Pinball's Stuff

Emails between the Hugo Awards admin team last year were leaked and turns out the American & Canadian members willingly went through all the finalists and removed those of us who they thought might offend China.

The leaked emails

The full exposé

Anon: I’m not sure if you’ve touched on this before, but what are your thoughts on shoes for centaurs? Would they have classic horseshoes or would they wear booties that they can put on as needed? I adore all your posts, they give me so much inspiration!!

Ok I definitely have a few thoughts about shoeing centaurs!

In general I think centaurs definitely use horseshoes as we know them, but it's not nearly as common as how we shoe our own horses. Nailed on metal shoes are a pretty long term solution that require specialized maintenance, but they can't really be beat for protection and durability. So they're kinda like steel toed boots, mostly used by those with physically demanding jobs in rough terrain and punks. For shoe-inclined cultures like the merchants, sandals with hardened leather or wooden full foot soles are the preferred hoof-gear for the average taur as they can be easily customized and used to protect tender frogs or support healing cracks with medical shoes available to correct issues in addition to just looking so fashionable and most importantly- relatively easy to take off at the end of the day. Slippers are comfortable lightwear, leather sleeves that are maybe hardened on the bottom but only really good for tooling around town on cobbled streets, soft earth, or in a house or business. Mule shoes are called so because they make the hoof tall and narrow like a donkey's hoof and are pure fashion. Basically centaur clog heels, they require a precise custom fit to wear properly and usually greatly restrict mobility and so are a mark of high-society. Though the most extreme versions are worn at festivals by specially trained dancers, sometimes with sparking metal embedded in the bottom for extra flash. These are usually attached to nails in the hoof like metal shoes to try and keep broken legs to a minimum.

Riders in particular don't tend to wear any shoes at all, preferring to go barefoot to avoid the fuss and maintenance of any sort of footgear with their active lifestyles. Their culture in particular does not have much in the way of metallurgy and certainly not anything in the realm of infrastructure necessary to maintain regular shoeing. Pretty much the only shoes they wear are war shoes, with spikes on the bottom to really make infantry rethink getting close on the battlefield. But those are pretty rare, it's just not worth the expense and difficulty of ensuring you have a well-trained farrier on top of expensive iron in their culture. But of course there's always a few bigwigs willing to take the expense, particularly in the bigger herd-families who range further south near the Merchant city-states and have a passionate scion who can be encouraged to learn the practice and supported in their work!

The merchant culture on the other hand has the built in metal-heavy culture and infrastructure built in given their close relationship with dwarves so shoeing is a pretty common and easy practice.