[This btw, is not the Vinga essay I have previously promised. That will be much more polite, will appear on another list, and will raise some issues not touched on here. This post is merely a vent.]
Keith has reminded us that immoderate writing, like any genre, has qualities that we should aspire to, utter disdain being one of them. Here goes ...
So Vinga is now a dyke. What happened dude? Did your character come on to guy playing a vingan in some campaign, and you felt all funny about it? Gender and sex identity signals get all confused? Did the Finovan and the Praxian giggle and make snide remarks about your masculinity? Fuck this, I know, lets make them all dykes so I don’t have to go through that again. Added bonus, that will attract interest from the quality end of the market. Who gives a fuck about the many people with established characters and stories who think the present myth works *just fine*.
So once upon a time, Vinga got pregnant and spoiled the boys’ fun. Stupid bitch dyke.
Whoa. One step at a time.
Glorantha is not a place, or if it is, it is a fluid, ill-defined, roleplaying sort of place. It is a broad set of ideas and principles, interspersed with hopes, dreams, nightmares, values, aspirations and jokes, all of varying import and effectiveness, a fantasy bricolage to explore with our stories and campaigns.
And yes, it will always be filled with contradictions.
At its foundation, Glorantha is a group dreaming, a many-voiced story. Glorantha is a conversation. But most importantly, on every level, Glorantha is a community.
We can deal with fictive ‘facts’ in any way we like. But for communities to operate successfully they need to inculcate a certain minimum amount of mutual respect.
Glorantha is also a diverse mishmash of fantasy and mythic elements (and yes, fantasy and myth are very different things). Its association from the late seventies with boardgames and tabletop roleplaying meant its prime values were those of the hobby at the time. Glorantha essentially elaborated a series of slightly hysterical (testerical I think, is the correct term here) constructions of western, white, middle class (and lets face it, American) masculinity.
Personally, I loved it. But I can’t watch the first Spiderman movie (which very effectively affirms and deflates those very same values) without wincing.
Now, campaigning and GMing is one thing. Feedback between the creative director and her players is direct and immediate. If they become indifferent what you’re doing with their game, they don’t bring pizza. You start laying down weird shit, they decide to go to an in-game tavern. If you *keep* stuffing up, they stay home and watch Deadwood.
However, when we act in the same role for our wider community – when we publish scenarios or stories or myths – the feedback can be less immediate. Its very easy (reflecting here on personal experience) to get overly impressed by our own imagined creative brilliance. But as community members we have a duty to write responsibly, and to think through the outcomes of all our rooly rooly neato ideas. Greg, you, me, everyone. There’s a lot of difference between refurbishing and wholesale demolition.
Creativity and mythic truth my arse.
When we present a new idea, we have to consider what it brings to Glorantha. We have to consider what it does to playability. We have to consider its literary utility. And we have to look at the ideology that underpins the idea, with all its strengths and weaknesses.
This leads us away from ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ YGWV now-piss-off distinctions and back to wider considerations. You know, good idea/bad idea. Positive or negative. Build or wreck.
Why is this idea better?
Who does it serve?
Who does it alienate?
Does it build on existing sources? Excoriate them? Or ignore them?
What are the game implications?
What are the mythic implications?
Gloranthan myths are like buildings. Usually you refurbish, add or subtract a wing. You can do a lot with a coat of paint and some new pot plants. If you want to build something new, its best to choose an empty block of land. (i.e. if you rooly rooly want a player cult of dyke warriors, why don’t you base them in Teshnos? Or Jolar. Pelanda’s nice this time of year. Make ‘em fuckin’ keets. **Please**.) Sometimes to build a new building you have to tear an old one down. Some people think they can tear down the building just because they want to, or because the new building will have a really nice facade. No fuckin’ worries!
Property developers and architects usually want new buildings. Communities sometimes do, and sometimes they want to retain the existing ones for a whole host of good reasons. Buildings can be assessed for their utility, beauty, architectural values, historical import, human comfort and livability, fire safety, a whole host of criteria. In most places, if buildings are to be replaced, there is a process of consultation, respect for the inhabitants and users, and careful thought for all the implications.
Some people can only build certain types of buildings. Nuclear engineers can only build reactors. High rise architects are usually pretty poor on football stadiums. Yurt builders generally stick to yurts. A building retained or replaced effects an entire neighbourhood, maybe an entire city. Watch out for property values as the art gallery is replaced with a drive through Burger King.
