ROTFL! SHALL (Smacking Head Against Laptop Laughing)!
This conjured up an image of something like Late Pseudo-Ignesian Lutheranism, manifested as some poor porn star in a skimpy outfit and too much makeup, brought before Greg bedecked as your usual Xena villain, sitting on a heap of rugs in a smelly yurt, flanked by people who look suspsicously similar to List Luminaries. Greg: "And now, you will DANCE for me!"
ROTFL! As to the questions of pseudo-Japanese images in Glorantha... Don't you worry, Japanese gentlemen: It's because they find them cool that those pesky gaijins put in "samurajs" and "ninjas" whereever they invent a pseudo-Oriental place for a fantasy campaign. Its a form of admiration. It might be stereotypical, but what the heck. I've resigned that the only vestiges of the culture of _my_ country (Sweden) are guys with horned helmets who drink a lot of beer and go a-viking. Heck, if they could at least have used Gustavus Adolphus' style of swashbuckling conquerors once... But the reason is, of course, that Viking Berserkers are Cool. But trite. :-)
(Off-topic: Have you seen the GURPS book Alternate Earths, where several alternate realities are presented as campaign ideas? In one of them, the two big competitors for world domination are the democratic, freedom-loving Japanese on one hand, and the tyrannical, bureaucratic Swedish empire on the other. Both alternate versions of late 20th-century countries are refreshingly free from stereotypes, and the writer seems to have a more than ordinarily accurate idea of their history. Comes highly recommended to any uchroniaphiles out there.)
I have much to say on what Greg and Glorantha has done to my subcreation skills (absoulutely loverly piece by Anthropowanking John Hughes, btw) but not enough time at the moment... later...
Erik Sieurin,
currently writing his master's thesis and working full-time as a teacher at the same time, while
trying to produce some RPG materials for a Swedish publisher... <sigh>
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