Honestly surprised the Chairman let him go at all. Why not simply murder the highborn and his priest and take their shit?
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Because Horion was a delightful conversationalist and they actually seemed not to have any shit worth taking. And Linus gave him the best laugh he had in years with the whole “eclect” suggestion.
According to the rumours (that neither I nor my mc trusts) they seem to have gotten themselves killed anyway without my mc needing to violate the guest right.
Tertiary my mc actually likes having guests as it is the thing that most sets him apart from his former life as a piece of livestock, slaves and cattle cannot have guests at best they serve or are served to the guests of their owners and masters. Thus being able to have guests in the first place is the surest affirmation of personhood to him and why he is fairly scrupulous about respecting the guest right.
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I do not agree with her, but rather I am in the opposite position, but I would like to point out the following in the interest of fairness. Namely, her attitude is quite generous for a pre-modern and extremely oppressive imperial aristocrat to look at commoners, especially poor people. In reality, in such a country, it is often the case that you cannot even expect to be treated as useful livestock. (Of course, such an oppressive system must be reformed.)
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Halassur should be homophobic. There is no reason that a society that WORSHIPS sex as a way to make babies would accept people that prefer to do it WITHOUT making babies, even if they ALSO have sex to make babies. That would be like if Martin was accepted for writing a non-ASOIAF book because he is also writing an ASOIAF book (for lack of a better comparison)
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Women are more reproductively important and it seems like there is a certain class of women who provide the supply of sacrificial infants for the Halassur war machine. I suspect their sexual orientation may be immaterial so long as they meet their quotas. Perhaps there is some suspicion and stigma there if they have same sex relationships. From what I gather from the lore so far these women are high status if behaviorally confined.
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Sorry, mon frere, but we disagree on the predictability of human cultures, as well as the logic behind homophobia.
The intense anti-homosexuality of the Hebrew Scriptures comes from a culture whose One God was far less gendered than the cultures around them. The compilers of Torah were reacting to neighboring cultures whose mythoi depicted reality as fundamentally gendered – cultures which divinized sex both as the source of cosmic creative energy and as the practice of worship by which humans tapped into divine reality. Those sex-positive, sex-worshiping cultures whose mythoi had male-female divine pairs at the heart of creation…were also pretty non-homophobic, by and large.
The authors of the Hebrew Scriptures were incomparably less sex-worshiping than their neighboring cultures…and also way, way less tolerant of same-sex relations. Homophobia was just one manifestation of their wariness of sex as an idol, their treatment of it as a source of chaos and uncleanness rather than a divinity to be worshipped.
I don’t think homophobia is an inevitable outworking of any cultural logic around sex–neither wariness nor worship. By that token, I’m happy writing a world whose dominant cultures are largely free of homophobia, despite their otherwise having a broad range of attitudes toward sex and gender.
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Actually, a successful Compassionate Aristocrat run would probably lead to much less Harrowing in total, so that would be quite good for Helots.
As for the failruns, they would fail to achieve much progress against the Hegemony, which would mean either it or another powerful faction (no doubt aristocrat-led and much less Compassionate than Reynard de Eramant) would be ruling the roost, and then the Helots would be just as screwed.
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It does feel rather saddening to know that homophobia as we know it was the result of a tribal kingdom seeking to define its own identity apart from the surrounding Canaanites. Especially because it seems to be an extremely compelling weed that spread wherever Western culture did - once the West came in contact with cultures like Japan (largely cool with homosexuality), homophobia was (and continues to be, in places like Africa) quickly normalized.
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Which Roman emperor first criminalized it? I want to say Theodosius I but I’m not 100% sure.
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It’s worth being careful here. Yes, homophobia as we in the modern world know it is almost invariably shaped to some degree by the Abrahamic tradition, given the global influence of Christian and Islamic ideas. But sometimes that fact can nudge people toward the claim that homophobia is a uniquely Abrahamic weed – that before some version of Christianity or Islam showed up, the rest of the world was free from homophobia.
I think that requires a pretty strained and tendentious reading of the evidence. Humans are always prone to come up with purity codes and highly judgmental frameworks for making sense of sex and gender…and on the evidence, plenty of them have independently (and wrongly!) decided to treat male-female sex as paradigmatic and normatively superior, while others haven’t. Regardless, relatively few cultures have approached the issue using categories that map cleanly onto our language about same-sex relationships or nonbinary gender today; it’s easy but misleading to cherry-pick the “more enlightened” elements from a given cultural history while downplaying the aspects that we wouldn’t consider to be just or inclusive today.
The pre-Christian Roman framework that valorized penetration and treated a man being penetrated as utterly vile was…not exactly “homophobic,” but also clearly kind of was? The Arthashastra doesn’t treat same-sex relations as harshly as Abrahamic law codes did, but it still treated them as minor offenses. Pre-colonial Africa had plenty of cultures that accepted same-sex relationships, but others that treated them as inferior or undesirable.
