Backlash

When I first posted my article on One Thing L5R Did Right,  it was really apparent I was feeling wary about posting it, feeling like that might be attacked.  I was glad to find out there was a lot of support for it, far outweighing the attacks I did receive. It was wonderful. Thank you.
One question I got in the responses I received, however, was the question "Why was I so concerned about posting on that topic?"  I've talked a lot about the history of gaming, and L5R in particular, and I guess to answer that question, I have to talk about some things that are not so positive.   Every person carries scars related to previous interactions they have had with different types of people, and those scars color all the interactions they have currently going forward.   I like to think if people seem irrational, even hateful, to me, it is usually caused by some sort of scar that they carry that I don't know about.  As for me, I have my own.

Everyone who knows me knows I really like the Crane in Legend of the Five Rings.  Hopefully, the reason why I like the Crane so much is apparent in the One Thing L5R Did Right article; the Crane, more than any other clan in L5R, represent the world placing value on soft power, diplomacy, and nurture, rather than aggression, dominance, and martial, supernatural, or unethical power.   For me, a game, a fantasy world, that valued those things was what I was looking for in the face of a real world that didn't. 

When I started playing L5R and interacting with the broader community, though, there was a lot of backlash against the Crane.  Crane characters were called weak, pansies, sissys, gay, etc.  There were lots of jokes about 'Not in the Face'. The idea that the Crane looked down on others more than any other clan was extremely pervasive.  And people continually raised them as being cowards, hiding in the back, etc.  Players described them as 'not really honorable'...but instead being really good at 'faking' being honorable while secretly using lying, cheating, blackmail, or whatever nefarious techniques they could think of  to get ahead.   The Scorpion were better, because they told you up front that they were going to lie, cheat, steal, etc, to get ahead, so that at least was honest.  The Crane, according to many players, did the exact same thing, but pretended to be honorable.   That all was the mild stuff...it got worse from there.

I was pretty naive, at first, and thought that this backlash was because the Crane had a powerful type of deck in the card game before I joined. People complained... and still complain... about non-interactive honor runners and being wiped out.  I naturally figured they must be right, and eagerly turned to tournaments to see if this would play out in tournament results. 
But it didn't.  Over the years, it was clear that the complaints... about lack of interactivity, for example... could be applied to strategies from any clan.  The term just meant 'a strategy that I cannot stop without modifying my deck.'  The complaints and backlash continued whether Crane was a top tier clan or a bottom tier clan.  While it was true that players of other clans might carry scars of previous defeats to Crane players, they did not offer the same  backlash to other clans while they had been dominant.  The complaints about the power of other clans were complaints to AEG about game balance, and were generally short lived, fading when that clan was no longer dominant.  This was not the case with Crane.

Considering I started playing in the late 1990's, homophobia seemed to be an obvious reason for this kind of backlash.  Being Cis and coming from a relatively sheltered background, I did not have to experience much of that prior to L5R, but I knew it was a possible reason.  After all, sitting down at a tournament and getting 'gay' jokes every turn is pretty blatant.  And I don't doubt that there was an element of homophobia in the taunting that Crane received.  But I, from my place of naiveté,  did not understand why the Crane were being associated with LGBT people.  Characters who were very, very clearly heterosexual, such as Doji Hoturi, were being labeled gay.  Others, like Kakita Yoshi, never expressed an ounce of interest in anyone.  AEG was really strict... overly strict, I'd argue... about excluding LGBT relationships from their storylines.  And some of the Cis relationships for Crane were were very powerful and significant.  It was more like the homophobia and gay slurs were being brought in to justify the dislike of the Crane, rather than slurring actual LGBT members of the Crane. As I understand it, this is very characteristic of the way homophobia works, so if I'm breaking things down to a far too obvious level, please forgive me.

As homophobic attitudes lightened up with greater education and equality, the specific slurs about gays and playing Crane did seem to lighten up, over time.  Certain extremely offensive words were no longer used.  But it's not like the attitude towards the clan completely vanished, either.  I was still left wondering about it. 

