> > >These limitations are worth stating explictly.
> > Among them are
> > >Glorantha's simplistic and unreflexive view of
> > religion (albeit, one
> > >shared by many western roleplaying games), its
> > over-reliance on an
> > >universalistic and discredited model of mythology
> > (Campbell) that denies
> > >much of what is interesting about real
> mythological processes, its
> > >creeping essentialism, gender bias, and deeply
> > conservative 'boys own' seventies masculism.
Lev:
> I must say I reject this paragraph in toto.
I'd been staring at it and wondering about it, too. It isn't often I disagree with John.
> Glorantha
> hardly has a "simplistic and unreflexive" view of
> religion, Campbell's model of mythology is hardly
> discredited,
Well.... to someone who studies this sort of thing "for real", I can believe that Campbell was trumped by later works the way Newton was trumped by Einstein. Though since I never really swallowed Campbell in the first place, I'm not all that bothered, and in any case, the apple still falls downwards often enough that I'm not changing harvesting methods just yet.
> and in comparison to other games and
> settings the accusations of gender bias,
> conservatism
> and "'boys own' seventies masculism" are quite
> asinine.
That was the bit that really struck me. It's acquired
gender bias in the last few years, as a new and very
annoying idea. But back when I started playing:
Orlanth accepted anyone who could breath air, half the
PCs I knew were female, as were the sample NPCs (and
no, they weren't all healers), and the ONE
male-dominated culture (the Sundomers) was
a) there to be laughed at for their extreme gender
bias
b) considerably LESS biased than Britain at the time.
Vega got into the army. I'd have been rejected simply
for being female.
That was half the reason for picking Glorantha as a universe to play in - because most of the cultures WEREN'T based on the assumptions of thousands of years of male-domination, they were comparatively sane!
Now, things are changing. How anyone can imagine they can make major changes to societies and cults and still claim to be in the same universe is beyond me, when they know perfectly well they're contradicting known facts to do so, but there's been a slide over the last few years as people try to project their WASP insecurities onto a universe that didn't need them. And then they try to claim it was always like that... have they stolen John's memory, too?
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