And now I wonder how FeFe´s friend is doing. He must be living in interesting times at this point.
Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Just doing work to improve Emerald Seas/Thousand Lakes relations by getting stepped on constantly.
Picture James Bond's Q except James Bond acts like an orc in combat and Q has to keep their equipment maintained.
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Bakkasama
There is always a greater fool
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Pronouns
- He/his
Right. Someone please remind me what the Ma family status and situation is? Mostly because this snippet reminded me of how Bei Meizhen thought we were grooming Su Ling and Li Suyin to be our subordinates and the Ma sisters used to be our bodyguards. On that note, neither Su Ling or Li Suyin had cultivators in their family, right? So they are both heads of their own Baronial clans since they both reached green before 21 as first generation cultivators?
(Mental Memo: Start referring to Su Ling as Baroness Su of the Emerald Seas Provinces whenever possible in her presence. Also drag her to CRX's next posh party)
(Mental Memo: Start referring to Su Ling as Baroness Su of the Emerald Seas Provinces whenever possible in her presence. Also drag her to CRX's next posh party)
Sirrocco
Pedantic
I think that a hollow, toxic, loveless political marriage would absolutely be a terrible idea. I think that a merely empty marriage, political, business or otherwise, would be a lousy idea... but I don't think that that's at all what's on offer here. Bao Qian clearly cares about how she feels about things and connecting with her (however difficult it is) and doing what it takes to make this work. He clearly admires her as a person, and expects that part of the process of wooing her will involve convincing her to admire him as a person. There's a really interesting divide in his words and actions between the business partnership that he's trying to set up and the relationship he's trying to develop, and it's clear that he wants both.
One thing worth noting is that Bao Qian isn't trying to get married (or even necessarily engaged) any time soon. It's not time for that yet. At the same time, I think this might be good for her. Bao Qian's romantic interest and financial interest are both out front on the table, clearly visible. There's nothing left lurking to strike and poison the situation later... and he's willing to put in the work to try to get to a place where she's okay with that. I think his "put all the difficulties up front, and then handle them as necessary" plan is going to be a lot healthier overall than one where she sort of sidles into a relationship without admitting or dealing with any f the potential issues.
As before, I think it's pretty clear that Bao Qian also wants it to be more than a business arrangement... it's just that "business arrangement" is the foundation that he knows for stable marriages, and then you build the "more" on top of that, and he's trying to do this one right.LQ´s other problem is that she wants it to be more then just a business arrangement "There is more to it than that. You're… there's supposed to be more to this kind of relationship than that," is what she told CRX. (CRX is no help here btw because her solution is "get a lover") Tbh here it is just interaction with the one courting LQ that will help. Like with Gu Tai it ended up with LQ not disliking the idea after just a few interactions.
side note: "aro ace" does not mean "political consideration is literally the only consideration". I suspect that she'd prefer that her eventual husband be someone she could get along with, someone she could work with, someone who could be happy being married to her in spite of the aro ace thing, and so forth. There are lots of practical, pragmatic reasons for wanting things that are not purely political advantage out of a marriage, even if sex and romance aren't a thing for you.
I think that where the relationship is at right now..
- They have a successful, mutually beneficial business relationship. It's an actual thing, and both of them are getting what they want out of it, including appropriate profits. It is likely that this will lead to further mutually beneficial business deals in the future.
- They have gotten to the point (by dint of significant effort) where they can chat about things, comfortably and amicably.
- Bao Qian has explicitly expressed romantic interest in Ling Qi, and demonstrated it through his actions. Ling Qi has managed to not flee in terror, and has by now gotten comfortable enough with the idea of it that he's able to slip gentle flirtation into their conversation sometimes without making her tense up.
- Bao Qian gets along reasonable well with Ling Qi's Spirits.
- Bao Qian has expressed a desire to get engaged and married eventually, a significant time from now. He's declared an intent to show worthiness through his deeds, and then acted in such a way as to indicate that he's serious about it.
Given all that, I think that the relationship he's building towards (patiently and carefully) isn't one where the political/financial arrangement dominates per se - not in the toxic way you mean it. It's more that it's at the core of the thing because you need the core of a marriage to be solid and stable and mutually beneficial, and he knows how to do that with a business partnership. It's not that the financial stuff is there instead of the romantic stuff, or that it forces out the romantic stuff, it's that the financial stuff is set down as a structure on which the romantic stuff can grow.
