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

I’ve been reading The Infinity lore since 1st edition and nothing that Yu-Jing is doing at the moment seems out of character.

They’ve always been the faction with the most authoritarian tendencies and their suppression of the Japanese has been long established. This was the faction with King-Shi and Wu Ming remember.

They are not the “Bad guys” of the setting, CA arguably have that title still for wiping out the Exrah, slaughtering civilians on Paridiso and having the Umbra amongst their ranks.

Yu-Jing represents the end game of an authoritarian regime obsessed with civil control and loyalty. It’s one avenue that a society could go down just as the hyper Capatalists of PanO with their political lobbyists, state religion, questionable treatment of those Ateks outside the system and the shady actions of the Hexa.

I don’t feel it’s an inditement of all Chinese culture represented in the setting and making comparisons between current real world stuff and the fictional representations in Infinity rarely ends well. I remember very unsavoury comments on Haqqislam many moons ago from a part of the player base that should have known better.

TL:DR ‘Twas always thus. Try to separate your expectations from both current geopolitical reality’s and fictional settings.

 

Genocide doesn't seem out of character? Really?

 

@Hecaton
Thanks for creating this line of communication with CB.

I think that this is not thread to argue. If you want to prove that somebody is wrong, in YJ subforum, we have a thread for every aspect of Uprising. As OP said. If you are happy, good for you. This thread is The chance for CB to discuss current situation with community.

 

Not for a faction with a noted authoritarian bent, distean for a people as a lower social class and demand for complete loyalty from its subjects.

Historically authoritarian regimes have come down very hard on any discent, there’s stuff hapening today with the displacement of peoples by military and repressive regimes that while not genocide are getting as close as they dare.

This is an authoritarian regime with an absolute state control writ large, responding to an insurrection by those they considerd second class citizens anyway. For all the talk of how O12 can compel the factions of the Human Sphere I doubt Yu-Jing would care what they think and anyway from them this is an internal matter.

Again nothing that Yu-Jing is doing here seems out of character within the context of the setting.

 

Not a moderating comment

I have to point out again, that "Genocide" is never mentioned in the background material, even in the recent PDF's, racism and cultural bias, yes, Genocide, no.

 

That's a creative interpretation of "every japanese, or person with japanese sounding name or surname, civilian or military, is a threat and must be "pacified"".

So, in your opinion, is there any fluff reason to want to play Yu Jing, assuming that I was conned and deceived (by bad people in no way related to CB) into believing that the faction wasn't made up of monsters?

 

If you can reconcile that the actions of the Imperial Service and the quite nasty Yuandun don’t represent everyone in the faction but are the most hardline elements then yeah? I think CA players can manage to play Onyx even though it means playing with Umbra who have stated genocidal tendencies.

I don’t think any faction in the game has a squeaky clean image PanO and Tohaa included.

If your playing a faction and some of their actions make you uncomfortable then by all means stop. Just be aware war and clandestine military black ops are never going to be victimless actions.

 

I will join discussion as soon as I`ll get my copy of Uprising.

But

Really? Really? You`re asking others is your creative interpretation is out of character for ingame faction? Of course it is, it`s your headcanon and headcanon is usually at least a bit OOC. Why blame others on your interpretation if it`s too creative or is a label of bad taste?

 

I am afraid creative interpretations are just that, creative interpretations, Kuraimori is still full of Japanese, ISS brutality is at surprisingly low levels given the Keimpetai and Tatenokai do their absolute best to stir up trouble and even one ISS agent has been prosecuted in a martial law region were civil law does not exist.

I would say this a farcry of what an actual genocide sounds like.

 

So basically fanfic and headcannon your way around it.

I was expecting better.

 

That's not in Uprising either.

 

Can you explain what you mean by this?

In the various Infinity background books we’re given the perspectives from multiple Yu-Jing characters there’s enough published material there that shows the cogs in the Imperial machine don’t all think like the most hardline elements.

