A couple of questions to the CB staff about fluff direction and the Infinity fandom

So the fluff is gray because nobody knows and can't make up their minds.

I take that as my cue to headcanon my own army and give the finger to the yuandun when they drive by.

 

Well if we remember Afghanistan it all suddenly make sense. There are a lot of differences between modern Coalition approach and old Soviet one. Looks like Yu-Jing is portrayed more in Soviet way, more ruthless one.

 

No they aren't.

They are portrayed as the unit on the ground in a specific event.

We don't have a large enough fluff set to say everyone is proud of them (or even knows what they are doing) and in the Uprising book people have reported that some ISS officers have been convicted by YJ courts.

This seems to clearly emphasize that the division is getting out over its skis and some of the rest of the ISS and YJ are slapping them back for it.

 

@deep-green-x I haven't seen anyone nail something on the head as hard as you have before. YJ really hasn't changed, it's just more in your face, as they actually had an insurrection to put down now.

You must be ignoring PanO's dark side as much as you're obsessed about IS's/YJ's. Who backed the Druze in the Commercial Conflicts, among other things?

That's not a secret in any way and we see crimes against locals show up all the time. If we want to talk about Vietnam, what about when US troops slaughtered a whole village for that exact reason? That was a war crime and how can we ever play games depicting the US army ever again? How can we ever be proud/relate to them again? (It's easy, shit is FUBAR all the time. It's not necessary to lump everyone together due to one action.)

Somehow being surprised that IS is doing terrible things to the people they subjugate is like being surprised that the SS did terrible things. Is what happened over the top? Maybe, but things like that have also happened historically, repeatedly. In this case, the public outcry was enough that the YJ government actually stopped.

I guess I find it only all to easy to separate historical events and sci-fi stories from my enjoyment of tabletop games. You like YJ, but don't like what IS did and your morals prevent you from playing your guys due to a story, play regular army YJ. It's like the difference between the Wehrmacht and the SS. Yes, Wehrmacht did terrible things to, as did all armies, and as do all armies in Infinity. Don't let the cyberpunk, chrome and neon distract you from that.

Treason focused on YJ and JSA. The expanded information on both showed that they are both a bunch of bastards. Just wait (meme all you want) until the next book or two comes out, focuses on other factions, and you can see how much of bastards they are too. Especially if they go back to the Commercial Conflicts.

 

Two things:

First:
The folks who think that ISS somehow "missed" the Japanese insurgency need to work on their reading comprehension.

Every major operation conducted by the Japanese towards secession/autonomy was set in motion by terror bombings. Virtually every chain of events in every theater basically began with "Kempetai bomb the ISS barracks/HQ for the region."

It's less about missing things, and more about having their infrastructure/personnel demolished. Hard to resist or counter pretty much anything when your manpower/intel/personnel are free floating ash, or are buried beneath shattered rubble.

Second:
What the fuck is up with the Yu Jing apologists?

Hate to break it, but Yu Jing's always been the bad guy. The fluff's been pretty unwavering that the Japanese have been actively oppressed since the beginning of Yu Jing's fluff. They aren't the scrappy underdogs to sell a new sectorial... They've always been the scrappy underdogs.

I actually read a post in one of these threads by someone defending the Kuang Shi program. It was basically a comment like "oh yeah, Kuang Shi are all irredeemable murderers and psychopaths who couldn't be rehabilitated any other way", as though kindly ol' Yu Jing has been patient with them and given them chance after chance.

Of course, that's a claim that has zero basis in the lore, and basically comes off as trying to morally redeem the fact that Yu Jing has always done things that are morally reprehensible. Black bagging political dissidents and reprogramming them as unwilling disposable shock troops is an idea that's been around forever.

I hate to break it to people, but none of these Yu Jing developments are out of character. They're a fascist totalitarian state. ISS is, and has always been, the secret police that terrorizes the populace and enforces adherence to a strict ideology. They conduct investigations without warrant, trials without due process, and either murder dissidents or force them to fight as penal troops. I see people in this thread who have been making social media posts akin to "I disagree with you. Bao agents have been dispatched to drag you into the street and shoot you in the head." ISS as bad guys is no mystery.

So why is everyone surprised that they're killing people who disagree with the Party? Wake up. Uprising isn't about the lore changing, but more about the lore suddenly having meaningful impact for players who could previously just ignore it, or screen it however they wanted. "Yeah, I'll take my AVA8 Kuang Shi. Sweet, I have 20 Orders." Yeah, blissful ignorance, because building a strong army list doesn't require you to think about where your units come from.

And honestly, there's nothing wrong with not caring about the lore. But when you get up on your soapbox (as so many are doing right now) and saying "wait, we're the bad guys?"

Yes, ISS is the bad guys.

Silver lining:
Wait for Invincible Army to come out. The faction's developmental arc will be completed, Yu Jing will be redeemed as IA saves the Sphere from the next major plot development, and Yu Jing will actually be truly grey in lore with a "shining hero sectorial and grim authoritarian sectorial" rather than being "oppressors vs oppressed" which they were before Uprising.

