Asukapaper

The real Asuka; the only Asuka

  • she/her

she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real

Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)


nobody asked you to make the case for the militia movement coded gang. nobody asked you to be reactive when people are simply saying "oh yeah I love using those guys as mooks." i'm very tempted to block people when this happens since this is the one very strange sticking point in RED's community where you can almost tell in an instant what kind of person they are, what they value, and whether you feel comfortable in the world they want.

to be clear, it tells me what they're scared of putting in the camp mode. that might be themselves and might not have ever been something they've experienced as someone in the majority


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in reply to @Asukapaper's post:

The hard part is that honestly portraying even the “good” 6th street in RED requires either internalizing the camp mode with the combat zone subsetting or seeing it as a gang who views the combat zone in that way. Now having a space full of orcs is the actual purpose of boostergangs and the combat zone, but to have a faction who explicitly sees it that way? it makes things a lot less innocent (you have to write off a place where people do live their lives, just outside the reins of the police) and it casts their writing in an uncomfortable light because the words on the page and the actual political economy of violence taking place are fighting each other. You dehumanize far more npc characters by humanizing 6th Street in the way they’re written.

At best, I think the faction forces the PCs to consider their place in the ecosystem a little more critically. I’m excited for the new splat properly retconning them into The Guardians, a gang that will become 6th Street further down the line, or at least for the prospect of giving some kind of official interpretation that can be toyed with, because I’m going to be honest, I can then have a much easier conversation with future players about what people do with them. That thing being portraying them like they are in 2077 because that feels like the more honest vision. It’s true when jabronis say this is “non-canon,” but I know it’s what’s more fun for the kind of players I attract and it aligns better with my own ideas about what community self defence ought to be as a marginalised person (not a bunch of people huffing lead primer and singing Dixie, that’s for sure).

Also tbh the way CDPR authors them is like a very Eastern European kind of drunken ultranationalism that routes itself back to being recognizably American through iconography and in the ways that many ultranationalisms overlap. I’ll take any chance to write yanks from an exaggerated non-American perspective I can get

and to make it clear, the setting has other guardian gangs or gangs in that mould (with 6th Street being referred to as a vigilante gang in the core, and I think that's an important distinction whether or not the book means it), it's just that they're in splats (like the Street Queens, a network of disenfranchised trans youth), or languishing back in a 2020 sourcebook. I mean after that we got the... Steel Vaqueros? Who are... a nomad pack I guess?

One of these days I'll fully tag some kind of essay on this, but for the time being I'm just not sure what the hell R. Tal wants 6th Street to be. I just see what suspect people see into them and nope the fuck out