#great steppes

[swiftcast-selene]

been thinking about how hard MSQ must be on the body, especially for someone who isn't exactly in the best shape of their life. must be hard to keep up with the warrior of light! which ended up in a couple studies of how Negi's carried his weight through the whole adventure, with a couple extra mostly-non-spoilery notes on each expac~

[sneez]

tervis (oc) sightings

/ id: three screenshots from the video game pathologic. tervis, a hunched figure wearing long hooded robes and carrying a walking staff, has been digitally painted into each scene. the first shows tervis crouching on a metal walkway between two buildings in the factory district. the second shows tervis with their hand pressed against an infected house, looking balefully out into the night. the third shows tervis sitting against the wall of the railway station, observing the trains. end id. /

[meirimerens]

god thank you for your response to that person I'm so tired of seeing takes that are like "the kin/the town are a 1:1 representation of the buryats" cuz... they're not... and honestly trying to hammer that point down comes off as quite insulting to the real and actual people they're supposedly represent.

the kin differs from the buryats by their economical system, faith and even medicine methods. the closest thing is the language cuz surprise, unless you're tolkien, coming up with a whole fictional language is hard

well, thank you, i'll guess. i'm not trying to start beef with nobody so everybody behave otherwise daddy's gonna get rude.

i also truly fully whole-heartedly believe the replier has no ill-intention, and probably has great love for the Kin (hence why they entered the discussion). it is also from great love for the Kin that i made the original post, AND from great love that i made my reply to the reply, which i felt ignored some issues that have for years been brought up + decided to seek the opinions of others who have more #knowledge than me.

wrt the kin i'm trying to like, be as... wide in my scope of it as i can and understand that yes, imaginary, bunch of shit not real, but also, very much real inspirations, and in these blurred lines of inspirations/imagination lies..... won't lie some racist biases, and perhaps what we could call intellectual colonialism: taking bits and pieces of real-life cultures for your Storey, while maybe not...... handling it.... the best........ again, i'm not like. The Best Person For The Job because. my sibling on this green earth i'm franco-french. but i try my best to read and listen what is said about the Kin by people for who their (mis)treatment matters most, and most of what i'm reading is. like Not Praise. ykwim..... i have no way of knowing if you, personally, are buryat or mongol or [...] & it's none my business, so i don't know how much of a horse you got in this race, but i'm trying to like. see things. a topic that demands careful examination and multiple perspectives? in the Multiple Perspectives video games? that's crazy.

there's also to me [as a storytellah] the fact that if patho wanted to fully represent all the peoples it is inspired by 1) it would be even more of a hodgepodge, and somewhat even more disrespectful, because the buryat and the mongols, while both Mongolic, are... not the same... they have different names for gods, places, different cosmogonies, [...]. the fact is, patho has multiple inspirations, and like. they're not... interchangeable... because central asian cultures are not interchangeable...... not monolithic......... and 2) it would make it so they can't go as quirky with the story as they did. the religion, the practices, the cosmogonies are invented (if inspired), and are not 1:1 to actual cultures. making it 1:1 to actual cultures would be disrespectful because you'd just... shove a new, fake religion upon these actually-existing peoples. or, you would have to write within the religious traditions of these peoples, which make it so. well. no living beating heart under the town, no albinos, no herb brides, no worms. you can make documentary-like games (i'd argue you should), but i think another thing that can/should be done is games by indigenous people about indigenous people and myths/stories, in the vein of "Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)", by Iñupiat people, with an Iñupiaq main character, about Iñupiat stories/myths. we've discussed it in the big guy but lead writer D., being 1/16 Chinese, perhapssss doesn't really have the same relationship to the Central Asian cultures the Kin is inspired by as someone who is Buryat, or white/Buryat (like artemy), would have.

but at this core, i don't think patho wants to full represent the people it's inspired by. it's a story. it's interested in making a story. to me it appears it's interested in making associations and parallels, maybe even homages?, but never actual direct correlations or representation (which itself can be another discussion. the kin is obviously central asian, from central-asian inspirations: how much of it can be seen as representation? how much of it as appropriation?) it makes up fake people for its fake town dealing with its fake illness. all of those have foundations, have obvious, legible roots, but they're not the same, and i'd argue it's... more disrespectful pretending the kin is 100% [ethnicity] (because. uh. [70 pages document about the mistreatment of the Kin])

(i also think this... """blurred line"""... allows for a... in-game and out-of-game [esp. fandom] a certain like. distance. or maybe suspension of disbelief. about the racism. like "oh, they're not a real culture, therefore i'm not showing Actually Racist(tm) biases when i depict members of the Kin as engaging in ritualistic sexual abuse, as being sexually violating or violent,..., because they're Not Real, so it's okay" which is. methinks somewhat braindead take. seen with my two eyes against my will to be fair)

tldr

An Imaginary People that's Not Real while taking from obvious inspirations because that's what you do when you write a story; you make shit up, especially if you plan on getting quirky wit it in ways no Actual Culture is because you're putting. Worms and the living beating Heart under the town and a Tower that defies the laws of physics (fake and gay?) and nobody.. has those. + it'd be way weirder if those women you're killing and making sexualize themselves were meant to be Real Ethnicity. i'd argue that'd be worse. so yeah. imagined. HOWEVERRRRRR[1][2][3][4][5]

[akirakirxaa]

My saturday TTRPG group is going to be playing Legend of the Five Rings, so I decided to use my gposing abilities for good by making my character with them. I've yet to name her but she's in the Unicorn clan from the Utaku family.

