Brain dump was to your usual high standards.
But then we get to...
>The Journey of the Female Hero
>In Sex and Sorceror Ron Edwards espouses the theory that the female
>mythic cycle is about fertility winning the right partner, becoming
>pregnant, defending your offspring. I'm not sure if myths like
>Inaana or Isis really follow this pattern, but what is the essential
>journey of the heroine?
... and I have to go 'Whooo steady!'. :) As though Glorantha didn't have enough problems with pervasive essentialism and lumbering Campbellism. Now I know that invoking the glorious name of Edwards will always invoke strong reactions in the rpg community ... personally I've always been pretty indifferent to the whole GNS thing (its almost totally clueless to the pervasive nuances of genre) but I not that this latest excursion is also a way of putting things into boxes. Women this time. :(
Sure Glorantha is a Campbellian/Eliadian (and of course Staffordian) world, and for good or ill the hero journey/monomyth ideology is part and parcel of that world. But if our adventures in Glorantha have demonstrated one thing it is that simplistic Campbellian notions are as ill fitting there as they are in the real world. There are many journeys of the hero, many paths to herodom. Sometimes you follow the ideologies of a cult to manifest eternity, sometimes you rage against these same bonds to assert your full humanity. You can be a sword wielding, genocidal hero of the Argrath type, or you can make a stand for human values by opposing these same heroes. Both - incarnating the eternal or asserting the wholly human - are ways to herodom.
To suggest that fertility, pregnancy and a concern with offspring are somehow essential to be being a *real* and *complete* woman... do I have to spell it out? The Inanna and Isis cycles are about many things, but primarily about sovereignty. They were very different goddesses, one of war, one of magic, both in different ways, of love, and their cults and myths meant many different things over the long historical period of which they were extant.
Given the recent attempts to retrocast Vinga in the name of some ever-deepening Heortling gender essentialism, this is probably a topic we want to leave alone. :) There are still a *few* women players left.
Cheers
John
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