Like the patriarchy to which it’s a close cousin, treating male-female sex as morally normative (and gender as a hard binary) is a mindset that crops up in various forms independently across cultures. It’s anything but universal–it’s great to recover the actual diversity of human norms and mores in this area–but homophobia will often have a local genealogy that can’t be reduced to Western influence. I don’t think the weed would have spread as fast or thoroughly if there weren’t existing cousins in the local cultural flora.
Within the Abrahamic tradition, the single biggest wellspring of homophobic norms was the separation-code to distinguish the holy (i.e. separated, distinct) people from the assimilationist imperial cultures around them (i.e. not just Canaanites, but Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and by the time we get to Paul’s anti-gay passages, Greeks and Romans). It’s also about purity codes that treat blood and semen as spiritually significant fluids; the phallocentric emphasis on semen is one of the reasons why the Hebrew Scriptures have barely anything anti-Sapphic in them (that comes in, for Christians, with Paul).
And yeah, all of that is saddening. But like patriarchy, we can all fight back against it within our varyingly-infected cultures–all of which also contain perspectives and values that can be used to undermine rather than reinforce homophobia. This evangelical will certainly keep trying to do so within my own tradition.
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No, but it’s the peculiarly Abrahamic version that seems to be spreading everywhere, like much of Western culture.
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In some places, like Uganda or Kenya, that’s plainly what’s gone/going on. In others, though, I don’t know if that’s the most helpful genealogy. Maybe it is – maybe the homophobes in e.g. India and China just need more convincing that it’s a foreign import and they’ll abandon it. But at present they tend to fight pretty hard for the idea that their homophobia is an implication of their indigenous value systems, not an “Abrahamic version” of anything. Within their worldview, LGBT-affirming values are the hegemonic Western idea, being promoted by the same channels as the other most popular Western imports.
Rather than try to argue them out of that perspective, I’d be more inclined to the same approach I’d take in the Abrahamic context: get them to see that their own culture/ history doesn’t speak with a single unambiguous voice on this; familiarize and humanize LGBT people, so the people I’m talking with realize the impact of this issue on real human beings; and make the case that the more inclusive values in their culture are preferable to the bigoted ones.
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ADAT I was writing about how closely (or not) I would stick to any given historical template from our world, and decided to write a culture that eroticized bare arms, shoulders etc. regardless of sex.
In other news, I’m kind of horrified to say it, but right now I feel like the Juneduin wagerers have the edge. I’m going to see how little sleep I can manage in the coming week.
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Mayduiners assemble!
Let us encourage an unhealthy sleep schedule!
Go Mayduin go!
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Have been giving the matter of assimilation some further thinking. If there is anything that will preserve the Shayarin language and identity, it will be reading the Canon in Shayarin. It is probably one of the few books which cannot be suppressed if published in Shayarin, both because the original word of the Angels was in Shayarin and because there is just no good excuse to justify excluding the Shayarin peasantry from hearing the Angels word in their tongue.
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This is actually an interesting criticism but even by the logic you layed out I can only find reasons why Hallasurq would be homophobic towards females. Male homosexualism would have no effect on total infant output of the population.
While Author’s argument about cultural predictability is sound for the most part, I would very much like to hear how Hallasurq view female sexual freedom. Is it:
- They can do whatever.
- They can do whatever as long as they pump a baby out once per year (even if their inclinations would be F only).
- Bisexual females are fine but there’s homophobia against homosexual females.
- There’s a strict and widespread homophobia against any non M-F relations.
If it’s number 1) is there a hermetic justification for it? Meaning one that’s inferable from the lore and doesn’t require logical gymnastics with the help of irl cultural and anthropological trivia.
EDIT: Sorry, don’t want to post under post.
It was Havel. Power of the Powerless iirc
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This discussion sparked a thought.
If infants have more aether than either of their parents, then one must wonder how aether arrives in the body. Since the soul is (as far as theurges and natural philosophers can tell) air and fire rather than aether, it’s probably not that - but it’s clear that aether is descending from the heavens at some point during pregnancy to concentrate in the infant’s brain. I wonder if there’s some way to observe the process of prenatal aetherization - and possibly discover a back door into the sphere of aether.
We must do science.
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I started off as a rebel leader, but then Cerlotta helped me realize Mad Science is really where it’s at.
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This really is the funniest thread on the site. The MC hasn’t even defeated a major army or taken a single city yet and people are wondering about how sexually liberal an empire half the world away is.
It’s like the tumblr threads where they talk all day about whether XYZ romantic option likes to get his nipples twisted, but for history / sociology nerds.
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Look, what matters is that the battalion they defeated seemed like a huge army to the MC.
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