I suggest to you an RPG game about detailed pillaging, rape and snuff. Totally fictional. Why do you refuse to play? It uses the same system as Infinity, by Modiphius. It's just a very realistic and mature depiction of Conan the Barbarian. Oh, well... then let's go and play a Star Wars adventure about playing with Imperial Stormtroopers, it will start before A New Hope and end just after The Return of the Jedi. It will be all about hunting aliens and "pacify them", all along the galaxy. Men, women and children. The first session won't even depict a house-by-house search, just going to Coruscant's ghettos and shooting away. Still a no? Ok, the Rebels are more to your liking? And you want something mature, on the Rogue One vein? Don't worry! We have this game about how the Rebellion uses brothels to capture, interrogate and kill Imperial officers. It culminates with an assassination mission, just... be carefull, since there is chance you will kill the children of the target. Or other children, since the only time you can get to it is in a Disneyland park, filled with kids, and you know how they are, always moving. I hope you are at least half as disgusted as I am after suggesting this. As you can see, "hard, gritty and lifelike" is not always "best". If writing a good product meant dropping atrocity after atrocity, then every slashfic writer in the internet would leave people like, I dunno, Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. Leguinn or Tolkien, for example, as amateurs. ¿? Sorry, but I still don't get your meaning if the first time I didn't. No. Nobility started with war. Tribes, and biggest warrior was the leader, and the children would inherit better training and food, thus giving them an edge. What you are talking about is the rich industrialists of the 1800-1900s. Or the politicans of today. Are you seriously telling me that Kuraimori, as described, is best for that people than sending them to O-12's recognized state (Japan) care?
Yes, nobility started with war - and to win at that, you needed money (better equipment and training) and that granted you power and influence. Just because the nobility of today hire out their wars doesn't mean they aren't de-facto nobility.
I am not as salty as some posters here, Uprising hasn't bothered me much, but Psychoticstorm, I think your are splitting hairs as the saying goes. If 'pacifying' (emphasis on the quotes) anyone who is Japanese, has a Japanese name, or has Japanese ancestry isn't genocide, it is only one very small step away from it. I think that kind of response in a civil ethnic war, with authoritarian leadership on both sides, is totally believable. It is also understandable why some players would find it off-putting. I really hope the next Yu Jing sectorial really brings the shine back to Yu Jing, but tempers being what they are, I fear Infinity will already have lost some good people by then.
But that is only a single quote from a rambo officer. The rest of the fluff has detailed criminal courts for abuses by ISS, and made it fairly clear that the civilian population remains on the island. That. Is. Not. Genocide. I've been to Rwanda, spent two weeks meeting and spending time with the people who live there (visiting someone who lived there) and went to the genocide museum they have. Genocide and military occupation coupled with draconian enforcement are not the same, and stop conflating them. It's insulting to real genocides, and lightens the meaning of that word. Genocide would involve them actually going house to house and killing every single japanese person on the island which they CLEARLY did not do. The nanking incident wasn't a genocide, it was a war crime. If there was a massacre in Kuroimori based on a unit getting trigger happy, that isn't a genocide, it's a war crime. It wasn't an industrial slaughter, they didn't send artillery in to flatten every city and then run daisy cutters over the ruins to ensure any survivors were crushed into a pulp. I understand being upset by the ISS being evil, I don't like it either, but blowing things out of proportion and using the wrong terms is making any sort of reasonable commentary impossible because real genocide is not what is in the fluff and saying it is... just muddies the waters.
If @psychoticstorm numbers on killed population is anywhere accurate it is very, very, far from genocide. Racist motivated oppression and murder, sure, but genocide requires a very large portion of a people to be murdered. We're talking about a handful of thousands in a city of million.
We have a Crane agent claiming "cities turned into mass graves for the insurgent" Was that hyperbole? Maybe, maybe not.
Wait, where did the fluff mention it, exactly? Honestly, it seems I missed something. Aren't we getting too much into the legal description here, though? Okay, so let's say that the Kuroimori massacre wasn't technically genocide. So what? It was still a heinous war crime and pure evil. I mean... you could argue that Germans didn't get into a "genocide mode" against Poles during WW2. No, they just tried to enslave us, they sent many of us to death camps, they instituted policies like "Execute 100 Poles for any German killed" etc. So what these might not constitute genocide according to some narrow definition? Are you seriously going to say that it makes it any less evil and horrible? That calling it genocide is "blowing things out of proportion"? The point is, regardless of the definitions, what YJ did during the campaign was evil, utterly disgusting and it makes it really hard to enjoy playing the faction.
Just ignore the fluff. It's really not necessary to enjoy the game. I stopped caring about the fluff a long time ago. It's a great game with even better models.
This is starting to sound more and more of "This is more evil that that". I don't think it matters! Bad is bad. we are not talking levels of bad like jay walking vs. murder. Really bad things have been done by my favorite faction. Whether it's War Crime, genocide, or other. I just want to look a future where Yu Jing is something positive in the world again.
BTW speaking of the future, since we've now lost most of Japanese troops, I'd like to see other asian ethnic troops. Korean, Vietnamese, Lao, Mongolian, etc. Sorry I didn't mean to double post!
I think there is a difference. Brutal occupation is very different from systematic extermination. Saying there were war crimes and we don't like that is fine, but I don't think the fluff depicts YJ as a whole being a genocidal nation, as some users are claiming, and that's important to address. The faction as a whole, (and the players and their armies) don't have to be part of the war crimes, but genocide is a pre-planned industrial attempt to remove an entire group of people from existence, and that is not something I see YJ attempting to do, so I think that players should be able to say that the yuandun is bad, but it doesn't exemplify the entire faction. That way, when you play, you can say 'hey, my dudes aren't a part of that' if you want.
Too bad when it intersects with the game and models start get taken away in the name of said fluff, you can't just dismiss its effects here on the game layer.
Stepping back from the grit I think the big issue is this: CB has made all the ugly side of YJ the only side of YJ that has any presence in the fluff. They could have had a bunch of fluff about Sun Tze and the other moral voices in the party objecting to the massacre hawks. But they didn't, they didn't give any room in the fluff for people to say, this is just a small group within the faction and my guys arnt this. Instead they reinforce that the fluff of civilian massacres is the face they want for YJ by providing CBL of the very troops slaughtering civilians. There is just no room to say the faction is cool when every part of it is condoning mass graves and war crimes.
I don't know where you are taking all that from. They specifically mentioned Sun Tze speaking out against the atrocities. Also, the face of Yu Jing is determined by the entirety of their fluff, past and present. How is it that the latest piece of fluff must be seen as the only defining source?
They specifically mention Sun Tze objecting and that nobody listened to him. As for the latest piece being seen as the only defining source, it has more strenght than the earlier ones because it is a major development and advancement of the timeline.
I don't see how that follows. We do have a rather comprehensive picture about Yu Jing as a nation, its political and military organization its culture and its history. The most recent event is just that - most recent. It's neither defining nor particularly important in the grand scheme of things.
Nobody listening to the master strategist they paid bazillions to make, losing a chunk of territory and population, getting the entire Sphere against them and showing incompetence, carelessness and a propencity to war crimes is not defininf nor particularly important. Suuure.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but people is very tired of the wait and see. Yes, I know Invincible is going to be posterboys nice guys because CB wants to make money. Yes, White Banner will be awesome to play and probably not assholes. No, it wont change the fact that thanks to Uprising Yu Jing will always be remembered as "those nazi guys that hate the japanese".
