I’m a little bit baffled here that so many people seem to think “He was rude so I can joke about killing him” is acceptable. In real life, and especially as a diplomat, you don’t get to “jokingly” threaten people who are rude or offensive.
And anyone who has ever been to a doctors office has to fill out a form asking your sex. There is absolutely no reason to equate that with the intrusiveness of asking for precise measurements of your genitals.
But for the sake of argument, fine they’re the same:
If someone asked me an intrusive question I would not threaten them with violence. “How long is your penis?” “I’m restraining the urge to kill you now.” What? Do you not see the disconnect there?
What scenario in our society is it okay to threaten to kill someone for being rude? Has no one been asked an intrusive question before?
There’s a more accurate metaphor, given who jevahir is traveling among. Imagine you travel to a society of nudists. They are confused by the fact that you wear clothes. Someone asks you to remove your pants so they can get a look at your genitals. To me, that’s innappropriate and none of their business, and I would absolutely decline. I would not joke about killing them, because I would understand I am traveling amongst a group of people who are not used to people like me. Which I think is just a basic requisite to being a diplomat.
I don’t want to come back! I wanted my thanks to being the last goddamn post I would make on this goddamn site which I hate, and then I could move on, do nothing with my life except be plektosis-consultant or some shit. Listen to me!
If you are not trans, you don’t get to decide what is rude to say to a trans person regarding your identity. Frankly, if someone said the coin flip toss to me I’d fucking scalp them in their sleep. Whoever you’re travelling with would have to physically stop me from throwing hands. Jev is being kind, and incredibly patient - considering another one of their jobs is literally some kind of assassin. It wouldn’t be hard to knock you about a bit.
Its not “our” society, it’s Havie’s. You do not come from Jev’s country. You do not have their experience. For all you know, repeatedly insulting someone’s gender is very much a grounds for killing them. Also they intentionally give you insulting Hallasurq words to use in diplomacy, so it’s evident they toe that line of being “diplomatic”.
Just because they have fluid gender roles in their society doesn’t mean you can misgender them. Equating one to the other is wrong. Jev is non-binary, explicitly with certain pronouns - and you are ignoring that. It is not equivalent to an intrusive question - they have asked you kindly to accept the very being that they are, their entire existence - and when you pick the coin flip, your character is whining like a baby. This is what that coin flip means: “Can’t you exist on my level, exist in a way I agree with, in a way that’s easier for me?”. Can’t I just decide for you your own existence? I’d fucking scalp them ON SIGHT.
Anyway, I want to leave this site for good. Thanks Sneaks for trying to explain, but this isn’t an intrusive question equivalency. It’s a denial of a person’s very self, and a severe response, many trans people would agree, is common.
I’m not back, I’m not coming back. I hate this site, I hate the people who run it. Won’t bother none with my “persistent, toxic behaviour!”
@Laguz I don’t want to return here either. But I am just posting that you and Havie universe have my support both in lore and right to interpret it.
But like I said I wont be posting in a place where the fandom doesn’t want me. But I think I needed to address that you always have my support. And @Havenstone but he is a big author so he doesn’t need me.
I think this is the important bit. I would not threaten someone with murder over being misgendered (would be especially ticked though, especially if I had just given a whole speech explaining my pronouns and identity to some village asshole who still can’t be bothered), but I am also not from a culture wherein people are routinely fed to woodchippers as like, a casual thing, and casual violence is likely a bit more accepted.
This is a terrible metaphor. Gender identity is not an aesthetic or lifestyle choice like nudism, it is an intrinsic part of one’s identity like, for example, ethnicity. Say you tell someone you are Uruguayan, and they simply say ‘nah, I don’t know what that is and I don’t care, you’re Mexican. Hey where are you really from anyways, we all know ‘Uruguayan’ wasn’t how you were born yknow?’ Like, that’s insanely offensive! It’s not just an intrusive question, it’s:
If I were Jev, from a culture with a high level of base violence, and I was out in literally hell with some country bumpkin asshole who completely ignored everything I just said, I might employ a threat or two to get across the point of how fucked up what they are saying is.
Apologies for the quotes, just wanted to pull out some of your words. Much luck wherever you go, may you be as persistent and toxic there.
