(08-01-2015, 06:09 PM)C'kayah Wrote: Honestly, I think it's the attempt to cast all of this into a modern, western "liberal vs conservative" thing that's the problem here.
Gridania isn't conservative because of Gridanian racism, nor because of the state-sponsored religion.
It's not liberal because it's led by a woman or because of the strong system of socialized care for Gridanians.
It simply is the way it is. You can call it one or the other to make it easy to understand the culture, but you're really missing out on the complexity of it if you simply use some sort of conservative-vs-liberal axis as your way of understanding them. And you're certainly setting yourself up for some interesting errors if you attempt to use that conservative-vs-liberal axis to predict the other ways that people from that society might respond.
(08-01-2015, 06:40 PM)LiadansWhisper Wrote:(08-01-2015, 05:33 PM)hauntmedoitagain Wrote: Eorzea is not a conservative place outside of racial issues, though.
Twelveswood, La Noscea and Thanalan? All ruled by competent women. Limsa has a notable lesbian pirate bar. One of the most beloved side quests involves a crossdressing detective and many others feature openly LGBT characters.
We're dealing with a sexually liberated game world with racial conflict holdovers. To consider Hydaelyn more liberal than our own planet understates the matter greatly.
If you want to try and justify IC racism that's fine, but please, at least try to do it from a logical perspective.
Equating real world "conservatism" with conservatism in a culture is a bit silly.
[snip]
Edited to Add: And for clarification, what I mean by "attempting to equate real world "conservatism" with conservatism in a culture is...this has nothing to do with modern day politics or political talking points. Cultures are by nature conservative. They want to remain as they are. They cling to values that have sustained them when they encounter different cultures. This is how cultures work.
In the context of Eorzea, we have a lot of very traditional (from our world perspective) behavior mixed with very liberal (again, from our world behavior) mores and values. Xenophobia actually makes perfect sense when outsiders are constantly causing the forest to eat people. Xenophobia makes sense when you are living in a meritocracy that values gold and success over all else, and every newcomer is a potential threat. Xenophobia makes sense when you are part of an embattled religion that believes that any difference of opinion or thought is heresy, and will thus bring down your entire civilization. The only city that isn't really xenophobic or necessarily racist is Limsa Lominsa, but it's also a city founded by pirates of all races. So..yeah.
^This, this, THIS. These two posts pretty much say it all.
Y'know... Some of the commentary being made in this thread (and a couple of others) is going right back to that RP pet peeve of mine I can't stand -- the assumption that because something works a certain way in real life or makes sense for a certain group of people/location/set of circumstances in real life, that it MUST be how things work in this FICTIONAL setting! Yeah... no. We don't determine that. That's not how things work.
Do you have to like everything that goes on in Eorzean culture? Of course not!
Can you work around those things or ignore them? (And avoid RP with characters that support said ideals?) Absolutely!
But should you try to warp a fictional world and its lore-- that you didn't create --to your personal, pristine view of what does or doesn't make sense just because you don't like it or just because that's what you think seems most logical?
...If that's what you want to do on your own time within your own RP circle, have a blast. But don't present it like it's fact, or the most obvious train of thought anyone else should be having here. Because it's not.
