@V2Blast Oh, it is not like I consider FF7 that masterpiece everyone else seems to think. IMHO it has multiple issues and the poor translation is just one of them.

... at least it is not Chrono Cross I suppose.

FF7 does,... seem to get huge props

I'm also in the camp that it wasn't quite as good as people seem to remember

I still liked it at the time but there have certainly been much better games

I don't know anything about the translation stuff but some of the story was a little too weird to follow for sure

At least in my opinion

@trogdor well, for one I seem to remember the original version never spoke about Sephirot "clones"

Anyway I could live with the translation - it is not like that is really uncommon in videogames and other media. What I am not a fan of is the plot, the continuous retcons and how certain aspects of the game are ignored or just "deleted" as an easy way to solve certain subplots.

Oh, and thanks them for never letting us know if Cait Sith really did saw fortune in Aerith future or was just pretending.

If he did see fortune, that is just another nail in the "removal of agency" coffin that Disk 1 ending is.

If he did see her true fate... thanks for letting us NOT know, I guess.

It is not like we could have acted differently if you told us...

yeah

@trogdor then there are all the pearls of the "official lore guidebooks" that were written afterward to milk the franchise. With ton of new "info" that -as always IMHO- seems just created to have something new to say.

I even once read (but couldn't find a real source) that the developers claimed that originally all the other support characters were meant to die during the return to Midgard (you would only get to keep the two ones that were in the party at the time).

Or even better, that the plot started as a "Noir-Style detective story"

Final Fantasy.

final FANTASY. The. Most. Profitable. JRPG. Franchise. Squaresoft. Had. Detective story...

yeah, right... so going to believe that one :P

set in New York, too...

I could have believed it if they just said that FF7 incorporated some scrapped elements from other games plot that never got become an actual game.

But I suppose that wouldn't have been a click-baity article title as good as claiming that "FF7 once was a detective story", wouldn't it?

lol

you can make pretty good click bait out of FF7

especially since they are apparently remaking it

they are. And it is gonna to be broken in multiple episodes

Which... doesn't exactly feel so great to me.....

I'm simply not interested in it

on an unrelated notice, seems the Pinkie figure from Kotobukiya will get release this Friday.

I thought Matriarchy was just a society wherein women are the heads, (not unlike a Patriarchy where men are the heads)

a brief scan of the wikipedia article on the subject suggests that different people use a variety of different definitions for the term

in some cases as broadly as "any non-patriarchal society"

@Carcer well that seems like a waste of a term

It also treads on being misleading, suggesting that a matriarchy is a step towards equality from a patriarchy since by that definition it would be but by another it wouldn't be

Matriarchy shares its etymological ambiguity with Feminism, in that a lot of the time it's more defined by what a society that contains such an ideology doesn't have than by what it does. Like, a properly Feminist society doesn't have men with disproportionate power and presence in our power structures, both legal and non-legal, but doesn't stipulate that such a society must therefore present women as the defacto-ruling power.

@DavidCoffron That's my understanding as well. Similar to the difference between patrilineal and matrilineal inheritance.

(Also because many Feminist Ideologies are concerned specifically with abolishing unjust power structures, with only nominal concern about their overt Maleness)

@Xirema Wait, which feminism are you refering to? radical or non-radical... not sure what non-radicals term is.

@GcL Both? Neither? It's a broad spread.

@Xirema I don't think I've met any of those yet.

@Xirema but then that society would just be neither patriarchal or matriarchal. It seems ridiculous to conflate the neutral state to matriarchy

Most of the non-radical feminists I come into contact with are accurately described as people pro gender equality or equity.

@DavidCoffron Weeeeeellllll.... It's not exactly a 'neutral' state though.

How is a matriarchy different from patriarchy?

or more precisely, how do the definitions differ?

@Xirema by neutral I meant that neither men nor women are placed as leaders in society as a consequence of gender exclusively. Genders would have neutral standing in the society's hierarchy

@DavidCoffron What's that system called?

@GcL it lacks a name because it is the neutral state.

@DavidCoffron What's the superclass of patriarchy and matriarchy? We could call it non-that

genderarchy

non-genderarchy

How about that?

It's a non-patriarchal and non-matriarchal society.