I never said that misgendering someone wasn’t rude. I am saying that rudeness does not justify murder.
Do we actually disagree on that point? I mean okay…
And I’m saying that Jehavir is being a bad ambassador, because they of all people should be able to handle unintentional and even deliberate insults. The hallasurq guy makes taliban level of gender oppression sound reasonable. I would like the gender fluid person to sound more reasonable.
Yeah, I’m not from their country and neither are you. It doesn’t exist. That doesn’t matter because I know what an ambassador does, they make their country seem appealing. They educate other people about their ways and try to make them sound good. They diffuse conflict. They do not “Scalp” people. Jehavir is not being a good ambassador, and I don’t think the explanation of the country makes enough sense I would like it to be explained better.
I feel like this discussion has become far too much about our world and not enough about this fantasy world. I felt one character did not come across well as a diplomat and that the country they represented could be explained better. This is not and should not be a referendum about what is rude to trans people, I have never said misgendering isn’t rude.
I kind of can’t believe mentioning a desire to scalp people got approved.
If you have actually scalped someone you belong in jail or a mental institution. If you are regularly fighting that impulse, get help.
I’m not really in a position to end a particular line of discussion but I really feel like we’re getting off-topic. I don’t think this specific conversation will be productive or lead to anything other than frustration. Take that as you will.
On a very different note, will future chapters/books include “management” sections like Chapter 2 of Uprising?
Fine, I’ll also weigh in on this conversation. I’ll start with addressing points about Jev in the story and Nyryal in the world, then pivot to the deeper point about gender expression and gender identity.
Nyryal in the Story:
It is new in-game, though it’s been known on the forum for a couple years now. Bear in mind that, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t meet any Nyrs in Uprising. The closest is Alaine Leybridge, who is half-Nyr, but she’s fairly assimilated into Shayardene culture. Add in even the high-INT rebel being a country bumpkin and it’s not too unexpected. There are tons of things this chapter that a player wouldn’t remember from the first game because this chapter expands the world a ton.
Jev does address this, and the answer more or less seems to be that Erjan treats Jev the way Jev wants to be treated, even if it goes against Erjan’s own values:
“And Erjan? How does your Halassurq companion feel about all this?”
“He’s a diplomat. He understands that even his Nyrish cousins don’t do things the same way as they do in Halassur…and that trying to ask about my sex would be insulting enough that he would spend half his life repaying the honor debt. He knows that in the end he can’t fit me into the daily structures of Halassurq life.” Jevahir glances across the training field to where Erjan is shouting orders, and nods with mild satisfaction. “And it drives him absolutely sarding insane.”
No one’s perpetually misgendering Erjan, basically. The closest you can do to that is asking him if he learned things from a book. Here’s what Jev has to say about that:
“And you shouldn’t ask them. Our Halassurq cousins would kill you for implying that their manliness or womanliness was unclear. We’ve not done that for a while in Nyryal, but we’d still consider it impolite and a little embarrassing.”
As apple noted, this is a world where institutional violence is commonplace, with either a slave caste or newborn babies fed into a woodchipper, assassins and spies could be anywhere, the police regularly abuse their power, and there’s an ongoing generations-long war. Recall that in Shayard, duels to the death over an insult are still a thing.
As an aside, this setting is beyond modern medicine, mostly. Medicinal plants have been Theurgically enhanced: agrimony is close to a panacea, mullow is a perfect contraceptive. In Uprising, three babies are born in the woods in the middle of winter and infant mortality isn’t a major concern then; both the Thaumatarchy and Halassur have had incentives across four hundred years to develop medical technology to reduce infant mortality.
I’m not sure if this has been explicitly addressed, but we can probably infer an explanation from the MC passing out once they start drawing on the aether in their brain. We could suggest that aether might not be so readily extractable from the brain without consciousness (which would be fair imo), and that makes the ethical trade-off increased suffering for fewer or killing substantially more.
This is, uh…
“So…when the Nyr say ‘diplomat’ they mean ‘assassin and spy’?”
“That’s not all they mean by it,” Jev protests, eyes twinkling.
