Chapter 1: Sunset

The world is bathed with light. During this time, that people refer to as the “day,” the most important tasks happen. People need the sunlight to be productive. But, like everything in the world, the day must end; the sun must sink below the horizon and the people must welcome the darkness. When most people see the sun setting in the west over the Thassa, they know that it is time to rest and sleep. And as the sun’s last light creates a million different colors on the water, it allows people time to reflect on their thoughts and welcome the change from day into night.

It started with a choice.

She had been born of the Scarlet Caste in Ar, a true gentrified noblewoman. Because of her shrewdness, she found herself companioned once, then twice and then at the side of the Ubar of the Kataii on the Plains. It was a hard life, but it was a good life. The men respected her, the Wagon Camp flourished and most importantly, she fell in love with him.

And then, she made her choice. She asked, “Do you love me?” He never answered the question; he didn’t need to. She saw the way that he looked at his slaves, lying by his feet. She could never compete with that. “If that’s what it would take,” she said, “I would kneel before you.” He laughed at her statement and waved his hand dismissively. He hadn’t even given her offer a moment’s thought. She decided in that moment that not only did he not love her, he couldn’t. She retreated to her chamber, aghast and broken, and spent the loneliest night of her life…waiting to see what the morning would bring.

At the dawn’s first light, he was gone. His slaves were gone and his only lasting mark on the Camp was two wagon wheels ruts trailing off into the distance. He had not even bothered to say goodbye. None of the men seemed to care or notice her; they simply packed up their own wagons and set off to follow their Ubar. As the last wagon left the Camp and the sun slipped beneath the ground, the woman known as Livia DeBoar died on the Plains of Turia. As the moon rose, the Panther Eve was born.

The Prologue

It starts innocently enough.

A little girl crawls on the limbs of a tree in the family garden. Her mother sees her out of the corner of her eye and comes running, pulling the girl down from the tree.

“Don’t let your father catch you doing that,” her mother chastises. “We do not want to have a little Eve in the family. Get off that tree before your father finds you.” The mother speaks half in fear, half in hope that the sentiment comes true.

Night falls and the little girl looks outside her window. In the clear night sky, she can see the three moons each in a different phase. The largest is full, followed behind with a half-moon and a crescent. “Look mama!” the girl exclaims excitedly. “Look how pretty it is!” The mother looks out the window and her face pales. Immediately, the curtains are drawn and the child is dragged back to bed. The mother slaps the girl across the face and rebukes her, “No more of this talk. You are no Sa-ta-Tor. Go to bed and get this silliness out of your head.” As the girl’s eyes close, taking her to the dream world, she is confused yet mystified. A simple tree and the moons had caused such a commotion: why?

Three moons, three phases, one sky. It was…it IS…the symbol of the Sa-ta-Tor. There were many panthers before them and there will be many panthers after them, but they will always be known as the first TRIBE in Gor. Men will speak of their fierce cunning, their prowess with the bow and their shrewd negotiating skills at the trade fire. Women will scoff at their wild ways, their howling at the moon and the general terror they caused a city without ever setting foot inside.

The truth, of course, is always much simpler. They were the Sa-ta-Tor because of the singular unwavering dream shared by all 30 women: three moons, three phases, one sky.

Guttentag

Apparently, my last post is pretty popular with people in Germany. It was linked by, from what I can tell, a German Gorean internet message board, linked here. I'm pretty sure they're making fun of me...which is totally cool! There's really a lot of material out there so if someone can't make fun of me, perhaps they need to stop and take stock of their life.

As I do not understand a lick of German, I have no idea what the thread is about, what it says, or why my last post has something to do with the topic. BUT...I have figured out that "rollenspielwelt" means "roleplayer" in German. And quite frankly, I'd rather be called a rollenspielwelt than a roleplayer any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I also have no idea what "gegenüber" means either, but I'm pretty sure I'd want to be that to. Anything with an umlat is gold to me.

So hello Germans!

Submissives

Ranting time...and what are blogs if nothing else than a way to rant in public and hope no one reads it although secretly hope that the right people actually do read it?

I don't understand "submissives." I don't WANT to understand submissives. Most women in SL Gor self-identify as submissives. I can understand and appreciate that. I have my own understanding of what being an overall submissive is (and I've shared it on this blog a few times), but it's clearly not the definition of choice of most submissives in SL Gor. As far as I can tell, "submissive" in SL means to be intellectual lazy, helpless and wanting to obviate all responsibility for themselves and their life choices. They'd rather pawn that off on someone else. Essentially, being a submissive in SL means to be an overgrown baby. Apparently, that's a good thing.

