Literary Universes

When you are given to over-analysis, as I am, it's important to understand the framework or the reason something is written, if only to rein yourself in, to keep yourself from getting too arrogant.   Or looking really, really silly.  If you are a nutritionist, or even an excellent amateur cook, reading the works of George RR Martin you would, very correctly, determine that the many long descriptions of food in his work are not very nutritionally complete and are not very healthy food.  You could even recreate the recipes in the books, even put together a cookbook!    And you would not be invalid...your analysis is perfectly reasonable.  You're right... It's /not/ necessarily very nutritious,  and it might be quite yummy. 

What you shouldn't do, however, is stretch too far beyond what the purpose of the item you're analyzing.  You can reasonably determine from the many wonderful descriptions of food in A Song of Ice and Fire that George RR Martin is a man who likes food, who likes to write about food.    That's not a big leap.  You can determine, potentially, that the world he's writing about does not value  nutrition the same way you would as a nutritionist, or you could argue that Martin is basing his food in his books on the food found in medieval Europe.  But you can't say that Martin is trying to make some sort of statement in his inclusion of all that food in his books.  It's a book about politics and fantasy.  It wasn't created to be a treatise on diet and exercise.  It is creating a universe, of which food happens to be a part.   A nutritionist who uses the depictions of food in A Song of Ice and Fire to criticize Martin's diet, no matter what that diet is or how healthy Martin is, is going way too far.  They're getting silly.  If you want to criticize Martin's diet, you look at what he actually eats, or potentially, what he recommends other people eat, if he ever does. He doesn't in Game of Thrones.  

You need to look at what the work was created for when you are criticizing works.  

You also need to look at when that work was created.

​If I'm reading Shakespeare, something like, say, the Taming of the Shrew, the depictions of women are terrible, for example.  It's pretty easy to go through the whole works of Shakespeare, and be certain, by modern standards, that Shakespeare was as sexist as can be.  But his depictions of women, for his time, were, if not "woke", brought women out from behind closed doors and purely domestic roles, giving them initiative and some degree of power. Works like  Uncle Tom's Cabin or Huckleberry Finn are absolutely racist by modern standards.  But they also contributed greatly to abolition and the fight against racism.  If you do your analysis and determine Shakespeare as sexist, or Mark Twain or Harriet Beecher Stowe as racist, you'd be right...but it's not a useful analysis, really.  You'd only be pointing out that, yes, they existed in the time they existed in. It's in comparing them to other works of their own time that you get some benefit from that kind of analysis.

So...L5R.

It compares to other similar works of its time.... Vampire's Tokyo by Night, maybe, or   Oriental Adventures, or Bushido.  

How you think it compares to the standards of its time...well, that's a different article.  And it CAN change.  It can be improved.  But if we're looking at improvements,  it's left with a balance of what we can change and what we have to leave because we can't change it too much.  What you think can change, how much it can, and why it should....that's a different article.  

But what was Legend of the Five Rings written for?

Well, I'm pretty sure it wasn't written to be advocacy for neoliberalism or any other economic system.  There /ARE/ Game Systems created to advocate for, or against,  economic systems, the unfairness and cruelty of the oligarchy, and the endless drip of the poisons of racism, sexism, hatred, and despair.  But that's not what L5R was written for. I think it was created to allow players to put themselves in fantasy samurai stories, such as those depicted in Usagi Yojimbo (released 1984), Rurouni Kenshin (1994), many other fantasy and anime works that were becoming popular at that time, and, of course, on the older works of Kurosawa and chanbara cinema.  It taps those sources, and Japanese history itself, to create a fantasy world that would let those stories play out, with details stuffed in there like A Song of Ice and Fire lemoncakes.  And these literary works that it is based on, are all based on the fictionalization and mythmaking from Japanese history and folklore. 

It was written to recreate a literary experience. It was created to make myths and legends, the stories behind the stories that L5R was made to create.

​When your game system is created for mythmaking, it doesn't matter, for example, if Hantei really sliced open the moon with his sword.  It's enough that the characters believe he did.  In fact, in a mythmaking literary universe, it's OK that one of  your PCs can pick up a sword and cut open the moon again.  Because the PCs now are the legends behind a day yet to come. It doesn't matter that there are seven different explanations for why eclipses occur.... each PC believes the version they believe. Scholars may know of several, and pick their own most rational explanation.  The Shadow lies...it wears the face of your lover...it brands unwary Scorpion...it is a piece of the nothing.... Everything can be true, and only the GM knows for sure...and the GM can make their own explanation.  Having the different explanations makes it /better/.... It gives players things that they know and can guess, so instead of being led like children, they can derive and conclude and create based on what the GM offers.  

I love to feed details and ideas to players and GMs, from historic Japan, from China...honestly, from the west if I think it fits.  My The Language of the Fan is based on Victorian fan language, not Japanese.  But they are ideas, launching places for creativity and storytelling, telling these sort of stories.  It's not 'true' or true to life, or anything.  It was never intended to be so...not intended to be even an Edo Japan simulator. 

The universe of Legend of the Five Rings is a literary one,  an exaggerated, larger-than-life one.  Go ahead and get it wrong. Fix what is broken...or break what is fixed.  Have your PCs become gods, or keep them as yoriki for a city magistrate.  Have yoriki become legends, or shatter before the raw realism of a world caught between big dreams and human cravenness.  

It's really OK.