So... I'm looking back over the stuff you posted, and it's like you're saying two different things. On the one side, you use words like "force" and "compel", and "has the power to" and on the other side, all you're really talking about is cutting back on the flow of extra resources, while suggesting that cutting off said flow would be enough to cripple Ling Qi's cultivation, and therefore enough to force her hand. I think the disconnect here is that no one is reading it like that, because that control is not actually as strong as you seem to think it is. That's true for a few reasons.
- First, Ling Qi is still in the sect, and doing quite well at it. Shenhua can't really afford the political capital necessary to force the sect to deep-six a loyal sect member who is doing well for them, and Ling Qi can develop at a reasonable speed just off of what the sect gives her. It's not the same speed as she gets with the Cai contributions, but it's plenty to keep going on. Similarly, Shenhua can't yank her out of the sect. That's not how that works.
- Second, Ling Qi herself has a decent ability to make money on her own. Sure, her political influence tanks if she stops being CRX's left hand, but it's not like the Bao are ever going to stop salivating over the crop yield benefits of having Zhengui trudge through a field and sneeze a few times, and it's not like her ability to convince people to pay money for her music is going to go down. She wants the money and other resources, sure, and she's doing these things (in part) in order to get it, but it's not that if the font cuts off it's going to bring her development to a halt, even if she's not in the sect.
- Third, as has been noted, she's not Shenhua's vassal. She's Renxiang's. Ling Qi's meds don't show up on Shenhua's budget. They show up on CRX's. The only threat Shenhua can really wield on this one is the threat to force CRX to drop the relationship (and thus the funding) and that's a matter of crippling the position of her heir, and also showing weakness and caprice to the outside. That's not worth the candle, really.
- Technically, CRX could more directly manipulate the resource flow, but she made a deal, and reneging on a deal with her chosen left hand in order to pressure said vassal on a matter of matrimony? That would do lots and lots of damage to her ability to make deals and maintain loyal vassals later on.
Vassalage is a system of societal organization, and it's designed to get buy-in from the people it needs buy-in from. One of the groups that it definitely needs buy-in from is lesser noble clans, and they really do have a pretty solid set of built-in protections from bad lieges
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Ma sisters are the daughters of a red realm potterer.
Li Suyin is the daughter of a mortal official, and through her mother the grandaughter of a cultivator whose clan got destroyed and who got his dantian crippled.
Su Ling is the daughter of a powerful 4th realm spirit beast, and we don't know who her father was.
Artisan father, potter iirc. So anything between mortals to low level cultivators but probably just commoners. This interlude gave the most information we have tbh.
Suyin had on her mothers side some cultivator blood, but they got their clan crushed and dantais destroyed. She got her fleshcrafting art from a grandfather that managed to save it.
Su Ling´s mother is a human eating fox demon that likes to play with its food.
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Also probably cripple her own cultivation, less Ling Qi really fucked up somehow and gave her reason.
..... Wait, snake posting? Can you explain what is it exactly?
- Location
- Greece
From what I gathered it is considered impolite in this forum, for some reason I do not quite understand, to quote a person part by part and to reply to each such quote separatedly, instead of answering to the argument as a whole.
Bakkasama
There is always a greater fool
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Pronouns
- He/his
I think they mean spagheti posting, the act of cherrypicking what parts of a post to quote to make it support your argument by stripping away the original context of it. Like quoting only a sentence that in the original paragraph was sarcastic to make it sound like it wasn't, but done several times.
Edit: Well, it wasn't impolite before but iirc there were some bad cases of spaghetti posting some years ago and ever since we quote the whole post if it isn't a really big one. So it isn't quite that Snake posting is frowned upon but that one type of mailicious snake posting is and thus it fell in disuse, even if snake posting itself isn't.
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I don't believe it does go both ways as Ling Qi, while talented, is just a green cultivator at this point and could still stall out in the next decade. Gan Guangli is obviously valuable, but Shenhua won't hesitate to drop him if he doesn't perform. There are plenty of young cultivators who would love to be in Ling Qi's position and to Shenhua at least she's very replaceable. She's not really dependent on the resources, but with Ling Qi's focus on personal cultivation I feel it's a significant factor.
I believe there are scenarios where it would benefit the Cai more though, like if the Xuan were really serious about getting Zhengui and offered them an alliance or something.
- Location
- Greece
... Yes, spaghetti posting was the actual term, d'oh, my brain wires must have been crossed because the danger noodles look like spaghetti.