That's a lot to type.

@GcL Authoritarianism, in its broadest, most abstract sense.

@GcL non-pat/matriarchal?

@DavidCoffron I can handle the slash. Seems good enough.

@Xirema that carries a lot of baggage though

@Xirema I don't think I know that sense of authoritarianism.

What is the most abstract sens of that term?

@DavidCoffron Baggage intentional, at least for my perspective.

@Xirema you think a society devoid of preference towards either gender for leadership is authoritarian?

Anyway, what's the difference in definitions between matriarchy and patriarchy?

@DavidCoffron Err, no, we're talking about the superclass of Patriarchy and Matriarchy, right?

Something from which both are necessarily a type of, but more specific than?

@Xirema I don't see either of them necessitating an authoritarian state.

Maybe I misunderstood the query

I was answering:

Ah. We were answering different questions

Nvm

@DavidCoffron Yeah, I see that.

Sorry, my programmer brain interprets words differently than people mean to use them. =P

I'm unclear on the definition of a superclass.

@DavidCoffron Sorry.. Maybe I was being too ontological. It's a term or class of thing that has the common properties of both. Like a biological family. Canidae is the family of wolves and foxes. It's a superclass of them.

As I was saying before: some people would argue that "Matriarchy" is the name of a state that lacks gender supremacy. That's certainly not the colloquial definition for it, but that is the semiotics of how Feminists would use the word, in the same way that Feminism doesn't mean "Female Supremacy", it means "Abolishing Male Supremacy".

@Xirema But... that is anti-entomological

I just don't understand why someone would redefine that word

Some words warrant re-defining based on cultural context. This does not seem to be the case here. It almost sounds like a dog-whistle to female supremacists

@GcL Hm. I guess the long form is "gender-based heirarchy" which could be shortened to genderarchy

@DavidCoffron Well, there's a couple things to parse out, firstly that properly Matriarchal societies have never been more than incidental in the long scale of human history. So if/when you're describing a Matriarchal society, and aren't specifically talking about a specific tribe or kingdom that was historically female-ruled, then you're talking about a society that probably doesn't exist.

@Xirema But it still could exit in theory. And the theory of its existence is well documented prior to the feminist movement

Now, depending on what field of academia you hail from or what context in which you're speaking, having a word that means "a hypothetical thing that could exist, but doesn't", may not be useful to you.

Especially because so much of Feminist ideology is about Activism: it's not just about describing things that are, it's about describing things that they want to be. If Matriarchy means "Patriarchy but with flipped genders", then it's a word that cannot be used, because it does not describe a society that Feminists want.

[bemused]

@Xirema Just because something isn't useful to a field of study doesn't mean you should co-opt it for a different meaning

@DavidCoffron I mean, fair—but people do that anyways for things that are of far higher stakes than this.

@Xirema True, I just think is a strange practice

@Xirema Which is why I recommend that Feminism should use a different term that doesn't muddy the waters so much

because traditionally AFAIK Matriarchy does mean "Patriarchy but with flipped genders", just as Patriarchy means "Matriarchy but with flipped genders"

I think it's important to keep in mind that the word matriarchy comes from a patriarchal context, and its history and meanings can only be understood with an understanding of that lens.

@BESW Right, matriarchy was a word developed as the hypothetical opposite of a patriarchy

@DavidCoffron Also worth noting: sometimes the terms "Gynarchy" or "Gynocracy" are used for describing "Female Supremacist" ideologies.

Not sure how in vogue those uses are, but they exist.

Two particular points: First, that patriarchy assumes its power structure is default and natural, so any system with another group in power will retain the same structure. Second, that from the perspective of the patriarchal colonizers any culture they encountered which systematically shared power between men and women looked like a woman-dominated society and got labelled as such.

@Ash I know, but the term was not created with those societies in mind

I live in a place where that happened.

@BESW By that light, don't all words come from a patriarchal context?

So we have a word, matriarchy, that was invented to describe things that the creators of the word did not understand, and more recently some people have been trying to give it a less delusional application.

@BESW So you're suggesting that the mislabelling of cultures as women-dominated led to the ambiguous nature of its definition (since some cultures which were actually neutral-towards-gendered-leadership were labelled as matriarchal)?

