Castles of Steel - Lesbians Good, Imperialism Bad

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Lieutenant Arisukawa Haruna

Balance Stats
❁ • ❁ Work / Life ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Warrior / Princess ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Radical / Respectable ❁ • ❁

Tactical Stats
Gunnery 0, Navigation +2, Command +2, Technology -4, Personal -2, Strategy +3

Stress: 3​


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PLEASE READ THE QUEST RULES BELOW

You collectively vote on the actions of Arisukawa Haruna, the first woman to serve openly in the Imperial Akitsukuni Navy.

This quest is set in a universe which is much like our own circa 1910, but with different politics, cultural norms, and ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as some unusual and advanced technology in places.

We are using this quest to explore themes like breaking the glass ceiling, divergent outlooks on gender and sexuality, colonialism and imperialism, and the place of royalty.

Content Warning
This quest goes some dark places.

There is violence, often explicit, often unfair, often against undeserving targets.

There are not always good options forward. The protagonist is not necessarily a good person.

There is implied content and discussion of sexual harassment and assault.

This is a world where people are often racist, sexist, queerphobic bigots. Sometimes, even the PC and the people they are friends with.

Voting Rules

We will tell you if write-in votes are allowed. If we do not say that write-ins are allowed, they are not. This is to prevent people from unrealistically hedging their bets.

You may proposal other options in a non-vote format, subject to approval, on non write-in votes.

We will tell you when a vote allows approved voting. If we don't say the answer is no, pick an option. We like making people commit.

Discussions makes the GM feel fuzzy.

Game Rules
When we ask you for a roll, roll 3d6. You are aiming to roll equal or under the value of your stat. If you succeed, Haruna gets through the situation with no real difficulties. If you roll above the target value, Haruna will still succeed, but this success will cost her something or add a complication.

Whenever Haruna loses something or faces hardship from a botched roll, she takes Stress. The more Stress Haruna has, the more the job and the circumstances she's in will get to her, and it'll be reflected in the narrative. Haruna must be kept under 10 Stress: if she reaches 10 Stress, she will suffer a breakdown and the results will not be great for her.

Haruna loses stress by taking time for herself, by making meaningful progress on her dreams, and by kissing tall, beautiful women.

Meta Rules
Author commentary is in italics so you know it's not story stuff.

Please don't complain about the system or the fact we have to roll dice. We've heard it before, we've heard it a thousand times across multiple quests. We're not going to change it, and it wears at our fucking souls.

Just going "oh noooo" or "Fish RNGesus Why!" is fun and fine. Complaining at length because you didn't get what you want less so.

If you have a question, tag both @open_sketchbook and @Artificial Girl. If you only tag one of us, you will be ignored. Seriously, we both write this quest.

And yes this is an alt-history type setting with openly gay and trans people, ahistoric medicine, and weird politics. Just... deal, please?

This quest employs a special system called Snippet Votes. Please read this post for more information.
 
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10ebbor10's Edit 2 there is sorta accurate, but what you'll probably end up seeing for a long while is one of the berth spaces has a section partitioned off with curtains or something like that.

To be clear, this is gonna be messy in any case and take years and years. Haruna knows this and knows it's gonna be some kind of mess that she's probably going to be considered some kind of responsible for. She's basically just advocating for one kind of disaster or another.

(also, debate is good and we love it, but also story comments keep us alive. We spend hours on each update, tiny comments mean the world to us.)

(also also, next scene is gonna be the debriefing as well as some home stuff with Aiko, so snippet votes???)
 
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10ebbor10 said:
Your seperated option would also, like the WNA of before, mean that women would all be concentrated in the same auxilary positions, with the same implications of inherent lower worth. What good is having a female direct superior when that superior has no meaningful authority, and therefore no power to protect her underlings?
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The example she's taking is that of nations where they ended up equal so I don't see that as doomed. She'll just have to push for gradually increasing responsibilities.

10ebbor10 said:
Edit 2: Actually, unless Akitsukini is going to go for fully integrated and shared accomodations, clustering is going to happen. Seperating accomodations across the entire fleet won't be cost effective, so only a limited amount of ships will be mixed gender compatible.
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This is a good point, though. Didn't think about that.
 
