#But that's the root of it. They have written out a rancid worldview.

[bonebabbles]

I would fucking love Clear Sky and potentially have him as my favourite villain…. If the Erin’s fucking let him stay a villain! Wtf is this redemption bs?

Simple: You're fundamentally good or fundamentally evil in the eyes of the writers. Nuanced questions are very rarely asked. Clear Sky was So Very Sad so all of his actions were painted as understandable and well-meaning, unlike the stinky foreigners who just love murder.

Good people can do bad things but you can't condemn them for it because bad people do bad things worse.

The writers are abuse apologists. They consistently downplay the abuse of their male characters, and so think that their character who most closely resembles a real life predator is "just misunderstood" and will be fixed by religion and an obedient, young wife to serve him.

In a nutshell, it's just terrible writing in support of horrible ideas.

#dotc hate #clear sky wc #Clear sky #Skystar #Like. I can unpack and unpack and unpack #But that's the root of it. They have written out a rancid worldview. #They think the realistic motivations make it less bad #And use extreme caricatures of violence as contrast #It's the kid who gets belted who convinces themself the abuse isn't so bad because other kids get chained to beds. #Or. Hell. A kid who gets belted who convinces themself that its parents love them unlike some other unloved belted kid.

[eleemosynecdoche]

ngl you're vastly overexaggerating the racist aspects of prax if you think they're as bad as korerala. even the faux native thing isn't as shitty as...literally nearly everything about the later.

I didn't say that the reason Prax sucks was solely because it was racist. (Although Prax is pretty racist when you step back and evaluate that it's a part of Glorantha where the primary population is faux-Amerindian *and* Mad Max postapocalyptic raiders, where the basic modalities are of the American Old West, where the imagery and worldview of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories also come into play, and then there's, as a tiny part of that, Argrath and the whole White Bull thing.) I mean, I played a game with lengthy sections in Caladraland, the presence of overt racism in the source content isn't the root problem I mean when I say a place "doesn't exist" as a joke.

Prax and Kralorela, to me, suck because they don't have playable content that I'm interested in. Prax has playable content that is entirely focused on Pavis and the places downriver of Pavis, and none of that really interests me. (In fact, Sun County/Mo Baustra as presented textually could be just about anywhere, because there's not that much about how its people interact with the Animal Nomads. This, too, is unfortunately downstream of the racism in the content there.) But stepping outside of that zone and wading directly into the Animal Nomads, the conflicts are over... what? Which of the big five is on top for the next little while? There's microscale content for, idk, fantasy life-sim stuff, but unfortunately the whole "strong and hard barbarian savages" element becomes really damaging there, because you're playing people who exist in an environment where cooperation across ethnic boundaries is downplayed and submerged.

I'm also, steelmanning the position of the hypothetical Prax defenders out there, straightforwardly ignoring the nu-Chaosium intent, which is that the Lunars conducted a genocide against the Bison and Impala People after First Moonbroth and then Argrath conducted a more thorough genocide against the Sables after Second Moonbroth, killing 40% of the adult population. I am ignoring this because it is content that goes so far out of tone for Prax that it's functionally gibberish. Metaplot metastasizing. But I'm also not that interested in playing with that kind of content either.

So that's Prax- I think Prax sucks because playing there with the content provided doesn't do anything which interests me, and it's also reveling in brutality in a way I find distasteful.

Turning to Kralorela, yeah, it's cartoonishly racist. I don't know if there's a clear way to quantify these things even in theory, but Kralorela is down there with Fonrit and Teleos and the Vadeli and Teshnos and, frankly, Pent as far as wanton racism baked into the content goes.

And Kralorela also does have a kind of proto-playable content thing going on, which is utterly fucking rancid because it's centered around a drug called "black lotus" and a guy named "Can Shu" who's positioned about where Manchuria would be and who's scheming to invade and overthrow Kralorela and ha ha ha, if you count the Kralori emperors they roughly match up with Chinese dynasties/Chinese states- and that's when I start screaming internally.

And yeah. Both of us could go on at length at how much racism is embedded in the content, and one area Kralorerla exceeds anywhere else in is that you really have to take a fire axe to almost all the names because of how they're pseudo-Mandarin (written in Wade-Giles or sub-Wade-Giles) rather than vague fantasy bullshit or recognizable words.

Setting that parade of misery aside, Kralorela is also fundamentally disconnected from the entire rest of the setting because it's built on the trope of Chinese isolationism, and that extends to the "East Isles"/Vithela which are ostensibly part of the same "zone", but which have significantly more interesting content on their surface. The Guide included a stream of racist vomit that attempted to lay out the desired metaplot for the whole area east of the Zola Fel, but it's metaplot and doesn't have more than the faintest hit of actual tensions or conflict you could play.

Also, Godunya is one of Greg Stafford's many self-inserts.

With that being said, I am now going to, out of sheer perversity, talk about the content in Kralorela that I think you could get to without too many swings of the fireaxe and which I think is interesting.

Kralorela has a pretty decent amount of pure fantasy content- chocobos! Bridges big enough to be entire cities stretched out across their length! Magical injection-molded fortifications!- that you could pick up and play with. Kralorela also has the advantage that there's a lot of external media you can use as a source for content once you've chopped away the vast majority of it. Cultivator novels aren't high art, but they're perfect to inject into Glorantha.

There's also- There's a way in which Kralorela having thus far avoided the nu-Chaosium reduction of Glorantha to working in a single way and via a single metaphysics opens up Kralorela as a place that is potentially valuable for wide-scope play with the Lunars, or the Holy Country. Again, a hard job with the fire axe, but once you're done, there's something interesting about the Kralori as "Lunars who sold out" and accepted their cosmic revision would only go so far and no further, and as a "Holy Country that escaped Belintar" and went on to develop a system that continued on without the deaths and annihilations of ruling demigods actually destroying it. That's, uh, really wide-scope play, the point at which the Altinelans and Luatha become polities interacting with other polities, and it's fairly limited in examples... but there's something there.

And you could very easily use Godunya the self-insert and Genertela being a horizontally flipped United States and just make Kralorela California or the whole American West Coast. Chen Durel is Idaho, Fethlon... okay, bad idea.

None of this makes Kralorela "good" or playable, just something that has more nascent content that interests me than Fonrit.

#glorantha #asks #very long posts #prax ain't real

[landofsomethingsomething]

Yo someone's trying to tell me Hussie is a racist and hates disabled people but has absolutely no evidence. What do I do?

You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding. 

And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice. 

Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside. 

Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to. 

Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?

We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life. 

There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.

The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many - of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there. 

How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified? 

It’s up to you.

#text #asks #on fandom #skelo-saurus