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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

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You know what feels good ? To crush the weak, see them frozen before you and hear the lamentations of their spirit beast.

[X] Liang He, Disciple 790

Pridefull swordman will soon understand that the best weapon is not a sword but a fully operationnal battle flute.
 
[X] Liang He, Disciple 790

If they want to hide their power levels then we'll just skip on by and let them
 
yrsillar said:
Ling Qi grimaced, already she had begun to field leading questions regarding her own status in such matters, and she was very much not looking forward to when she would have to start giving such things serious consideration. Still, a question lingered in her thoughts. "You know, how are things likely to work out for you regarding engagement?" She asked quietly. Sixiang remained thankfully silent.
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Okay, so, serious question here: given the setting and the kind of things we've seen from high level cultivators, why is imperial culture exclusively heterosexual in terms of formal arrangements? I'm not just asking because I'm lesbian trash who wants every story I read to be as queer as I am (although I am that), it just seems like there's a disconnect between the cultivation and the culture.

Part of what makes marriage such an important social construct is in keeping track of children, especially in intensely feudalistic and/or clan-based societies. It binds members of two families together in such a way that they are compatible to produce children, creating a new line that is a blend of the two families. This new line either becomes the main line of one or both of the families or it becomes a new family that both clans have a vested interest in, incentivising positive relations between the two original families either way. It has, in the real world, been traditionally limited to heterosexual relationships because two people of the same sex would be unable to produce children, which would remove part of the whole point of the marriage. But given what we've seen of the effects of high level cultivation, I have trouble believing that it would be impossible for two high-level cultivators of the same sex to reproduce.

I had this same thought when we learned that Cai Shenhua was together with her assistant, despite having a husband that she tucks away and ignores. But it kind of makes sense, given the rigidity and black-and-white nature of her domain, that it wouldn't lend itself to blurring the lines of cultural roles and expectations like that. The people who best represent my point are instead Jiao and Xin. We know from our time being instructed by Jiao that his physical body isn't...really his physical body. At his level he's more of a purely spiritual existence that only really manifests physically as a person out of convenience. And given that, could he not alter his physical manifestation to look like whatever he pleased?

Even more relevant in this case is Xin. She's a moon spirit who has been shaped specifically by Jiao to be his waifu wife. If Jiao was gay, would he have shaped that aspect of the Moon to be male? If so, it seems odd to suggest he couldn't have a child with the resulting moon spirit, considering it's already a mostly spiritual relationship as opposed to a physical one. There's a blurriness there when it comes to spirits and gender (as also shown by Sixiang) that leaves me questioning how important the physical reality is when it comes to high-level cultivators.

And that's glossing over a lot of other "gender-and-sexuality-blurriness" issues that cultivation seems to bring up; certain directions domains could be pushed seem likely to seriously effect sexuality; trans cultivators likely change physical sex in the course of their physical cultivation, and even if they don't their domain is almost certainly affected in a direction that allows them to change or transcend their original sex; at a certain cultivation level everyone seems to transcend purely physical human existence, leaving a question as to how sex (both the characteristic and the action) applies to them except at their leisure; and given all of that it seems hard to believe that high-level production cultivators couldn't create talismans or pills that act as workarounds for gay couples looking to produce biological offspring. And if gay couples can have children, I have trouble seeing why marriage is exclusively straight given what we've seen of Xianxialand.

Given what we know, I can think of a few reasons why this is an issue. One, there is some spiritual restriction that requires a male and female participant to create a child in this setting. There could be something there with the Mother and Father spirits from the origin story that makes - for lack of better descriptors - "masculine" and "feminine" qi important components to creating a new soul. Or, it's possible that everything I've said is generally right right and it actually is possible for a gay couple to have children and/or get married, but it's just difficult or not common within the parts of the setting we've seen in the story. Perhaps gay marriage is only really common in other parts of the Empire, or a gay couple having children is a little more difficult than I've made it out to be, leading to it being more uncommon and this society and thus too politically messy to get any official recognition. Now that I say that, I feel like this has come up before, but I don't really remember where...
 
[X] Liang He, Disciple 790

archangis said:
Also dang, meizhen and Cai are taking their sweet time getting to foundation. Trying for some special insights to slot in maybe ?
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My guess is that it's mainly due to a lack of a math cabal to optimize their pill usage. Like, if we hadn't had a coherent enough suite that a music pill could pull its bullshit on an entire turns worth of AP we wouldn't be nearly as close behind as we are now.
 
Just noticed the edit, Yu Jiu is now 794

Wonder if there's ever going to be a battle where only spirit beast participate. Zhengui would dominate I bet.
 
Xepheria said:
You are assuming Sun Lilling isn't going to be challenging upwards this turn.
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She is gonna wait until the end of the month if she do a challenge because of the violent dab meizhen did on her by keeping the five position gap last month.

It's what is so great about it. Either she does a challenge and get punted by meizhen keeping the five rank gap again, or she doesn't and then we get to have three places over her.
 