The Meat
Let’s start by evaluating the context of the Can’t I just toss a coin and call Jev “he” or “she”? comment.
And honestly, I feel like you’ve answered your own question. Let’s look at o’s response:
“Oh, not at all.” They wave a hand in your direction. “You weren’t to know. Not the first, won’t be the last.”
Meanwhile, where does the “toss a coin” comment come in? After Jev’s spent a while describing Nyrish culture, gender expression, and o’s own personal non-binary (non-ternary) identity, and immediately after specifying that in Nyryal o/om is universal (consider how in spoken Mandarin — albeit not written Chinese — 他，她，and 它 are indistinguishable out-of-context), and that “they/them” is also acceptable.
You know that idea, don’t attribute to malice what can attributed to ignorance? The first time was ignorance. The “toss a coin” comment comes after a conversation about Jev’s culture, gender expression, and gender identity: it’s not unreasonable to me that Jev would attribute the comment to active malice, and so o reacts accordingly by deciding this conversation was a waste of time. It’s not like o holds it against you for this one time anyway: all it does is end the conversation early, and you can still be actively described as friendly with Jev later down the line.
Which I think us to the ultimate point, about who Jev is and how Nyryal views gender.
Jev is not gender-fluid. Jev actively doesn’t identify with any gender.
Edit: In modern terms, agender or genderless would probably be a more precise term to describe Jev, but honestly Jev feels like the kind of person who wouldn’t want to put a label on o’s feeling.
The Thaumatarchy is a society that’s done away with gender roles. It’s not a society that’s done away with gender expression, gender identity, or implicit gender biases. Likewise, Nyr is a society that independently moved past gender roles but where both gender expression and gender identity still exist, along with a third androgynous gender.
So I just don’t claim any of those names. Nyryal is an easy place to get by without anyone ever pressing me on it."
“And when you’re outside Nyryal?”
“I bring my freedom with me.” Jev folds their arms. “Not as easy…but still worth it.”
Jev is not Nyryal and Nyryal is not Jev; Nyryal is just the place where Jev can most comfortably be who o is. O’s explaining two key points: (1) Nyryal and its relation to the world, and (2) o and o’s relation to Nyryal.
So to briefly summarize by going through my take on these main points:
Jev’s gender identity is very important to om, and is an aspect of o’s freedom. O’s gender expression is a reflection of this, and o’s culture is one where this doesn’t cause significant friction.
The absence of gender roles does not mean that gender is completely irrelevant. It’s very important to Jev.
Jev’s comment came after o already patiently explained o’s perspective to a confused person, and deciding to end the conversation after the person demonstrated a lack of understanding despite Jev explicitly laying things out.
Can’t speak for Havenstone but he’s made past comments that we’re unlikely to see a repeat of a “week-to-week survival grind”, and more likely to see a focus on doing different things in different ways across different playthroughs. We already see a glimpse of that in Chapter 5, with the choice between the village, nomads, none, leaving early with Wolfbait, etc. For the Grand Shayard chapter, there are 5 broad faction groups listed (with internal division in each faction), and the current plan seems to be that we’ll only have time to work closely with 2. So it’ll be a different kind of optimisation.
Aww…you posted this just at a time when I was really swamped with work.
Anyway…I like the Xaos chapter thus far. A pity I won’t see Vigil with my main mc though since I did the Carles and not the Wolfbait intro with as the Wolfbait intro always seemed more geared towards the aristo background as an opportunity to question the cruelty and display some bland liberal piety.
Now me being late to the party means a lot of the points I was gonna raise have already been raised by others but about Sojourn specifically did the Brauracha being roving nomads even before the cataclysm actually build those places? Or did they have a relationship with the city (state) dwellers of possibly older civilizations already in the region akin to what some of our historical hordes had with some more settled peoples, that they provide trade and luxury goods and pay a tribute to the great Khan but were otherwise mostly left to their own devices?
Also will the mc ever learn how to make the Xaos storms themselves? It’s great Cerlotta is close to figuring them out but that doesn’t help my mc very much. Still the opportunity to learn from an actual abhuman was too great to pass up and I wonder if my mc can use that autoplektosis to perfect his own human male form, more like this, than work towards animal traits?
