creature/creator

Reclamation, not Imitation

Pachucos are male members of a counterculture that emerged in El Paso, Texas, in the late 1930s. Pachucos are associated with zoot suit fashion, jump blues, jazz and swing music, a distinct dialect known as caló, and self-empowerment in rejecting assimilation into Anglo- American society.

JAR (Joel Arthur Rosenthal) sheep head hair clip

Homo homini lupus

where will you go next?

NEW CREATURES FROM 'THE VOID'.

MIMIC: A shy creature, it flat-out refuses to fight, preferring scare tactics via inflation of the chest while sitting upright, relying on its markings to scare off the opponent. Otherwise, it flees.

WRITHING: A gentle giant, it only attacks if provoked, and will only want one thing: The target's DEATH. If the provoker manages to get away, it will trample the grounds in a rage until finally calming down and returning to its docile state. It will, however, hold a grudge for eternity... and it NEVER forgets a face.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

If it's for an RPG, its purpose is to support the game, and that means all sorts of worldbuilding atrocities and crimes against verisimilitude are allowed, and indeed welcome, as long as they facilitate gameplay. (Standard fantasy examples: universal Common language and universal currency. Doesn't make sense but makes the story go, roll with it).

If it's for a more or less serious attempt at speculative fiction, I want it to make sense, and to be consistent and believable within the framework of its own assumptions.