A lot of what I experienced or saw laid against the Crane, I eventually labeled as misogyny.  These things that the Crane are into...the beautiful hair and clothes, focusing on soft power, courtesy, diplomacy...they are things that my society had labeled as being in the sphere of  being 'female'.  It was easy for me to think that the backlash was against the feminine.  Or at least, male characters doing things that were feminine.  But the term isn't actually very good for describing what I saw and experienced.  Many players would gladly enjoy my offerings, as a female, of these soft skills, or even participate in the right context. There were people who would exclude me as a female player, who would express that misogyny that women weren't capable of playing.  But that was uncommon, at least for me.

That is not to say I did not see really terrible treatment towards women during my time playing L5R.  I did.  The worst of it, though, was towards Ree Soesbee, lead storywriter for the game for a good number of the early years I was playing.  Ree was sweet, generous, welcoming, creative, and intelligent.   And she was, to be perfectly honest, a beautiful person.  The number of guys who would try to hit on her, attempt to convince her to put their personal ideas into the storyline, and then speak about her horribly when she refused either, or just behind her back when it was clear they could not use her, was really, really gross.   She agreed to write Curved Blades for FFG in 2017 as the first Unicorn fiction, but the response she got to that fiction was a stream of  'Dumb woman doesn't know katanas are curved too' as male readers missed the point of the story and ignored the fact she was (and is) extremely knowledgeable about Japanese culture and had written for L5R for years. A bunch of dudes had acted like asses again...it brought back a lot of bad memories. I felt badly for her, and I am not surprised she did not write any further fictions for FFG.  She's probably washed her hands of L5R, and I don't blame her.

But Ree also committed another crime, beyond being an intelligent, beautiful female in a privileged position.  She is the one who really created the Crane clan, and gave it its core stories that made it what it was.  Something made it different than the other clans, and I think part of the reaction that Ree got was because of that difference.    At the time, she was blamed for it as 'favoritism' towards the Crane, though she also wrote Hitomi and the Dragon with equal fervor and spread stories between all the clans just as much as all the other story leads do.  The Crane were transgressive, then, even apart from Ree as the designer, in the eyes of many.

It wasn't until just in the last year or two that I came across the right term for what is going on with the reaction the Crane have gotten in the L5R crowd.  The better term, I think now, is Gender Policing.  If that is familiar to you all, that's great. It was kind of new to me.   Gender policing occurs when someone feels the need to enforce certain behaviors or gender expressions based on sex upon another person, or, in this case, an entire clan.   Caring about beauty, fashion, art, poetry, politeness, meekness, diplomacy, and so on, all went against the expected expression of masculinity of the 90s/00s.  And that really disturbed many players of L5R.   I don't think they even knew what they were protesting.   But for such people, the Crane made more sense if they were gay, or if they are just 'faking' being honorable and are secretly being conniving and hypocritical.  If they were gay, then they weren't really male, and therefore their behavior did not challenge the definition of masculinity.  If they were conniving and hypocritical, then they weren't really admirable, and therefore their definition of masculinity was 'in the wrong' and did not need to be addressed.  Anger comes from expectations that are not met, and I don't think the Crane fit the expectations of expected masculinity correctly. That annoyed people.  The homophobia or seeming misogyny or other issues seemed to come from different ways to put the Crane outside the definition of masculinity so it did not challenge that definition... or to make others acknowledge the clan as inferior so it was not a challenge.  That experience, for what it's worth,  explains my observations.  And it's the source of my nervousness, presenting these ideas again. 

Gender policing is not exclusive to Legend of the Five Rings, or even to the Gaming Community.  I do not blame those who have, even directly to my face, fallen back on really offensive behavior to enforce these norms.  I think that certain gender norms are beaten into kids pretty strongly, sometimes literally.  Certainly to the point where they are self-enforced and self-enforcing.  I know such norms were drilled into me.  But this enforcement cuts off whole swathes of the world to folks, based on their gender.  Whole fields of beauty they are not allowed to see and admire and pursue.   It is my hope that the whole goodness found in the human experience can be opened and appreciated by us all.