Yes, but GW's approach is to write three or four conflicting absolutes and tell the players they are all canon.
Thank you for posting what I have been trying to find the time to type. To add to it can I add the dictionary definition and how it corralates with the treason qoute Dictionary definition of genocide the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group. The quote for page 18 of teason ITS challenge. Any person with a Japanese surname, speaking Japanese or related to Japanese (this is your particular ethnic group/nationally), and regardless of being military or a civilian (meaning all of the for mentioned group) is for us a dangerous individual and therefore we have to "pacify them" (pacify is military talk for kill. Any remaining ambiguity is removed by the qoute marks surounding the final 2 words.) And there you have a match with the dictionary definition of genocide. Synonyms of genocide racial killing, massacre, wholesale slaughter, mass slaughter, wholesale killing, indiscriminate killing; mass murder, mass homicide, mass destruction, annihilation, extermination,elimination, liquidation, eradication,decimation, butchery, bloodbath,bloodletting; pogrom, ethnic cleansing,holocaust, For those saying 'massacre' and 'mass graves' in the in the Syco craine qoute does not eqate to a genocide, take note of the presence of 'massacre' and 'mass homicide' in the list of synonyms. So can we stop claming these qoutes do not mean acts of genocide. I am happy to have Yu-Jing be the most radical faction in terms of law and order(a bit of grey is way more interesting and realistic after all) but that does not go for the killing of civilians who have committed no crime. It is totally different to the criminal killing background of the ISS.
You know guys, after reading the fluff of uprising I think it's not that bad and one sided as I thought it will be. It's still very vague and there is a lot of deus ex machina in what had happened and the IS is still a bunch of incompetent idiots. If I read it like two months ago I might even think it's OK. Still after reading over 100 pages of arguments from both sides I'm a bit wiser about military tactics and politics so I guess it's harder to swallow the book now. My point is maybe we are overthinking the fluff of uprising. Maybe if we start paying as much attention to the other section of infinity fluff and analyse the whole setting, it will also easily fall apart. That being said I'm still upset about the current fluff. First we lost JSA. Then IS turned from being a judge drad state police force to ethnic cleansing trigger happy bunch of nazis. What next? Will Gutier visit me personally and kick me in the nuts because I try to play vanilla? I get the impression someone at CB don't want me to play YJ any more. Because that's not how you encourage people to play a fraction. Isn't it? Even if they dropped Invincible army today I'm not sure I'd care any more. My attitude to the game turned from being super enthusiastic and getting every realse for my fraction to barely interested. My super new JSA crispy detailed miniatures are collecting dust under the bed and today I literally forced myself to paint my IS models (I have to paint them as a part of local group motivator). I know some people don't care about fluff but for me it's an important part of this game and the recent additions are spoiling the fun for me. I really hope CB take this whole mess into consideration to avoid such situations in the future or they shouldn't be surprised why new YJ miniatures are not selling well. I hope next bath of fluff will get us back to fractions being grey/dark grey. I don't want to read about PanO atrocities on varuna or Haqq hassasins blowing bakunin to balance the current fluff. There is already one grimdark system on the market and I don't think we need that in infinity.
moderator This thread needs to either cool down or face the same fate the other threads have. /moderator
Thanks! I was a bit worried what I had written didn't explain it very well. I guess we in English speaking countries, especially those untouched by serious conflict, have with thinking about a difficult topic like this. We only learn about limited things like the Holocaust and how great our countries were for helping stop it, and other forms of genocide are not things we are ever taught about, or even see in the media. Several weeks ago I met some refugees from a town near Afrin in Syria, who explained that their entire town has vanished. Most people did escape beforehand, but the Turkish military, and their ISIS/Al Nusra (the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate) proxy force took over the region, and now dozens of families have just disappeared, with thousands of these former ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters moving their own families into the towns, claiming it is theirs and always has been. Nobody knows what has happened to the Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds who have all vanished, but everyone assumes they are dead now. Old pagan temples, some of them more than two thousand years old, are all being destroyed and desecrated by the invading forces. Even the ruler of Turkey announced before that he was going to remove the minorities from the region and "return" the entire region to the control of Turks and Arabs. The people who escaped the Islamist onslaught might not have died, but what do they do now? Their language, culture and traditions will now be very difficult to maintain, because they will need to integrate as refugees in other countries. Many places like the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia are made up of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of refugees, yet how many of us still maintain our ancestor's mother tongue? How many of us can sing the songs or read the poems written in the languages of our forebears? Even if the Turkish military and their Islamist friends had just forced everyone out instead of murdering them outright, the outcome is still the same. Even if they had just allowed most people to remain but banned their language and moved thousands of others into the region threatening their cultural integrity, the result is identical. It's still wiping a people out. It's still genocide. There are so many ways to eradicate a people without resorting to the stereotype people have in their heads about machete wielding gangs or concentration camps, and it's up to all of us to talk about this, because unless people know about it nobody is going to ever do anything about it. Have you considered trying to write/draw your own fluff? It would be very difficult but if you do a good enough job people would probably read it! There are plenty of people who read and do fan-works for other systems so I am sure plenty of people would be happy to read anything you write yourself.