Night_stalker said:
Just to be sure, we're getting a cat, right?
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We're not getting a cat. You already have a cat at (Asuka's) home!

Besides, neither Aiko nor Haruna are cat people. Aiko is too ADHD to take care of living creatures and Haruna demands Absolute Loyalty from any animal that serves her.
 
open_sketch said:
We're not getting a cat. You already have a cat at (Asuka's) home!

Besides, neither Aiko nor Haruna are cat people. Aiko is too ADHD to take care of living creatures and Haruna demands Absolute Loyalty from any animal that serves her.
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OK, just checking.

[] Haruna gets asked for her autograph by one of Aiko's blushing schoolmates. Even more hilariously, it's one of her male ones.
 
[X] You didn't need your own unit with just you in it, and enlisted women wouldn't either. You could do anything a male officer could, and so could the women who would follow you into the enlisted ranks. The admiralty would probably be more reluctant, but it would get these women, when they arrived, mixed in with real crews on real ships.

Separate but Equal never is. And once we get stuck into that, it's very hard to change. Better to set the way we want it to end now.
 
[X] You didn't need your own unit with just you in it, and enlisted women wouldn't either. You could do anything a male officer could, and so could the women who would follow you into the enlisted ranks. The admiralty would probably be more reluctant, but it would get these women, when they arrived, mixed in with real crews on real ships.
 
Way I see it:
-Separated means it easier to marginalize and write them out entirely. Moving units around is pretty easy bureaucratically, and if you could push them into dead end boring jobs where they can't win acclaim, and won't be seen around 'real' military folks, they can become a quaint footnote like all the stories of female samurai did. Isolation also makes it easier to turn the rest of the military against them.
--However, the living conditions of the women that DO join would be significantly better, and abuse is going to be harder. Think more kept in never-deployed reserves. Recruitment would be easier as well.

-Mixed means that they're there, they're going to be barely visible, and they're going to be earning their own recognition, when the bullets are flying you don't have TIME to care what the person next to you have in their pants, as long as they're fighting to keep you alive. Even bigoted assholes are fairly likely to back up their teammates against outsiders, even if they treat the women as domestic help or worse.
--On the down side, you're going to see horror stories, abuse in this kind of environment is very hard to prevent without a broader prevailing culture(or officers who care coming down like a hammer), theres going to be horribly insulting shit flung around, and the women are probably going to be adopting the hypermasculine army culture (which is going to drive the conservatives up the walls about the whole immorality of it) or dropping out to escape abusive environments a lot to no really good career.

So to oversimplify: Nicer to individuals, but much harder to enact real change, or absolutely terrible to individuals but might actually make something happen in politics within Haruna's lifetime.
 
[X] The Europans have been doing this for centuries, there must be something to it. Female enlisted should have their own watches and crews. This'll be easier to sell to them, but likely reduce these crews to effectively auxiliary positions for a while.
Baby steps, baby steps.

[ ] Someone writes a farcical bit of fiction about a submarine crewed entirely by women. Haruna finds it hilarious, though probably not for the reasons the author intended.
 
I'm strongly against separate but equal as an intermediate step, that's what everyone else has so if we do it then we will be Cool and Europeanised and we will never, ever get it fixed.

[ ] Aiko finds Haruna's gigantic blunderbuss of a pistol and cannot stop laughing at her tiny girlfriend with a massive gun.
[ ] One of the warehouses that falls under Haruna's responsibility turns out to be full of something implausible. I dunno, Samurai style armour or something.
 
[X] The Europans have been doing this for centuries, there must be something to it. Female enlisted should have their own watches and crews. This'll be easier to sell to them, but likely reduce these crews to effectively auxiliary positions for a while.

I really like this story a lot. :)

I think that not having all the women quit is more important to building a corp of experienced sailors and officers than immediate integration. I worry if the washout rate is super high, as would make sense for individuals, then it'll be taken as a 'women aren't suited' proof, and scouting that is priority 1.

Having the European example to point to doesn't hurt either, for getting movement. And a political win here can maybe be leveraged further.
 
Another note about Separate but Equal is that we're a woman. If women are segregated and then shuffled off into shit postings where they can't do anything then so will we be. Now, yes, it's a story and Haruna won't actually end up being a logistics housewife for the next thirty years but she doesn't know that.
 
