To me, Vinga comes across precisely as a 'vehicle for different
>values', a way for sensitive, contemporary creators to inject
>sensitive, contemporary values into the Orlanthi. However, why should
>the Orlanthi be so sensitive? The whole elaboration of Ernalda and
>the creation of a Vinga certainly gives a much greater, more
>interesting and empowered female voice. Vinga is especially multi-
>purpose, spearing enemies, rescuing orphans, saving the day when
>those silly men screw up. It feels like mythic positive
>discrimination; it may well have its place, but I would rather a
>more 'warts and all' female deity as standard bearer, one who has
>trouble asserting her place in Orlanthi society, one who screws up as
>often as everyone else.
>Please don't take this as a personal attack, but for me, Vinga is a
>little too shiny, a little too self-consciously written to redress a
>(real) imbalance.
Mark, it wouldn't worry me if it *was* a personal attack.
Being the list's token anthro, I should applaud any attempt at reflexivity. I just wish Jeff and Greg would engage in it a bit more.
Ok: self-reflexivity: I started my working life in Australia's Equal Opportunity Bureau. Between that and a growing fascination with myth and culture fueled in a large way by you-know-what, I ended up in anthropology, thereby ruining forever my chances of a real career or invitations to the better sorts of parties. I live in a house *filled* with images and statues of goddesses, especially Indian and Tibetan goddesses. My red-headed partner is an Eclectic Atheist Wiccan of considerable insight and inner strength, not to mention having little toleration for fluffies, fundos or sexists of any denomination. Do these influence my view of Vinga? Of course they do!
Is the cult writeup a little too good to be true, a bit of fantasy positive discrimination? Yeah, I can accept that. There's a lot of the irrepressible anime teen heroine in the Vinga of our myth, just as the Thunder Brothers owe as much to Warner Brothers cartoons as to Snorri and the Vedas. My own reservation is that as a player cult Vinga gives too much access to rune goodies: she is a power gamer's delight.
But if you look at the fiction about Vingans (as opposed to the myths about Vinga), from Jane, myself and others, you see a different picture. The dark side, the despair, the cost, is never far away. The warts are there. But that's the nature of player characters and literary creations - they develop into multi-dimensional people. In our home campaign arc, Cradledaughter the Vingan goes mad and starts murdering key allies (including Redwheel). It all gets very dark.
This is probably a good time to bring up Jeff's 'Red Sonja' disparagement. First up, Glorantha is bricolage. That's a mythological term from Claude Levi-Strauss. It's a French word for 'junk': it means that we make our myths from whatever bits of popular culture we find lying around. Everything in Glorantha has been nicked or borrowed from somewhere else, but often changed into something unique: Vinga is no different. And given Jeff's present obviously jet-lagged state, I'd rather have a conversation with Pam Carlson directly than with Jeff's memory. Pam is very singular woman, so I'm sure she said *something* along those lines. :)
The red hair is from Greg. At first, it was all we had to go on. Then Alison, Jane, David D, Bruce Ferrie, myself and others got to work and created between us a GAG Vinga that endured quite happily until Storm Tribe, and I tried to pay full respect to the ancestors in that write up. Whether Greg had Red Sonja in mind I don't know: pheomelanin can connote a lot of things. My own first association was with Boudica. The Celts associated red haired women with the war goddeses: that's more likely to be Greg's inspiration than any direct borrowing from Howard.
is Vinga really a Red Sonja rip-off? I certainly don't see it. RS is your classic male fantasy view of woman, which is exactly the problem we're all in such a lather about. All the Vingans I've come across have been sensibly dressed. One of the nice things about Glorantha is that it doesn't do chain mail bikinis. Any more.
> > How correct is my suspicion that over the last ten years Glorantha
>has
> > become an increasingly masculinist, conservative, essentialist and
>lets
> > face it sexist place to roleplay?
>I'm curious -- could you expand on this? I'm wondering what makes you
>say this.
Partially a rhetorical flourish, though I do think its something to think about. Glorantha is a conservative world in lots of ways: that's the nature of mythic rationales, and is neither here nor there. Myth is conservative, the answer is in the past and in the way things have always been. (All praise the Red Goddess for ripping into that one). The women in my gaming groups lost interest in Glorantha long ago, but that's hardly surprising either. Fantasy tends to be masculinist: fact of life. The essentialism coming through in Greg's construction of Heortling society does give me more cause for thought, and it seems, a lot of other people as well. There's apparently some indefinable female and male 'essence' that stops most women doing 'male' type things and men doing 'womanly' things: its hard to construe this as anything but neanderthal, but then I don't think Greg has ever been questioned directly about it. That's why I'm pulling together a more polite vinga essay as a package. If he has literary or mythic rationales, I'd be fascinated to learn what they are.
Personally, I mostly ignore the more elaborate Heortling gender constructs and restrictions. Cults are open to everyone, the cult mix is pretty much the same as in published Glorantha purely for cultural reasons: player characters are by definition extraordinary and unique, and sexual preferences are between a player and his or her bed straw.
> > Out of interest, where are the good bits for women in Glorantha?
>Are there
> > any?
>
>I would have thought that the Lunar Way does offer such, and now
>explicitly with ILH-2 where iot has largely been implicit before.
>Sure, the Dara Happans are a rigid bunch of sexist wankers, but one
>of the fascinating aspects of the Lunar story is precisely how their
>Way becomes a battleground with the 'host' culture, as DH influences
>seek to rehape the Lunar faith and different Lunar strands begin to
>undermine DH certitudes.
Yes. Glad to hear it. To be honest, I don't think I'm across the recent Lunar stuff. Not out of disinterest: I'm not across much of the recent *orlanthi* stuff, believe it or not.
And the Darra Happan experience taught us all the fun to be had in subverting the dominant paradigm when its as crass and rigid as the one portrayed. MOB was a master in poking fun at Yelmic pomposity. We have perfect freedom to do the same with the sillier and more outrageos bits of the Orlanthi set up of course, though the overall tone seems to be much more reverential. Bollocks to that.
There's a balance between cultural immersion and experiencing difference on the one hand, and applying gamer imperatives of optimism, genre fixes and our all-important myth of purposeful action on the other. The mix is up to each campaign.
Cheers
Jimbo
BTW. I'm slightly peezed that **no one** noticed that my first post in this thread contained five Glorantha bingo ploys, the words 'yurt', 'duck', 'yogurt' and 'excoriate', and that it contributed in a meaningful way an ongoing list topic. That's a BINGO! to me. Do I get a life now?
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