@georgewest To begin I’d like to state the purpose of discussion is not to win. The purpose of discussion is to learn each others points of views and help to foster understanding, finding common ground and coming to a state of peace and harmony. To further this I will continue to discuss things “patiently” with people such as 213 (troll though he may seem)
@213 Well I for one don’t accept the role of victim (though I’ve heard a lot of heterosexuals claiming victimization “help they’re shoving things down our throats” bullocks). There are people who still be victimized, though to be fair there are still plenty of people trying to make victims of them. I had a friend recently transgender.
He was terrified that he’d be ostracized and have no place in the world, though feeling as he was meant to be a women was too strong too much a part of him That he choose to become a she (not physically). Her choice was welcomed by all of her friends and family. We didn’t hold anything about it against her, after all that’s who she was. She wasn’t making a statement or trying to get people to think of her as a poor helpless victim. She just didn’t want to hide within her own skin that she didn’t choose to be born with.
On the other topic of homosexual’s in games and how they develop. There has been lots of experience writing well developed deeply personal heterosexual relations, however not as much as writing homosexual (especially male-male homosexual) relations.
I for one find ever yaoi distasteful because it’s always one guy is always feminized and the other guy is more normal or worse they’re both sluts or both feminized. A good relationship would be like one between Choi Young & Dae-man or even a guy like Chun Eum-ja from the Korean Drama “The Great Doctor”. Unfortunately they’re just not written.
So yes you’ll hear complaints from people if something isn’t done right. The ration of people who think something (they care about) is done right compared to those who don’t let’s you know if you’ve portrayed what you’re attempting to portray in a proper way. Though it’s possible to portray something in the way you meant and still it might be disliked, but that’s not normally what is aimed for.
yes but this sort of discussion NEVER comes to a middle ground or any sort of understanding because their isnt a middle ground you either support it or you dont . it just goes around in circles until one side gives up continues to have the same views and moves on and the only accomplishment is wasting hours of your life typing
You gotta have your homosexuals. And your women. And you black/chinesse people. Otherwise we might think you’re some sort of anti-gay/mysoginist/racist. I’m all for social inclussiveness and fairness, but it is when the so-called “social justice” people try to force them down everybody’s throats, even if it doesn’t fit in the devs/writers vision (most of the time because you have little idea about writting gay female chars when you’ve been a fat heterosexual white male your whole damn life, but that won’t stop the SMJers from complaining), when I get pissed off.
Why? You’ve seen a million times how it ends. Imagine Skyrim. You walk into a npc’s house. There are 2 guys standing there. One of them looks at you and says something like “Oh. Hey. I’m just hanging out at home with my “FRIEND””.
That kind of attemps at dodging the ires of the SMJers by pointing out HEY LOOK, HERE ARE OUR GAY’S/FEMALES/BLACK DUDES with a neon sign is the only thing we are going to get as long as they are asked to include things that were completely unnecessary to the plot they were creating. Just look at how even G.R.R Martin is being bashed because “not enough black people”.
That said, sure, KCD should include gays, as long as romantic relationship is an actual topic in the game, and it is portrayed historically accurate.
@georgewest speak for yourself mate. With over 3 those views (over various threads that have included or talked about the subject of homosexuality( do you think no one learned anything from either side? That’s a pretty ridiculous claim. You may hear the most staunch objections and the most zealous pros from those who’ve made up their minds and are unwilling to accept another way of thinking, but then there’s those hundreds of others who simply read and think to themselves (those are some good points) on either side and then they talk to their friends and co-workers and a discussion in born beyond just a thread.
Also you’re wrong about there not being common ground. We’ve already found it. We who would like homosexuality portrayal in games only want it done well in ways that fit within the games design and in this game that design is historical accuracy and we don’t want it portrayed in any other way. That is out common ground. People are free to argue the pros and cons outside of that, but that at least (from what I’ve read from just about everyone these past months) is something we all can agree on.
With that said @qwar I agree with you I detest social justice movements. They’re typically a bunch of people stirring up hate and bigotry in the name of fighting against it. Take the recent “Michael Brown” case. The media, politicians (especially Obama and his “Department of Justice”) are trying to inflame race riots when all that happened was a police officer was trying to keep a guy out of danger (because he was J-walking) didn’t even know he’d just robbed a store, but the guy thought the police officer was going to arrest him and so he attacked violently. He ended up breaking the police officers eye socket and so the police officer shot the assailant. Is that something one should cry “Social Justice” over? No. It’s what you call normal justice. You try and harm a police officer who’s duty is to protect the people then you should be shot. Period end of tale. Same for any other claimed victim or minority group. Simply treat people with respect and you’ll be treated with respect in turn. We have a long way to go before we all pretty much have social acceptance (like in the UK) however things like what the government and media and race profiteers (people who make money creating racism) take us decades back.