Lastly about Cerlotta when she is arguing mages should give up power I would like my helot mc to be able to retort a bit as he does think that is a position borne of centuries of privilege on the part of the Hegemony’s theurge class:
Particularly now that he knows more of the Magi of Halassur that last sentence would ring even more true that without at least some real power magic alone does not necessarily make for a life worth living.
As someone who is (like you) not from a shame-honor culture, I agree… but I’ve spent enough time in such cultures to know that in a good chunk of the world today and even more of it throughout history, rudeness absolutely does justify murder.
In societies with an honor-based ethic, even when the state becomes strong enough to start trying to reduce honor killing, the language of violence remains the language of honor. It may start as a joke for relatively minor offenses, and even when it stops being a joke it’s still not literal–until you cross another line, and suddenly it is. Figuring out those lines, for someone not reared in the culture, is hard. Taking violence-language literally before it’s meant literally is a common reaction from outsiders; understandable but mistaken.
Halassur and Nyryal are honor-based cultures, a fact which will only become more apparent as/if the MC spends more time with them. Nor is it right to sum up Nyryal as a culture in which gender simply “doesn’t matter”. After all, Jev tells the MC at some length about the contortions the Nyr go through to be able to justify breaking with the rigid roles of the normative model they share with Halassur. Even if the result is a culture where gender can be performed very diversely, it’s also one where people are vastly more self-conscious about their performance of gender than people are in Shayard – which I think is consistent with the tenor of the whole Jev-MC conversation.
When Jev has spent a lot of time explaining how to not dishonor them, and the MC promptly dishonors them, a joke about violence is absolutely consistent with Nyrish culture. It’s also consistent with Jev’s earlier not holding the MC’s question against them-- the difference between knew-no-better and should-have-known.
As for Jev’s role as a diplomat, it doesn’t stop them from answering rudeness with rudeness, any more than it stops them from being deliberately provocative to Erjan.
I understand that you may not like the culture or character as I’ve written them, and that’s your prerogative as a reader. I’m glad there are other aspects you enjoy more.
I assume old Brauracha was too then…although my mc may have liked their conception of it better, particularly since we learn that in the old nomad clans before the cataclysm most of the mockery was reserved not for the weak but for the powerful.
Makes me wonder what, if anything the inhabitants of Vigil retain or indeed if Vigil itself was an even older city state and its original culture is now fused inextricably with the Brauracha survivors.
Depending on what we might learn my mc may lean towards the stance that old Brurq could well have been right about a lot of things.
Definitely something that’s been on my mind too, especially with Havenstone mentioning that we’ll see adamantine stone on the inside of the Wards. Acknowledging that pottery isn’t people and architecture isn’t culture, we could nevertheless construct an ancient aether-based civilization stretching from Vigil to Corlune that would’ve collapsed hundreds of years ago. The question then would be whether there’s meaningful evidence of that, but our rebellion really hasn’t had a chance to explore places that would have that evidence, since we’ve mostly been in the woods, in the mountains, or in a place where nearly everything has been destroyed.
“Do you know who built it?”
“Swive me, no. Always been here, the nomads say. Corlune has some old buildings that look like these, and they’re older than the Hegemony.”
I suspect Archlich Ghaesh would be able to answer a lot of these questions, with his centuries of knowledge. Who knows, maybe Ghaesh comes from this ancient civilization.
It has made me revisit my hypothesis of Cunning-Quick as the creator of Vigil; now I’m toying with Cunning-Quick as the one who rediscovers Vigil by way of the boulder of dreams. To pivot back to Cunning-Quick for some addenda to my earlier thoughts…
Cunning-Quick’s “family” exiling her to the driest wastelands and summoning Kargash was weird to me before, but it clicked for me recently that the Brauracha people mythically all descend from Brurq the Kinslayer: this allows us to view the Brauracha people as a “family”, and fits with other testimonies about the Xaos-storms where it’s the Goety of the Brauracha as a whole that caused them.
Past proud Kargash crept Cunning-Quick Feared not, stole his spear And fled again laughing—ha!—out into the wild wastes To trick, tease, taunt, seize, Slay Kargash’s children with Kargash’s weapons Live free from her family Never kneel nor obey. To this day.
