Paige's Ponderings

garak tells himself that this is Fine, even though julian hasn’t bothered to learn kardasi. in the five years they’ve known each other. even though julian and martok are laughing and joking together in the runabout back. it’s good to know more languages, of course. what is not Fine is julian insisting from that point on that they only read klingon stories for their book club. ”they’re so engaging”, julian says. ”so romantic and muti-facetted! so much better that that last play you forced on me-”

Shen Yuan in the not-too-distant future plays an immersive virtual reality MMO, a revolutionary one of its kind that offers unprecedented customization options, called YGGDRASIL. While the basic game inclines itself most strongly to western fantasy TTRPG tropes, it's so flexible that players can create a wide range of fantasy archetypes.

Shen Yuan ended up falling in with, and eventually taking over, a guild that was focused on xianxia tropes and workshopping character classes and race types to create them. The guild had pretty strict rules on what players could do racially and aesthetically to fit in -- stuff like secret dragons and demons and aesthetically-swapped paladins were in, elves were allowed as long as the character lore steered more towards nature spirits and less towards tolkien, and undead were taken on a case-by-case basis.

Over the course of several years, the Cang Qiong guild rose to prominence on their server as one of the strongest good-aligned roleplay groups, to the point of even having some dedicated copycats and rivals. The original twelve founding members each built a different segment of the guild's base, styling it as a mountain range with twelve peaks, and a lot of energy was poured into constructing NPCs to defend the peaks from the frequent incursions of rival player factions.

But over time, other games like YGGDRASIL started to appear and pulled players in. Some were more complementary to the eastern fantasy genre, some had better immersive features or superior tech, more hype, and etc. Other plays began to filter out as different aspects of their lives took over and they started families, got too busy with work, found other hobbies, and so on.

Twelve years after its launch, YGGDRASIL announced rather unceremoniously that it would be shutting the game down, with everything on it destined for the deletion bin. By then, the only players left in Cang Qiong guild were Shen Yuan and Xiang Fei, the latter only ever logging on occasionally to goof around and build extra NPCs for his novel ideas, while Shen Yuan kept maintaining the guild out of nostalgia and a firm belief that the game would be getting some kind of renewed interest any day now.

Accordingly, Shen Yuan was pissed to learn it was just going to be shut down, without even any word of a possible YGGDRASIL 2 or if players would get any bonuses for carrying over their accounts.

Shen Yuan decides to stay online until the last possible moment as the server goes dark. Xiang Fei joins him and nearly has to log off to go to sleep and get up in time for work in the morning, but decides to tough it out for his bro. As Shen Yuan laments, the two gather up all the major NPCs in the sect, head for the peak lords hall on Cang Qiong, and arrange the "Peak Lord" NPCs around the table with them. The NPCs can't talk, but each was styled as the lord and defender of a different peak and as brethren of a united sect, deferring only to their ancestral masters and creators, the godlike players of the setting.

Shen Yuan also insists on bringing along Luo Binghe, the secret demon emperor and trump card for the sect's defenses. Binghe was, in Shen Yuan's opinion, the pinnacle of Xiang Fei's creativity. Though with the appearance of a humble (read: ridiculously beautiful) disciple, in reality Binghe was a top level max skill demon lord, who had taken so many resources and quests to bulk out that it was ridiculous. His programming was fussy, to the point where he had once gone on a rampage and wiped out the actual guild players -- sort of the last interesting thing to have happened before another more popular game was released, and their guild activity plummeted.

Xiang Fei had often teased Shen Yuan about liking Binghe so much, especially since, in his opinion, he was a less interesting secret demon than the one defending his home peak of An Ding. As a final gesture, Xiang Fei reprograms Binghe to be a disciple of Qing Jing (Shen Yuan's peak) in specific, and chuckling to himself deletes the line about him being a playboy and replaces it with a line that says he's madly in love with Shen Qingqiu (SY's avatar).

As the players and their NPCs sit around the table, the game servers go dark. Shen Yuan closes his eyes, braces for the forced log-out...

Then feels himself draw a lungful of cool mountain air, instead.

Ensue Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua freaking out as they realize that they've apparently transmigrated into some sort of reality based on their game. At first the other "Peak Lords" (the NPCs who have suddenly come to life) are confused as to why their sect brothers are acting so erratically, but then they go out and discover that their entire mountain range has seemingly been displaced from its geographical location in YGGDRASIL, to some unfamiliar spot in a totally different world.

Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua double freak out because not only have they somehow become real in the context of the game, they've also brought their mountain range wholesale to yet another fantasy world?!

Shang Qinghua takes some of the other peak lords and goes to check on the actual peaks, to confirm if the other NPCs have come to life and that everything from the guild has made the inexplicable transfer. Shen Qingqiu sets out to check the surrounding area, while tentatively agreeing to let Liu Qingge, Yue Qingyuan, and Qi Qingqi go check in other directions. Luo Binghe ends up insisting on accompanying him, much to Shen Qingqiu's bewilderment, but he just ends up going with it. Outside the unfamiliar world is in its night cycle. Most of the exterior wards are still functional, although they've lost some of the alert arrays from the further outposts. Shen Qingqiu flies up for as high of an aerial view as he can get, surveying the situation, and musing that it really does seem that they've been transported to a totally new world. Also, using all his cool cultivator/class abilities is even more exciting in the flesh.

Anyway, Shen Qingqiu warns Luo Binghe that this unknown world could also contain unknowable threats, they don't know how their respective abilities would stack up here, etc etc, and Luo Binghe privately vows to bring this world to heel and lay its treasures safely at his shizun's feet.

Additional thoughts under the cut:

Loving the idea of it being mid-canon. Wei Wuxian is just like hey. Where did. Why's there...? And yet he can't just ask because obviously anyone should know the deal about the Mysterious Mountain of Cultivators that appeared sometime in the years he was dead.

And SY and Airplane do have to stay in their identities, yup! It would probably destabilize too much for the NPC characters who've newly spawned into actually being alive for them to try and add the additional layers to it, and who knows how they might react? They're all now very powerful cultivators, some even more powerful than Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua, so it's safer just to go along.

I think Shen Qingqiu's probably got no actual backstory that he settled on for himself, beyond a few sentences about being the Qing Jing peak lord and being important enough as a strategist and political player that even the sect leader defers to him on many matters. Then when everything becomes Real he somehow finds that he's Shen Jiu's twin brother and Yue Qingyuan defers to him because of trauma reasons, by some alchemy of the system trying to work out the most reasonable explanations.

she'll do anything she can to protect the world without hesitation, not doing so would be unthinkable, so she crosses boundaries and breaks her morals and contorts her soul and hurts some people to save a greater number of people. hurting people is difficult, but just letting the world freeze over when she has a chance to fix it is simply not an option, so she stores the guilt somewhere for safekeeping out-of-sight where she doesn't have to address it until she's done. if she felt all she was doing she'd crumple up and freeze forever, which would mean she would get less efficacious, and that's also not an option.

she's not a saint made of cold marble, she's not immune to the occasional mini power trip and she sometimes acts with the assurance that she already knows best without, yknow, actually checking if she really knows best first, but she gets no joy in cruelty for cruelty's sake. she gets carte blanche permission to commit any crime she wants for who knows how many years in a row and it never occurs to her to abuse that power for her own pleasure because for her that just wouldn't be pleasant. she'll bomb the antarctic without flinching then console her accomplice as he buckles under the remorse she is categorically not allowed to feel. she'll kidnap and conscript people into labor then make sure they never want for anything while they live in her domain. she'll see the prison sentence barreling ever towards her and never say a word about it. she'll give her friend the barest chance to say "yes" so that maybe he won't ever have to know that "no" isn't an option. it's her spark of hope, the mad idea that he'll be the first person to spare her a hard choice.

when she has to hurt him, it's the only thinkable choice available. she loves humanity too much to even consider lowering its chances, it would be the worst most selfish cruelty to not send him just because she doesn't want to, so she makes the arrangements and gives the orders and files the new guilt in that same ignorable dark corner. but when he goes down kicking and screaming and threatening and begging, when it's playing out right in front of her eyes, that she can't tuck away in time. it makes contact with her stupid heart and the sudden pang behind her ribs for the first time in years has her wishing with a kind of resentment that she could just make him agree. but she can't, obviously. she is neither ignorant nor stupid, she knows human nature, so she has to be right over being kind. towards him or towards herself.

just the ol' nine-to-five

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.

The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.

You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.

another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)

i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?