[ratmanwalking]

Sunny weather gets me feeling like I'm possessed by a wild horse

[good-night-space-kid]

I don’t think people realize just how unpopulated most of the Great Plains actually are. There’s a 115 mile stretch between Bismarck, North Dakota and Mobridge, South Dakota where you literally cannot cross the Missouri River. There’s really only three cities of any size on I-94 through the entire state of North Dakota. Everything else you pass has a gas station and <1000 people. It’s the best.

[tovaicas]

btw re: my opinions on StB, I kinda tapped out on caring abt it at the ‘gosetsu fails to understand the concept of trans people, how funny heehee haha’ scene and imo it didn’t really get much better from there, so it’s smth I rip apart particularly scathingly bc some of it’s choices actively make me angry

[prokopetz]

Something I love about The Far Roofs is how much of a swerve its premise is if you're coming to it uninitiated.

Okay, so there's these talking rats with a culture of swashbuckling heroism – basic Redwall/Reepicheep stuff.

Also, there's a magical realm called the Far Roofs which exists above every human community, and that's where the rats go adventuring; a little weird, but you can see the precedents in popular fiction. It's like wainscot fantasy taken to its logical-yet-absurd conclusion.

By default, the game wants you to play as a fictionalised version of your (presumably human!) self and go up onto the Far Roofs to have adventures with the rats. All right, now it's coming together: it's like isekai fantasy meets The Muppet Show, with you as the obligatory human character, right?

Then we get to the nature of those adventures: the rats have this whole culture built around questing against beings they call "the Mysteries" – beasties with names like Harpy and Goblin and Unicorn. So basically it's a bunch of muppety rats on the roofs fighting Dungeons & Dragons monsters, and you go up and help them do it. Great.

And then you get to what the Mysteries are actually like, and... well, I'm going to let the following excerpt carry the weight here. (This particular bit of text also appears in a previously published work by the same author, so I'm not giving anything away that's still under wraps.)

Unicorn, which is named Numinous, dwells three steps away and beyond the world, but most often in the Farthest Roofs, where the Steppes of the Sky come down to touch the Vast and Earthen Court. There it is stepping upwards from the world, as it has always been stepping upwards from the world, caught in a moment of transcendent glory that does not complete. It simply is. Melanthios heard the footsteps of Unicorn. Melanthios heard the ringing of Unicorn’s bells. So Melanthios chased Unicorn off to the Farthest Roofs, and Melanthios did not return. Anton and Karel, who were his sons, were wiser than their father. They heard the bells but they did not follow. Instead, they memorized the scent. They gathered swords, and ropes, and nets, and they went out. They brought food and water and all manner of gear. They clung to the roofs with all four feet wheresoever after Unicorn they went. It proved no good. Anton looked up, and Karel to his brother. The world came down— That’s what Karel said. He had time to look away. He had time to bury his head in his paws. He did not see the fullness of Unicorn’s presence. He only saw Anton his brother become unreal. In the light of the moment of the Unicorn, Anton became as a paper figure in the fire. His reality burned out. His shadow seared into the roofs behind him. Where he’d stood, for just a moment, the Steppes of the Sky came down to touch the Vast and Earthen Court; and Anton was gone away. So Karel ran and Karel ran and Karel ran from the Unicorn; and all his life, he envied but was more fortunate than his brother.

These are gods. You're going up there to kill God.

Like, it's still silly wainscot fantasy with funny talking rats, but there's that tension. It's like if Fraggle Rock occasionally took a hard turn to serious cosmic horror – Lord Dunsany by way of Jim Henson – and that tonal juxtaposition was treated as something unremarkable.

Basically what I'm saying is go back The Far Roofs.

[wanderingokali]

A species of blep from cold steppes. Like most species of furred tetrapods, it keeps its young in a pouch for months until they are hardy enough to run about and eat solid food. It eats lichens, roots and mosses primarily, but is an opportunistic scavenger if those prove scarce. It lives in groups of variable sizes, with complex familial dynamics, but these groups can be spread out over great distances; they communicate by loud bellows that cover long distances despite great winds.

[jeannereames]

Sharing in case there are grad students or other young scholars interested. Outside my wheelhouse, but I'd be very interested in at least hearing/reading the papers, if any are on Zoom. (In person conference in Paris)

Not the updated deadline for abstracts. You got a month (posting this on 5/31/23).

[judasvibe]

finding a name for castiel's hypothetical daemon is so hard like it HAS to be an ancient name, it has to predate the christian era.... and not mean something like 'wife-of' or 'cute and pretty' because this is castiel we're talking about here....

[annelidist]

consistently one of the most interesting things to me about the bachelor is this: he is a mystic. he doesn't admit it, of course, not for one instant. daniil dankovsky positions himself against the world as the rationalist, the empiricist, the reasonable man. he doesn't believe in steppe man-eaters or little girls who talk to ghosts or mistresses or taglurs or foci or great slumbering bulls beneath the world. all of that is nonsense. backwater superstition. worthless as soil. what he does believe, starkly, shamelessly, as if unaware of the naked wizardry of the thing, is that he can cure death. this is the first fact the player learns about him and yet it's so easy to forget, so easy to let him wear his reasonable mask, as if he isn't as mad as an alchemist. i think, in the end, that's why he can walk the inner stair of the polyhedron, see the magic lantern: because the bachelor already believes in the impossible and the eternal, deeply, beyond question.

[thagomizersshow]

I've seen a few people on my steppe post struggling to decipher what's going on in this photo:

This is a displaying male great bustard and they normally look like this:

They're also probably the heaviest flying birds, out weighing swans and condors. The biggest specimens are found in Manchuria and can be heavier than your average kindergartener.

[darktripz]

WINDSWEPT - The Great Cold Steppe & WINDSWEPT - The Onlooker

DRUDKH - Microcosmos & DRUDKH - Лебединий Шлях (The Swan Road)