Omniatrix said:
Okay, so, serious question here: given the setting and the kind of things we've seen from high level cultivators, why is imperial culture exclusively heterosexual in terms of formal arrangements?
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Presumably, the nature of domains starting broad and later narrowing means any domain that can create the needed children from a non-heterosexual pairing would be heavily hampered at doing the other stuff required of high level cultivators. It also means this person would have to plan several hundred years in advance keep that possibility open, starting at or potentially before the time when people are first starting to examine their sexuality. I wouldn't say it'd be impossible, but it definitely would be very very rare.
 
@Omniatrix from last thread.
yrsillar said:
Fertility manipulation in the form of medicines or techniques is pretty trivial for cultivators to acquire, yes, though it isn't entirely perfect, due to competing effects being a thing. (O Hai Zheng clan) Guys can't get pregnant unless they cease being guys through some method, though weird spirit reproduction things can happen ala Zeus sewing up baby Dionysus in his thigh. or Dresden and his fallen angel brain baby

To create human offspring, you do require a male and a female participant though, insofar as Imperial knowledge goes, things can get a little fuzzy at the edge cases though as with all things cultivate-y
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Omniatrix said:
Okay, so, serious question here: given the setting and the kind of things we've seen from high level cultivators, why is imperial culture exclusively heterosexual in terms of formal arrangements? I'm not just asking because I'm lesbian trash who wants every story I read to be as queer as I am (although I am that), it just seems like there's a disconnect between the cultivation and the culture.

Part of what makes marriage such an important social construct is in keeping track of children, especially in intensely feudalistic and/or clan-based societies. It binds members of two families together in such a way that they are compatible to produce children, creating a new line that is a blend of the two families. This new line either becomes the main line of one or both of the families or it becomes a new family that both clans have a vested interest in, incentivising positive relations between the two original families either way. It has, in the real world, been traditionally limited to heterosexual relationships because two people of the same sex would be unable to produce children, which would remove part of the whole point of the marriage. But given what we've seen of the effects of high level cultivation, I have trouble believing that it would be impossible for two high-level cultivators of the same sex to reproduce.

I had this same thought when we learned that Cai Shenhua was together with her assistant, despite having a husband that she tucks away and ignores. But it kind of makes sense, given the rigidity and black-and-white nature of her domain, that it wouldn't lend itself to blurring the lines of cultural roles and expectations like that. The people who best represent my point are instead Jiao and Xin. We know from our time being instructed by Jiao that his physical body isn't...really his physical body. At his level he's more of a purely spiritual existence that only really manifests physically as a person out of convenience. And given that, could he not alter his physical manifestation to look like whatever he pleased?

Even more relevant in this case is Xin. She's a moon spirit who has been shaped specifically by Jiao to be his waifu wife. If Jiao was gay, would he have shaped that aspect of the Moon to be male? If so, it seems odd to suggest he couldn't have a child with the resulting moon spirit, considering it's already a mostly spiritual relationship as opposed to a physical one. There's a blurriness there when it comes to spirits and gender (as also shown by Sixiang) that leaves me questioning how important the physical reality is when it comes to high-level cultivators.

And that's glossing over a lot of other "gender-and-sexuality-blurriness" issues that cultivation seems to bring up; certain directions domains could be pushed seem likely to seriously effect sexuality; trans cultivators likely change physical sex in the course of their physical cultivation, and even if they don't their domain is almost certainly affected in a direction that allows them to change or transcend their original sex; at a certain cultivation level everyone seems to transcend purely physical human existence, leaving a question as to how sex (both the characteristic and the action) applies to them except at their leisure; and given all of that it seems hard to believe that high-level production cultivators couldn't create talismans or pills that act as workarounds for gay couples looking to produce biological offspring. And if gay couples can have children, I have trouble seeing why marriage is exclusively straight given what we've seen of Xianxialand.

Given what we know, I can think of a few reasons why this is an issue. One, there is some spiritual restriction that requires a male and female participant to create a child in this setting. There could be something there with the Mother and Father spirits from the origin story that makes - for lack of better descriptors - "masculine" and "feminine" qi important components to creating a new soul. Or, it's possible that everything I've said is generally right right and it actually is possible for a gay couple to have children and/or get married, but it's just difficult or not common within the parts of the setting we've seen in the story. Perhaps gay marriage is only really common in other parts of the Empire, or a gay couple having children is a little more difficult than I've made it out to be, leading to it being more uncommon and this society and thus too politically messy to get any official recognition. Now that I say that, I feel like this has come up before, but I don't really remember where...
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Gay guy here, my opinion on the setting is that it's still a heteronormative and cisnormative society. Fantasy !NotChina may be full of magic,but there is still norms, rules, expectations, discriminations etc... After all bigotry in real life often doesn't make sense when it's examined closely. So bigotry in fiction doesn't need reasons either.
 
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EternalObserver said:
So a bit confused at the moment, who is Tao Gong?
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Apparently a Scion of one of the two remaining Count clans of the Thousand Lakes(Bai land). The other Count clan is the Qiu.

We have not met him before.

... Well maybe we have but LQ auto-pilot mode in social situations might mean we have just forgot that we have met him.