you have found ground with people who you already had ground with . i can promise you no one would bring homosexuality up at work , i work on a building site and to be fair there are many times when we get into deep life conversations but never ever talked about how homosexuality is portrayed .
i have already shared my opinion with you on your other thread so i wont go into it all again , but for me it has no place in gaming its not needed and adds nothing to the game end of , doesnt matter how many threads you make it just wont happen because it adds nothing and as what another person put on one of these threads when it is put in you dont win because the same people then come back screaming and shouting you did not represent it in the correct way so it goes into the religion and politics category of subjects not to bring up
and thus since you’ve contributed nothing further, think irrationally with a “me” focused world view, and can’t seem to think beyond that (also called being open minded) then with you at least there is no point to further discussion. @onekn1ght You just reminded me of morrowind which had exotic dancing strippers you can find videos on youtube.
Does it really matter? Homosexuality was not prevalent in those times and was even less accepted (unless you had power and kept your mouth closed). I’m sick of SJWs fighting for representation where there was none, especially when it wouldn’t even have any relevance. There’s no point in forcing it just to appeal to the PC crowd.
i think he’s basing it off the fact that being gay in modern times is widely socially accepted, while being gay in medieval times meant your genitals had to be mutilated. that’d be the main difference i think.
i can imagine it scaring people straight so to speak.
Concern over sexual preference has enjoyed swings and roundabouts. Persecution of homosexuals is almost always a uniquely religious niggle. Because “morals”.
I say again, prevalence is not informed by public display of same-sex affection. Much like Christianity in the old USSR, it was just as prevalent - it just carried far more risk and certainly some absolutely shameful consequences.
Yes, by necessity it was less advertised - It is not, however, an emergent modern behaviour which is what is being suggested here. It isn’t even a behaviour unique to humans.
It’s depressing how we still get so worked up over something so simple…
you would not get a single openly gay person in medieval times so its irrelevant to put it in a game i think is what he is getting at . yes it was down to a religious thing of morals but try and find a atheist thats open about it in them times
No. The word used was “prevalent”. This would be a measure of incidence.
I think we all get that, owing to the oppression of whatever sky-faerie cult happened to be in power at the time, folks had to avoid public scrutiny for fear of senseless persecution. Fine.
My confusion is around what this has to do with homosexual population numbers. Although we have no statistical data we can hazard an informed guess that this stabilised sometime back in our murky past and will remain stable until such time as humanity ends up destroying itself in some suitably creative fashion.
How would any covert heterosexual relationships happen in medieval times? How did noble heterosexuals have affairs? Same way gays did. The gays were there and it’s documented that gay relationships have happened in the major civilizations throughout history, and in this medieval setting, it was both publicly disliked and privately practiced.
These threads are amazing. People are fine with sexuality as long as it is heterosexuality. They say no one cares or should bring it up, but then their aggressive reactions or irrational complaints point out that homosexuality is going to be made into a conversation one way or another in this society.
If you want to use the logic that sexuality shouldn’t be brought up without being a hypocrite, then nobody can wear wedding rings, have photos on their desks, or invite people over for dinner parties. God forbid you ask someone who they went on vacation with and they accidentally reveal to you whether they are living a heterosexual or homosexual lifestyle.
Thus far I’ve avoided posting in these types of threads because regardless of what position I take, I figured someone would get mad and the discussion would go nowhere. However, its been frustrating to watch these threads wasting a lot of breath that often betray a great deal of ignorance and incomprehension on sexuality in the medieval era. Most frustrating above all is the (what seems to me, at any rate) bizarrely unfounded notion that the homosexuality in medieval Europe would somehow fit into modern categorizations such as “gay”, and that such relationships would at all be alike to what we see in contemporary society. To say there were “gay” people in medieval Europe is to impose modern sexual norms onto a society where they quite simply do not make a lick of sense whatsoever; quite frankly, I doubt that a person engaging in homosexual relationships in the period would conceive of it in the same terms that modern people do today.
