotaurs but not merfolk, altogether. Maybe replace them with diabolical Warhammer Fantasy-style beast men.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:25
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Transient People posted:My only worry is that it'd be almost too easy to make the revolutionaries a 'hero faction', what with the whole 'one thousand candles, slowly snuffed out by the great power until only one remains' thing that more or less happened in the south american continent (broadly speaking, of course), and the fact that the revolutions had a remarkably 'clean' history, much cleaner than Exalted usually likes. On the other hand though, that might be a good thing. There were an innumerable number of atrocities committed in South America, but the fact that it happened AFTER people got done fighting for a noble cause (again, broadly speaking, no big revolution was without its unforgivable crimes) is a great well of untapped potential for Exalted, which tends to favor the 'everybody is a shitlord every time, all the time' approach, instead of letting good people fight for a noble goal and face the risk of being corrupted by power they come into possession of. So I dunno. It's something that would require some effort, but probably worth doing.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:27
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The other thing about that essay that rings false for me in retrospect is that comment about stone-age technology. The more I read about maize alone the more I understand that pre-Columbus American tech is only "stone age" if you accept a definition of technology that privileges the sorts of technology Western European civilization values and refuses to acknowledge anything else... which isn't surprising, since the very concept of stone age -> bronze age -> iron age was made up to accomplish exactly that. But that essay was pretty early, and we've done a lot of reading since.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:29
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Just get rid of Beastfolk, including centaurs and minotaurs but not merfolk, altogether. Maybe replace them with diabolical Warhammer Fantasy-style beast men. That's exactly what they are already. Beastfolk are far more interesting, especially with civilizations rather than monsters who only exist for you to genocide.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:48
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Nessus posted:It certainly doesn't seem impossible to me that a Solar or Lunar circle, or even an unusually gumptious sworn brotherhood of Terrestrials, could cause a fast, clean, wide-sweeping revolutionary change, the question just then becomes "what do you do from here?" I always had the vibe that it was 100% OK for PCs to be the good guys (in the narrative sense, and even the 'yes we are idealistic anime heroes' sense), I just got annoyed when 'being the good guy' became equated with 'instituting modern post-industrial social and technological structures with minimal changes'. That's exactly right. The central conflict of a region that copied that setup shouldn't be 'BUT ARE YOU REALLY THE MONSTERS, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM?!!!!!!', but rather 'where do we go now?'. Honestly just setting things up so the players were gently pushed towards repeating similar mistakes to the poo poo that happened both in north and south america in the 1800s and early 1900s (the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination, surrendering natural resources and power to the Big Imperial Powers for a quick burst of funds and basically entering an indentured servitude, the USA's Civil War, etc.) would be all that you'd need for a brilliant empire building game. Sometimes you don't need to make every hero secretly a baby rapist on the side. Sometimes all you need is hard choices with difficult but not impossible solutions. Transient People fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 00:52
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Transient People posted:That's exactly right. The central conflict of a region that copied that setup shouldn't be 'BUT ARE YOU REALLY THE MONSTERS, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM?!!!!!!', but rather 'where do we go now?'. Honestly just setting things up so the players were gently pushed towards repeating similar mistakes to the poo poo that happened both in north and south america in the 1800s and early 1900s (the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination, surrendering natural resources and power to the Big Imperial Powers for a quick burst of funds and basically entering an indentured servitude, etc.) would be all that you'd need for a brilliant empire building game. Sometimes you don't need to make every hero secretly a baby rapist on the side. Sometimes all you need is hard choices with difficult but not impossible solutions.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:55
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Nessus posted:Helpfully, I think you can read this vigilant defense as being just as much the mastery of small manners and a harmonious society as it means standing out there and keeping your firedust dry I would bet that any kind of formalized recognition of other people as being real and separate from oneself, whether through custom or hospitality or honor codes for dueling, would help to defend against the physical encroachment of the Wyld. Per Graceful Wicked Masques, a raksha had to have Staff/Conviction 5 in order to successfully comprehend the needs and wants of others, and a more "average" raksha of Staff/Conviction 2 would just baaaarely be able to understand that they weren't literally alone in a landscape of solipsistic phantoms.
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Jul 6, 2014 01:57
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Transient People posted:That's exactly right. The central conflict of a region that copied that setup shouldn't be 'BUT ARE YOU REALLY THE MONSTERS, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM?!!!!!!', but rather 'where do we go now?'. Honestly just setting things up so the players were gently pushed towards repeating similar mistakes to the poo poo that happened both in north and south america in the 1800s and early 1900s (the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination, surrendering natural resources and power to the Big Imperial Powers for a quick burst of funds and basically entering an indentured servitude, the USA's Civil War, etc.) would be all that you'd need for a brilliant empire building game. Sometimes you don't need to make every hero secretly a baby rapist on the side. Sometimes all you need is hard choices with difficult but not impossible solutions. While I consider this to be the optimal method of doing things Exalted fans have a tendency to react poorly to this. Actually, I'm pretty sure all RPG fans react to this poorly because of the default assumptions of most narratives - namely that the protagonist will 'win'. I can't count the number of times I've seen people say that they'll be sticking to the high road no matter the cost because at the end of the day they know the cost won't be that high and they'll be able to pay it. This gets even worse in Exalted because there's a common fan expectation that Solar magic will just solve all your problems with a snap of the fingers. Which is hilarious to me because it's like asking why if Jesus could multiply bread and fishes didn't he solve world hunger. To make matters worse, when writing about hard choices with difficult solutions if you do it wrong the character just ends up looking like a villainous ignorant jackass because complex characters are difficult to write and if finger-snapping easy problem solving magic is available then what the hell?
