[Zarkaylia]

Aye.

I have absolute say in all of it.


<3

[Kitkatmanftw]

I agree a lot with Cerb's post pretty much wholeheartedly.

I was discussing marriage traditions with a few people, and really it comes down to, in my opinion, is this: It depends on the character's culture. That more or less means marriage traditions and ceremony can vary from place to place, so players may have to get a little creative with thinking up what kind of traditions your own character would have, and maybe even doing a bit of research.

As for homosexuality, that depends on something. Is Mesalia more of a Medieval RP server or a Modern era RP server? Homosexuality from what I understand has only recently been accepted in modern-day society. Again, from what I understand and have been told, Mesalia is a Medieval RP server, so homosexuality would more than likely be looked down upon as something filthy and unnatural considering, well, to put it bluntly, the parts don't fit.

And as for male superiority, this depends more on the culture I'd say. Again, female equality is a more modern idea, but as we can see from the past, females in some cultures were seen to hold even higher social statuses than men, although not often. However, some cultures even accepted all females to be of higher social status than men, not individual ones (The Amazons are a good example of this). So really, it comes down to the culture I believe.

[Zarkaylia]

Homosexuality from what I understand has only recently been accepted in modern-day society.

That's actually not true. In some cultures it's been common and accepted even thousands of years ago, but cultural and religious changes in the world have made it vary a lot.

Thus I'd say same applies for homosexuality as for marriage. Culture, religion, origin of the character... Etc. It all comes down to that.

[mcman]

I agree a lot with Cerb's post pretty much wholeheartedly.

I was discussing marriage traditions with a few people, and really it comes down to, in my opinion, is this: It depends on the character's culture. That more or less means marriage traditions and ceremony can vary from place to place, so players may have to get a little creative with thinking up what kind of traditions your own character would have, and maybe even doing a bit of research.

As for homosexuality, that depends on something. Is Mesalia more of a Medieval RP server or a Modern era RP server? Homosexuality from what I understand has only recently been accepted in modern-day society. Again, from what I understand and have been told, Mesalia is a Medieval RP server, so homosexuality would more than likely be looked down upon as something filthy and unnatural considering, well, to put it bluntly, the parts don't fit.

And as for male superiority, this depends more on the culture I'd say. Again, female equality is a more modern idea, but as we can see from the past, females in some cultures were seen to hold even higher social statuses than men, although not often. However, some cultures even accepted all females to be of higher social status than men, not individual ones (The Amazons are a good example of this). So really, it comes down to the culture I believe.

I think you're incorrect to equate "medieval" with "homophobic". For one, medieval is a Eurocentric term, but even if it just so happened to play out that medieval society on Earth was homophobic, does that mean medieval society and homophobia are intrinsically linked? I don't think so; I think that things like feudalism, agrarianism, and religion (which just so happened to be homophobic but could very well not have been) are what actually define medieval society. And if you think about it, we hardly even model feudalism in our RP; the only thing that's really medieval about our server is the level of technology, which really doesn't have much impact on cultural attitudes toward homosexuality.

Also, aren't the Amazons a mythological female-led society who were often contrasted as barbarians in comparison to the civilized (and incidentally patriarchal) Greeks themselves? What I've learned in my mythology class is that if anything the Amazons were used by the Greeks as a fictional device to justify their own traditional gender roles...

[3llusive]

And as for male superiority, this depends more on the culture I'd say.

Agreed. And I don't think it's fair to go to Mesalia and slap a "Medieval RP" sticker on it. I would say it's more close to fantasy, except without the typical fantasy tropes like elves and all that other unneeded crap.

So far the players have come up with many cultures, not just Medieval Aged European nonsense, so we should really just take a step back from it. We've got Northern Scandinavian like cultures, Japanese type cultures, Chinese, hell, even a city based off of prohibition era Chicago.

Mesalia as I see it, is whatever the players want it to be. If the majority of the server wants to include homophobic tendencies into some of the lore, that'll probably happen. If the opposite is true, then the opposite will be true. We don't just say "Well, that wouldn't happen in Medieval times", now do we? Sure, that argument is occasionally brought up but more often than not it's a moot point. Using an example: After being enslaved for 30 years by a master race of men with supernatural powers, from a medieval stand point 90% of the server would see Xitians as scum. That's not an exaggeration. Ireland has a rich history of hating the "Black and Tan" British soldiers that exerted control over them. To present day in fact.

But, the populace would prefer not RPing things that way, and like their characters to be more open-minded - which isn't a bad or a good thing, really, it's just part of the characters we want to play, then they won't RP it that way.

Tl;dr - Mesalia is what we make it. Let's stop trying to genre-fy it and generalize it.


EDIT: Leave it to me to basically repeat the exact same point in the post above mine. D'oh.