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Author Topic: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex  (Read 6463 times)

Spike

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Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« on: September 23, 2020, 04:01:48 PM »
I intend to do a proper review of this book when I have time and energy, but I don't want to get side tracked into a long side-rant when I do, so I thought I'd get this issue off my chest, and open up a hopefully interesting conversation along the way.


Simply to get it out of the way, the creators of Eclipse Phase are quite obviously very much pro-social justice and 'allies' and all of the other issues of the progressive left. This is not meant as an aspersion upon their collective characters, but a simple statement of fact, of where their beliefs lie.  This is relevant to the topic at hand, as presumably they are deeply concerned with being 'allies' if they themselves do not identify as some species of 'queer', and this informs their worldbuilding.


There are three topics of sex that are raised in Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition, which were largely (and appropriately) glossed over in 1st Edition, and the writers of EP seem to have allowed their perceived status to have overcome their common sense in world building. These three topics are, approximately, Homosexuality, Transexuality and Interspecies Romance.  Note that I am forced to condense complex topics into simple subject headers, so please keep your outrage at my 'hate' confined to your pants until I've actually addressed these issues in the post.  Its only going to be a paragraph or two until I get there, you can wait.  As a bonus round I will also briefly gloss on the subject of childcare in the Transhuman Future.


To understand why these are issues, it is necessary to understand the explicit and implicit nature of the Eclipse Phase setting.  The core premise which EP is built around, and thus can define itself as distinct from any and all other Science Fiction RPGs and settings, is the fundamental idea that "you" is not a body but a mind, an 'ego' which can change bodies the way people of today change clothes.  Thus, any attempts to define a person by their origins or flesh is fundamentally doomed to failure. A coded computer program can run a biological body and call itself 'Bob', while the person who was in 'Bob's' body yesterday is now  a digital entity slaving away at processor stacks, probably mining cryptocurrency. 


This has drastic implications for the setting, for Humanity as a whole, and a great deal of the writing for Eclipse Phase involves inviting you to explore those implications.


Well, with a few exceptions.  Namely: You can explore them as long as you are willing to indulge in draging early 21st Century sexual politics into a setting that has fundamentally changed the scene, complete and unchanged.   Frankly I'm surprised BLM didn't get dragged into this new edition... perhaps it hit the presses a couple of months too early? 


When I want to talk about homosexuality in Eclipse Phase, what I really mean to talk about is the entire spectrum sexuality as we understand it.  In a way, this should be my second topic, but I think it is the most interesting so its first.  You see: while in one way Eclipse Phase 'solves' the entire "Problem" of homosexuality in society, what it actually does is make it far more complex and interesting, at least from the perspective of a writer wanting to explore the human condition.  Once upon a time you were relatively limited in what you could do: heterosexual romance, homosexual romance, cross sexual orientation attraction... that is a gay man attracted to a straight man (and how that influences their character dynamics), a straigtht man attracted to a gay woman (etc) and so on.  The first option is the default, and will always be the default simply due to demographics (that is: a majority gay population, favoring a majority gay romance in literature, will quickly spiral into demographic death), and the second is currently the most popular in our modern culture. Both are relatively simple and mined out, you are not saying or doing anything interesting by exploring either. The third option I mention used to be fairly popular, and because it offers complex dynamics could be interesting even in a side character (I'm thinking of Travolta's gay henchmen in the Punisher film, and how their relationship plays out in the film).  But there are only limited ways to play that out. Unrequited romance, tragic unrequited romance, or eventually a homosexual romance.


Enter Eclipse Phase and body swapping. A new variable appears, and the equation gets much more complex.  Allow me to set an example: A man working for firewall goes on a mission to Mars, where he is expected to shoot a bunch of Exhumans in the face. He naturally wants to get into a combat morph, and that means a Fury. He doesn't see himself as a woman, doesn't pick his morph because of the tits, he just wants a solid combat morph, and prefers biomorphs. So, for the duration of his trip to Mars, he is in a woman's body. While he is there he meets a woman who just hits all his buttons. She's hot, of course. All morphs default to hot unless otherwise specified, but there is a real connection.  This woman, as it turns out, is a woman. And she likes him back. As a woman, and plans to follow him back to, lets say Venus, where he normally lives. As a man.


