Rewatching this, I'm once again shocked that White Wolf based an *entire Clan* in Vampire on "things James Earl Jones does in this movie". Treating it as if it was, y'know, actual mythology. Then again, this is the same company that produced "The Gypsies Splatbook" and not one but MANY different "here is a place that has non-white people therefore the rules that apply for ALL THE WORLD don't apply HERE" books, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised by it. But seriously, using THIS as your source for your Africa Splatbook? SERIOUSLY? There's all kinds of "sheesh, white people" levels there.
Not that I'm disagreeing, running a werewolf:the apocolypse game in Australia, and dealing with thylacine werewolves as the background.... I do wish they sank a bit more thought into how things work outside european derived cultures at the start of planning a game.
Don't you remember? The Setites, being the whitest, were also the only vampires from Africa for *years*. Well, except from some Apartheid Ventrue.
(And then the "African Vampire" splat got printed in a footnote at the back of the book, and it was embarassingly racist. And then EVENTUALLY, like a decade later, an entire book was printed about how vampires in Africa are fucked up, weird, and different from other vampires and yet for some reason have not yet ever appeared because it's not like any human populations have ever left Africa or anything.)
(Similarly, Kindred Of The East. I have a far more interesting and better theory about KotE, that rather than retype I'll see if I can't look up....)
My favorite bit of howler was Norwegian vampires migrating to Finland for the summer to avoid sunlight in a Dark Ages sourcebook.
WTF, that makes no sense. It is just as bright in Finland as it is in Norway. Someone got their latitudes and longitudes and their effect on daylight totally mixed up.
The anniversary edition has a rare independent bloodline -- because clearly we needed another one of those -- called Noiad, entirely based around the idea of Sámi shaman vampires. I don't remember if their shtick was "forest wisdom and nature powers", but this being White Wolf, I'm betting it was.
I think oWoD had some Get of Fenris allocated to Finland.
In real life folklore, werewolves and such were rather sparse as well; most of them were people who changed their shape with a spell, rather than due to a curse, spreadable bite, pledge to dark forces or some innate power. Since "vironsusi" is one of the names for a werewolf, you can probably make some educated guesses about who were up to that, according to folklore.
Setites. Making them "based on Egyptian history", by taking a god of storms and the harvest whose main accomplishment is killing a great snake, and making him the "dark, corrupting snake god" because that's what they were like in the movie, and making their entire Discipline "things James Earl Jones does in the movie".
There was an awesome essay running around called "why Setites hate Egyptologists" for a while, but I'm not seeing it on the first page of google hits and not going to look harder right now. The point is: Everything the Setites do is based on 1982 Conan Movie, not ANYTHING involving Egypt.
Hm, guess I just don't remember the Setites being particularly super-white. I always pictured them as Egyptian, which is really only technically Africa. This could just be I haven't looked at any of those in like ten years, though.
They were Egyptian, which makes them "only technically in Africa" and were mostly portrayed as caucasian or arabic. They were also the only vampires from Africa. Early Vampire (and all other early White Wolf stuff) was not particularly good about race.
I'm not finding my original rant about KotE handy, but the short version:
Caine's curse it to become a monster and spread across the earth, not stop at the border of a place just because they have katanas there and dumbass otaku 90s gamers will pay money for "it's better because it's LIKE ANIME".
So how to you combine the pre-established extreme xenophobia of the "Eastern" kindred with their notable successes in keeping others out, and with the fact that there's zero fucking reason why it's even remotely possible that there *aren't* western-style Caine-based Kindred there?
You pull in a random thing mentioned in a couple of places, specifically that the Ventrue antedeluvian kept abandoning his children for failing to live up to his expectations and moving on to try again, something different in somewhere different.
The Keui-jin? They're Ventrue. Every last one of them, all coming from an independent set of childer of the Antedeluvian. They're sitting on a many-millennia-old stack of "we are the true heirs, the true kindred, others are defective and broken and unclean and will ruin all the work we've put towards building the perfect society", backed by a bunch of nightmare Methuselahs with massive amounts of Dominate and Presence who've been wound up by the Antedeluvian and set loose to produce his perfect society - he'll be back any day now to check on their progress, and won't they have a whole lot to show him! And they've been working hard, not exactly in lockstep but certainly with a lot of nudging (both subtle and unsubtle) to keep them all working towards similar goals shared by their local bosses, and part of that work has been keeping anyone who isn't one of them, who isn't one of the REAL kindred descended from one of the very few REAL Ventrue. They don't even consider western Ventrue to be real kindred.