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Jul 6, 2014 02:32
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Ithle01 posted:This gets even worse in Exalted because there's a common fan expectation that Solar magic will just solve all your problems with a snap of the fingers. Which is hilarious to me because it's like asking why if Jesus could multiply bread and fishes didn't he solve world hunger. Well, why not?
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Jul 6, 2014 02:52
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Dammit Who? posted:Well, why not? Because he was fictional too. 
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Jul 6, 2014 02:55
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Vadoc posted:That's exactly what they are already. Beastfolk are far more interesting, especially with civilizations rather than monsters who only exist for you to genocide. Beastfolk aren't any more interesting than the normal subaltern people they normally stand-in for in fiction.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:10
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Transient People posted:That's exactly right. The central conflict of a region that copied that setup shouldn't be 'BUT ARE YOU REALLY THE MONSTERS, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM?!!!!!!', but rather 'where do we go now?'. Honestly just setting things up so the players were gently pushed towards repeating similar mistakes to the poo poo that happened both in north and south america in the 1800s and early 1900s (the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination, surrendering natural resources and power to the Big Imperial Powers for a quick burst of funds and basically entering an indentured servitude, the USA's Civil War, etc.) would be all that you'd need for a brilliant empire building game. Sometimes you don't need to make every hero secretly a baby rapist on the side. Sometimes all you need is hard choices with difficult but not impossible solutions. this is dumb as hell
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Jul 6, 2014 03:13
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Beastfolk aren't any more interesting than the normal subaltern people they normally stand-in for in fiction. Well, we also have normal subaltern people throughout the setting. Honestly I'm not sure what the beastfolk are doing here except that maybe Grabowski wanted Lunars to be able to raise armies born wearing Lunar team jersies? In any case we're not taking them out (the catgirl and sharkdad fans would riot), so we have to do something with them.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:13
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Actually, I retract that question since that'd get onto a tangent I'm not really interested in following right now. I'm not sure how a game where you're "gently pushed to [...] the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination[...]" is somehow better or more grownup than one where you just successfully revolt against your oppressors.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:16
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Stephenls posted:Well, we also have normal subaltern people throughout the setting. Honestly I'm not sure what the beastfolk are doing here except that maybe Grabowski wanted Lunars to be able to raise armies born wearing Lunar team jersies? In any case we're not taking them out (the catgirl and sharkdad fans would riot), so we have to do something with them. You should make a western civilization of literally just sharkdads. Make it a super chill civilization that has normal trades with all the western places, and just happens to be popualted by shark people. Bam, there's your idea for a beastman nation that isn't RAWR MURDER?
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Jul 6, 2014 03:16
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Dammit Who? posted:Actually, I retract that question since that'd get onto a tangent I'm not really interested in following right now. I'm not sure how a game where you're "gently pushed to [...] the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination[...]" is somehow better or more grownup than one where you just successfully revolt against your oppressors. I also vote for Sharkdadtown
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Jul 6, 2014 03:20
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Dammit Who? posted:Actually, I retract that question since that'd get onto a tangent I'm not really interested in following right now. I'm not sure how a game where you're "gently pushed to [...] the genocide of an entire country's male population, racial extermination[...]" is somehow better or more grownup than one where you just successfully revolt against your oppressors. I'm pretty sure the complete annihilation of all your enemies is what a successful revolution looks like...?
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Jul 6, 2014 03:50
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Attorney at Funk posted:I'm pretty sure the complete annihilation of all your enemies is what a successful revolution looks like...? This is actually a very contentious question.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:57
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:This is actually a very contentious question. I aim to teach the controversy, by compelling everyone who disagrees to forced re-education through labor
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Jul 6, 2014 04:01
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Attorney at Funk posted:I'm pretty sure the complete annihilation of all your enemies is what a successful revolution looks like...? The "male population genocide" bit sounds like a reference to the War of the Triple Alliance, actually - essentially, Paraguay got into a war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay and only surrendered after something like 90% of their male population died. As far as I'm aware (which isn't very far), the Cliff Notes on the origin of the war was that the leader of Paraguay was pretty expansionist and aggressive, scaring his neighbors enough to get them to beat him into the ground. He proved stubborn, though, as note the 90% casualty figure. I guess the Solar equivalent would be a Solar declaring a New Deliberative, refusing to ally with anyone who failed to submit to his authority (because his authority was from divine mandate, damnit!) and thus getting attacked by every power in the region plus the Realm and getting almost everyone in his nascent state killed for the sake of his principles and his vision of a pure, divinely-ordained Solar Deliberative.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:08
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Stephenls posted:In retrospect, that thing is pretty wince-inducing in a few place. It doesn't really acknowledge the full variety of culture, technology, and aesthetics that one tends to find across all the various peoples that have been called barbarians by expansionist imperial powers within the last few centuries. loving lol "I don't get why this is offensive"*a few minutes*"In hindsight I see why this is offensive"
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Jul 6, 2014 04:11
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Tomn posted:I guess the Solar equivalent would be a Solar declaring a New Deliberative, refusing to ally with anyone who failed to submit to his authority (because his authority was from divine mandate, damnit!) and thus getting attacked by every power in the region plus the Realm and getting almost everyone in his nascent state killed for the sake of his principles and his vision of a pure, divinely-ordained Solar Deliberative. Yeah! That's the ticket.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:12
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