Persona choice: who knew it was political?

[gurdymonkey]

O my readers of the SCA persuasion, it's that time again. A newcomer to the sca-jml Yahoo Group is not actually a newcomer to the Society, but after an absence of some years he discovers that suddenly the persona choice he made a very long time ago "detracts" from someone's "vision of The Dream," God help us all. I immediately directed him to my private blend of Asshole Repellent.

Another poster chimed in that she was told she would have to give up her Japanese persona and reign as a European if anyone ever fought and won a Crown Tourney in her honor!

East Asian personae date to the early years of the Society. Non-Western-persona members have been valuable and valued contributors to this game for its entire duration. Anyone who says otherwise needs a portcullis dropped on his head.  The current king of Northshield, Kitadate-Tenno, has a Japanese persona.

You know what detracts from my vision of this game we play? People who feel the need to shit on other people who are playing within the rules of the game. You wanna trick yourself out in a wool apron and a fur hat, knock yourself out, it's fine by me. You wanna bake a linen pie in your oven and wear it around your neck (I'm looking at you Ms. T!), you go!

You wanna give me the ol' Eurocentric stink-eye for attending my Kingdom's Twelfth Night in the finest attire befitting my persona, pray visualize this: there's seventy yards of it. Fully researched. Hand sewn. Now kindly get out of my way, if you please.

EDIT: Commenters who insist on invoking The Dream (TM) in my journal will be summarily sent to the far side of the portcullis and used for target practice. The Dream (TM) is an idiotic concept that has been used to justify laziniess, wooly thinking, and the aforementioned persona-bigotry. Pray leave it at home.

Comments

[didjiman.livejournal.com]

Can you give a short summary to "The Dream?" I googled it and it's TL;DR. Of course unless it's too long to summarize...

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Here's a summary, paraphrased from the Historic Documents :->
Sursum Unum

L. One. (makes the sign of One)

R. We are One.

L. One is the beginning.

R. Are you One, Herbert?

L. I am not Herbert. (drops hands to side)

R. He's not Herbert. We reach.

L. Are you of the Body? (places right hand over heart)

R. The Body is One.

L. Blessed be the Body, and health to all its parts.

[Courtesy of http://www.loyd.net/rite.html]

What'd I Do?

[minstrlmummr.livejournal.com]

Now I have Bad Star Trek earworms eating my brain 8P

:::::rushing to YouTube for Sarek clips:::::

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

I could, but I don't have a bucket handy to vomit in right now.

Silverwing's (?) Law: The Problem Is Not "Dream", It's "The"

[minstrlmummr.livejournal.com]

The least-toxic version of "The Dream" I've encountered was a friend (during a camp-circle-discussion at Pennsic) asking the others, "When you discovered the SCA, who did you 'want to be'?" (I'm convinced said friend wanted to "be" d'Artagnan or Cyrano, for example). The term is often used as a catch-all description of the milieu which SCA events try to create by common consent.

Problem One arises in the same way that it does for the "iPod Shuffle" radio format -- WHOSE iPod is being shuffled and broadcast as something everyone will like? Problem Two is that indulgence of romanticized fantasies =/= actual knowledge about the actual pre-1600 world...

Everything gurdeymonkey has said about this conceit is also true. Unfortunately.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Reduced to its essence, The Dream(tm) is "that which gives the speaker warm fuzzies," and tends to refer more to subcultural aspects of the game than to medieval/Early Modern recreative research.

[elmunadi.livejournal.com]

Amen. Just slightly less amusing than having someone wearing denim and hiking boots with a sateen t-tunic complain about all the "Non-period" "out-of-society-scope" Persians/Osmanli, and the like.
Perhaps Asians weren't common in Europe in period... but unlike elves and Klingons and vampires and the quarter-dozen-musketeers... there was a viable connection and commerce.

[razor-dancer.livejournal.com]

I often say, with much head banging, that the period/type I like to se in the SCA is "something done well". As an academic who deals with the middle ages and renaissance, I also get pretty frustrated with the fact that many of the same people who bitch about non-western (and often non-14th century personas) go on to provide the most poorly substantiated "hollywoodisms" for their opinions.

feh. Do we have to keep having all the bitchy mean people telling other people how "wrong" their (totally period and well researched) ideas are for the sca...*snit off*

[reynardine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I love how some of the people who insist on telling me how Asian persona "ruin their Dream" are wearing tennis shoes and a cotton-print t-tunic over jeans.

This might be shallow of me, but I'd be more inclined to listen if they were wearing garb that was as well-documented as mine.

[danabren.livejournal.com]

Amen.

Seriously.

Amen.

[silk-noir.livejournal.com]

The Asshole Repellent is a great essay and I have posted a link to it on our baronial forum.