Hopefully, just in the setup of this premise, you can see how this creates entirely new dynamics of sexual attraction and queerness. NEW dynamics, it eliminates the old dynamics entirely.   Unfortunately, I rather suspect that Posthuman studios caught some flak after first edition for 'erasing' the LGBTWTFBBQ issues in 1st Edition, because you sure as shit see a strong emphasis on modern queer identity based issues in the 2nd. No Erasure in this edition, my friend...


Which brings me to my second topic, Transexuality, or to put it a bit more broadly: Sexual Identity Politics. If the 'gay' issue was utterly transformed by the premise of Eclipse Phase, then the Trans issue was completely 'solved'.  See yourself born into the wrong body? Don't worry, mang, you ditched that one long ago for one that is more to your liking. Before the game even started!. I mean: If you are 'lucky' enough (per the setting's premises) to actually have a gendered body at all.     


This is where politics come to the fore, however. You can't just erase the entire Trans movement, and all the surrounding prenumbras of sexual identities just because your setting's core premise magically solves every single issue raised!  Not that EP set out to cure the Trans movement's ills, or this is something they added to the setting because of Sexual Identity Politics... this is the entire premise of the setting, this is the core, the foundation upon which it is built!   


But as I said, Posthuman Studios are very concerned with Social Justice Issues and with being good allies (they go so very far as to insist that their game should not be played by fascists or pro-fascist people.  Curiously, I am unaware of any actual fascists who are interested in RPGs. They are rather hard to find these days, but Posthuman Studios inability to define a fairly well understood political movement is a digression...  The point is that Posthuman Studios absolutely must display their Trans Ally Bonafides or risk being ejected from the club of good-thinkers, regardless of what their setting actually does.  Frankly the end result is fucking hilarious, and it raises far more questions about the setting than it could ever hope to answer. 


For example: While the number of example characters has vastly expanded, and said characters have expanded into fully developed characters rather than frameworks, what is more noteworthy is that now it is super important that we understand each character's biological sex, gender identity AND sexuality. I feel compelled to point out that the idea of neckbeards playing lesbian stripper ninjas is well over thirty years old at this point, Gamers REALLY don't need to be told that they can play whatever gender and sexuality they like, but I digress.  This insistance on providing these details for well over a dozen distinct individual characters means that some... interesting... examples are raised.  Just to prove their virtue, one of the examples was born Intersex, and is listed as Non-Binary.    To clarify the point:


Unless your parents were horrible, evil no-good bioconservatives (and probably fascists!), then you were born into a Splicer  Morph by default, which means that all of your genetics were 'cleaned' to ensure no unfortunate health problems arose. One would naturally assume that 'intersex', the condition of being born with both sets of genetalia (usually with one set being non-functional, or less than fully functional) would have been 'erased' from Splicers, and all 'up-scale' biomorphs even if it isn't seen as being an actual 'health issue'... and if not, why not?  But lets continue delving into this example character's issues, shall we?  Since this character is NOT in a Splicer Morph (because... ew! That's almost as low-rent as being a Flat! (where being intersex would be understandable).    No, they are in a Sylph Morph. So, does this mean that Morph Designers are creating a significant numbers of Intersex models for the tiny handful of naturally intersex individuals and the even smaller amount (presumably) of Intersex afficionados?  I can't speak for everyone, but my explorations of the Interwebz has taught me that far more people would be interested in functional Hermaphrodites and Futas than in the semi-nonfunctional, but all too real, Intersex.  Weirdly, however, Eclipse Phase doesn't have any morphs that I can recall that are Herms, but somehow this individual can always find an Intersex Morph whenever they resleeve. Curious.


