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History and the mutilation thereof.
Feb. 26th, 2002 10:48 amBlah. I was gonna write something else here but it wasn't going anywhere. Lemme start over.
Part of the joy of playing characters in RPGs, for me, is getting cozy and familiar with stuff I didn't know before. The same goes for writing characters in stories or books. Various characters have led me into the worlds of police procedure, Schutzhund training, ice hockey, metallurgy, brewing and distilling, BSL4 viruses, classical violin, woodworking, and all kinds of other places. (From a purely research point of view, I should point out, with the exception of violin - I took lessons for a while until they got too expensive, just because violins suddenly seemed cool.) The current area of Stuff I Didn't Know Before is Chinese culture and history, thanks to my Ashes character, Fang. He's an opera performer, after all, and he's been steeped in it since he was six years old. He might not be much in the way of mathematics - all right, he *wasn't* much in the way of mathematics before roughly a third of the population of the MUSH seemed to decide to take him under their collective wing to get ready for the GED - but by damn, he knows his own culture. Which means that, in order to get him right, I need to as well.
The more I read these days, the more I become acutely aware that I was right my freshling year at college. I'd just signed up for a course in Asian medicine, and the teacher gave us some basic history the first few days of the class. I remember walking outside after one of these classes and suddenly yelling "NOBODY EVER TAUGHT ME ANYTHING!". Up until then, China's history basically seemed to jump from 'oo, they invented gunpowder' straight to the Opium War, and from there it jumped again to Chiang Kai-Shek, and then Chairman Mao, and then Richard Nixon, and then Tiananmen Square. I went to good schools, and this was all I got. AAARGH! I mean, the schools went to more trouble to teach me about the damn Babylonians, and the Babylonians were dead!
Anyway. The point is that as the result of this realization in college, I started paying more attention to the stuff I could find on Asian culture and history. I had a brief Nipponophile phase - not so much the result of anime/manga fondness as the result of really neat pictures in the iaido, kyudo, and other Japanese sections of Paul Crompton's Complete Guide to the Martial Arts - but eventually that faded. (Even Battle Angel Alita can only sustain fascination for so long.) Thanks to the anthropology courses I took that focused on Asia, I managed to pick up a good dose of history by osmosis. Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe 2 didn't hurt either, and neither did my RL friend Jeff's running a Feng Shui game for nearly a year. That led into both fiction and history, and that led to Hsiang Ho in the VicMage game run by Cadhla, and that led to Fang...
If VicMage has taught me one thing, it's that someone who merely butchers history, literature, and culture because they don't know it gives me toothaches, but someone who knows history/lit/culture, slashes it to ribbons, and then weaves the pieces into a new and terrifying whole that only distantly resembles the original is a joy to behold. You can't really dissect it until you know it, and once you do know it, you become that much scarier. Both to the people who have no clue about the original stuff, who're surrounded by detail that scares them, and to the people who do know, who're probably blinking and wailing 'noooooo!'.
I'm going to be running the Asian branch of the VicMage game, once the current crew is done with their adventures. This should be *cracks knuckles* fun.
Today's pulp survival tip is #145: Boxes that give off an eerie supernatural light when opened, probably shouldn't be opened. That goes double for boxes that give off eerie supernatural light through cracks.
Part of the joy of playing characters in RPGs, for me, is getting cozy and familiar with stuff I didn't know before. The same goes for writing characters in stories or books. Various characters have led me into the worlds of police procedure, Schutzhund training, ice hockey, metallurgy, brewing and distilling, BSL4 viruses, classical violin, woodworking, and all kinds of other places. (From a purely research point of view, I should point out, with the exception of violin - I took lessons for a while until they got too expensive, just because violins suddenly seemed cool.) The current area of Stuff I Didn't Know Before is Chinese culture and history, thanks to my Ashes character, Fang. He's an opera performer, after all, and he's been steeped in it since he was six years old. He might not be much in the way of mathematics - all right, he *wasn't* much in the way of mathematics before roughly a third of the population of the MUSH seemed to decide to take him under their collective wing to get ready for the GED - but by damn, he knows his own culture. Which means that, in order to get him right, I need to as well.
The more I read these days, the more I become acutely aware that I was right my freshling year at college. I'd just signed up for a course in Asian medicine, and the teacher gave us some basic history the first few days of the class. I remember walking outside after one of these classes and suddenly yelling "NOBODY EVER TAUGHT ME ANYTHING!". Up until then, China's history basically seemed to jump from 'oo, they invented gunpowder' straight to the Opium War, and from there it jumped again to Chiang Kai-Shek, and then Chairman Mao, and then Richard Nixon, and then Tiananmen Square. I went to good schools, and this was all I got. AAARGH! I mean, the schools went to more trouble to teach me about the damn Babylonians, and the Babylonians were dead!
Anyway. The point is that as the result of this realization in college, I started paying more attention to the stuff I could find on Asian culture and history. I had a brief Nipponophile phase - not so much the result of anime/manga fondness as the result of really neat pictures in the iaido, kyudo, and other Japanese sections of Paul Crompton's Complete Guide to the Martial Arts - but eventually that faded. (Even Battle Angel Alita can only sustain fascination for so long.) Thanks to the anthropology courses I took that focused on Asia, I managed to pick up a good dose of history by osmosis. Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe 2 didn't hurt either, and neither did my RL friend Jeff's running a Feng Shui game for nearly a year. That led into both fiction and history, and that led to Hsiang Ho in the VicMage game run by Cadhla, and that led to Fang...
If VicMage has taught me one thing, it's that someone who merely butchers history, literature, and culture because they don't know it gives me toothaches, but someone who knows history/lit/culture, slashes it to ribbons, and then weaves the pieces into a new and terrifying whole that only distantly resembles the original is a joy to behold. You can't really dissect it until you know it, and once you do know it, you become that much scarier. Both to the people who have no clue about the original stuff, who're surrounded by detail that scares them, and to the people who do know, who're probably blinking and wailing 'noooooo!'.
I'm going to be running the Asian branch of the VicMage game, once the current crew is done with their adventures. This should be *cracks knuckles* fun.
Today's pulp survival tip is #145: Boxes that give off an eerie supernatural light when opened, probably shouldn't be opened. That goes double for boxes that give off eerie supernatural light through cracks.
