Missed this last time. Yep, that's the word, thank you! Yes, this expands the narrative possibilities, but as I said above, it makes the Imperial Service out to be utterly, criminally incompetent at counter-insurgency warfare. And they are supposed to be the experts at it! Either that or that Crane is a Kempeitai in deep cover or a Shasvasti. Can we not go there, please? We finally got rid of the Suicide Bombers with N3.
Does anyone genuinely believe CB would leave the advancement of their fluff in the hands of the player base?
Mostly the part about how not much has changed for the Keisotsu - the Domaru, their new overlords, still treat them as cannon fodder. And the Kenpeitai are portrayed as more or less equivalent to 40k Commissars in terms of morality.
The global campaigns are 100% railroaded. In any case, the quotes we're getting from Yu Jing in the media surrounding this release aren't the kind of things a totalitarian regime with a firm grip on the media would put forth. Instead, they're the kind of cartoonishly evil stuff you'd expect from a setting where people expect that (40k forex).
If you work with the premise that Yu Jing is supposed to lose and look bad doing it, it makes sense. In pro-wrestling terms, Yu Jing is the heel. Their job is to fail, but to fail in such a way that it doesn't elicit sympathy, but rather to have people cheering whoever beats them.
So I'm a long time Yu Jing player staring with the ISS and over the laste couple of year branching out into Vanilla and was slowly staring to integrate some JSA unit into my army. BUT I really think that you guy are reading the Infamous Crane quote wrong. I really think the Mass Grave thing is way overblown (don't get me wrong Mass Grave = Wrong) I read the quote as flowery language, That the Crane is saying see mass civilian casualties turning the area in to a de facto mass grave not see where I just executed a bunch of guys. Also i should be clear now that when C.B makes one of those posters they have a tendency to throw subtlety out the window.
Well go re-read Zoe fluff then. It is ancient (well before supposed this year theme) and pictures ruthlessness of Nomads society well enough.
Except that to continue the analogy, this was the face-heel turn. YJ had been the face, in that despite the fact that all these nations/tribes have been at war with each other for the last 5000 years, they can all come together into a whole greater than the sum of their separate parts that is the just-barely-second-strongest economy/nation in the Sphere. Is it authoritarian? yes and no. Today, there are greater differences between ideological camps inside the Chinese Communist Party than there are between the (competing) Democratic and Republican parties in the US, and the people elect their chosen representatives to the People's Congress (or whatever that big meeting is called). I assume that continues to be true for the Infinity timeline. But that pic/quote turns that around. Now, the Imperial Service is a bunch of murdering bastards who don't care if you are guilty or not. Before, that was just the Bao, who were kept on a leash by the Emperor's command and only rarely let off in the most dire circumstances. Yes, the Imperial Service has very few rules regarding it's behavior. Driving people into the arms of the enemy is most certainly NOT something that they are supposed to do. The Vietnamese (who are part of YJ) beat the Americans at counter-insurgency warfare mostly via propaganda (and criminally-stupid ARVN policies that made the local civilians hate the South more than the VC). I'm not sure there was a single battle against the US that the Vietnamese won (though I welcome the chance to be corrected!). Tet? That was such a bloodbath for the North that they were ready to sue for peace because they had no soldiers left to fight until Kronkite said that "the war was not winnable" on camera. That gave Ho Chi Minh and his generals hope that they could sway the American people to their side (and it more or less worked). So how the [expletives deleted] does a nation who has fought those kinds of conflicts and won every time for 200+years screw it up? CB has so far failed to earn that suspension of disbelief. I can only hope that they do in the actual book.
I know this is sort of heresy on these forums, but it's possible that CB just isn't as good a storywriter as they prop themselves up to be, and that's what we're seeing.
This might be a case of the fans and the writers having different ideas. We had assumed that Yu Jing wasn't cartoonishly evil in this manner... but the writing team might have always intended it.
It`s too serious business for me now. I guess I`ll take a break, paint some chibi robots and convert another cat-girl.
