Yu Jing Fluff - Perception, Reality, Desire

And let's not forget that with the lobby system, those corporations are likely part of at least SOME of the government, so some departments were likely for it, and some not...

 

And that feeds into the campaign fought in the political sphere and Sun Tze's comments to the high command. The JSA didn't have to win on the battlefield, they had to hold out long enough for the diplomatic campaign to succeed.

 

Is it a new technology in the context of the background do you reckon?

 

It seems newer, but not cutting edge, i.e. with a decade or two of use. However, it's still a higher end source of entertainment.

 

If I were Yu Jing I would be investing in thousands of sensatranslator porn studios in PanO, then rocking up a few years after the birth rate crashes to mop up the foggy-brained, hairy-palmed, near-blind survivors.

 

I would expect IA will have a number of these moments. I think the problem with Yu Jing at the moment, (and even before the uprising), was that the two sectorials, (which tend to go into more detail than the general faction overview), were the ISS, the highly authoritarian police force who take on drug cartels and other criminal organizations, a fact which is slightly over shadowed by dealing with dissenters in nearly the same fashion, and the JSA, the oppressed second class citizen army whose main division, (the Keisostu), have a history of being used as cannon fodder until reinforcements can arrive.

 

Banner armies and the Invincibles are so much cooler prospects, same goes for if the Yanjing get some more field agents represented with models too.

 

At least the old level systems, not sure if the new high recreation level systems are a new development and had this effect on the population, or if the shows (ahem propaganda machines) became better.

 

This is part of the problem with Flanderization, it becomes harder and harder to dial it back as you get deeper in to it. People take a while to adjust to background changes, and it becomes hard for a faction to get out from under the weight of its own perceived ad-copy.

Yu Jing has been going down the rabbit hole for a while now, hell, ever since the first Human Sphere dropped. Back in 1st, the worst thing attached to us was a throwaway line about the Japanese being second class citizens (and Keisotsu not having cubes) and Wu Ming (which remains a perfectly acceptable thing in the context of Confucian thought and thus at least fit the faction ethos at the time). It gave us a bit of a ruthless edge, but still something that could get some positive spin in other places. It was grey, perhaps even dark grey, but grey.

But the second we got zombie people bombs and the two most visible sub-factions were the ISS (shown more often as jackbooted thugs and authoritarians with an axe to grind) and the Japanese (who had their themes of oppression amped up even higher with a side of terrorism). This has set the tone for the way the faction has been viewed for close to a decade now. At this stage, the whole State part of the StateEmpire has been a relatively minor part of how Yu Jing is viewed and is probably the least developed part of its background.

Now, with the whole faction largely focused on just the ISS and with Uprising taking their already grim and ruthless depiction and Flanderizing it further with genocide and the slaying of children, and you're starting to reach critical mass in terms of how the faction as a whole is viewed. Bottom line, unless the Invincible Army are shining paladins of virtue, people are still likely to remember Yu Jing as "the evil Asian fellows".

Because CB have taken so long to expand out the (unarguably larger and more important) bits of Yu Jing society, they've sort of pigeonholed Yu Jing in to a very narrow view to most people and if they want Yu Jing to be anything other than ruthless, evil, and dumb then they've got a lot of work ahead of them with the next couple of sectorials.

For a culture that has access to such a rich and interesting mythological and historical tableau, it's sad that the most Infinity has done with them is make a faction that makes today's PRC and DPRK look like slightly less terrible governments.

I think the only chance Yu Jing really has at this point is if CB drop the gloves and show the other factions in just as bad a light, but then we start edging the whole setting toward nihilistic grim-darkness and that certainly isn't an improvement either. But so long as the worst crimes of PanO are either off-screen and un-recorded, or relegated to small blurbs about how they aren't nice to Helots (a species we know almost nothing about) or Atechs (and really just that one story) then trying to paint them as equally evil seems a stretch. As it stands, even the Combined, as blood-thirsty as they can be, have a more sympathetic set of motivations than Yu Jing (or at least understandable) and that isn't a good thing if CB want all the human factions to be something folks can relate to.

I have a small glimmer of hope that the Invincible Army will be all "Yu Jing; FUCK YEAH!" but it is starting to gutter the more I see about what was written in Uprising. My fear is that they use where they've come to at this point as a jumping off point to go lower, rather than a precipice that they wont cross again.

 

@Durandal The other thing they could do is have Yu Jing have the most significant victories vs. CA, using Wu Mings and Kuang Shi to counter the use of the Sepsitor, and generally cutting corners on the moral side of things for gains of expediency. That way it could present the moral choice of what depths humanity is willing to sink to for survival. But as it stands Yu Jing is presented as having crippled itself through its "pragmatic" (generously speaking) behavior, which seems to have united the Sphere against them. So why do it, unless they're being presented as just idiots? And since the memetic strategic genius Sun Tzu is speaking out against it, you can assume that it's being presented as the categorically incorrect and suboptimal choice.

 

Going forward, there are really two places we might see improvement.

The first is the Invincible Army release. We know they were being playtested. We know that CB has developed and put out some profiles over the years. Maybe there has been a problem, they're far from ready, but with this new focus on linking releases to narrative developments it seems a good case can be made that this is the darkness meant to make the light all the brighter, a weakened and defeated Yu Jing the backdrop for the appearance of an Invincible Army at Humanity's darkest hour. I wish I were completely confident, I am not, but it remains a definite possibility.

The second is the Yu Jing RPG book. I'll admit I have more hope here, since the core basis of the book is that there are players, protagonists, who want to immerse in Yu Jing. When Gutier writes Uprising, his focus is on the new army, setting its story and its triumph, it is what it is even if I think there were better approaches. But the RPG's very different focus means it is still Gutier's material, but coming out through a different lens, one that is inherently going to present a more nuanced picture of the StateEmpire.

Unless the YJ book is revised to be the Japan book and Yu Jing is now an NPC-antagonist faction, but that's impossible. Everyone please tell me that is impossible.

 

Time to pass some reforms and reorganise the Imperial Service, possibly bringing some other agencies to the front, and launch some promotional campaigns.

 

Fuck this is grim.

Also an excellent summary of the problem and the damage getting JSA and IS before any regular state army sectorials has done to the setting. I wish the RPG book will correct this, but now that it is being modified post Uprising we can be pretty sure we know what's coming. Sooner or later even the "wait and see crowd" will have to concede that many of us described what followed with near psychic clarity pretty much on the day of the first ENOUGH teaser.

Fuck this is grim.

 

@Shiwen I don't have confidence that the release of IA is going to change anything in terms of the fiction. The Daofei debacle alone is enough to make me nervous. Probably didn't fit with the sledgehammer theme they are working with.

 

Daofei debacle?

 

Daofei are the "The Tactical Section of the Invincible Army" according to their unit bio. They train in Dailing, on tropical Shentung.

In two separate seminars, @Bostria has said that they would be in White Banner and not Invincible Army and their logo redesign seems to strongly indicate that they will be in White Banner. Their dossier, shown on BoW during the Beyond Red Veil release also lists them as White Banner.

 

Could argue old fluff vs new fluff - updated dossier and new miniature certainly match with White Banner, yeah. it could also be available in both forces, of course, much like the Zuyong (probably)