For a point of reference, lets just take a look at Catharism, since that’s been brought up several times in both of these threads. They were a heretical group that emerged in 12th century France and died out by the late 13th century, making any possible inclusion in this game very much anachronistic - although some related heretical groups would still be extant by the early 15th century - with theological ties to gnostic-derived sects like Bogomilism and the Paulicians. The word Cathar itself is a Latinized rendering of the Greek katharos, or “pure”. They maintained the physical world was created by the demiurge, an evil entity they believed to be the father of Satan, who ruled the earth. The demiurge himself they identified as the Abrahamic God of the Bible, and they believed this evil entity was locked in a perpetual struggle with another “good” god, whose angelic son was a (significantly modified beyond all recognition) Jesus of the New Testament. The evil demiurge not only created the physical world, but also humanity; this he did by seducing angels and trapping their immaterial souls in vile, impure bodies of flesh, and it was only through the mercy of the “good” god that anyone in such a vile state could be saved. Jesus, being only a spiritual being, was not the physical Incarnation of the Son of God attested to by the rest of Christianity (as God taking on wicked human flesh was utterly repugnant and unthinkable to them); rather, his coming to earth was in an illusory, spiritual form, and he came to enlighten mankind about the truth of the evil of the body and the natural world and the possibility of transcending it to enter into the better spiritual realm of the “good” god.
Catharism’s disgust with flesh as a physical manifestation of evil went far beyond loathing the human body alone as an inherently wicked creation. Practitioners were forbidden from consuming any meat or dairy products, as to eat anything that came from flesh was quite literally to consume evil incarnate. And while the “good” god of Catharism made no ultimate distinction between the souls of either gender, the female body was selected for special denigration and disgust. The female body was condemned as especially vile and loathsome, a hateful tool of the “evil” god to tempt men into the unforgivable act of procreation; procreative sex was, insofar as Catharism was concerned, a horrible act that trapped angelic souls in a physical bodies, damning them to into a hateful, evil existence. So heinous was this act that pregnant women were denied any access to the consolelamentum, the sole organized ritual within Catharism that was believed to redeem the soul of the sinner so that it could be liberated from its wicked body and transmitted safely to the “good” god. It is within this context that homosexuality emerged as an approved form of sexual contact, as while it was held to be preferential to not engage in any sexual activity whatsoever, it was thought to be a lesser evil because it would not result in the sin of pregnancy and childbirth.
Obviously Catharism is but one context in which homosexuality was practiced in medieval Europe, but even so I hope it serves to effectively illustrate my point - namely, that the “why” and “how” of homosexuality in medieval Europe defies any neat categorization within modern concepts of gay sexuality, and I can provide other examples as required. Most of what I see in these threads are demands for Warhorse to indulge in creative anachronism. Honestly, if any sexual content whatsoever (be it heterosexual or homosexual) is included, I hope it actually is actually something relevant to the story and isn’t just some tacky, exploitative gimmick ala BioWare’s handling in the Mass Effect games (OH LOOK MIRANDA HAS A BUTT AND BOOBS OMG LOOK AT THEM AND THERE IS LESBIAN BLUE ALIEN SEX, OMG! - ugh, those games were embarrassingly immature in their handling of sex…) and actually has something genuinely accurate and meaningful to say on the subject.
Cool, but where are these “most” of what you see here being “demands for Warhorse to indulge in creative anachronism”?
You narrowly misinterpreted the use of the word gay to refer to a public culture rather than what it appears to me it is being used as more frequently here, being a term for homosexual people, regardless of practice or beliefs.
So as many have said, yes, gays (meaning homosexual people) were in fact present in the setting of Kingdom Come. The requests I am seeing from those interested in the depiction as it relates to Kingdom Come are for their courtships, relationships, or affairs to be portrayed however they did occur and could have realistically occurred.
Though I am sure some appreciate the information you have provided about what you called a “very much anachronistic” group, that anachronism alone makes that group irrelevant to many of the explanations in favor of a depiction of homosexuality found in this thread. The posts I am seeing regarding homosexuality are clear about historically appropriate depictions, which is why I am left curious as to what posts you were replying to that made you feel yours was called for. Who is it that described this subject with the notion that they would like history ignored for the inclusion of this subject in the game?
And realistically, there are many games that include sexuality. It is a common theme of fiction in any variety so it isn’t as if the subject of any sexuality whatsoever has come out of nowhere in the discussion of a game.
Well, let’s just use a few examples from this individual thread, shall we?
"have a secret society of gays in a cave that in a quest you have to break up and execute or save and lie to your lord that you killed them "
Sorry, that’s just wrong. Really, just painfully wrong. This isn’t an accurate or plausible idea in the least. For one thing, its just daft to suppose a “secret society of gays” would make any sense in 15th century Europe. Secondly, why the heck would any lord even bother with putting down something so trivial? He’s got more important things to do than hunting deviants in caves. This is simply bad.
Now, certainly by the 15th century the older system of penances (and on rare occasions castration of repeat offenders) had been gradually replaced by harsher sentences (often including death in most codes of law), it was rarely enforced with much strictness; in Bruges, Flanders (the modern Netherlands), it was considered an abnormally large number of executions when the city averaged one execution for sodomy a year between 1450 to 1500 AD - in many other places, it was far, far less. That’s still not especially nice, but that hardly indicates anything on the scale of repression that many in here seem to assume existed.