@Alphz Thanks for taking the time to post about how your position changed/was clarified. As a number of people have commented people on both sides of this conversation have become entrenched in their views and in that context having you show some movement towards a more progressive discussion of the topic is a great first step. As someone who is firmly in the camp of feeling this whole episode has been really poorly handled I'd really appreciate it if some of the other posters on this thread in the same position as me could rein things in a little. I have no issue with clarification of definitions (and I think we've covered that pretty conclusively now) or criticisms of how the intended perception of what YJ is has become confused but we have not helped our case with a number of the personal attacks. They may not have been intended in that way and I totally get that when people are frustrated it gets harder to keep the debate focused on the issues and not the people but if we want to try and salvage anything resembling a positive resolution of this situation we need to find a way to be better in how we present some of these points. Just as we got more frustrated with each passing event (wotan fiction, removal of profiles, ISS incompetence, intimation of ethnic cleansing, etc) and have become less and less comfortable with the notion of "wait and see" or to give the benefit of doubt over the flanderization of the faction, it's important that we don't just mirror that behaviour and make things worse. We've made a number of very valid points through the literally hundreds of pages on the topic in multiple threads and we've been told that CB is listening to the issues. Now, I get that sounds an awful lot like "wait and see" but there really are lead times on a lot of these issues so there aren't many other options available to us that are in our power. On that point, if @psychoticstorm could give some insight into what kind of options were being looked at, which points CB acknowledged need addressing or, even better, if some of the material that didn't have such long lead times (such as digital only web content) could be bought forwards to start addressing some of the issues that would go a long way to trying to rebuild some of the trust lost in this episode.
So i got my copy a few days ago and while I agree that the ISS is pictured as evil (the case of the 15 year old girl is the best example. But this passage is written strangely imo so I don't rly know what to think about it) the harsh reaction of the military is somewhat way more understandable than people in this forum said. You have to consider that when the uprising began the Kempeitei and Tatenokai attempted terrorist bombings on state facilities in ALL regions that were inhabited by japanese ppl mostly througout the sphere and kidnapped and assassinated all agents that were off duty, so most likely unarmed. The fluff also states how fanatical the JSA is, that they are determined to achieve victory by any means necessary and are willing to die for their emperor (40k lulz) and fight to the last man. You can't just go to them and say something like "hey guys, I'm sure we can sort this out peacefully". Also there's a text that tells us that the state empire published a message to all japanese Citizens that it was not to late to declare their loyalty to Yu Jing before military measures were taken. This even sounds generous to me, considering it's YJ which we are talking about and the JSA just bombed their institutions and killed state officials. So yeah, to me it sounds logic that they try to stomp the uprising with full force. The deathsquads of the narrative event still are a bit too much, but the rest isn't as bad imo. Good for me I guess because many will disagree. Gesendet von meinem SM-J500FN mit Tapatalk
The way yu jing acts is understandable because they managed to get caught so off guard the soviets at the start of barbarrossa look like the most on guard army ever. Offices blown up from under their feet. Not a clue caught on a massive conspiracy covering 5 systems and tons of personnel. Can't even effectively blockade their home system. That's the second power in the sphere guys! Why hasn't Haqq just annexed the Uyghurs yet, is CB saving it for the next book?