@GcL Certainly most of the words we use in English, yes.

But this conversation seems to have been treating the word as inherently neutral in origin, which causes a lot of confusion in trying to understand its history and contemporary application.

Patriarchal power structures are the water in which we swim, to borrow an anthropological metaphor.

@BESW I don't care about the history of the term. I was drawn here by the assertion that it's definition was something other than gender flipped patriarchy.

@BESW I gotcha. So, since the patriarchies that invented the word treated anything non-patriarchal as matriarchal (from their point of view), that is the context the word could be understood

@GcL The history is necessary to understanding the definition, since the definition had to come from somewhere.

@GcL It was created to mean a gender-flipped patriarchy, but was immediately applied to cultures which aren't that.

@Xirema I can totally understand the definition of "circle" without knowing the history of the term. Same with the color "blue", which does have a colorful and interesting history.

That inherent tension exists within the word because of its history.

@GcL Speaking as someone with a strong mathematics background, you might be surprised by how weird the definition of a circle can get. ;)

@BESW Sure. I don't mind tension. I was promised a definition that wasn't "gender flipped patriarchy" and I've been reading through a bunch of vague statements about sorts of feminism I don't encounter nor know about.

So historically matriarchy was used to mean "non-patriarchal", even if those espousing that term insisted it meant "woman-dominated"

@Xirema Still don't need to know the history of it to get a definition of it.

@Xirema I know of many ways to describe that which is a circle, but no variant definitions of a circle

@DavidCoffron Please don't ask a mathematician or someone with a bend in that direction about definitions. We don't need that kind of tangent /S

@DavidCoffron Right. I personally wouldn't get into the weeds of feminist academia using the term, as it's... predominantly white and American, more concerned with the theory than the praxis, and in this case its concepts are not particularly wide-spread outside the wonkiest of academic spaces.

Like you could call a patriarchy: "male-dominated" (the 2D graph wherein every point is equidistant from the center) or "woman-submitted" (an arc of 360 degrees), but you are describing the same phenomenon

Okay, "woman-submitted" is not the right term

That makes it sound like it was willing

"woman-dominated-over" is better

Suffice to say that cultures like the Chamoru and Hopituh Shi-nu-mu (which shared power more or less evenly between distinct responsibilities across gender roles) were considered matriarchal by colonizers, and that colonial anthropological context for the term (not the academic political discussion) is the prevalent one in modern popular discourse.

@DavidCoffron Probably just leave it as straight male dominant over all others as a description of the state of affairs.

@BESW So you are suggesting that the popular discourse uses the "non-patriarchal" definition, while the academic discourse uses the "inverted-patriarchy" definition?

No, I'm saying that it's messy and nobody agrees on anything.

@BESW ^

@BESW Seems like a decent reason to default to the vernacular.

Popular discourse continues to perpetuate the original definition/application conflict. Academia has multiple jargonistic applications, each specific to a niche field.

@BESW You know... there are a lot of niche fields, but you never see anyone selling niches for cheap. They must never be in season or really hard to grow.

@GcL Trouble is, what is the vernacular

(And of course, in sociopolitical scholarship one academic's lonely, two's an argument, and three adds up to two bitterly opposed alliances and a splinter group rapidly gaining in popular support.)

Xirema and BESW both seem to be at least suitably-informed on the topic and disagree on which is the lay definition.

Any attempt to present a definitive meaning for the term matriarchy is doomed because its premise is false.

@DavidCoffron I think @BESW is more correct than I am with respect to the history: a lot of my knowledge on the subject tends to be a bit piecemeal.

@BESW I don't think it is doomed because the premise is false. I think it is doomed because people disagree on how words should be defined (whether they are defined by how they are used or how they are intended to be used)

If we define matriarchy by how it was actually used by colonizers, it means "non-patriarchal", but if we define it based on what they meant (however flawed their perceptions were), it means "inversely-patriarchal"

@DavidCoffron Probably the definition you get when you google it.

@BESW What's the premise that is false?

@GcL That would be the "inverse-patriarchy" from my google search's top 5 results, but google adapts to users, so it seems like a poor rule-of-thumb

@BESW Oooh I like that poem.