Shenhua won't hesitate to drop him if he doesn't perform. That is kind of exactly my argument though, the point I stated repeatedly, that Ling Qi would be dropped if she falls behind, not if she doesn't marry/ act as a political chesspiece. (and even then not by CRX but by Shenhua but meh, that is semantic on that point)
There are no scenarios where the Cai would be benefited more by a forced marriage because the person marrying is not a person of the Cai clan but a vassal. The vassal will gain any and all political power, and the Cai will only truly benefit from it if the vassal is loyal, because the vassal is not property no matter how bnding the contract. Making the vassal disgruntled and then giving to it political power? Bad move.
Moreover, in the scenario you describe, we'd be forced to marry into the Xuan. That... creates all sorts of new problems, including the fact that we'd be no longer Cai's vassal afterwards. That creates a ton of problems, such as the fact that such a pact would be very nonbinding because we are not a member of the Cai clan, and as such, no longer tied to them in any way after we marry into the Cai and the fact that this would technically violate the Cai's own contract because it would be pushing us towards no longer being her vassal, which would be a political powderkeg among nobility too.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
So the big problem with GG is that he failed. That's why he is in the position he is in. Ling Qi is doing quite well by all accounts and so forcing CRX to drop her is way more politically costly because it shows everyone that the Cai don't reward success. That is a very very dangerous precedent to set in a feudal society.
So the specific concern with the Xuan isn't a concern because they are two different shoals which means working together is going to cause a lot of problems. As for the idea of forcing a political marriage, the Cai don't really have the political capital to do that. They are two people keeping their duchy undercontrol with sheet power. They can't afford to set the precedent of micromanaging their vassals like that because that would cripple the trust they have to develop with their vassals to effectively run things.
- Location
- Russia
Yrsillar, Are Ma sisters still Yellow at this point (turn 8-9)?
Sirrocco
Pedantic
Okay. Fine. Ducals and people named Shen.
Another one of the things he offers is a functional set of familial lore on how to live at this tier. CRX can offer a bit, but she's pretty alien. Beyond that... Ling Qi has no idea how to be liege over a plot of land, or how to handle troops sworn to your cause, or how to interact with sects from the outside or a model of how to maintain healthy familial and matrimonial relationships in a family full of cultivators or any of the other thousand and one things that a standard noble family would have accumulated up over the generations and passed on to their children as a matter of course. These are things that Ling Qi has no real understanding of, and they're the sort of thing that he would have paid particular attention to. He's even willing to explain a lot of this stuff just for the asking.
I like Xiao Fen... and it seems like she's enjoying being a sort of tiny dread goddess. She shows up when and where she wills, You can't control or predict it. She's kind of terrifying to basically everyone... but it's so much better to be on her good side than on her bad side.
It seems that she has made progress in reminding the trash about proper respect.
I'm pretty sure that it was saying that she had cuts and bruises on her face and limbs, and also had a spearhead in her shoulder, but I'll admit that the idea that she had limbs in her shoulder is a moderately amusing one.
I was going to correct this, but it is Shenhua. Doing incredible things by sheet power is not out of the question.
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I like Bao Qian honestly...
I like how straightforward he is and how upfront he is.
To be honest, I really empathize with Linq Qi's issues with figuring out "hey X is interested in me", I don't have the same underlying issues but being blind to facial expressions and body language and most tone of voice means that I have serious issues figuring out what people around me are thinking or feeling at any given time. So that Bao Qian is so upfront about everything is nice.
I like how straightforward he is and how upfront he is.
To be honest, I really empathize with Linq Qi's issues with figuring out "hey X is interested in me", I don't have the same underlying issues but being blind to facial expressions and body language and most tone of voice means that I have serious issues figuring out what people around me are thinking or feeling at any given time. So that Bao Qian is so upfront about everything is nice.
DeusExBritannia
Red-White-Black-White
- Location
- Texas
Now, see, Lady Ling is a freak of nature, so using her as any sort of measure for yourself is a mistake.
Good job Gan, prevent those nasty hard-to-let-go personal bonds from forming in his subordinates.
A servants pride is turn 8 and discusses various competition for the tournament. So the Mas are still yellow at this time.
There are three main expenditures for cultivators:
1. Drugs
2. Spirit Stones
3. Mathematician salaries.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
4. More drugs for your spirits.
TimEd
Meteor maker
5. Drugs equivalent from your spirits.
Oh my god, thanks so much yrsilla, we got a new target we must absolutely talk to.
Ask Ma Jun about romance. She clearly understands how it suppose to go.
Ask Ma Jun about romance. She clearly understands how it suppose to go.
TimEd
Meteor maker
Dont forget about Su Ling and Li Suyin