That would be one weird character with some questionable design choices, but it goes on. THe very next character has 'Gender:Female" and 'Sex: Male" listed without a single bit of commentary as to why someone who identifies as female apparently consistently chooses male morphs. I'm not saying its not possible, or even likely, but now that you've raised the issue, you kinda need to tell me why, Posthuman Studios.  This is a very interesting facet to this charater that needs to be given at least some explanation, right?  I mean, if you showed me a D&D Elf who preferred living among Orcs, I'd expect some commentary about why.... or is the answer 'This is nonsense we had to include to appease our fellow travellers and we really don't know why someone would do that in our setting other than to prove a point of 21st century queer politics...'?


Moving on: We have the character with Gender Neuter and Sex:-, which would be fine if they were an AGI, but apparently they were born and raised a person who then decided to live an utterly asexual life as a spider robot. Again: Not saying it can't happen, but isn't the entire point of the modern Gender Politics movement that biological sex is innate, but Gender is a choice? Who were they before they were a spider robot? Small potatoes, lets move on... I'll speed it up: THe next character is also a sexless robot, but this one has a male gender. M'kay...  a few more pages we have an AGI (computer person) slotted into a genderless Synth robot shell who has the Gender of Female, but no Sex...


But I missed one: I missed the character with an 'undefined' gender, a female sex and an apparently (based on Pronouns... for all I know it could be a Riley Denis and 'her' 'lesbian' girlfriend who really enjoyed Riley's dick on the regular. I'm old fashioned, but to me that means Riley is a man, his girlfriend is straight, and everything they say about sex is needlessly complex and probably wrong...). What does Undefined MEAN? That's female looking art and a female 'sex', so what exactly is 'undefined' in this context? Now I don't even know what you mean by Gender OR Sex in these examples!  So Confuse.


I am not, but I thought it would be fun to say.  What I actually mean is that clearly Posthuman Studios threw all of this in the second edition because in the decade or so since the publication of the first edition the Progressive Stack altered RADICALLY and the culture war went hotter than ever, which meant that new, hotter takes were necessary, even if it merely winds up exposing how made up most of this all is, how much of it was crammed into a setting which cannot support it meaningfully, just to make a public declaration of allegiance.


I haven't even got to the best example yet:  In a later chapter on sexuality in the Transhuman Future (A waste of three pages, in all fairness, regardless of your setting...), there is a 'in character' sidebar of some size written from the perspective of a Trans Activist in the setting, pointing out that Trans is still a thing, etc. It is extremely abrasive and in your face and ends with a parting shot about being off to a Drag Show, and the entire thing is so, unbelievably bad... bad optics, bad representation, bad...everything (also: There is a difference between Transwoman and Drag Queen. Yes, yes... plenty of cross over, but they ARE Different Areas of Interest despite the similarities) that I can only think that one of the writers must have been as offended by including it as I was at reading it... it reads like a Poe, or like the writer was TRYING to make the Transhuman Trans Activist look as bad as possible as a passive aggressive shot at whomever insisted he write it. If so: I tip my hat to you, good sir or madam or xim...


But I've gone a bit too long, so lets get to the third point while we are fresh on the topic of the chapter on sexuality.


So, Posthuman Studios really, really wants to make a thing out of sexless robot Case Morphs having romantic dinners with their uplifted Octopus mate, and infomorp AGI sex workers masturbating based on which filing system they use to archive conversations. It is all very, very sad. 


But it fits all too well with one of the less well understood facets of the Progressive worldview, which is that whole Pansexuality thing (you know: Lando Calrissian banging his Droid Co-Pilot...). I'm not suggesting all progressives, or all left leaning individuals go for this, but it is a part of their movement, and Posthuman Studios, with a setting ripe for exploring that sort of weirdness, had to go there.  A huge part of what makes this assumption work is the idea that sexual attraction is all in the mind, biology need not apply. This is an evolution of the post-modernist idea that attractiveness is a social construct, that standards of beauty vary wildly from culture to culture. I certainly agree that different cultures can value different things in 'beauty', but that these tend to be variations within a surprisingly tight tolerance... that biology creates attractiveness, from there a culture layers on additional factors, sometimes to surprising degrees, but never too far out from that biological baseline.


