Needless to say, but I rather like this option #1, less bloodshed by far and it would fit into my “winning by forfeiting” strategy.
Any conceivable way to do it around the historical dates in the 1800’s?
Secession would never be tolerated because of various reasons. The first was that many in the North did believe that the Union is indivisible and thus secession was illegal and invalid.
The second is that their whole bet on the fact that Europeans needed Southern Cotton over Northern food collapsed shortly after secession. The South also was missing out in all the industry, banking systems, manufactories, and food necessary to feed themselves. The biggest advantage that Europe would have gotten out of it is a divided USA which would have severely weakened us.
The South as an independent nation just wasn’t ready and their whole economic system was doomed to failure even if slavery continued.
1 Like
Just to check, should the spin off discussion related to imperialism and suchlike maybe be split to another thread? 
It’s super-interesting but it’s a bit unrelated to “writing and inclusive protagonists”
I can see later on that @ParrotWatcher’s helped demonstrate our perspective to you, but please just allow me to note a few additional corroborating points 
The vast majority of media (books, games, movies, everything with characters) is from a heterosexual point of view, which is also the point of view that is generally assumed by society as a whole. It’s unfair when the bulk of empathy is disproportionately placed on the disadvantaged group—we have to relate to the majority—rather than having them reach partway to empathize with us as well. We’re already to used to making this empathetic jump throughout most of our lives because it’s the common background of our culture—it’s everywhere. This is true out in the world, too, where it’s commonplace for people to assume that anyone is heterosexual without a second’s thought. Plus, I spent all the way through most of my teenage years living under the charade of pretending to be heterosexual, even thinking I was, because that was just the default, and many people have spent far longer doing so, or remain in the closet. And even now (and I am pretty darn open), in far too many social situations I get caught up in the analysis of “would it be worth it if I were to drop any kind of indication that I’m not heterosexual, or do I just go along with it?” Given all that, playing at being heterosexual in my recreation has pretty well lost its appeal.
An interactive game is also a bit different from linear storytelling, since you don’t relate with the protagonist the same way. While I do get particularly excited over gay characters in books or movies that I like, I’m still plenty fine with reading and empathizing with heterosexual protagonists, since it’s not like I’m trying to put on their role in the same way.
Also, I mean, when it comes to romance options, people are generally just gonna be more interested in romancing whatever gender they’re into, because, well… that’s what we like It sounds kind of basic, but there you have it. And I don’t necessarily want to have to play a different gender just to be able to get a guy 
Like, not neurotypical, or physical disabilities? 
Those would be interesting to see more of, and I would certainly support more of that, though I can understand it could take extra research. Or did you have something else in mind?
Agreed! And there have been a lot of interesting subcultures even in disapproving times! There’s an interesting book out there (disclaimer: I have not read the whole book) called Gay New York which talks extensively about the gay subculture in New York before WWII, generally a bad time for social acceptance, but they certainly found a way.
I also noticed a book about Gay Berlin at my local library recently, though I didn’t check it out. But I did take a glance, to note that it details the gay culture in Berlin around the end of the 19th century. It was a significant hotspot for the development of a gay identity (and the coining of the term “homosexual,” for that matter). Things just got much worse in the next century 
Another tidbit I find interesting is the significant amount of gay coding in The Maltese Falcon, which went over the heads of the censors when it was made into a movie. They even kept in a bit of dialogue in which one character is referred to as a gunsel—they thought it was slang for a gunman, but in fact referred to the passive partner in a male-male relationship 
(It’s… not a particularly positive portrayal of gay people, but then, I’m not sure there’s really a positive portrayal of anybody in it.)
Plus there were the Mollies of late 18th century England, for a time period when it was punishable by execution. People will find a way.
Aw, beat me to it 
And, last I checked, every US state except California 
…okay, now it’s California and Illinois, and sounds like Rhode Island is forthcoming, but… yeah. Not good.
9 Likes
I remember reading a paper as an undergrad about the gay subculture in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century, and how it literally caused city authorities to shut down all the public washrooms because of the fear that gay working-class men (who didn’t have the privacy of privately owned homes) were using them for hookups. Meanwhile, wealthier gay couples were more or less invisible to authorities because they had the resources to keep themselves and their orientation hidden.
7 Likes
When you give history nerds a “safe” thread to go into, they tend to get wild and go places no other threads go … understanding why history may not be recording a diverse population is important to help explain why inclusive protagonists is an important issue, so I think we can rationalize our wonderfully diverse discussion.
Now, having an exploration of medieval medicine in Europe is a little out there, which is why I’ve stopped myself from sharing all sorts of fun things …
History is history 
9 Likes
Going back to the root a bit: what real world cultures would make for the most inclusive historical protagonists? Based on my own fairly limited understanding, the Norse, Anglo-Saxons and Scythians seem to be pretty big contenders on that front, from what limited archaeological exidence we have.