The entire story has had Haruna being shuffled from one crappy post to the other. As a promising officer and member of the Imperial family, she would normally have served upon one of the big fancy battleships, not a cargoship or a tender, or some barren rock in the middle of nowhere.
 
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10ebbor10 said:
The entire story has had Haruna being shuffled from one post to the other. As a promising officer and member of the Imperial family, she would normally have served upon one of the big fancy battleships, not a cargoship or a tender, or some barren rock in the middle of nowhere.
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She's been getting okay postings. She's been allowed to go to sea and she's been allowed to serve on combatant craft. Honestly I half suspect she has someone up there in the Admiralty looking out for her, if they'd wanted they could have stuck her in a shore establishment doing admin work forever. If she was a guy she'd have no doubt been getting excellent jobs, but if she's a guy then the story isn't gay so it's a definite win-some lose-some.
 
FrangibleCover said:
She's been getting okay postings. She's been allowed to go to sea and she's been allowed to serve on combatant craft. Honestly I half suspect she has someone up there in the Admiralty looking out for her, if they'd wanted they could have stuck her in a shore establishment doing admin work forever. If she was a guy she'd have no doubt been getting excellent jobs, but if she's a guy then the story isn't gay so it's a definite win-some lose-some.
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She's a member of the royal family. She's literally been given the worst possible posting they COULD for her social status without outright insulting the royal family. She's been repeatedly put in places where she could die to accident or enemy action, or which are completely unlikely to see any action if the strategic picture goes as planned, while simultaneously unlikely to acquire any medals in the process.
 
veekie said:
She's a member of the royal family. She's literally been given the worst possible posting they COULD for her social status without outright insulting the royal family. She's been repeatedly put in places where she could die to accident or enemy action, or which are completely unlikely to see any action if the strategic picture goes as planned, while simultaneously unlikely to acquire any medals in the process.
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I'm interested to hear about the third category of military posting implicit in your response, the place where she cannot die to enemy action but is likely to encounter the enemy and get loads of medals. Matsura is good but it's a couple of years before they can get a functional strike drone together for us. :p

She's royal but she's also a woman. Akitsukuni cultural mores say that she stays home and does the accounting while the men fight. That's been made explicit repeatedly both in this quest and ACDQ. It wouldn't just be easy politically to make her do admin, it would be easier than posting her to tenders or torpedo boats.

Someone must be looking out for us.
 
FrangibleCover said:
I'm interested to hear about the third category of military posting implicit in your response, the place where she cannot die to enemy action but is likely to encounter the enemy and get loads of medals. Matsura is good but it's a couple of years before they can get a functional strike drone together for us. :p

She's royal but she's also a woman. Akitsukuni cultural mores say that she stays home and does the accounting while the men fight. That's been made explicit repeatedly both in this quest and ACDQ. It wouldn't just be easy politically to make her do admin, it would be easier than posting her to tenders or torpedo boats.

Someone must be looking out for us.
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Eh, she's been given alternately boring and shitty jobs, but I don't think NOT promoting her is an option, theres certain minimum rank expectations for a royal, and "she's greener than grass" wouldn't work forever.
 
FrangibleCover said:
I'm interested to hear about the third category of military posting implicit in your response, the place where she cannot die to enemy action but is likely to encounter the enemy and get loads of medals. Matsura is good but it's a couple of years before they can get a functional strike drone together for us. :p

She's royal but she's also a woman. Akitsukuni cultural mores say that she stays home and does the accounting while the men fight. That's been made explicit repeatedly both in this quest and ACDQ. It wouldn't just be easy politically to make her do admin, it would be easier than posting her to tenders or torpedo boats.

Someone must be looking out for us.
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Remember, Haruna does have a couple of people in her corner that have quite a wealth of soft power, even if they can't give orders directly to the Admiralty regarding her postings and so forth. There is, after all:

-Her mother, an important socialite with all kinds of connections in noble politics who decided to support Haruna's naval ambitions to the hilt once it was clear to her that it wasn't a passing fancy.
-Her father, an economic vice-minister who seems to have his finger in almost every pie and who has been keeping track of her career and her well-being from afar.
-Her cousin, the Empress, who has repeatedly expressed a fondness for modernity. What's more modern than a woman in the Navy?
 
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