However: Posthuman Studios also thinks that 21st Century Mental Disorders are merely lifestyle choices in the Transhuman future, and thus we are forced to assume they think paraphilias (people who want to fuck cars, or mannikens, or brick walls) are, in fact, on to something rather than people with an actual, if mostly harmless, insanity.  If you start from the premise that car-fucking is perfectly natural and normal, than I suppose assuming that a genderless robot body (with out genitalia or a hormonal system) having a functional erotic relationship with an octopus (a species with absolutely no attraction vectors in common with humanity... I assume. Bold choice, I know.), is similarly natural.


Note that I don't dispute that it is possible. People fuck cars, after all. If you have sentient cars, it is only a matter of time before you find one that is into people rubbing their ugly bits on it.  I do dispute that it is natural, or common, or that it needs to be pimped by the writers as something that should feature heavily in their Eclipse Phase Games about fighting Post Singularity AI-Gods turned Cthulu by body-hopping and shooting things in the face.  I further would argue that someone in a Case Morph (genderless cheap robot bodies) who is sexually attracted to uplifted octopoids is far more likely to succeed at the romance of their dreams by actually getting an octopoidal body of their own.  And if they are in it for the Hentai? Why a sexless robot body?


Why am I asking all of these weird questions? Because Posthuman Studios clearly didn't. And since they wanted to write about it, they sort of needed to.   No one was satisfied by the Lando question being answered with 'It just works', and that was a movie, a 90minute time filler. You are a three hundred page book meant to be explored by groups of, say, four people at time for four or more hours at a shot, week after week. 'it just works' is a cop out. 


Oh, do you care about my opinion on software masterbation via filing systems?  Its three shades of stupid, but lets save time by leaving it at that, shall we?


Part one
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Spike

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #1 on: September 23, 2020, 04:02:29 PM »
Continued:


Now really this is sort of off topic, but it isn't unrelated. One of the many, many setting issues in Eclipse Phase 1ed was how they handled the topic of children. Mostly I'm against children in games with a fair share of caveats. One of which is that a functional setting should acount for the existance and rearing of children in a way that makes sense. Focusing on it is sketchy and misguided, but... look, knowing that Dwarves have family units and homes, and that young dwarves grow up to be apprentice miners or what have you is probably all you need. If your game clearly focuses on your players interacting constantly with those children I may call Chris Hansen on you, that's all I'm saying. Eclipse Phase made the opposite mistake, they more or less eliminated children from their setting entirely.  Rather unnaturally, ten years after a horrible apocalypse which wiped out ninety percent of humanity the ONLY people interested in repopulation (other than those icky, evil no good bioconservative fascists out by Jupiter) were mad scientists interested in fast growing children in VR or something, because who wants to actually raise little humans, amirite?  And it went predictably bad.And Eclipse Phase seems to have caught a bunch of fire from critics for ignoring that in a setting with communities of millions of people, at least some of those people are going to WANT to have families... so how does that work when everyone is a body hopping pan-sexual slut?  So EP2 answers that question, and good on them for trying.  We do get some practical answers to how different morphs (bio-morphs only, for once. Pan-sexual procreation seems to be a piety too far) go about resolving their engineered DNA for compatibility that sound eminantly practical (defaults to Splicers I believe, probably involves doctors/genetic technicians doing the actual blending. You can use your natural DNA, if you have it somewhere and other things that would actually matter to people trying to create little humans to fill their emotionally dead lives of hedonism and Cthulu killing...) Where EP2 goes wrong is that they assume (and this isn't a review, so I'm not fact checking... I may be mis-interpreting a minor bit I read in passing) that families are putting the little tykes into a biomorph that is permanently child sized, then upgrading every few years into a new permanently child sized, but age appropriate, morph as they develop mentally. WTF?  Why would you even...  I... Look. Bodies grow. M'kay? Like, naturally, and neural development takes years... so either you are putting infants into bodies with inappropriately developed neural networks (brains, man.. brains), or you are...You are doing it wrong, Eclipse Phase.   'Baby's First Morph' can totally be a thing, but how about you just have people WAIT until the 'baby' is, I dunno, a teenager or something?  Why in the everliving fuck would you even go shopping for baby-bodies, aged 3-6 months?  Why would you open yourself up to hard questions of artificial (but possibly biological) brains and infant Egos, of aborted natural neural development and all of that? WHY? ???   I just...There is a snippet of the setting of a tranhuman 'nuclear' family where the two teenage boys are 45 and 41 respectively, trapped forever as teenagers in their presumably emotionally smothering parent's home.  I don't know if Post-Human studios meant for it to be creepy and depressing as fuck or not, but given the nature of the setting I'm going to default assume they did, so... kudos for being creepy I guess?  I mean: Given the ever expanding definition of childhood in our society, maybe its aspirational?  A ray of hope for NEETS everywhere?   I report, you decide. 