“If my character would encounter, say a gay couple living in secrecy in the countryside, or two soldiers desperately keeping their affair secret, then found them hanged for sodomy, it would greatly add to my sense of realism I think.”
Nope, not plausible either. They’d be far more probably sentenced to some religious penance (unless they were repeat offenders, in which case castration might be imposed as a sentence by a court). In any case, this is still pure fantasy. If this is an “accurate” rather than “creatively anachronistic” depiction being proffered, then I don’t know what is.
I take issue with the usage of the word for precisely because it is loaded with modern baggage, and much of the discussion thus far seems to me to be colored by the employment of modern labels, conventions, expectations, stereotypes and sexual mores that are irrelevant to 15th century Europe. I perceive it less as being narrowminded than I do as being a truthful historian, although perhaps that’s just arrogant conceit on my part. See the above examples - I can cite even more if I were to peruse the other, even longer thread.
Did I deny that homosexual activity occurred in 15th century Europe? No, I didn’t. I took issue with the application of labels like “gay” and the various scenarios being proffered on this thread as being, silly absurd and anachronistic. Feel free to disagree with me as you wish, but after spending as much time as I have studying the period I quite frankly find much of this thread to be a product of well meaning (and sometimes excessively pushy) ignorance.
Though I am sure some appreciate the information you have provided about what you called a “very much anachronistic” group, that anachronism alone makes that group irrelevant to many of the explanations in favor of a depiction of homosexuality found in this thread.
Go up a few posts. I only brought up Catharism because another user did as part of this discussion (they also came up in the other thread), and I felt that illuminating some of Catharism’s beliefs would give readers on this thread some inkling of how very differently their conceptualizations of sexuality differed from what we would conceive of as being “gay”; I also fully noted that they fall into the extremes of the margins, but that I felt that perhaps covering such ground might give people some clue of just how very differently those we are labeling “gay” for the sake of convenience would perceive and define themselves (Cathars were not alone in this regard). As I said in my previous post, I can provide further references if needed - I chose Catharism because it had been previously introduced and thought that throwing some light on the subject might prove helpful; clearly, it didn’t and seems to have only created more confusion.
The posts I am seeing regarding homosexuality are clear about historically appropriate depictions, which is why I am left curious as to what posts you were replying to that made you feel yours was called for. Who is it that described this subject with the notion that they would like history ignored for the inclusion of this subject in the game?
Because those posts, whatever their good intentions, consistently show a greater reliance of stereotypes about the period than they do an awareness of the historical reality. Because the scenarios being proffered are weepy fantasies that make for shallow drama that do nothing to enlighten the player on how or why anyone felt or acted the way they did. If something is going to be included, I’d prefer it to possess some actual meaningful and relevant relationship to the game’s story and setting and not merely be an exercise in exploitation (see: BioWare). If people genuinely want a historically accurate depiction, then I’d be much more impressed if they were doing research more in-depth than lightly browsing Wikipedia and cooking up silly sob stories.
Did I say anything to indicate I was somehow ignorant of that fact? All I said was that if such content is to be included, I would like it be relevant and also not anachronistic. For the record, I adore the writing of the 20th century English novelist Patrick O’Brian, who did an absolutely fantastic job of ensuring his characters behaved like believable people from the era, sexual mores, prejudices and all. He made no effort to alter or their behavior to suit modern attitudes and kept their actions completely consistent with what was plausible for the era. Heterosexual, homosexual, paederasty, beastiality - you name it, he brought it up, at one point or another. It just so happens he actually treated the material with an eye for historicity and never let any of it feel forced, anachronistic or fantastic. Therein lies my problem with these threads: just about everything being bandied about really isn’t accurate or believable at all.
I appreciate your candor. I completely agree that too often times people put a modern spin on things. I know a bit about the Gnostic beliefs you mentioned (was studying for seminary once) though as you added not to relevant to these times, however you did highlight that for reasons outside our own norms there were homosexual relations. Was penace the most common thing for a homosexual to go through if found out? That’s the sort of thing I’m interested in. I want to see this in an historical accurate manor however it might be. If people were rounded up by the hundreds and an old man with scissors walked up to each one snipping off their dangling bits have that in there. (no need for a video or movie or even showing the scene, but that knowledge out in the world would be interesting) if it was more benign punishment and not as severely ostracizing as some are making (my guess uneducated) claims. Then have it in there. It only needs to be in there as big as it was not romanticized, not bastardized. I’m hoping to learn a lot from this game as well as enjoy it.
