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

Yes and no - In making your Yu Jing be a group of heroic terracotta warriors, you aren't bending the fluff hardly at all - they just had no part in the uprising, or if they did, followed the rules of war. Making them orcs hiding in human power armor is, yes, rather more off topic.

Point being, the factions are big and there is room to play good guys even if some of the YJ army is made up of very bad guys.

 

I don't understand how you can't tell the difference between saying, "Yeah, my guys are the Judicial Police fighting against the triads, rather than Psycho Crane's dudes who firebombed the block." and "My CA are My little pony who shoot your guys with friendship!" but okay, you do you and continue to get upset about some fluff that doesn't apply to everyone in the faction. It's not even "headcanon" to say that. The fluff doesn't stipulate, every YJ military unit was a bastard. It even says who did the atrocities, so just don't say your guys are those guys. They have a whole standard military that is stalemating PanO, along with ones fighting CA. One or two events do not define a faction.

With people facing military court for what they did, and YJ easing off and letting JSA split, it shows a lot more restraint than, "YJ big bad guys. They are so evil." If you're upset that YJ caught a black eye from it, just remember, they are already the #2 loser faction and have always been. And when you get sad about that, just remember that they have more interesting profiles than PanO, and get happy again.

 

Having read all the fluff I found yu Jing relatively competent.

I mean the whole thing is written very sympathetically towards JSA, but every faction section does that.

Even trying to sell it though, JSA repeatedly get their teeth kicked in. Particularly when the invincible divisions get involved.

The other factions/corporations all get involved purely from self interest, with JSA having a lot of promises to make good on. Much of that hinging on kurage and becoming a stable power.
Things hang very precariously despite plans going about as well as they could have for the Japanese.

Sun Tze is a very likeable character and is opposed to some of the worse moves made by ISS and xi Zhuang is also written quite positively.

I'm not quite getting the sweeping things some of you guys are getting angry about on the fluff.

Edit: and before someone brings up genocide. I feel that discussion has been hashed out. I would suggest reading the definition of genocide, and then also realising to reach the conclusion requires your own interpretation of "pacified".

 

Wow...

 

Yeah, I was a bit torqued.

An apology (well, a statement that it wasn't directed at me) was given, and I'm going to accept it.

The difference is that the US went and arrested the unit, tried them for criminal acts.

The Shield Division seems to be getting a free pass.

It's not about the bombings. It's how the ISS and Yanjing somehow didn't see the damn meetings and planning BEFORE the Uprising. All this was one man's work, over the course of at least one year (I don't have the book, it could be longer).

You're absofuckinglutely correct that statement doesn't have any basis in the existing fluff!

That was a way to make the Kuang Shi program somewhat more acceptable option than their current incarnation.

Really? Some person who thinks that their way to fame is to shoot up a movie theater? Someone who is only attracted to prepubescent children, and incapable of not acting on that attraction? Those aren't worthy of reprogramming?

Exactly.

Yeah, and with no mention of these 9 of 10 other things that the ISS was distracted by in the fluff.

That would have made it a bit easier to accept that the ISS and Yanjing were distracted, instead of completely unable to see it.

Yes, it's very hard to stop the insurgency once it kicks off. That's why it's so critical to not let things get to a shooting war in the first place!

Hey, sounds like the Cold War.

And the US and USSR never started openly shooting at each other for that entire time, let alone 20 days of openly shooting at each other!

I'm telling you that as a US Sailor, if my commanding officer put air quotes around pacified like that, he's telling me to kill everyone who even looks at us funny, man, woman, or child.

 

Neither the US nor the USSR were enveloped in a civil war on the scale of the japanese insurrection though. Imagine one of them had, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the other would have pounced on the opportunity?

 

Oh, absolutely.

But NEVER to the point of shooting at each other. That way lies Global Thermonuclear War. Goodbye human race.

 

Sorry, doublepost.

 

They also aren't worthy of rape, or being eaten. Not everything should be used as punishment.

Edit: Maybe everyone wouldn't spiritually understand the problem with brainwashing people to make them useful. What about harvesting organs (without consent) on execution? Does that sound okay?

 

Or worse making them watch the rest of the office after Michael Scott leaves the show...

 

No disagreement there.

I was getting at was that there are some people who are an active danger to either themselves or others. There's no way to make them not a threat short of death in our time. You can confine them, at which point they are still a danger to the guards and other inmates. Plus, if they ever escape or are paroled, they're back to the same threat to the community.

What the hell do you do with people like that? "Shot while attempting to escape"? That's bad, but at least they've had their day in court. "Shot while resisting arrest"? No, what happens if you have the wrong person?

Better people than I will make arguments about the state of someone's soul, and them needing the chance to repent.

Well, usually the heart is too damaged by the execution method, and the other organs are damaged by other problems. Like Hepatitis. Go ahead, go donate plasma. They ask you if you have ever been in a jail for more than 72 hours. After 72 hours, it's assumed that you've been raped and are now carrying HepC (if not worse). So at least in the US, felons are explicitly barred from organ donation.

But in general terms, no organ harvesting without consent. Ever. That should be hitting people's squick levels harder than me screaming genocide.

 

@Section9 an an American I'm sure you are aware of small towns that get funding off a single speedtrap when major roadways pass through. In general some police forces begin to rely on ticket income and will give fraudulent/unfair tickets for extra money.

Then there's the case of that judge getting kickbacks from a private juvenile prison...

I don't want to give our or any government a conflicting interest when sentenceing. I don't want a judge getting kickbacks for lobotomizing (whether physical, chemical or psychological) people by whoever profits off them.

You don't need to destroy (whatever's left) of someone's humanity and you certainly don't need to turn a profit off them. If they truly can't exist in our society just kill them. It's the least cruel option.

 

And xi Zhuang? He seemed pretty morally good. So, like both you Jing characters

 

May I suggest that we should get back to (what I interpret as) the original question of whether it was a bad choice of CB to paint two factions, YU and JSA into very dark colours while they had been the usual dark grey of everyone else before?

I have a lot to say about the real life politics here, but I cut it out in order not to distract and disturb. Suffice to say that indeed, the Human Sphere is a much more peaceful place than it is nowadays. What YJ did to the Japanese in the Infinityverse was not nearly as horrible as what is happening in Syria in our time. It is still a pretty horrible story, enough to upset players who thought of their army as morally acceptable.

I think what makes the difference to the other factions that here there is open warfare with YJ bombing civilians. The other factions have not done that, their crimes remained hidden as seems to be the style of the 23rd century. No, PanO is not nice. They are greedy, corrupt capitalists with heaps of skeletons in their closets. But they look better on paper. Now PanO and JSA look really bad and I am not so sure how the players of those factions feel about that. I would like to know from them.

I second the idea that the OP's question should be put to cb via direct mail. CB will not get involved via forum, I guess. They may answer because people seem to be interested. Are we really heading for an even darker Infinityverse? Uprising reads like CB wants to release a new large-scale battle game a la Dropfleet Commander or Firestorm Armada.

 

The question wasn't posed at us.

 

That wasn't really the question or the point?

What's the phrase? "Moving the goalposts"