DARA HAPPA
Thanks to Keith for giving me someone to talk to...
> This seems to me to be a good source of both female Adventurers
> ("those bastards threw me out, now I am a sword for hire") and for
> Lunar Levitating Bald Chicks.("those bastards threw me out, but now
> I'm the Examiner for Kostaddi"
Good hooks! If the DHn culture is really as sexist and patriarchal as
I described it, one can just imagine the collision between it and
Lunar culture (which, after all, is majority female in terms of the
gods it worships).
>> Female children are treated as household servants-in-training by
>> the men. Infanticide is, however, not practiced.
> I don't see why Dara Happans would avoid Infanticide. They seem more
> likely candidates than most, especially for those not of Yelmic
> descent, or those "impure" in some way.
My thought on this is two-fold:
1. Since Yelm was one of the first victims of Death (?) I would assume
his culture would be very focussed on the sanctity of life.
2. Yelmic culture would seem very rule-bound, and so laws against
killing would be enforced across all conditions - ie, no fuzziness at
the extremes of age. Following this view, btw, I imagine Yelmic
culture is very anti-abortion.
But really on this issue I could go either way, so long as all of the
rules were zealously enforced.
>> Traditional DHn culture has no representational sexuality. There
>> was male nudity in statues, but no female nudity.
> I do not agree that the Dara Happan have nude statues; IMO the
> Pelandans do, the Darsenites, the Darjiini, etc but NOT the Dara
> Happan who invented civilisation after all.
In this case I see the DHn male nude as being very desexualized, and
as being more a representation of physical 'perfection' than being a
real model of a real person. So I would expect that the nude form
would be very stylized, and probably never modeled on a real person.
I should say that I know almost nothing about the other cultures
mentioned in this last message.
=======================
ORLANTHI
On to Alex's comment
> Allegedly though, it's not the homosexual 'slur' per se that's the
> mortal insult, it's the imputation of 'passivity'. i.e., had the
> insult been "you use the Troll of that mountain like a woman every
> fortnight", then it would be no worse in principle than an
> accusation of poor taste...
Hmm... I can see some cultures definitely taking this view - that it's
the active/passive split that matters, not the actual gender who's
playing opposite you. But like Alex said, there's a blurry boundary
between this viewpoint and misogyny. I'm not sure if a non-misogynous
culture would view the world this way.
Since there seems to be consensus that (all) Orlanthi culture is
(relatively) non-misogynous, I'm not sure that they'd take this
viewpoint. As Alex said in his next post 'they're fairly open-minded
about people who do not conform to their gender stereotype'. This
doesn't seem describe a group of people who would heavily criticize a
man for being another's 'woman' - if they discriminate against
homosexual behavior, surely they do it against both parties involved.
Did that statement make sense?
==============================
PRAX
On to a new culture (now if only someone could do Kralorela).
I think the post is excellent in general, Andrew. It certainly makes
nomadic sense. One question:
> Praxian art is probably more abstract than that, but certainly
> contains figures with enormous breasts and penises.
So, sexual art aside, what in general is Praxian art like? Cave
drawings, little statues of extremely fat women?
Theo
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