 

@Hecaton

I don't think heroism comes into play much when it's about pursuing political and economical supremacy. Will Yu jing behave differently in a different setting with a different conflict going on? Probably yes. Would PanO have a different, more unsympathetic role to play in a conflict that compromises their own interests? Probably yes.

 

Even nations like the United States have done some iffy stuff (trail of tears, for instance) and the natives themselves did iffy stuff (cannibalism and ritual sacrifice of captives).

I think people need to remember that the worst of a nation shouldn't be used as the defining nature of the nation, any more than the absolute best. We all fall somewhere in between, and usually in difference spots on different days.

 

PanO has already done so by Proxy with the Druze during the Commercial Conflict. Did you not pay attention to the Alive stuff? Did you not read Outrage? It's all rife with PanO breaking international law, letting their people die/or killing them themselves to tie up lose strings.

 

The only fucking reason to play this game is so the cyberpunk, chrome and neon distract me from all that.

You say that, I bet that Varuna is going to go exactly like Uprising, except that PanO will win.

It is already established that the Blue Sea Project is brutal (ISS is brutal, and they weren't using TAGs for counterinsurgency as their SOP).
And it is already established that Yu Jing sends stuff to the Liberts, so its not that difficult to guess.

First: CB is expecting us to take seriously a super police force that... gets its office builidings blown up from under its feet.

Second: Oh the deception! We were all so so blind! Thank you oh wise ones for illuminating us from this clever ruse! And thanks for insulting everyone by calling them either stupid blind idiots, self-delusional WAAC players or powergamers.

Silver lining: So we wait for 9 to 12 months for our faction to stop being Pol Pot's fanboy club. I wonder why nobody thought of that. Oh wait, we did. It's one of the many reasons why people is angry.

 

Hmm?

PanO is portrayed as the most heinous expression of corporate interest in modern politics. It's the ugly intersection of capitalism and democracy. Even the Church has strict control over religious "salvation" by having dominant control over the Cube process. The wealthy are saved and lead ideal lives, the poor are forgotten to the point where they can't even utilize public services or infrastructure because they lack the technology to even interface with common societal amenities. PanO corporations are essentially the beating heart behind internecine war and organized crime throughout the Sphere; their equipment arms criminal gangs and mercenary factions, their hired gunmen massacre remote villages to stake mineral claims, and they interfere with the internal politics of sovereign states in order to better the quality of their own lives. The entire plot of the Uprising manga (and certainly its most significant moral takeaway) centers around how PanO can't be trusted. The fact that we have to deal with Emily in every StarCo list, instead of every NCA list, is because PanO is bad, cant be trusted, and is entirely willing to fuck their own people to maintain their place in the Sphere.

 

There's not really a crime fitting for reprogramming. Although they're not fascist, not everything evil is fascist.

 

Also, lest we forget, there are PLENTY of examples in PanO's own fluff describing them as nasty people. The agent talking about slaughtering villages in N3:HS, the descriptions of the Hexas and Locusts, the utter callousness towards Ateks, PanO intelligence officers talking about murdering captured YJ criminals so those criminals can't let the ISS and Eyes know they were funded by the Hexahedron... folks who haven't seen the nasty bits about their faction(s) have been willfully ignorant.

 

As for the police force failing to stop terrorists... I give you 9/11, the latest shootings where the shooter reported himself to the police and wasn't stopped, and many, many, many more.

It's impossible to stop every single criminal - sometimes the big problems slip through when you get distracted by small stuff, sometimes you get complacent, sometimes... you get unlucky.

 

People is complaining about Yu Jing's nasty bits overcoming the entire faction and covering it in what can be described as shit.

Not about those bits not existing before.

 

Sometimes... the author needs to Deus Ex Machina an entire sectorial away.

Like, sure, you can't stop every single thing, but the fluff pretty much puts it as if they couldn't stop any single thing.

 

Not really.

At one point the British police reported they were stopping terrorist plots in 2017 at a rate of almost 1 per day.

Sometimes the volume gets so high that a few get through, and then you get things like London Bridge with a van ripping through a line of pedestrians.

Sometimes you stop 9 out of 10 bombers, but the 10th hits your station and blows your department into chaos.

Sometimes you stop 9 out of 10 collaborators, but the 10th is the one that secures the deal for Pan-O backing.

 

ONE specific event, which is rather large, has exploded, and part of YJ has come roaring to the fore. Just as a PanO fan could have been upset by the way PanO was portrayed in Outrage, etc. Or, you could simply note that life is grey, Infinity is grey, and that in a sci-fi setting 175 years in the future, people will do nasty things to accomplish what they think is "right". It's along the lines of the Operative, or Count Fenring, or Wraith, or any number of sci-fi characters. Are these all the be all and end all of their setting or their universe? No, they are a compelling single story. If you reduce everything down to your displeasure that it's your faction's turn on the spit and can't look around it, that's on you, not on CB.

 

I think he was referring to this.