Let’s just call it “the history thread” and call it a day.
Most governments choose to fervently believe that right up until a secession is actually hitting them on the proverbial nose. The US actually chose to go to war over it, rather than use a fig-leaf plebiscite/referendum.
Of course I think the US South wasn’t worth the cost of your civil war in hindsight and that civil war and the continued, forced engagement with the most toxic elements in the South really set the US back as a nation in ways that are still felt today.
Welcome to the South, the same applied to South Sudan then and now, it also applied to Eritrea in fact it applied to most African nations during decolonization it arguably even applied to Ireland right here in Europe back in the day. All of those are independent today.
Yeah, I’m not really interested in playing female either, usually, I can make exceptions for games that otherwise tick many of my niche-interest boxes. But I’ll never prefer it when given a choice, which is why it is only fair to give girls the same choice.
Like I said, many of the games I used to play in my youth were simulation and primitive politics games exactly because they didn’t feature romance as such. If a throwaway line referred to my ceo’s or politicians being married in them, well that was probably just for public consumption, but they were still games that didn’t force you to engage with that part. Thus most of my protagonists in those old games ending up being de-facto married to their work.
Hello Wisconsin, eh? Here in the Netherlands they have just developed a disturbing new variant of it, where religious freedom (and we all know the adherents of which religion form the greatest trouble spot here) may not get you off the hook entirely anymore but will get you sharply reduced sentences to the point where they become non-custodial. It is apparently not a hate crime anymore when the gay panic is caused by conflict with certain religions.
It is probably also at least a partial explanation of why gay people, though mainly the older ones who presumably remember the last vestiges of the bad old days are a growing base demographic for our mr. Wilders and misses Le Pen in France. And they may be many, frankly despicable things, but they are not idiots they do this outreach because it helps them politically and ironically what the gay panic defense is morphing into is one of the things helping them make their pitch to some gay men, here and in France, right now.
That is the story throughout history, I remember reading a book about our old republic that had a passage dedicated to gay people, particularly gay men, the state didn’t actually care much for the persecution of lesbians as long as they also moonlighted as dutiful wives. In short, the main threats to poor gay people were the church and the state and if you were supremely lucky you’d only get exiled to the colonies as indentured labour if caught. Meanwhile for wealthy people the only real threat was their family and then mainly their fathers and the fathers of their wives. If you had a father who didn’t much care and a wife who was in on it, or at least didn’t tattle you were golden. Even if it was so public and open that the state couldn’t pretend to look away anymore they also got exile, only to Paris with their fortunes intact.
This still continues today in milder forms of course since they gay elite is part of the elite and they are far less threatened by some disturbing developments today.
For example I still have as much or even more in common with say the Portuguese working (okay, probably more lower middle) class these days then I do with the gay elite in Amsterdam. Which is part of why our Liberals who think being “in-touch” with gay culture means occasionally partying with Amsterdam’s gay elite were practically falling over themselves a couple of months back in their haste to kill the proposal for trans-national constituencies in Europe in order to prevent the 73 British European Parliament seats from being turned into an experiment with a transnational list constituency in the EU. Since they fear voters uniting in elections and new parties that are genuinely European in nature, instead of being mainly focused around national issues and a de-facto referendum on the performance of the national governments might mean actual reform in Europe.
It was one of the few occasions of them rushing to de-facto ally with mr. Wilders, who obviously also didn’t like the idea of a trans-national constituency in Europe, albeit for slightly different reasons.
Okay, rant over.
2 Likes
Thanks for taking the time to expand on the earlier points. Using my Ghostbusters example, I hadn’t considered what it would be like to be, let’s say, a woman who’s seen fifty men-only Ghosbusters films in a row. You’d be pissed off and desperate for some content that related more to your perspective. Empathy is key but sometimes we need guidance to fully understand another’s perspective, I guess! Bridging the rivers of our differences is a collaborative effort it seems. Thanks for sharing that last link by the way! Pretty crazy how we’ve had such varying attitudes towards these issues as a civilisation.
@Dark_Stalker That’s really interesting to consider! I wonder if there are some deaf people reading this thread and wishing they received a similar level of representation.
Good point! I guess these things are relative - it could always be worse!
Regardless of the thread it’s in, I’m sure many of us would enjoy learning interesting or fun facts about history! Now we’re in The History Thread, if you need an excuse to take a break from proper work, you have one 
3 Likes
For the first part, yeah that fits perfectly though I suppose other religions and cultures can fit their too. It doesn’t help that I’ve seen people use other groups as an excuse without focusing on them… and even then it might be difficult to include a character at all but what about the mc? Especially in 1st person. If it’s a choice how would you lead up to something like that? If it’s not you gotta be willing to alienate a good portion of the typical audience. If you are doing it, say on autism or anything else on a spectrum with possible downsides, how negative do you make it and again is it a choice? And even then no matter what you do, you’ll probably get complaints from that little rainbow.
