another odd question (altenative lifestyles)

[Carnage]

We aren't racist in zalanthas. We're specist.

Uh, Allanak vs. Tuluk? Seems like people are blatantly racist against people from opposite sides of the world, and I'd assume some are racist against tribals as well.

Biologically speaking, the sterile/fertile halfbreed/hybrid offspring is not a given, contrary to how specie may have been defined when you were in school. There are conditions where the female (yak-cow) is fertile, while the male is sterile; there are conditions where all offspring (beefalo, wolphin) are interfertile.

There's an exception to nearly every rule. And it's not a far fetched idea either that humans and elves are the same species. They may look a bit different, but so does a chihuahua and a golden retriever.

[Agent_137]

This is the semantics of biology, seriously, this isn't up for discussion. Some one go whump down their bio text book and read through the species section, post the answer, or go home.

[/thread]

[EvilRoeSlade]

Half-giants would be a separate species as they cannot interbreed and produce offspring...which has to do with fertility, not the fact that trying it would be like mating a St. Bernard to a Chihuahua.   :shock:

Please don't share IC sensitive information on the GDB.

I had fully intended to find that out IG.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I do beleive that Morrolan's information is fully accessible outside of the game and on the website, which typically conjures it as common knowledge, or, rather, common enough to be displayed here on the GBD.

[EvilRoeSlade]

Yeah, but now I don't have any excuse!

Bah, who needs one?

Bye.

[naatok]

I haven't seen a staff post on this one.  Perhaps I missed one.  Dunno.

In this one particular case, I WILL draw upon my OOC experience and say that AT THE VERY LEAST....rape is a crime of theft and would be dealt with as such in a society with laws against thievery, assault and murder....like most societies in Zalanthas.

It isn't that Zalanthans would be horrified by hearing about rape...they may quite possibly shrug their shoulders.  Many do so when they hear someone has been beaten unconscious, robbed or murdered.

Is rape a sexually 'deviant' behavior in Zalanthas?  Who the fuck cares?!  It falls under the category of assault and robbery and would be dealt with accordingly....regardless of individual thoughts on the matter.

Rape occurs in 'The Real World', in part, because rapists feel they can physically overpower, and mentally intimidate their victims.  I won't go into all the psychological ramifications of this here.  Sometimes the view is rooted in perceived differences between male/female..such as strengths and weaknesses...sometimes this is a view rooted in the fact that you have five or six trusty lads or lasses to back you up and you feel like humiliating someone because you have experienced humiliation and on some level, feel the person you're raping falls into the 'Ones Responsible' group.

Personally, I view rape as the unholiest of blasphemies.  Sexuality to me is a sacred event to be shared by consenting adults.  I like how my ancestors dealt with rapists.  It was viewed as a theft and an insult and rapists were treated like thieves....strangled and thrown into bogs as a sacrifice to the gods.

As for Zalanthas....ArmageddonMud is a game...but we are all real people.  Some people are VERY sensitive to the subject of rape.  My advice is that we all follow the clearly documented 'Consent' rules of this mud.  Beyond that, use common courtesy and fuck other people's pcs over as you would want them to fuck your pc over.....keeping in mind, of course, that in a world like Zalanthas....you're gonna get fucked over sooner or later!  :twisted:

Just a naughty monkey's two rotten bananas.

[joyofdiscord]

Well, since the other Homosexuality thread was locked with an invitation to add to an older one, and the keyword search turned this up (among about 3 other locked threads   ), and I'd just typed out this monstrous post, I thought I'd put it here, because my own hubris makes me think it might be thought-provoking it least.


WARNING: LONG RAMBLING POST AHEAD

Sexuality on Zalanthas has always seemed such a nebulous and particularly difficult concept to grasp from a "cross-cultural" sort of view where we have to put aside Earth prejudices, which are all we have.

In the case of tribal peoples, absolute high fertility from every single member might not be essential.  There are many examples of tribal or "primitive" peoples on Earth (living in extremely harsh climes) that take measures to limit their population, even including infanticide.  That seems to me just as fitting to Zalanthas' harsh world of limited resources as a "you have to have a lot of kids to keep going."  Gay men also wouldn't affect this, as few men can impregnate many women, and unless 90% of the tribes men were gay to cause inbreeding issues with so few fathers, there wouldn't be a problem.  Whatever percentage of exclusive lesbians might exist would probably be negligible.

It was also brought up in a Sexism thread, someone asserting that tribal peoples might be more sexist, which seemed to me as sort of an unconscious jab at real life non-Western peoples.  IMMs I belive weighed in to say that tribal peoples, along with everyone in the known world, are not sexist.  I don't think it makes any more sense to think that they would stigmatize homophobia, especially when the docs say that homosexuality is not stigmatized.