And even if that's the definition (or even if I'm wrong), I have no problem with that. Everyone has their emotional and psychological problems. I've got plenty myself that probably make me appear childish and selfish, so I really can't be throwing rocks at that type of behavior. Where my problem occurs is when women confuse roleplay with reality and assume that because my male characters portray dominant personalities and react well to submissives...they assume that I personally am a dominant individual and am actively looking for submissives to dominate in my normal life. Ergo, them.

This can't be farther from the truth. First of all, my characters are fake. They exist in an imaginary roleplay world that are subject to the rules of John Norman's very stupid writing and the rule sets contained within them. My characters have to be callous and "dominant" because Norman says they must be. That's not reflective of my actual personality simply because...shocker...I don't live in Gor. I am a product of my environment and my environment says I must respect all people and treat them as equals. So I do, and more importantly, I want to treat all people as equals.

Second, I'm not looking for a relationship in SL Gor outside of someone who can entertain me in roleplay. I find it monumentally stupid to try and find love in a game where people present false depictions of themselves. I understand that this is no different than trying to find a date at a club where a woman is all dolled up and not acting "naturally" because she, too, wants to instantly attract a mate. The only reason I tolerate clubs is, well, it's real so even if the woman is faking it...I might get something tangible out of it like sex or a companion to do fun things on a date with. For an online relationship, I'm simply deluding myself: as long as I can convince myself this person is what I want, I'll stay. Seems rather hollow and superficial to me. I'm not saying I can't do it- it just seems a waste of my time.

And even if I were looking for an actual relationship based on my roleplay interactions, I sure as hell wouldn't want a submissive women. I find the idea of having a "genuine submissive" as a potential mate utterly repulsive. I can interact with them, no problem. But get serious with them? No thanks, not my cup of tea. I'd rather have a woman with a brain who asserts herself. Someone might argue that a submissive can be all those things and assertive...but really, she can't. It's listed within the definition of submissive that she can be assertive, but can't be an assertive person. If she can be all that, then she's not submissive- she's just pretending she is. And I hate people that can't try to be honest with themselves so I wouldn't want to have a relationship with them anyway. On the intimacy front, "submissives" and "me" do not mix- just a fact of life. And those that want to convince me otherwise are largely wasting their breath.

Finally, I think "dominance" and "submission" as state-of-beings is a crock of shit. I consider it something akin to homosexuality. There are certainly a group of people in this world that are inherently and genetically homosexual. No matter what can be said or done, these people will always be attracted to the same sex. Same can be said for bisexuals as well. But there are a group of people who experience the psychological condition of "mimicry." If you put these people around lots of gay people for a long period of time, they will self-identify themselves as gay...and if you took them out of the gay population and put them back in heterosexual communities, they'd self-identify as heteros. You find this exceedingly common in prison populations: inmates have homosexual sex inside the clink to mimic the rules, customs and behavior within prison...but revert to a hetero lifestyle when living in a mixed population. Same thing with SL: when confronted with a paradigm where everyone must be split up into "dominants" and "submissives," women see that submissive box, self-identify with some of those characteristics and then unilaterally decide that they must be all of those characteristics...when they're not.

I don't doubt there are a few genuine submissives in SL Gor. As in people who have an innate tendency to follow and please people. It's just written into their DNA. But I suspect that 99% of the "submissives" out there are actually just sexual submissives who mistake their timidness in the bedroom and sexual relationships to be representative of the rest of their personality. And if you take them out of a sexual relationship, they are confrontational, abrasive and controlling...just like normal human beings. Which is cool. I like normal human beings. I just don't like people who pretend they are something they're not.

The other truth I've learned out there is that most people who roleplay in Gor either do not understand the IC/OOC split...or don't care. They are here for boyfriends and damnit, they're going to get them. Somehow, I end up on their wish list because I can type a complete sentence and can show an original thought from time to time. I have no idea how to disabuse them or get them to ignore me. So...I rant. And this is one of them.

Alright, it's all over now. I will now put myself into that state where I debate whether I should have posted this and whether I should delete it.

Choice

As an aside to the now THREE daily regular readers- I promised posting my story of the Sa-Ta-Tor. That will unfortunately be postponed indefinitely until I figure out what to do with it. Either the roleplay is dead and I need to reconcile my ideal vision of the story with what I have...or I wait until (if ever) it starts up again. Luckily, such projects need no deadlines. They get done when it is time to finish them. Eventually, I'll make a decision but not now. So it will wait in storage as a series of blog drafts, waiting to be published.