The original rant had a bunch of references to books and events and history and stuff, showing clearly why my idea fit with everything else and why KotE contradicted it, but that's not really important. What's important is that my version doesn't break all the rules of Vampire, doesn't involve "inscrutable eastern magics" that work differently from everything else on the planet Because Orientalism Yo, maintains and reinforces a whole lot of the themes of Vampire, and is way less stupid.
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theweaselking
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 01:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 02:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 04:46 am (UTC)Not that I'm disagreeing, running a werewolf:the apocolypse game in Australia, and dealing with thylacine werewolves as the background.... I do wish they sank a bit more thought into how things work outside european derived cultures at the start of planning a game.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 05:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 11:43 am (UTC)(And then the "African Vampire" splat got printed in a footnote at the back of the book, and it was embarassingly racist. And then EVENTUALLY, like a decade later, an entire book was printed about how vampires in Africa are fucked up, weird, and different from other vampires and yet for some reason have not yet ever appeared because it's not like any human populations have ever left Africa or anything.)
(Similarly, Kindred Of The East. I have a far more interesting and better theory about KotE, that rather than retype I'll see if I can't look up....)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 08:50 am (UTC)WTF, that makes no sense. It is just as bright in Finland as it is in Norway. Someone got their latitudes and longitudes and their effect on daylight totally mixed up.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-23 06:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-23 08:05 am (UTC)(They're not. Physical undead were not a part and parcel of local folklore. We're more a ghost country.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-23 10:01 am (UTC)(Do we even get to have werewolves in Finland? Because I have no idea if we get to have werewolves.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-23 12:29 pm (UTC)In real life folklore, werewolves and such were rather sparse as well; most of them were people who changed their shape with a spell, rather than due to a curse, spreadable bite, pledge to dark forces or some innate power. Since "vironsusi" is one of the names for a werewolf, you can probably make some educated guesses about who were up to that, according to folklore.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 11:40 am (UTC)There was an awesome essay running around called "why Setites hate Egyptologists" for a while, but I'm not seeing it on the first page of google hits and not going to look harder right now. The point is: Everything the Setites do is based on 1982 Conan Movie, not ANYTHING involving Egypt.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 05:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 05:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 05:31 pm (UTC)I'm interested in this KotE theory.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-22 06:31 pm (UTC)Caine's curse it to become a monster and spread across the earth, not stop at the border of a place just because they have katanas there and dumbass otaku 90s gamers will pay money for "it's better because it's LIKE ANIME".
So how to you combine the pre-established extreme xenophobia of the "Eastern" kindred with their notable successes in keeping others out, and with the fact that there's zero fucking reason why it's even remotely possible that there *aren't* western-style Caine-based Kindred there?
You pull in a random thing mentioned in a couple of places, specifically that the Ventrue antedeluvian kept abandoning his children for failing to live up to his expectations and moving on to try again, something different in somewhere different.
The Keui-jin? They're Ventrue. Every last one of them, all coming from an independent set of childer of the Antedeluvian. They're sitting on a many-millennia-old stack of "we are the true heirs, the true kindred, others are defective and broken and unclean and will ruin all the work we've put towards building the perfect society", backed by a bunch of nightmare Methuselahs with massive amounts of Dominate and Presence who've been wound up by the Antedeluvian and set loose to produce his perfect society - he'll be back any day now to check on their progress, and won't they have a whole lot to show him! And they've been working hard, not exactly in lockstep but certainly with a lot of nudging (both subtle and unsubtle) to keep them all working towards similar goals shared by their local bosses, and part of that work has been keeping anyone who isn't one of them, who isn't one of the REAL kindred descended from one of the very few REAL Ventrue. They don't even consider western Ventrue to be real kindred.
The original rant had a bunch of references to books and events and history and stuff, showing clearly why my idea fit with everything else and why KotE contradicted it, but that's not really important. What's important is that my version doesn't break all the rules of Vampire, doesn't involve "inscrutable eastern magics" that work differently from everything else on the planet Because Orientalism Yo, maintains and reinforces a whole lot of the themes of Vampire, and is way less stupid.