 

That's a quote from the publicly available "Treason Narrative Event pdf".

 

Ok, it`s in Treason. Treason =/= Uprising. And your creative interpretation does not exist in neither of two.

 

If I like Hägen-Dasz Chocolate Chip Ice Cream and Hägen-Dasz changes Chocolate Chip Ice Cream to include Ghost Pepper, I can switch to Carte D'or's Chocolate Chip Ice Cream if it suits my taste just as well. I don't need to convince 10 to 20 of my friends to also stop eating Hägen-Dasz. You can argue all you want that Hägen-Dasz has always had some Ghost Pepper in their Chocolate Chip Ice Cream recepie, but that's not really relevant since the problem is that now they've increased it and unbalanced the taste significantly.
To stop buying a product only works as a solution for personally consumed products, but this is a game with more than one participant and where the products aren't actually consumed (the expected running time for each miniature exceeds that of a mobile phone) and it's not really all that a trivial cost due to the actual investment of both effort and money (we don't also have to paint our ice cream and make scenery for it to get enjoyment from it) we're putting in our hobby, so if Corvus Belli starts making my models with Ghost Pepper in them I can't simply just change to Cool Mini Or Not's Yu Jing because it doesn't exist and that means I'd have to convince my local meta to also make the switch, most of whom are just fine with miniatures because they either don't have Ghost Pepper in them or the like Ghost Pepper.

Asking Corvus Belli to not include Ghost Pepper in their miniatures or limiting it to a rare few is actually the first stop in how to fix the situation. Next stop after that is of course to start lobbying the local meta to also stop buying CB products, just like you suggest.

 

I think the crux here is that many people want to play a faction that they can identify with in a way. I have not read the entire Uprising book yet, but I am happy that StarCo is described as an ethical mercenary company. (It is weird for me to imagine that something like this could exist.) My factions are Corregidor and Ariadna, so I can play StarCo no problem, and this background also makes Corregidor look good. All fine for me.

At some point, Carlos Bostria explained that there is no good or evil in Infinity. Rather, we look at moral ambivalence and political realism. Fine, I like that. However, with Uprising, CB seems to have left the idea of moral ambivalence. Ikari and Druze are described as evil, and the actions of JY and JSA does not paint a positive picture of them.

From what I have read so far, the description of the actions of Ju Ying and the JSA are realistic enough to be judged believable in the context of a sci-fi setting. But will players be happy with the background of those factions from now on?

For me, the story sounds like "an oppressive communist regime fails in their attempt to brutally surpress an uprising led by corrupt elites that fooled people into accepting traditionalist oppression by feeding them nationalist nonsense." Cool, I can absolutely imagine that something like that could happen, but would I want to play such a faction? My answer to this is no.

I agree with the OP that for those reasons, some players may be turned away from those factions and may even feel offended for cultural reasons. Around here, there are quite a few players with Chinese background who, guess what, play Ju Ying. I don 't think they want to have an entirely negative description of the Ju Ying culture. It should remain gray. People should still have ways to portray their JY forces as heroes.

Ju Ying and JSA are not an entirely fictional faction like the Combined Army. Describing them as evil has some cultural ramifications that players may not appreciate. Sure, some players like to play evil, but a human faction based on real cultures is obviously something different than orks or dark elves.

 

It is an ITS mssion and event pack made to represent the events during uprising.

 

What bothers me is that same idea of pleasing everybody in anytime crawled here, into pretty well done game. With a bit patchwork fluff and some plotholes but at the same time a sufficient rule of cool. And now I see same warriors as guys blaming Witcher 3 and Kingdom Come on not having female protagonists and race variety.

 

It is like judge Lord of the rings by single page describing life of orcs in Mordor. Apparently with a bit of "creative interpretation"© LoTR is a dark story all about enslaved orc population living in inhospitable lands.

 

There’s an entire series of books written with this as an alternative interpretation for the Plot of Lord Of The Rings.