And so we come to the latest daft twist in a world-story that has had no shortage of spectacular daft twists.
Not to mention a few specular daft twits.
Some people can’t just stop fiddling. If it’s not broke, don’t fucking ‘fix’ it.
Jeff R’s increasingly inane protestations and diversionary flourishes aside, Vinga is one of the most important goddesses to the Gloranthan community. To players (especially female players) and to Heortlings alike she represents a refreshing change from the boys-own masculinist tripe that characterises so much of Heortling myth and so many of our campaigns. She gifts storm warriors and adventurers with the craftiness, wisdom and lateral thinking of Ernalda. Mythically, her role is to save the Storm Tribe from its own stupidity. In the Greater Darkness, when the Big O was off sorting out his most spectacular cock-up ever, it was Vinga and Elmal who kept the tribes alive. Not the Thunder Brothers – they were off arguing (in so many ways) about who had the biggest dick and who could be leader while daddy was away (sound like any of the lists you’re on?). Vinga is the leaven in the storm bread: her influence extends far beyond the small numbers of her actual cult.
(And yes, most of them are player characters.)
Historically Vinga came along early 90s to rescue Glorantha from its growing reputation as a boys-own bastion of masculinist conservatism. And ducks. Roleplaying was pushing all sorts of new frontiers, Glorantha was treading water at best. In this, Vinga is up there with Humakt and Orlanth and the Red Goddess and KOS as one of Greg’s most successful creations. At a time when the initial feminist promise of the Lunar Way was being clawed back into some sort of quasi-Darra Happan nightmare, Vinga was a way for women to enjoy roleplaying in Glorantha without being forced into the roles many men wished to confine them to in real life. Her presence as a character option saved more than a few campaigns. She was a vehicle for different values, other ways.
But some people obviously don’t get it.
We’ve all watched as the women in our lives struggled in so many different realms for equality and choice and presence. Most of us like to think we did our part to assist. Goddess knows why, twenty and thirty years on, it seems we have to fight them all over again. Spare us the misogynistic mens-view-of-womens-sexuality bullshit, lets play Cthulhu instead.
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? And if Glorantha has become such a realm, what is our part in making it so?
Back to Vinga.
First up, gods are not people. Any Heortling initiate knows this. Orlanth gets cut into forty nine pieces but bounces back to win the day. Yet, Vinga, who fought at Cheserosos and Doereros, who cracked gods skulls to bring decorum to Storm Hall, who faced down Valind in personal combat, who bluffed the Eat You Army and protected Drenyan Red Claw from the Marching Teeth as she gave birth to Heort the Swift, this mighty Storm Woman gets pregnant and goes to little girly pieces, apparently. That’s how the boys tell it.
Yep, Vinga gets pregnant (even though Ernalda was guarding her fertility at the time) and because of this the Thunder Brothers lose a battle, according to Jeff. What a difference a woman makes.
But what’s the deeper myth here? What were the male Thunder Brothers doing before the battle? If they were acting as they normally do, its not difficult to guess. Starkval was practicing his shortsword play with the hearth maids, Finovan was sneaking off with some cattle he’d found and claimed as bounty, Destor was on the piss with Drogarsi, telling magnificent lies about his imagined adventures, Barntar was twiddling himself by the sheep pens, and funny guy Urox was finding similar satisfaction *within* the sheep pens. They arrive next morning for battle hung over, exhausted and totally shagged out. They throw up over their breakfast yogurt and go on to lose the battle. Rather than accept their share of the blame, they decide to blame Vinga and then ban her from getting pregnant.
Did they consider banning wenching, drinking, or shagging sheep the night before a battle? Strangely no.
Did they consider promoting male homosexuality as a way of stopping all those suddenly unwanted pregnancies? (Forget for a moment that children are the deepest joy of Heortling culture, a clan’s greatest treasure. This is **deeper myth** folks). Male homosexuality, you’d think by this reasoning, would be a double virtue, ‘cause it would keep the Thunder Brothers pure by stopping them mixing with all those polluting, passive, girly-type essences. Strangely, no, even though it makes equal or more sense than the make-Vinga-a-dyke solution.
No.
Blame the woman.
Because apparently one woman was pregnant during one of many battles that the Storm Tribe lost, all women from that point on will pay the considerable price.
Well fuck me, where have I heard that type of thinking before?
‘Eve tempted me’.