So, teh new forum software kills my Wallo'text. Sad.
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Ghostmaker

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #2 on: September 23, 2020, 05:09:47 PM »
I was sorely tempted to write a character background for a bioconservative neo-octopus who persists in pointing out that, y'know, if you've just burned your house to the ground it's going to be hard to convince some people that fire is awesome. So maybe, just maybe, the Jovians have a point about eschewing certain technologies in the short term.


That and EP (at least, the editions I've seen) never explains WHY the Jovian habitats have such problems... which leads me to wonder if certain radical autonomists are sabotaging the habitats. Which would most certainly piss off a number of factions and not just the Jovians (Firewall would certainly disapprove, since there are MUCH more serious targets).


But yeah. Body dysphoria should only be a long running issue if you're sleeved into a morph that you're having trouble adapting to, or if you're literally rock-on-ground poor and can't afford a morph swap.




trechriron

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #3 on: September 23, 2020, 05:50:07 PM »
Great thoughts! I laughed many times. It's a perfect example of politics ruining games. EP is a self-masturbatory creative endeavor designed to thrust (obviously) a bunch of fetishes into your eyeballs until you die. I really liked 1e for a small moment until I couldn't figure out what you do in the setting or why you would venture out of whatever hole you were hiding in. The system itself was overly complex for no appreciable gain. I tried running it at a con with some other industry peeps and they did not enjoy it.

I'm enjoying The Void thus far, although it is a mess of poor editing, poorly thought out ideas, and gloss-overs. However, it's easy to hack, so easy to fix. However, The Void has a great setup. You know what you're doing (playing Wardens) and you know why you're doing it (the Solar System is likely coming to an end with the approaching Chthonian Star...). Also, I just included some laws against cloning, uplifts, sleeves, and genetic engineering. Viola! No more worrying about three character sheets and constant refiguring. :-D
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MigRib

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #4 on: September 23, 2020, 06:04:42 PM »
And shouldn't have they dropped the "sleeve" thing? Since Richard K Morgan was cancelled, as the horrible transphobe he is, "sleeve" should have been considered a dirty word...

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #5 on: September 23, 2020, 08:40:00 PM »
Man, I got the impression that Eclipse Phase was a game about adventures in a transhumanist setting.
This writeup makes it sound like an RPG about fucking robots.
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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #6 on: September 23, 2020, 08:58:24 PM »
Some thoughts.
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I think that EP1 got it right in that a sufficiently advanced culture would eventually totally solve these problems from multiple angles. And that this is a GOOD thing. A person could be WHATEVER and happy rather than how 2e practically lock-steps certain characters into what can only be misery as they are denied a "cure" by activists obsessed with making sure everyone else is as miserable and fucked up as they are. Joy.
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All to make a "statement". It comes across as more fascist than the supposed fascist they are "fighting" with these "bold" changes. mm-hmm.-As for why a supposedly straight woman would be wearing a male body. That one could be fairly simple like its just more practical for their line of work. Or for anonymity somehow, or for fun, etc. The rest? Some of it looks like they just rolled on a random table or threw darts at a board and the players and DM are supposed to interpret that however.
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Its an odd way of going at it for sure and whole chunks of the changes make no sense in the context of the setting. Whats next? 3rd ed and theres people demanding to be handicapped and refusing actual cures? Or parents stuffing their kids into limbless shells, because activism!
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Omega

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #7 on: September 23, 2020, 09:02:49 PM »
Man, I got the impression that Eclipse Phase was a game about adventures in a transhumanist setting.
This writeup makes it sound like an RPG about fucking robots.
It was till 2e and its gender obsession.
 To be fair you can get through 2e and ignore the weirdness. But like the gay gnomes in 5e Essentials. It is still weirdly... there... But at least not meaninglessly so as in 5e D&D.