I probably did a blog post about this earlier. If I did, who cares? Here it goes again.

Compare these two videos:





In the first talk, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates why choice is a good thing: the more choices you have, the better chance you have at getting something you genuinely want. In the second video, Barry Schwartz demonstrates that infinite choice creates an information crisis: while you get exactly what you want, the cost it took to make the decision actually exceeds the benefit so you're overall WORSE off than you were before.

So why this topic?

Choice creates two sets of problems that interact with one another: why you roleplay and how you achieve that goal.

To create a Gorean community, much attention needs to be placed on the environment. SL, as a program, gives the creator a lot of choice in terms of creating the most authentic environment: build a Mediterranean city, Victorian style, inland city empire, coastal island, whatever. If someone can conceive of it, it can be built. The same goes with clothes, characters and everything else needed to build a Gorean community: SL provides infinite choice so it's absolutely possible to build the "perfect" Gorean community that a person wants.

The problem is that richly detailed environment makes it prohibitively expensive to play that environment. If you want to create an authentic Torvsland sim, you need to have people that fundamentally understand the nuances of a Torvie culture. People have to promote stories and characters that fit within that niche, instead of the generic Gorean man. And this isn't just one person. EVERY person that plays in that environment has to meet some threshold of immersion or else...the detail, nuance and sophistication is lost. Just walk into a scene where someone says, "Hi lulz. I iz Gorean. U r slave?" The mood is instantly broken. So, to keep that level of immersion, the sim has to create a whole rule set and create a system that approves people into the sim ("You must be THIS Gorean to roleplay here"). The more rules a sim has, the more time is needed to learn and understand those rules. More moderators are needed to keep the sim faithful to those rule sets. The more authentic the picture, the more people and time are needed. To actually extract the benefit of getting what you want, you have to pour in a lot of effort that you didn't think was needed. As Barry Schwartz points out, to get to the level of choice that makes you happy, you're worse off in a situation where there was no choice.

And that's a fundamental unsolvable problem for any online roleplay community: roleplay is supposed to be a diversion, not a job. But to get that deeply immersive and rich element, it's prohibitively expensive. Lots of lots of time and effort must be spent. Is it worth spending all that time and effort on what's supposed to be a game? Some people answer this question by making it personal: they use the game to find themselves a suitable real life mate. By raising the stakes, the effort is worth it (people will do a lot for love vs. just fun). Some people compromise their standards so that the benefit exceeds the effort. Most people, though, answer this question by simply just walking away.

I wonder...

...how people decide their character motivations.

I think most people create backgrounds and stories that help them shape and design their characters. I've done this on occasion: I have a general idea in my head and then I try to flesh it out with specific characteristics and tendencies that would result from that particular idea. I imagine most people do the same thing.

When roleplaying in Gor, I hear so many people say, "Well, my character is proud so she'd never do such and such." Or some guy will say, "My character's a real Gorean man and he'd refuse to take a collar out of principle. His sense of honor precludes him from doing that."

But...the interesting question is HOW does someone decide what characteristics naturally flow from that idea? What makes something natural as opposed to forced? How does someone connect a particular trait to particular actions? I can easily construct a scenario where it might sense for a Gorean man, even the most stereotypical by-the-codes Gorean Warrior, to submit completely and unstintingly to a woman. I can easily construct a situation where the most elite, proud, spoiled brat of a Free Woman would be so humbled beyond words that escape into a collar might be the most obvious solution for her. And yet...people might disagree with my assessments. So how do people draw the line between natural and unnatural reactions of their characters?

The reason this thought occurred to me dealt with the roleplay between one of my Gorean characters and a slave. I had a chance to converse with this person outside of roleplay for a while. She was commenting about how proud and spirited her character was, despite being a slave. She also mentioned that, at one point, there was a man who truly made her character understand her submission, but he disappeared from the roleplay universe...and because of that experience, her character is motivated to avoid giving away her heart again. It was very interesting to learn and I thought quite sensible. This person has thought about this situation enough to take concrete and identifiable traits to transform an idea into a genuine character.

By chance, our characters got to roleplay for a while. True to her initial explanation, her slave character was bratty, opinionated and irreverent to her station in life. So my character responded in ways I thought a Gorean man would respond: force her to recognize her reality. And not with long-winded speeches about how kajirae do this and act like that. It was quick, swift and brutal. Along the way, I tried to drop subtle hints and clues as to why my character was doing the things he was doing. He wasn't trying to devastate her character by attempting to kill her; it was a series of calculated actions and carefully constructed sentences in order to push her character into being what she's supposed to be: a submissive kajira. Or at least, what I understand a submissive kajira to be.