This is the true lesson of myth folks. All myth is ideological. Intensely so. Myth tries to hide its ideology by claiming that it is ‘natural’, ‘eternal’, the way of the gods or the archetypes or the collective unconscious. Bullshit. A myth always privileges certain points of view and tramples over all others. A myth provides one answer, and stops you thinking about other answers. It opens one doorway. It closes several more.
Glorantha, for all its potency and charm and sheer joy, is a construct that primarily utilises reactionary, simplistic Campbellian / Jungian / universalist / ’archetypal’ (huh!) approaches to myth that pretend that human stories are secret messages from God, or from some pure racial fountainhead. Glorantha has always been incapable of modelling myth in any serious way because it denies the basic, ideological truths behind myth, that people make up, modify and invert myths for their own advantage. Pretending that mythic truths are eternal, Glorantha fails to draw attention to the man (and yes, its usually a man) behind the curtain, pulling all the levers and piling up the power and prestige.
Pox.
So don’t feed me this “deep mythic vision” shit.
I happened to write the Vinga cult in Storm Tribe. I did it in close consultation with Greg. The write-up contained many of Greg’s ideas, my ideas, and many ideas from the existing GAG corpus about Vinga, with more than a few explicit nods to the work of Jane Williams, and some close consultation with her as well. The email exchanges that built up the cult draft were both invigorating and vigorous. Now either Greg didn’t think I had the mythic insight to handle the ‘deeper’ mythic truths he was keeping to himself about Vinga, or we were both working hard to create a myth that is very different to the new improved flavour-of-the-week butch dyke Vinga.
You know, the one presented in Storm Tribe.
And if its not broke, don’t fix it. Or if you do ‘fix’ it, do a proper job.
Because Vinga is the gateway cult to Orlanth, many Heortling women of power and ambition, according to this latest gem, are strongly encouraged to become lesbians in order to advance their roles in their cults and clans. That right? Or have to manage their fertility, which in some folks mind is apparently the same as becoming a dyke?
What does this do to marriage roles, and the supreme value Heortling place on children? How is this particular sexual orientation introduced to initiands? Or is it true what they say about Mormons and what they do in their barns?
Same-sex orientations usually are taken for granted in Heortling society. But natural relationships arise naturally. This one is pure artifice. So how does it go, do dykes become vingans or do vingans become dykes (the second, btw, is *not* homosexuality). Where’s the historical analogue for cult lesbianism as a career choice? We all know the fantasy analogues. Even thought about old fashioned chastity? (You can get millions for pushing it in the States, apparently. it doesn't work, but WTF.) Or does Sapphic ecstasy push more of your buttons?
And what does this wondrous clever breakthrough do for the underlying rationale for Vinga as mediatrix, as hearthguard, as Hopebringer and strength of women, as child of Orlanth and Ernalda.
Let me venture my opinion.
It shits on it.
>From a great height.
Carelessly and thoughtlessly.
Equally, it shits on the people who have invested much time and effort into building up a coherent, positive Vinga mythology and who played out and expanded that mythology into their own stories and campaigns.
And what exactly is all this underlying Heortling gender role crap anyway? Women need a dispensation from god every time they take off their aprons? Freedom my arse. (But that’s another post). Do Lunar women have to put up with this sex role straightjacketing? And remember, this is not presented as cultural adaptation, or historic analogue, but the order proclaimed and upheld by the Heortling gods.
You might want to think about that just a bit.
Don’t get me wrong, exploring alternative gender roles is usually a positive thing. But forced, cultic sexuality, for a player character cult! What the fuck were you drinking? And in the context of a highly conservative, ‘boys is boys and girls are girls’ eternal-divide cultic ideology that straightjackets human choices and is enforced as god-given values? That ain’t myth, that’s fundamentalism.
Out of interest, where are the good bits for women in Glorantha? Are there any?
Thank god for gms and players, who can ignore, contradict or subvert this ideological tripe. On every level, roleplaying is fundamentally about making choices. We have to be able to choose.
There's a delightful little snippet in the Vinga writeup in Storm Tribe that is pure Greg. Page 167. it starts by talking about foolish men looking for signs of Vinga's inferiority.
"Those men are stupid, if they ventured further into their own gods myths, [they would find similar events].
Couldn't have put it better myself. And on that note, I look forward to sharing quite a few deep, rooly deep myths of the Thunder Brothers in the near future. And the real truth about Big A and the ducks. Preferably with pictures, so you can try it at home.
Vent ended. I will be a lot more even-handed when I post my open list Vinga response. I hope.
Cheers
Jimbo
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