Spike

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #8 on: September 23, 2020, 11:21:52 PM »
Honestly, the reason to point all this absurdity out is that I do think EP actually is improved in the second edition, mechanically as from folding in more of the setting development that came as the line matured after release. These are good things. As I noted in the children side of things, it does seem that they took many of the criticisms to heart.  I'm not a huge fan of pool mechanics, but as a means of handling the different capabilities of different Morphs, its an elegant solution to the problem 1e suffered regarding Character Sheets and resleeveing. It's not perfect, but its light years beyond 1e on the topic, and that is a very difficult row to hoe. 


The problem with the Bioconservatives is of course purely a matter of politics.  In the setting the Jovians are absolutely right, if not quite on every topic, but because religion would be certainly a strong starting point to be suspicious of body hopping (Philosophical questions of the ramifications of suicide and rebirth as a means of travel will, eventually, fall onto the sword of the Soul, after all), so they get a bunch of other 'evils' crammed on them because if you have wrong-think on one subject, you clearly are a truly evil monster about all things, so they are also creepy fascist authoritarians who practice mind control, or something.


The real 'wrap your head around it' change to the setting was to take the Ultimates Faction, playable in 1e, and turn them into a still present, still dominant, but non-playable faction in 2e, even going so far as to assign them the meme cultural value of being 'Pro-Fascist'.


Rootless mercenaries with a philosophical drive towards personal perfection with a ruthless meritocratic system and no state are somehow pro-fascism?  Fascism: the political philosophy best summed up with the motto coined by one of its intellectual fathers as "Everything For the State, Nothing Against"?     There is a wide gap to leap between those two points. Not necessarily unbridgeable, I suppose... like I said in the rant: if you have sentient cars, eventually you'll get one that wants a person to fuck it, but man..


Meanwhile the poor rivals to the Ultimates, Direct Action, get name checked every other chapter but other than they are mercenaries who use Reaper Morphs, not one detail is ever revealed.   Like... you could have just, I dunno, ignored the Ultimates if you disliked people wanting to play them that much, dude. Why reveal that you literally have no meaning to 'fascist' but 'stuff I don't like'?   Like... I don't think the Jovian Bioconservatives are called Fascists explicitly, despite the fact a credible argument could be made (from what little detail the actually give us.. god forbid you actually develop one of the factions of wrongthinkers we're supposed to hate so we can fight them or whatever...I guess that's giving them free press and borderline wrongthink!), that they ARE in fact Fascistic.
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Spike

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #9 on: September 23, 2020, 11:23:03 PM »
And shouldn't have they dropped the "sleeve" thing? Since Richard K Morgan was cancelled, as the horrible transphobe he is, "sleeve" should have been considered a dirty word...




Since I don't really follow the background trivia, I need ALL of the context for this. What?
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

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MigRib

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #10 on: September 23, 2020, 11:44:09 PM »
Well, I am not completly sure about the origin of the term "sleeve", but I do think it was coined by the author of the Altered Carbon books (the trilogy has been mentioned as one of the inspirations, probably the main inspiration for the Eclipse Phase setting, so even if the term has another origin there's still a strong connection). Richard K Morgan has dared to defend the reality of biological sex - I think it was when the woke mob first tried to cancel JK Rowling - and has been since deplatformed from just about any social media. The story is in his blog:
https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2019/11/the-trouble-with-twitter/

Spike

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #11 on: September 24, 2020, 12:01:17 AM »
Ah. Thanks for the update.  I suppose I've been meaning to get up to speed with Altered Carbon, since the show has garnered some... interesting... commentary.  I'll be honest, my respect for Rowling went up immensely in the last year or so. I mean: Low Bars and all that, but still.  I'd rather someone stood by their beliefs, even if I find them wrong, than they allowed the current fads to dictate them even if I agreed with the current fads.  Rowling had looked an awful lot like a trend follower, with her post-hoc gay Dumbledores and her 'Hermoine could be black even though I described her as white' retconning, but at least she has stuck to her guns on this issue.