Yes to the first two paragraphs, not so much to the last one. Sure, they are evil, we are talking about brainwashing political dissidents and strapping them with an explosive belt. But it was "covert". As in, what we see on the table are not regular army units (aside from special cases like Achilles and his merry boys), but "black ops elite teams" (well, aside from the 30 fusiliers spam... or the Volunteers/Morlocks spam... trollings like that). So yeah, YJ was evil, but not "STUPID EVIL" that uses "for the lulz" as a battlecry. First, you are (I hope not intentionally) failing to get the point: This is "stupid evil", not "evil". The main problem people is having is, simply put, this is an infantilistic, basic, and totally black portrait of a full faction in a game who advertises all factions as "grey". There is a difference between being the "bad guys of the human team" and "the frigging Combined Army have BETTER PR than them". Heck, I'm the first stomping on ANY player charging "in character" against Tohaa "because of what they did in Paradiso", which is something stated as "no one knows BUT the surviving Tohaa involved in that fuckup". This? This is sloppy, lazy, opportunistic, and frigging dangerous. As for the "whinyness", well, I don't know about you, but playing a game with a faction that boils down to "you are the designated villain, with no redeemable features at all, the company will paint you that way, the other factions' players will ridicule you for complaining about the company force-feeding the sh*t in your throat, and half of the other YJ players will eagerly eat it and scold you for not enjoying it". No, you are forgetting 300 points is "a special ops team conducting black ops" with "army operations". The human armies face the CA, O-12 would not allow otherwise, but the low-key, opportunistic operations are what we play, and what define how things unfold somehow during the online campaigns. Or should be, if it were not obviously rigged. Oh, and newsflash. The EI IS invading, all the time. With its SMALL vanguard troops, not its main forces. The problem with this? This used to be a homebrewed RPG. And it seems the good parts come from the players back then. Kinda like how The Silmarillion can be divided on 3 parts: the narrations others gifted Tolkien, some parts Tolkien narrated/wrote as poesy, and the Encyclopaedia Tolkien wrote and packed there. I find very hard to find any fault with almost anything you post, man. As for the last question? YJ is the designated holder of the Idiot Ball by CB. So they have to be the target for all of the hate, and then CB will come and say "but we give you Invencible, aint we nice?". I've been trying not to conclude this since I read the Outrage comic Character resumé they posted on Facebook. I totally agree. And it seems like CB wants to fan this up as much as they can, I hope they are not banking on some sort of extra publicity from the TV in case they get some sort of law citation (in Spain there have been quite the upheaval on this stuff the past decade, even if it has subsided the last 4-5 years somehow... and it related directly to mass graves during the spanish civil war). I surely hope I won't have to hide my bag when moving to the gaming shop, you know?
Yeah, about that again. Can we have our Ciaphas Cain at least? Or that proposed reference to Judge Dee? It's getting pretty dark (in a heavy-handed way) here, and I was pretty sure we are still supposed to have about 38 millennia to go? I don't feel like judging that kind of thing, but it's possible they just decided to go the old and tested route of "give everyone the reason to hate everyone else in-game, common sense be damned". Although I would like to add that this works better when said everyone is sure that his guys are doing what's right for them, or at least what they have to do.
Also, I think that we are seeing the "development" of what someone with no real idea about what equates to YJ at this time (China, Japan, Vietnam, etc...) would think without bothering to check with reality. The fact that there are no YJ "player characters" (like Zoe, Bran-Do Castro, etc...) also suggest me that in the original homebrewed RPG YJ was the designated villain. Wanting to place one's country as the most hated one on the whole Human Sphere? Piss on Aleph's goodwill, and incidentally on its total control over everyday's stuff like traffic lights, and the like? Seriously, I doubt the Overseer AI that unifies the whole Human Sphere would a) let this reach public consumption (which is, incidentally, what we are seeing), or b) allow this to happen. You know, Aleph's "grayness" comes from having no qualms about removing threats to humanity as a whole. With assassination teams, if subtle manipulations are not feasible (like, I dunno, a car accident). Things that would remove people from ordering the kind of shitty stuff this image suggests, or for it to be ever aired. Ah, BTW, Humanity's BEST military genius is THERE. In YJ. The Frigging Sun Tze "I have the same Willpower than a frigging AVATAR, the embodiment of the Evolved Intelligence's will". That works better if the game starts that way. Or if it would happen to the CA, since they are canonically the ones that need to suffer that for humanity to survive. This is kinda like, I don't know, the TAU entering a civil war while the 'nids are at their doorstep?
I mean, it's possible that in their eyes, Yu Jing is still the brilliant socialist utopia with a legislative structure that protects citizens from exploitation and allows the People to flourish in a way the Pan-O middle class can only dream of, but with a totalitarian regime who imposes this greater good with an iron fist and who'll not hesitate at the chance to statuate an example when someone crosses the line. They just might not be good enough writers to show the good sides or provide the necessary justification (the ends that justify the means) for the oppressive parts. All we're seeing is the means, because that's all they are capable of writing. Painting with black because they think they paint on a white sheet, but that's not what we as the viewers have been provided. Edit: all we get to see is what the Pan-O media would show, if we're being generous.
I'm just happy that helping the Combined Army seems like a valid option for civilians living in the state empire now. Hey there non-ethnically Chinese civilian, now that YJ have driven out or murdered an entire population, who do you think they will blame for their failures next? As an option B, how would you like to be part of a hegemony that treats all species equally? Humanity is going to be favoured, even, given that you're an excellent replacement for the Umbra (you are more intelligent and exactly as cartoonishly villainous) I mean, I'm confused as hell because that is a stupid way for fluff to go, but pleased at the same time. I can play CA as the good guys!
Eeeeh... no. Too much people, by statistics alone they must have someone with enough common sense. Also, you can't have it both ways: YJ is either a totalitarian state that does not allow any kind of free press, having little qualms when it comes to suppress what they don't like, or has enough freedom to let the Japanese left (but attacking YJ's territories is a big No-No). The first case allows for the killing of civilians with little issue, but not the publicity of it, while the second case does not allow civilian killing but would allow it's publication. Also, as I mentioned, Aleph would not allow mass murder to start with, nor would allow this kind of propaganda to be public, since it would run counter to the necessities of keeping the Human Sphere able to withstand the CA.