The "every char is different and my char has a good reason to be anti-gay, sexist, whatever" argument, I don't think holds up, because suddenly you WILL see a lot of Zalanthans with unlikely reasons that provoke them to feel uncomfortable around gays.  In contexts like this, too often, all it really means is every char is different in the same ways that people in real-life North America are different.  At that point, we might as well establish the elven cavalry unit.  

No matter how good a roleplayer someone is, we ALL bring a LOT of our real world cultural background into the game.  This is most evident in the posts with analagies to "common sense" or matters of etiquette when talking about Zalanthan norms and character behaviour.  Many of these common sense notions are lifted directly from North American cultural norms (Tavern Etiquette being a HUGE one, but it pops up everywhere).  They don't even apply outside of North America, as I've seen as I've dealt with some pretty heavy culture shock living in Mexico, and that's in an urban setting in a city with heavy, heavy international influence.  Other parts of the world would be a hundred times worse, and Zalanthas is another matter entirely.

Also, real-world behaviour is still very evident in PC-PC and PC-NPC sexual behaviour and tension.  Every time I've seen a sexual advance in the game, it was an aggressive male trying to get himself a female, and a female trying to judge if he was worthy and/or rebuff his advances.  I'm still new, granted, and I'm POSITIVE people play it the other way often, but I'd be surprised if the above situation wasn't much more common.  Also, jokes about sexuality that I've witnessed among PC's could have come right from a real life locker room, frat house, or coffee shop.

The exclusion of real-life prejudices from Zalanthas is, apart from a great way to take out the ugliness of the real world (and leave plenty of room for more INTERESTING ugliness appropriate to the game world), pretty appropriate to the game setting, IMO.  The common example of skin-color racism: doesn't exist on Zalanthas because there are ELVES which want to rip you off, and arbitrary designations like skin color don't make any sense to pursue.  I think this applies just as well to sexism and homophobia.  What kind of pampered Zalanthan, or helpless busybody are you playing that you can waste the effort to hate you some faggits?

In any case, some aspects of sexuality are inherent in many of our characters' relationships.  Some sort of vague consensus should be reached as to how some of things things would typically be handled in Zalanthas.  How, for example, would someone respond to an unwanted sexual advance?  Yes, yes, all characters are different, but I think one thing that should be the same across characters is that the sex of the advancer shouldn't make a difference in the response.  A gay guy winking at your straight male char should have the same effect as that unattractive woman winking at him.  This still won't fix the "most male chars are played by male players and male players are hornyand do most of the advances" issue, but it's a start anyway.

Personally, in all my MUDding years before Arm, I'd always played my characters pretty asexually.  Maybe that's bad RP, but I just didn't like bringing that aspect of the world into the game.  My former MUD had a period where it was infested with certain players and their alts designing and playing these complicated BDSM games in public view of others.  Later, spousal abuse situations were RPed, and all this left a very bad taste in the mouth of many players, including myself.  The Arm staff made an EXCELLENT decision in eliminating RL prejudices and warping Zalanthan sexuality to this end.And they did it without compromising the realism of the game world.  We as players shouldn't keep inventing "totally realistic and IC" reasons for our characters to bring in the ugly prejudices from the real world, especially when they are often patently absurd in a Zalanthan setting.  

In light of the great ambiguity as to how a Zalanthan would respond in a sexually charged situation, I've always played them pretty neutral, trying to talk about sex things the same way I might talk about cooking up travel cakes.  The impossibility of understanding the Zalanthan mind in this regard has made anything more than that feel like hopping that longneck onto a kank, because I'm either bringing in real life norms or going directly opposite them.

In the end, I think playing these situations out over and over again with a strong focus on preserving the integrity of the game world, not just following our own "common sense" RL instincts, is the only way to really learn how a Zalanthan might respond.  That means a concerted effort to view the sexes as equal, and if that proves impossible, a lot more cross-gender player chars to muddy the waters (even though I haven't played any here and admit not being sure I could do it).  I mean, really, if the sexes truly are equal, "acting like a real woman" shouldn't be a problem, because the only distinguishable difference would be the personal pronoun.  In fact, in a Zalanthan setting,I'd say that trying to "act like the other gender" to pass off your opposite gender character just means following real life gender stereotypes, and, yup, hopping the elf onto the kank.  The best possible thing a cross-gender character could do is act exactly like the player would imagine a same-gender character with a similar personality doing.

Besides, attempts at passing off opposite gender characters are often laughably obvious.  It was very easy to distinguish that the female characters on other MUDs who giggled, curtseyed, played with their hair, and all manner of things were clearly men in real life.  Actual female characters tended to behave like real women, that is like normal people with actual developed personalities besides giggling and "acting like a woman."  On Zalanthas, the efforts are bound to be much more sophisticated, but are they really appropriate to the game world?

Hey, maybe Zalanthans should have no gender, and could reproduce with any one other person.  (Because asexual reproduction or spawning makes evolution SLOOOOOW).  That is a very extreme measure, though, as we'd have to refer to ourselves as "it" or something.  (Colored text means it's not a serious proposition.)