What is so terribly tragic about this politicization of fiction is that none of this is new. Somewhere (not here, on my travel laptop of cheap disposability) I have a PDF of a essay written in 1946 or thereabouts from a Communist Party Member of all people, warning his brethren about how forcing art to be propaganda was ineffective because it was always going to be bad art (he was a writer, so the art in this case is writing). He was, of course, unpersoned immediately.


It sucked when my grandfather was a young man, it sucks now. The primary difference is now the people calling for this crap are the ones holding all the gate keys.
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

For the curious: Apparently, in person, I sound exactly like the Youtube Character The Nostalgia Critic.   I have no words.

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MigRib

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #12 on: September 24, 2020, 12:14:02 AM »
I also have no interest in JK Rowling as a writer. She may be good, I have no idea, I suppose the Harry Potter fandom appeared too late in my life to capture my attention. I watched the first movie and that was it. But she does keep on fighting the cancel mob, so that's something. As for Richard Morgan, I only knew him vaguely as the author of the AC books, but after I knew the Twitter mob had come for him I decided to read his books. I was tempted to try Eclipse Phase because of the Altered Carbon connection, but then... well, then I come upon a small portion of what you exposed on your post and I just gave it up. There's a lot of trans in the setting, but I thought it was supposed to be mostly transhumanism.

Omega

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #13 on: September 24, 2020, 12:23:27 AM »
Bemusingly enough, TSR way back explored this some in their Amazing Stories anthology books. One that stands out after all this time still and spot on to Eclipse Phase's setting was a short story about a person who was raised from birth to hop bodies for various tasks by their parents. If recall right one was male, one was female, one was some sort of beast thing, and so on. And at the back of the closet was their original body. The character had some notable psychoses from having to live like this.
Think the term they coined in that one was "Hanger Queen" as those with the setup kept the other bodies in a sort of closet. Pretty sure it came up in one of their Amazing Engine settings as well. It was certainly a thing in d20modern Gamma World. With some people stuck now in whatever body they were in when civilization was crashed.
On a similar note theres DeathNet also for d20m which has thousands of people in VR trapped in the system and stuck in whatever avatar they were in at the time.

Spike

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Re: Eclipse Phase 2nd Ed and Sex
« Reply #14 on: September 24, 2020, 12:34:06 AM »
I largely ignore dumb ideas in settings, so... despite posting more than 20000 words (according to the forum software that made me cut my post in two) on the topic, I actually don't care much.  I use written settings as starting points, not ending points for setting up games. I'm more interested in what the rules let me do or don't do.


NONE of this sex talk actually impacts the rules. At their worst you have a tiny waste of space on your character sheet for useless details about gender and sex.   The setting is full of interesting elements, the gate exploration and the alien worlds generated, the conflicts on mars between nomad barsoomians and the more corporate and urbanized terraformers dropping cometary ice, the elements of post-singularity intelligences creating a sharp divide between transhumanity trapped on the wrong side of the Singularity, and the godlike beings and their motives on the other side...


All of that is interesting. Comments about climate change wrecking Earth... before Skynet techno-gods unleashed nano-swarms and headhunter droids to wreck it is a pointless bit of commentary and easily ignored.  Comments about the sex lives of secret agents in an apparently doomed effort to stop Cthulu from ending Humanity once and for all is easily ignored once the book is closed and the dice are picked up. To me, anyway.


So there is still a lot of Transhumanism left in the setting. This crap, this nonsense, is little more than a tasteless bumpersticker on the car (and we haven't even talked about the legacy silliness of the economic regression to a barter system being seen as the next step forward towards the socialist utopia of a purportedly post-scarcity setting that still insists on creating scarcity... which is ALSO easily ignored unless you treat the writers as canon gods...
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

For the curious: Apparently, in person, I sound exactly like the Youtube Character The Nostalgia Critic.   I have no words.

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