By the end of the scene, it was clear that the person roleplaying the kajira either completely missed all my hints and subtext, or flat out ignored it. Similarly, I also fear that I missed a lot of the hints and subtext (assuming she was sending them out) that she was giving out.

Some of the hints and subtext I tried to insert (there were more, but these were the two big ones):
*Trying to get the slave to stop using the words "I" and "beg." This is a standard crutch for slaves when they get into trouble. The first thing they say is, "I beg forgiveness." Now, while that's all well and good, I simply don't think that the right response for a true submissive. I think the better response is "I am sorry for displeasing you, Master." What's the difference between the two? The first one is inherently selfish- the tone and subject of the sentence make it all about the kajira and what she did. In the second sentence, the same message is sent but it creates a power dynamic: by being sorry, she is placing herself in an inferior position and the sentence is about the obligation that she owes him. While most slaves intuitively understand the concept of apologizing and why it's important, I don't think they ever really think about how to properly convey that sorrow. A slave is supposed to eat, live and breathe for others. Even apologies.

In this situation, the slave begged for her life. Again, that is the phrasing of a person that has not embraced her submission. Had she phrased it, "Spare me your mercy" or "I am nothing without you, Master," her answer would have been received much more favorably.

This may be too subtle and even a nitpicky thing...but I think it's important in properly conveying a submissive demeanor. A proper slave never thinks in terms of "I" or "me," but always in relation to those that are superior to her. The way she phrases things is a good measure to figure out whether she is actually submissive or just paying lip service to the concept.

*Constantly referring to her as a whore and a slut. Over and over again, the slave was referred to as a "worthless slut," "stupid whore," and on and on. I assume most people think that those are just attempts at insulting and degrading a person. That's very true. But it also serves a deeper purpose. Breaking someone for shits and giggles is generally a counterproductive idea. While every slave needs to be broken from her self-centered "Earth" perspective, the idea is that she's being broken so that she can be reconstituted to fully embrace her submissiveness. The breaking is a part of a process to create something new.

So...a beat down because someone mouthed off seems rather extreme and harsh. It really does nothing but emphasize that minor infractions result in extreme consequences. That's discouraging because it encourages the slave to do nothing...it's the only way she can ensure that she'll never get beaten. So if someone is going to resort to such an extreme measure, there needs to be a payoff.

Enter the constant stream of degrading insults like "whore" and "slut." Now, on Gor- these aren't necessarily bad words...but it's clear that in this particular context, they were. Moreover, I took great pains to use these words over and over. These weren't casual uses of a particular insult.

There's a basic concept of psychology on how people deal with failure. If someone is told that they suck over and over again, there's a good chance they will give up completely. But if someone is told that they can't accomplish a certain task, that person builds an incredible amount of will and determination to prove their doubter wrong. It's the seminal act of defiance that is deeply ingrained in every human. So, in this context, the kajira is not being sent the message that she sucks. The constant use of "worthless whore" is meant as a challenge to her: her existence and her worth hinges on the display and use of her body. If she can please men sexually, then she is NOT worthless. But if she cannot succeed in this area...truly, she is beyond worthless.

So the idea is to damage her psyche at the same time as giving her direction on how she can validate her existence. Breaking while building.

* * *

That's what prompted this blog post. Almost always, no one really ever understands the subtlety of those clues in roleplay. I don't blame them either- it's hard to pick up such meanings in a real-time interaction.

But to properly evolve a character, you have to have pretty much 100% understanding of their state of mind and motivations...even in the unconscious parts. On any given day, if I used these particular techniques and tricks on someone in RL, they would instantly respond to them...whether they were aware they were being manipulated or not. However, in SL and online environments, these tricks and methods, which are so vital to make characters into people, are pretty much useless.

There is no answer to this particular issue. There shouldn't be one. But it is interesting food for thought: how much can you really know about your character? How deeply are you thinking about what makes your character tick?

Blogroll

I don't have one. Then again, I don't really have a readership (still cruising at 2 hits a day) so I suppose having a blogroll is sort of a moot point.

That being said, I don't read many SL Gorean blogs. It's not that I don't want to...it's just that I don't actively search them out like I do my general interest blogs I read in my "normal" life.

If there are any interesting blogs or sites I should be reading relating to the Gorean experience, drop a note in the comments and/or e-mail and I'll make sure to look it over and add to a blogroll.