I mean yeah, thats definitely how it can be read. But what I'm trying to point out here is needed to make a number of assumptions to get there because the text doesn't give you all of that information. This is why other people can read the same paragraph and come to completely different points of view. I for one and imagining a lot of chaos around the opening weeks of uprising. A lot of officers acting on instinct rather than having sit down meets. The way forces are cut off by other powers would have added to the confused nature of the conflict. I mean, this is a very cold and emotionless way to look at the facts. Maybe they got clues but it didn't point to a full blown uprising. Just because the text doesn't go into detail as how the bombings were done or what the imperial service were doing while the kuge plotted, doesn't actually mean they were "clueless". As I've pointed out above, the text doesn't have all the information. and to come to certain conclusions requires certain assumptions. The kuge were supported by an unprecedented number of factions, including tohaa. Because all of the factions stand to gain a little something something. I have a feeling some may come to regret that support and may reneg in the coming events. Not sure what you meant about blockade their home system? They did and as a result beat the JSA at kuraimoi. I've really just been engaging the wrong people around the events. I can't fault any of these statements. I fully agree, there is going to be a bit of time before any of the concerns get addressed and a bit of patience would go a long way.
They definitely have some success with the blockade of Yutang-Shentang, PanO is unable to deploy their Steel wall and Yu Jing maintains air superiority. But there are also a few rather glaring failures, such as the Japanese Emperor being evacuated from Kuraimori, and the premise of the current ITS Treason event which shows Japanese forces on Shentang are being successfully resupplied by PanO (and that in turn demonstrates Yu Jing DIDN'T beat the JSA there, that fight is still ongoing), and also that the Combined Army is engaged in operations of some sort there. Now, that said, those failures don't bother me too much... blockading space is hard, the Yu Jing blockade of the home system has been generally effective, it accomplished the overarching goal of preventing the secession seen in the other systems, and its failures are the exceptions not the rule. But I'd like to have seen more of that across Uprising as a whole, particularly the first day decapitation carried out vs the ISS, which in the text is just too clean to be believable to me.
Let's just say that there will be more than one "team blue" force marching in support of Yu Jing rather than the Japanese we are "supposed" to be backing.
Have you considered using a different color font for moderator warnings. Something that will always call attention to itself. I recommend red. Then again, I would, wouldn't I, eh, recommend red? And a note in your sig that red is your "moderator Voice" and Bob's your uncle. This is where I ask if anyone has heard any rumors about the contents of the next book? A discreet leak or two would be very helpful, especially if it is about the Invincible Army.
I am considering colours Between red and orange red feels too aggressive and orange is the same with links, any suggestions I am open to it.
To be fair, any different colour will work as long as it's clearly identified in your Sig. Clarifying when you are using your "moderator voice" and just participating in threads as a member of the forum would be good.
@psychoticstorm , Red and Orange are traditional, in as much as there can be traditions in the internet. They are 'warm' colors. I'm guessing that is what you meant by aggressive. Chose a 'cool' color. This is readily noticed and a 'cool' color. Legible on a white background and distinct from a black font. Even easier to read when in boldface. However what the admiral said is true. Any color works if properly identified as the "mod voice." and used consistently as only the 'Mod Voice' To the topic: My uprising book arrived today. It is a nice book, in the physical sense, hardbound and visually appealing. I start reading tonight. Wish me luck. The brawler looks like a fun to paint mini. Only two pieces too. Easy to assemble. One must love that.
I assume you're talking about my comment as a US-trained troop. I bet that if you asked any other veterans on the forum, they'd say the same thing, regardless of nation. Military and civilians might use the same words, but we don't speak the same language. Because the text doesn't give any information, it makes the Imperial Service and the Yanjing look incompetent. If there had been a mention of Ninjas or hackers going through and cleaning up evidence so that the Imperial Service or Yanjing didn't find anything, it would have been a lot more believable. Hell, even just a mention of odd Ninja deployments around The Gray Man's trips might have helped the suspension of disbelief. Red is traditional, and honestly, if you are warning the thread as a whole you want it to jump off the page, be rather aggressive. I almost missed that warning you gave. A moderator is a police officer for the forum, you are allowed (and expected, even) to be aggressive in your warnings.