Oh god empathy, hate the word. It’s always felt like a “focus on me more” word to me, while usually ignoring others. Though I suppose appropriate/inappropriate is in the same vein.
Depends on the person. I’m not gonna start playing Overwatch for the being the first and only triple A to explicitly include me as playable.
I’m sort of shocked by the number of peoples who seems to think homosexuality, transgenderism and such are more presenr today than we have ever been and use it as an excuse to remove us from historical games. We have alway existed. Maybe not using modern labels but we most definitely existed, just not as publically because of the repression.
To use an example from earlier, a gay, polyamorous transgender knight could have existed without anyone ever knowing it for the simple reason that they werent caught. Its also important to remember that the public medieval gays and woman warriors and etc are known and werent as repressed because they were nobles who had a certain social protection but out of the gilded halls we were still very much present and were conscripted, taxed and participated to community events like everyone. And to add to the defence of womans passing as mens, I’l remind y’all that even without testosterone tons of peoples look masculine (and vice-versa) and its not a stretch to believe one or two irl knights trough history were actually just very buff womans who were good at hiding their identity or that some popular saint woman was actually transgender. It just wasnt publically known.
Basically what I mean is that using “historical accuracy” to remove lgbt peoples from historical games isnt realism, its an opinion thats debunked the second you start thinking about it for a bit.
Edit: this also applies to POC in a way. Its not common knowledge but one of the knight of the round table from the arthurean myth is a black man of moorish origin named Moriaen. French author Alexandre dumas as well was a black man of mixed origin who’se own father, Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, was a black man who also was a revolutionary france officer. I know many peoples who would say a black revolutionary france officer isn’t historically accurate and surprise they’d be wrong.
8 Likes
There’s also Palamedes and his brothers, who are likewise Moorish and are often presented as either Arabic or African. Although several depictions of Palamedes have him being green.
Which makes me wonder the conversation there.
“But what does a Saracen look like?”
“Well, they have a strange skin color quite unlike our own.”
“Done.”
“Not what I meant, but I mean, we can work with it.”
In the Early Middle Ages, it’s not impossible that any wealthy traveler could come from afar with arms and armor and pledge their life in service of some king or another. It was only later on that being a knight became a Big Deal, and they began to have more responsibilities than simply being part of their lord’s retinue.
4 Likes
That’s not true at all considering the Union amassed an army of 2.2 million men whereas the South mobilised a force of 750,000 - 1 million. You have to understand that to the North Slavery was seen as abhorrent and many people were willing to fight to ensure that it was crushed. The problem was, that even many of them didn’t see the African-Americans as mentally equivalent to the white man. Which is why Jim Crow wasn’t really opposed on a national scale for 100 years.
Not to burst your bubble but the union didnt find slavery all that abhorent. After the civil war the US didn’t completely end their slavery. It was still used as a legal punishment, many, many “freed” slaves kept working for the same salary at the same farms under te same supervisons only instead of being actual slave they were debt slaves wich the federal government didnt do much to prevent (look up sharecropping). Another example is that if a black person was caught unemployed they would be arrested for vagrancy and put to work without pay (especially in virginia). Another way was to take up freed slaves as “apprentices” to “teach” them methods to work the land but instead use them as free labor. Another method was to simply kidnap black peoples and force them to work without repercussions because black peoples couldnt testify against whites. Its also important to remember that even post civil war white peoples could easily get away with murdering black peoples so many were forced to work trough intimidation.
Most of those methods were considered illegal even before the civil war but the federal government did next to nothing to prevent it. The state of Mississippi itself didnt ratify the 13th amendment until 1995. The union fight over slavery was an excuse to weaken southern land owners and keep the union together while sidelining actual anti-slavery peoples to prevent true progress. It was really just a justification to look like the good side of the civil war when in truth both were *ssholes.
2 Likes
It didn’t even weaken them all that much, sadly. For a large part it seems to be the same old elites in the US South
1 Like
But now all the stuff about inclusivity in protagonists seems off topic… that was a writing-focused conversation, and was in the writing subforum. It really feels like there’s two separate conversations going on in this thread.
You might find this thread interesting!
That sounds concerning, but I’m not quite following what you’re referring to could you clarify the sort of behavior you’re referencing?