@DavidCoffron maybe google it from a private window?

@GcL Seems like a very strange way to collect an idea of "vernacular". Polling might be better suited

@DavidCoffron Ugh... but then you've got to talk to people, and they're the worst /S

mostly :-)

> The new field of modern Matriarchal Studies calls non-patriarchal societies ‘matriarchal.’ Traditional research on matriarchy is laden with unclear definitions and excessive emotionality. [Source]

Hmph. That source's abstract goes on to say:

> Lacking a clear scientific definition of ‘matriarchy,’ the term has been misunderstood as ‘rule by women,’ provoking a lasting, ideologically distorted prejudice against it. Modern matriarchal studies reorients the field with precise definitions, an explicit methodology, and a theoretical framework

Less helpful then I originally hoped

Still going to try to find a way to read the actual article, but it seems to orient the definitionality from a particular lens

Some interesting reading on potential origins of the word in modern discourse, and how it differs from gynecocracy

including:

> Bachofen’s English translator substituted the word matriarchy where Bachofen had written gynecocracy

Another article which appears to come to a similar conclusion about the term:

> Matriarchy is an alternative, parallel, or opposite culture to a contemporary or historical patriarchal culture. As such, discussions of matriarchy relate directly to patriarchy and respond to dominant patriarchal cultures with specific structures and ways of thinking; influenced by the cultural context of patriarchy, psychologists have at times overlooked expressions of matriarchy, or treated them as deviant.

____

Going to have to read these articles (and others if I can find more) to be sure, but it seems that academia is unclear from a cursory glance

oh man this room lit up bigtime

@trogdor My fault I suppose:

Better here than general chat

We'll end up talking about how racist we all are about orcs in there.

I have never thought about giving any conversation I've been a party to the justice they deserve.

Mostly because I'm opposed to doing that amount of violence to anything ... even a conversation.

Sounds like a conversation about the definition of justice xD

@DavidCoffron eh it seems like it was a good thing to move it here, I'm just not used to this room getting so much use

Is that why you were here? Did we uh... disturb something?

the problem with words is that they're often used to mean simple things by people who mean them to mean simple things but may have a lot of baggage and context which is considered by other people to be an inseparable part of the word

(I went swimming around the time this conversation started)

@DavidCoffron Strongly suggest you check who's writing those papers, and look for Indigenous conversations about social power and gender roles, since those are the spaces where you'll find people talking about "matriarchy" from a practical, experiential perspective and not just shooting their mouths off about theory or cultural tourism.

(We keep getting Swiss linguists spending thousands of dollars to come tell us how they're misinterpreting obvious things about the local use of language.)

@Ash Oh, I'm the same. It's why I've developed such highly advanced Googling skills.

That's fair.

....having talked with you on many subjects (and having a lot of experience with academic myopia), I rather suspect it was often a matter of the professor not understanding your perspective rather than your perspective simply being wrong.

@BESW yeah why is that a thing anyway?

@Ash also yeah I don't think you should blame yourself for that, if you did all that work on something no one should just tell you "but you are wrong though"

that's one of the many things I hate about education, at least as it is applied at so called "higher levels" if anyone comes up with a perspective that doesn't fit into what already exists it's "wrong"

automatically

and it isn't that education is bad, but it is the case that a legitimate observation from a different perspective can be treated as a wrong answer

Mk

I can definitely get that frustration

I've worked on projects in classes and at work where it felt like I put in all the effort required and bent over backwards for the right result and still didn't satisfy some requirement that no one explicitly told me

Maybe part of that is being on the spectrum and missing something implied that most people just get

I do things pretty literally as instructed a lot

And then get told that was wrong

Not all the time but it's very frustrating when it does happen

I guess I miss a cue sometimes that someone better at automatically reading body language wouldn't

Or miss an implication that wasn't spelled out, or something

But the point being, no one gets taught to understand that not everyone sees things the same way

Even though two neuroatypical people aren't even going to see from the exact same perspective

Academia seems,... Especially bad at it

From what I understand you have to work pretty hard to get people to even listen to new information

I feel like this is very true in general

but probably moreso in academia

Yeah

Seems like it to me