It wasn't really the side saddle issue that bugged me about the setting. The weird physics threw me more (I couldn't visualize what shore lines must have looked like for one thing). It was a weird custom but there are allot of customs, superstitions and beliefs that don't make sense or have much basis in reality that have and are strongly believed. The oddest thing about it was that it was so uniformly believed across the entire setting (unless it is a fact of life in that world which I assumed it was).

Yeah the sidesaddle thing was weird, I mean it supposedly causes infertility, but not impotence.  100% foolproof birth control and guys aren't using it?

The continental people idea seemed to be weird but pointless, most everything was underwater.  What's the point of living on a titanic chick if I can't go live on a clit the size of Mount Everest.

I went and looked it up in the Reign book and it's impotence, not infertility per se.

Quote from: Necrozius;747450Riding side saddle is a ridiculous cultural practice. I haven't read or played Reign, but I assumed that this was the point: not all customs make sense. I mean, in our world that custom (applied to women) makes even LESS sense, but we accept it as benignly old fashioned. Again, haven't read the game, but I thought that this one detail was sort of clever. Meh.

Men fuck.  Men who win in fighting fuck more.  Men who fight on horseback win more than those that don't.  Men who fight on horseback and win are not men who ride sidesaddle.  Men who who fight on horseback and win fuck more, and that means they figure out the taboo is bullshit because they breed the women that they fuck.  Taboos exposed as bullshit don't stay taboo for long, which is why it's bullshit.

That's what the folks who dogpiled me about my objection never figured out: it's a bullshit taboo because effective ones don't break when you look at them like that.  You want an effective taboo?  How about "Women don't go into combat because it means the death of the tribe."  Effective taboos work because they reinforce repeatable observations of reality as it is, not as some try-too-hard wanna wants it to be; send your breeding age women into combat, and you risk the survival of the tribe if your losses hit a critical mass threshold of deaths and cripplings (unlike if a shit-ton of men die in combat).

Sure, matter-of-fact reality ain't so cut-and-dried, but when dealing in taboo formation and propagation you're not looking at cultures with the Scientific Method- at best, you're looking at strong (but not scientific) cultures of logic and reason, and most often you're looking at a handful of influencers (who do have such things) using religion as the means to push out the knowledge into a people who are too busy Not Dying to bother with figuring out anything that is not immediately concerned with Not Dying.

Fucking morons.  This is one of the many reasons I say that Reality Trumps Fantasy.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;747656You want an effective taboo?  How about "Women don't go into combat because it means the death of the tribe."  Effective taboos work because they reinforce repeatable observations of reality as it is, not as some try-too-hard wanna wants it to be; send your breeding age women into combat, and you risk the survival of the tribe if your losses hit a critical mass threshold of deaths and cripplings (unlike if a shit-ton of men die in combat)..

You'd be pretty hard pressed for finding evidence for this, especially the whole birth rate issue.

Quote from: Kemper Boyd;747662You'd be pretty hard pressed for finding evidence for this, especially the whole birth rate issue.

Yeah, cos women fight so badly they don't even get killed.

What about if you send your men to fight, and we send our men and women to fight and we win because we outnumber you two to one and then we go over to your place and kill all your women whom you have foolishly not taught how to fight back?

Quote from: Axiomatic;747669What about if you send your men to fight, and we send our men and women to fight and we win because we outnumber you two to one and then we go over to your place and kill all your women whom you have foolishly not taught how to fight back?

Depending on how you use your women, you might actually be at a disadvantage!

Quote from: Axiomatic;747669What about if you send your men to fight, and we send our men and women to fight and we win because we outnumber you two to one and then we go over to your place and kill all your women whom you have foolishly not taught how to fight back?

Well, men in Reign's setting can and do fight. They just make rubbish cavalry, because they ride sidesaddle.

To create a Men's Riding Army, you'd need to convince enough men to ignore the social stigma and lifetime of conditioning not to ride astride (When they could just be infantry instead, which is a fine career), and convince enough women to be willing to train them. But of course... your character has been raised in this culture as well. Maybe it won't occur to them that they could do so.

(I never understood the fascination with wanting female Space Marines, anyway. Take a boy child and a girl child, give 'em a few decades of psychotherapy, growth hormones, implants and combat training, and by the end of it they're both going to be pretty similar, regardless of their genitals.)

I can buy a gameworld where women cavalry are a thing. I can even buy a world where in some cultures the cavalry are exclusively women. This doesn't even have to result from a "warrior woman" culture or a matriarchal culture per se. Perhaps early on in a culture's development they came to the conclusion that handling domesticated animals is women's work, and then the women realised they could make important contributions in battle by lending their horseriding skills to the men. Perhaps the macho thing to do is to be a charioteer - after all, then you're handling multiple horses - whereas riding horseback is seen as second best. I can buy women cavalry being a thing in all sorts of different cultures, male-led, female-led, whatever.

Yes, in some respects the taboo is impractical when you view it from a coldly utilitarian perspective. But all sorts of cultural practices become impractical once the original impetus for them fades away but they are still retained anyway. (For instance, keeping kosher is inconvenient and, depending where you live in the world, can be downright expensive and difficult, but people still do it anyway.)

What I can't buy is the same cultural taboo being shared by every single culture on the planet. There are precious few cultural mores which are common to all human societies in our own world, and "only women can ride cavalry" is the sort of taboo which is so niche and specific that you'd really expect there to be a lot of variation.

I have no problem with Stolze positing a world where the prevailing cultural assumptions about gender roles differ from our own - this is fantasy, right, we're allowed to use our imaginations - but the horse taboo is a completely goofy and heavy-handed way to go about it and has the side effect of making his imagined world seem less real because its societies don't vary on this point to the extent you'd expect them to.

I agree with Warthur - in principle "horse riding is a female role" seems like a workable trope, tropes don't have to be optimised for utility; but making it universal makes the culture seem less real.

Quote from: S'mon;747715I agree with Warthur - in principle "horse riding is a female role" seems like a workable trope, tropes don't have to be optimised for utility; but making it universal makes the culture seem less real.

EDIT: I'll take my opinions on culture elsewhere: I'm here to talk about gaming!

I agree to the extent that mono-cultures as they tend to be represented in RPGs and fiction tend to be kind of "off" to me.

Is the culture in question a ruthless matriarchy? Are these bronze-age cultures?

Quote from: Necrozius;747724EDIT: I'll take my opinions on culture elsewhere: I'm here to talk about gaming!

I agree to the extent that mono-cultures as they tend to be represented in RPGs and fiction tend to be kind of "off" to me.

Is the culture in question a ruthless matriarchy? Are these bronze-age cultures?

I forget the fine details but I vaguely remember the assumed tech level as being bronze age-ish.

I don't get why not just make the side saddle issue an in setting fact. It does causer impotence. Then such a wide spread taboo makes more sense as a observable verifiable fact.

Quote from: Necrozius;747724EDIT: I'll take my opinions on culture elsewhere: I'm here to talk about gaming!

I agree to the extent that mono-cultures as they tend to be represented in RPGs and fiction tend to be kind of "off" to me.

Is the culture in question a ruthless matriarchy? Are these bronze-age cultures?

The land masses are apparently about the size of one or two Africa's in total (The internet is vague in terms of whether that's an Africa per body or in total). I think all of the modern cultures share a common ancestor though, with the empire's first monarch having been female and that having lasted since; not really ruthless, just that's the way it was.