Catalina de Erauso—also known as Alonzo—is an interesting figure. From the early 17th century Spain, which was decidedly not a beacon for tolerance in pretty much any way. Um, and it’s a little tricky to determine what pronoun to use, since this is someone who lived as a man, but whether that’s due to being transgender in the contemporary sense or just due to wanting the freedoms is impossible to say. Anyway, Catalina was living completely as a man, doing a lot of fighting and dueling—not really a good role model, to be honest—and after being found out, eventually wrote to the Pope and was granted a special dispensation to wear men’s clothes! (Which, kind of ridiculous that one would need the Pope’s permission, but pretty interesting that he actually granted it!)
Also features in Rejected Princesses, for that matter.
Anyway, if this person could exist, a similar fictional character should be able to too.
And his horse is green too? 
4 Likes
That’s the danger with any thread, unfortunately. And it’s also why I put it under “General” instead of “Off-Topic.”
Or simply because their story hasn’t been told often enough for their presence to enter the public consciousness, which is why stories with gay, trans, poly knights set in time periods where most people don’t think they existed are so important.
Unless you’re someone with an acute interest in a particular period, or a trained historian with some background in gender/race studies, chances are, you’re going to have a very simplified and very distorted view of what the past was as given to you by your compulsory education and by the media you consume. There are a lot of stories and elements of history which get cut out of mainstream media presentations of history, and that’s how you get people assuming certain things are “historically inaccurate” when in reality, this sort of thing happened.
The Union as a whole didn’t, but there were states within it (especially in New England) which were considerably more abolitionist than others.
The implementation and failure of Reconstruction is a whole different topic altogether, and I don’t think the failure to successfully implement some level of racial equity and resist the rise of the “Redemption” and Jim Crow was necessarily due to an initial lack of public will on the Northern population’s part as it was a lack of will on the part of the Johnson administration, and the fact that after the war, the American Deep South was absolutely waist deep in white supremacist militias and terrorist organisations (we’re talking cities where a third of the population were members of the White League and the like), which made the price of trying to enact Reconstruction policy too high for the tastes of people who’d just lost half a million lives to a fratricidal civil war, and really didn’t want to lose a quarter of a million more enforcing the peace.
8 Likes
Thats the problem though isnt it? A few states might have helped the abolitionist cause but overall the union failed spectacularly at remunerating and protecting the freed slave and at times also participated in their repression. The population did have abolitionist tendencies but the actual real abolitionists were sidelined because the union only wanted to implement token reforms.
What I mean is actual real abolitionism was a civilian movement that the government piggybacked on for PR points. I believe this failure to implement true reforms was conscious. The government knew when they declared it that they wouldnt really take land from white landowners to give to freed slaves but profited from the image of a liberating force for freedom while simultaneously playing nice with the newly formed KKK and such. I used sharecropping as an example of how they’ve kept slavery while masking it as remuneration.
Basically what I mean is the Union government were hypocrites and took the anti-slave stance mostly to prevent slave uprising in their own states and keep the confederation in the union. The real abolitionists were sidelined by moderates.
I’m not sure it was so much a matter of “wanted” as it was “could”.
Reconstruction was a pretty ambitious policy for its time. It involved establishing african-americans at every level of society, including in law enforcement and government. There was a very brief window of time when legally, at least, african-americans were allowed a great deal of economic and political freedom.
The problem came from the fact that the southern whites often took measures into their own hands, and effectively created massive terrorist networks to enforce white supremacy, up to the point of committing regular massacres against black communities and hunting down Northern whites trying implement Reconstruction policies. The level of armed resistance to any sort of racial equality in the deep south cannot be understated.
Ultimately, the northern states couldn’t really commit fully to Reconstruction unless they were willing to commit to some massive feats of social engineering (frankly, it would have meant putting the South under military occupation for two or three generations, while treating a good fifth of the American population as active terrorists) which modern states would find impossible, let alone the exhausted Federal government of the late 1860s and early 1870s.
2 Likes
It doesnt pardon anything to me. If the government would have had any intention to stay true to their words they would have done a lot more than pardoning the confederate leaders and basically bring things to the way they were. The confederation had just lost their war and both parties were exhausted but I do not believe it is a justification for letting the southern peoples act out their violence freely. letting white kill blacks with impunity did absolutely nothing but allow violence to persist without any punishment and reinforced segregation. Its one thing to try to prevent terrotism but its another to let said terrorists run free without any consequence.
If they were ready to fight for the slave freedoms they would have been ready to fight for their survival after the war but the government was comfortable doing nothing while the peoples they supposedly fought so hard to free were getting murdered and re-enslaved. If a large portion of your population are terrorists you have to acknowledge it and fight against it or else you play right into their hand. Whatever happen there would have been violence but the government decided they would rather let the victims be black than soldiers or police officers and more often than not freed slaves defending themselves were passed off as the aggressor and were sent to jail so I just cant see the Union as any better than the confederates because of that.