Christ, if we're doing this can we just take a page from Manacle & Coin on this one? Please?
Do you understand it, though? Because the two things here cannot be more set apart from eachother. Manacle & Coin can get away with recounting its horrors in a dry, anthropological perspective because the things it recounts are things people can and have dealt with in real life in many cases, and while there are recorded instances of these things, they are bad but not universal, and there is the option for fighting against them by having the knowledge of how they work and why. It is an informational text. This does not parse with a key, if not headlining, mechanical component of the noncombat supernatural powerset of the Corebook to a roleplaying game which says "you callously disregard the boundaries and comfort-level of others through overt, magically-enchanced sexual manipulation."
I can understand you not wanting "its creepy" to overshadow the other actual point being made of "it is also mechanically suspect, to matter how many sidebars exist which say not to use it." But given how the line itself has had multiple
crippling failures with regards to keeping its hands clean here, and the very Corebook it comes from was headed-up by a serial harasser and those fully willing to stand in his defense, "this is creepy, and by being an optimal path to power requires players to either implicitly sign onto or begrudgingly tolerate sketchy behavior they did not potentially want to engage with when they purchased this Demigod Fight Game, this is Non-Ideal" is a crucial component of the argument which shouldn't be lost sight of. Even the nature of the oft-touted "Red Rule dismissal" here requires that the Charm itself become a Discussion Point for a group, and it stands to reason
why this game requires me to
have that discussion. Maybe I just want to play a cool hero, not explain why the book includes the option of sexual abuse via metaphysical power dynamics.
Because more to the point, Manacle & Coin did not present itself as a How To Enact Drug-Trade And Slavery manual with Helpful Tips. Meanwhile this power, by its very existence, presumes that someone is or will be skimming the Solar charm set
looking for ways to bypass these things, and logically that you
should want too because the Charm text explicitly lays out the sexual preferences and even
willingness of others to resist your advances is an Obstacle to be overcome in pursuit of a goal. That's the "gameplay" being promoted here, placed in the same section as playing a musical instrument Really Well, and trying to create some kind of unspoken equivalence between the two.
Not wanting a game to obliquely advocate to you "this is normal, if not expected. Do some real unsavory pretend shit with your friends, we're all cool here, right?" does not make one oversensitive or a prude for remarking as such. Because in the end, we are all people just trying to have fun with a game which sometimes deliberately fights against us in the process. When we put "creepy" or other moral judgements by the wayside, we are forced to reduce the argument down and get into the nuts and bolts of the mechanic itself, as though the things it is trying to replicate are acceptable in a purely-mechanical context. "How do we make this Less of what it is"
absolutely needs to acknowledge that unspoken advocacy, or else we fall into the same trap by trying to legitimize it through "alright but what if ignoring the sexual agency of others was
nonoptimal."
Calling a spade a spade is the least objectionable part of this conversation.
.