The other ones ran away with Sun due to having a murder boner for the Western Jungle folks and a hate boner against the Bai because the Bai are horrible people.
 
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Omniatrix said:
Okay, so, serious question here: given the setting and the kind of things we've seen from high level cultivators, why is imperial culture exclusively heterosexual in terms of formal arrangements? I'm not just asking because I'm lesbian trash who wants every story I read to be as queer as I am (although I am that), it just seems like there's a disconnect between the cultivation and the culture.

Part of what makes marriage such an important social construct is in keeping track of children, especially in intensely feudalistic and/or clan-based societies. It binds members of two families together in such a way that they are compatible to produce children, creating a new line that is a blend of the two families. This new line either becomes the main line of one or both of the families or it becomes a new family that both clans have a vested interest in, incentivising positive relations between the two original families either way. It has, in the real world, been traditionally limited to heterosexual relationships because two people of the same sex would be unable to produce children, which would remove part of the whole point of the marriage. But given what we've seen of the effects of high level cultivation, I have trouble believing that it would be impossible for two high-level cultivators of the same sex to reproduce.

I had this same thought when we learned that Cai Shenhua was together with her assistant, despite having a husband that she tucks away and ignores. But it kind of makes sense, given the rigidity and black-and-white nature of her domain, that it wouldn't lend itself to blurring the lines of cultural roles and expectations like that. The people who best represent my point are instead Jiao and Xin. We know from our time being instructed by Jiao that his physical body isn't...really his physical body. At his level he's more of a purely spiritual existence that only really manifests physically as a person out of convenience. And given that, could he not alter his physical manifestation to look like whatever he pleased?

Even more relevant in this case is Xin. She's a moon spirit who has been shaped specifically by Jiao to be his waifu wife. If Jiao was gay, would he have shaped that aspect of the Moon to be male? If so, it seems odd to suggest he couldn't have a child with the resulting moon spirit, considering it's already a mostly spiritual relationship as opposed to a physical one. There's a blurriness there when it comes to spirits and gender (as also shown by Sixiang) that leaves me questioning how important the physical reality is when it comes to high-level cultivators.

And that's glossing over a lot of other "gender-and-sexuality-blurriness" issues that cultivation seems to bring up; certain directions domains could be pushed seem likely to seriously effect sexuality; trans cultivators likely change physical sex in the course of their physical cultivation, and even if they don't their domain is almost certainly affected in a direction that allows them to change or transcend their original sex; at a certain cultivation level everyone seems to transcend purely physical human existence, leaving a question as to how sex (both the characteristic and the action) applies to them except at their leisure; and given all of that it seems hard to believe that high-level production cultivators couldn't create talismans or pills that act as workarounds for gay couples looking to produce biological offspring. And if gay couples can have children, I have trouble seeing why marriage is exclusively straight given what we've seen of Xianxialand.

Given what we know, I can think of a few reasons why this is an issue. One, there is some spiritual restriction that requires a male and female participant to create a child in this setting. There could be something there with the Mother and Father spirits from the origin story that makes - for lack of better descriptors - "masculine" and "feminine" qi important components to creating a new soul. Or, it's possible that everything I've said is generally right right and it actually is possible for a gay couple to have children and/or get married, but it's just difficult or not common within the parts of the setting we've seen in the story. Perhaps gay marriage is only really common in other parts of the Empire, or a gay couple having children is a little more difficult than I've made it out to be, leading to it being more uncommon and this society and thus too politically messy to get any official recognition. Now that I say that, I feel like this has come up before, but I don't really remember where...
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Thanks for making such a thoughtful post!

It is as you suspect more complex than simple physicality in this setting. Ones gender is something that exists on a spiritual level as well. Jiao could manifest a female body but he wouldn't be a woman, anymore than someone wearing a pair of fake boobs on a laugh is in rl. Xin could do the reverse, and the situation would be the same. The metaphysics of the setting are such that a male component and a female component is necessary for the creation of a child through a union of spirits. Lets take Meizhen's cousin Cui as an example. Her mother is a snake the size of a bullet train, and her father is a generations old knife. However, the spirit the knife manifested as male for a number of reasons, so despite the physical differences he was capable of producing offspring with a spirit who had a female identity.

Your assumptions regarding trans individuals are largely correct, a trans cultivator who advanced sufficiently on their path would find their body steadily changing until it matched their identified gender, this is because Male and Female are distinct concepts in this universe. I don't know enough gender theory to say if this is right or not, but it is an assumption I crafted the setting on. So even though physical gender can be mutable enough to be largely irrelevant at higher levels the sort of male female pair bonding at the root of most recognizable social structures remains the assumption. There are indeed ways to fiddle around the edges but the results are volatile and variable enough that they're not in the realm of mainstream acceptance.

Beings who don't have genders at all are generally not able to reproduce in the 'normal' way.

I didn't design things this way to make people feel bad though. I just felt that I could explore non-straight characters a little better in a setting where there is still a degree of adversity regarding their identities, and exploring the way a society fundamentally built on expressions of individual power handles keeping a cohesive society.
 
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