[takadai-no-tora.livejournal.com]

Maybe I've just been very, very lucky, but I haven't run into the "How dare you be something non-European" attitude in my home kingdom. In fact, the only flak I've gotten has been from a very few people who were offended by having someone with an established European persona (Luighseach is an Irishwoman living in Oxford) practicing and teaching Japanese A&S. Even that has been very rare, the more typical response is "That's cool! What the hell are you doing?" and then I get to show'em. The other common response has been for people to ask me when I'm going to officially have an alternate Japanese persona.
OTOH, I'm pretty well-known for not paying too much attention to bullshit patent nonsense and I've been playing long enough and gotten a few awards, so most people who find my Japanese stuff offensive are probably just muttering behind my back

[carolhelga.livejournal.com]

I refuse to listen to those folks who try to tell anyone in period garb of any culture that they're not following "the Dream". While I do have a European persona (11th century Swiss, thankyewverymuch), I have always enjoyed the variety of cultures we can pull from. One of the first Japanese personas I met was a tall blond young guy (I mean like 6' 6"), and after getting over the surprise of seeing a blond Japanese, I fell right into it. Sooooooo cool! I'd much rather see a well researched Japanese persona than some idiot in a chain mail g-string (I kid you not, and he was most definitely *male*) or someone in a fairy-princess garb (complete with 'magic wand' that when waved sprinkled sparklies) complaining that I was rude by calling him m'lord when he was obviously a lady....

Most of my SCA friends are smart, well-rounded and articulate folks. I try not to let the idiots ruin that for me.

[takadai-no-tora.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of my favorite SCA moments was at an event many years ago when I saw an Asian man in full-on Scottish garb and a red-haired Anglo in 16th century Japanese garb deep in discussion about sewing machine brands and the best places to shop for fabric in the Los Angeles garment district.

Why I do this

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

One of mine is my first meeting with Baron Vail Visconti of the Far West. A Japanese national with a late Italian persona, his first event in the Central West Kingdom was an October Crown a couple of years go. He bowed. I bowed. He said, "Kosode beautiful!" and presented me with a cell phone charm. (I was towering over him in the red and gold "shoot me" kosode.) I was so floored by this gesture, my Japanese vocabulary completely left me and I was forced to thank him in English.

[masahide.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder if this attitude by some people in the society is due to jealosy. Or possibly just plain mean-ness. I have noticed recently that there are quite a few "hidden corners" of the SCA where people show themselves to be just mean.

Ouch. Also, WTF?

[minstrlmummr.livejournal.com]

I'm grateful to live in a group which has a Mongolian household comprised partly of actual Mongolians, and people who regularly do business in Mongolia. Unfortunately, the ME dancers who've actually researced pre-1600 ME dance (like, fully-dressed women dancing at all-female gatherings...) live somewhere else, but they're around. People who know more than I, might recognize poor or limited research, but at least some research is being done.

I'm always sad to hear about yet another group of people who spend their time minding someone else's business.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

If I'm trying to submerge myself in 14th-century English, then yes, the presence of Japanese personae makes the "willing suspension of disbelief" that much harder. But so does the presence of Vikings or Elizabethans, or for that matter Jews. The SCA isn't, and never has been, about a particular small region of space/time.

Hey, nice Noh mask!

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Exactly! It's different when I'm with the Free Artillerie Company and we're all being Scottish royalists rallying around Charles I together, because those are the parameters of THAT game.

I find the "You're all foreigners to me" approach works whether I'm Saionji confronted by Europeans or Jehanne confronted by Saracens, hairy Northmen, or fashionistas from Elizabeth's court.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

I find the "You're all foreigners to me" approach works....

That's an approach that works for me, too (although when confronted with some of the more egregious Pennsicians, I switch to "They must be players--who else would wear raiments like that?").

Re: Hey, nice Noh mask!

[takadai-no-tora.livejournal.com]

"the 'You're all foreigners to me' approach..."

can actually be rather enjoyable. The SCA's governing documents say (my summary) that if you play non-European to think of yourself as a guest in a European court. I can have fun with that--talk about how kind everyone has been to a traveller far from home, etc., and go on about how when we get back to Kyoto, we'll have to tell everyone about our adventures and how my poor husband is already stressing because he knows he'll be expected to write tanka about it and he's not a poet.

Re: Hey, nice Noh mask!

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Or the evening when Saionji wandered past the Company of St. Teresa and was induced to converse with several of its members, all of whom were playing their frilly 16th century hearts out. You should've seen her reaction to that "weird purple sake" they offered her. ;-D

[steamage.livejournal.com]

...I kind of thought that SCA was for learning and having fun, not staging freaky culture wars... Actually, the only reason I got interested in the SCA was because of the medieval Japanese wing. I was searching online in my quest to make a junihitoe, and I came across your page and links to the mailing list.

Until then, I had never heard of SCA...