It’s also been tricky to interpret these lines, but now that I’m reading them, I’m getting a sense that they could be symbolic of Xaos-storms, emanating out from Vigil into the wild wastes, Kargash’s weapon to slay Kargarsh’s children (the Brauracha), rejecting the meta-telos to return to original form (not kneeling or obeying that supposedly fundamental idea).
I don’t think it should be literally interpreted in that way, but I don’t have a good interpretation for Cunning-Quick’s fate and this idea seemed compelling.
Or, alternatively, looking past the fanciful legend this might actually be the very brief history of the Brauracha themselves, assuming the exiled cunning quick is actually brurq themselves.
Could mean they either learned or did indeed steal the knowledge of magic from one of the rulers of the people already living there and then had a falling out with them?
Could be how the Brauracha came to dominate the land over the city dwelling civilizations who were there before them and use magic/goety to do so too.
Which would be the ancient Nyr and Halassurqs in this interpretation.
Live free or die and an aversion to tyrants seems to have been a central tenet of old Braurach culture, considering they liked to mock the powerful.
Considering this would all be very ancient history well predating the Hegemony.
Man, I’m somewhat bemused, but also impressed that people are this passionate about the game’s lore!
I guess I have a more detached view. I mean I love the story, the characters, the worldbuilding, etc…but for me, the reason I have hundreds of hours in this series was because of math and optimizing.
Perhaps I was always like that. Even when I played Oregon Trail as a child, I would compare runs between starting as a Doctor or Gunsmith, between Horses/Mules/Oxen as your transport animals…I’ve been minmaxing since I was 7 years old.
To that end, I will soon be taking down my existing “Noble Knight” guide on Steam, which was intended as a beginner’s guide, and replacing it with a very thorough guide for a 2COM/1CHA Comp/Dev(I)/Cosm Aristocrat, which uses some tricks to get both Noble/Merchant alignment boosts AND get Bleys.
This guide should also be good for beginners and experts alike, and I will be pleased to have two diametrically different builds (Blue Bars Aristocratic Knight vs. Red Bars Helot Mage) that are both minmaxed and ready for export to Game 2 when the time comes!
This is just some thing minor but i don’t think simon should grip my shoulder after i asked him to cut off the parasite i know he’s angry and shocked but still
Hey @Havenstone , why is the main character so horrefied when he finds out harrowers primarily harvest brains and spine rather then blood?
I know it is a slight deviation from what they are thought by the priests but does it really make a diffrence when helots are constantly being tortured to death? Irregardless if the main objective is the brain rather then the blood?
The big revelation would probably be that the entire process is faked in the disguise of an angelic will to a devout mc (who still believe in the contemporary interpretation), while a skeptical mc would’ve probably figured there was no angel’s will behind their actions and would now be satisfied to know the truth (whitch confirms their beliefs and whitch may be used to debunk lies that the priests propagate to the general populace), while a indifferent mc would probably be shocked and a heretic mc would have a less subdued reaction of the skeptic.
Also maybe it would be good to add an option whitch relates to the inspection of harrowers that can be done in chapter 2 book 1, perhaps suprising the theurge, depending on how thoroughly you examined it, how intelligent you were when doing so etc.?
The difference is that it means the torture is necessary, and short of inventing a new method the MC will have to continue Harrowing to fuel large scale Theurgy. Previously, with the understanding that it was just blood, Harrowing could simply be dismantled as there are plenty of ways to nonlethally harvest quantities of blood, not so for brains. Now the MC has to seriously consider what the Harrowing alternative is, if there will be one at all.
True! This is a good moment for that to come up again, if the MC can mention that they have already seen the internal mechanisms of a Harrower.
I am curious if there will be a way to avoid population collapse that doesn’t involve keeping part of the current system or doing what the Hallasurqs do.
Current choices all very unappealing. Hopefully Phaedrus or Sarcifer have some breakthrough that can help.
isn’t that book 3? I know magical sword is no basis for a system of government, but it would help a lot for my combat 2 char in book 3, so she won’t get out scaled by any random bandit.
