[Theory Thursday #1, part 2]

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Thanks, truly, for everyone who answered my last post. I am trying to thrash this out, and I don’t have very many people around that I can safely talk to about it. I appreciate the discussion — I appreciate the direct challenge to some of my basic principles, even. I do not promise to agree with anything you say, but I will try to be an intellectually honest little lizard, and try to understand them at least.

I am not sure quite how to go about this, though.

There are at least two sensible approaches.

First, I might have mis-classified myself in my current (and correct) classification system. I had somewhat assumed that in my previous post, but many of you have challenged me on it, so I am willing to consider the possibility that this is the wrong question altogether.

Or Second, my current classification system might be incorrect, in a lesser or greater degree. (Example ‘lesser’: modify the definition of ‘traff’ to allow some same-species interest. Example ‘greater’: toss the whole thing out, and simply rank a person’s possible interest in each of the eight prime species on a scale from 1-12.)

But I can’t see all the way to picking a new classification system right now. Before that, I should at least try to think of what makes a good classification system. Here are a few thoughts from a distinctly dazed dragonet:

1. Conciseness: it has as few categories as possible.
2. Simplicity: Each category is well-described by a simple phrase.
3. Accuracy: it describes people well; in particular, nobody is in two categories.
4. Ethnocentricity: it makes sense in terms of prime people and culture
5. Canonicality: it is, in a sense that I cannot currently define, defined sensibly. (E.g., a system with “likes mammals” and “likes non-mammals” is more canonical than “likes Cani and Rassimel” and “likes the other six species”.)
6. Usefulness: it is useful, e.g., for telling who I should admit to Castle Wrong on the basis of romantic preferences.

Bearing in mind that my current system scores well on all of these save, perhaps, accuracy. [Bard adds 'and canonicality' for reasons of its own. -bb]

Addendum: Tarfnie

(Tarfnie’s situation was rather more complicated than it might have seemed from my brief description. The Considerable Drama part of it include a number of regrettable incidents from nearly everyone involved, and I might have expelled Tarfnie — or Yowdon — on the basis of violence. The observation that Tarfnie was not traff and Yowdon was did help my decision. One or both of them had to go, though. I grant that several aspects of the situation continue to trouble me, and that I did not behave particularly well myself: but it was not so simple or wicked as discovering that Tarfnie was cissy and immediately tossing him out.)

Comments

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

The simplest, which is how I always think of cis and traff, and which covers your problem, is this:

Transaffectionate: capable of romantically loving/lusting someone of a species different than one's own.

Cisaffectionate: incapable of romantically loving/lusting someone of a species other than one's own.

It doesn't cover the subtleties of what people like in detail, but it draws the line culturally for what's "right" and "wrong" (a la Castle Wrong) in a way I think most people would agree with intuitively.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

I had an alternate system that was romance and relationship focused, and didn't say anything about lust, and with your system, would be written somewhat as,

Cisaffectionate: Interested in romance, love, and affection with their own species to the exclusion of others. Doesn't say anything about lust or play.
(Needs a term other than Libertine): Not actually interested in romance, love, and affection. Doesn't say anything about lust or play.
Transaffectionte: Interested in romance, love, and affection, but in any way other than "their own species to the exclusion of all others". Doesn't say anything about lust or play.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Here's a question: SHOULD any categorization include lust, play, and quick ephemeral and transient things like flings in it's categorization process? Or *should* it just describe something deeper and hopefully more solid, like the nature of a desire for a deep romantic relationship?

[nekomavin.livejournal.com]

I think this variation captures the essence of the problem. I feel that you are defining Transaffection too rigidly, Sythyry.

Transaffection in your use of it is attempting to be everything and exactly that which Cisaffection is not. This is both too strong and too specific. Too strong, in that some primes can be attracted to both their own species and others (and thus bridge the categories). Too specific in that not all non-cis primes are necessarily attracted to *all* other species. You appear to fall into both these 'exceptions' to your definition.

If you define Transaffection as above, as capable of attraction/love for those not of one's species, it encompasses all those cases. And encompasses the cases that society seems to frown on.

Individuals, in all their complexity, will have varying degrees of affinity for other prime species. Draw a wheel with 8 spokes, label each spoke with a species name, and put a prime's attraction to each species as a mark on that spoke.

Cisaffectionate: strongly attracted to own species, not at all attracted to any other. (Most of the population.)
Weakly Cisaffectionate: most strongly attracted to own species, attracted to other species. (Might consider a traff relationship if they found the right prime, one whose personality was a better match than others of their own species.)
Transaffectionate: more attracted to other species than your own. (Given your affinity for Orren, I'd put you here. Most of the wrongfolk fit here, too.)
Universal Transaffectionate: attracted to all other species. (I suspect that this is extraordinarily rare, or possibly an empty set. Those who profess to it may be deluding themselves or caught up in an archaic definition of traffness.)
Strong Transaffectionate: very much more attracted to another prime species rather than one's own. (Mynthe, among others.)

Libertine is something else entirely - incapable of forming emotional connections, using bodyplay indiscriminately for momentary pleasure.

So still two essential categories, with a few shadings of meaning to distinguish edge cases.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the vote of confidence! :)

[alex-muridae.livejournal.com]

I must agree with this description, and the five broad catagories suggested atop Gavin's notion. I actually thought well of Sythyry's half-joking suggestion of a scale of attraction of 1 to 12 for each prime species, except that may be a little restrictive. For those Terrestrial beings, or analogs of, or those on analog-worlds of, etc, etc, you may remember the Kinsey Scale. These days, modern psychology looks at said scale as being entirely inadequacy in describing the variation among people, albeit a step in the right direction from black & white. For those with no idea what I'm talking about, shades of gray would indeed be the right way to look at it, but there are likely more factors still then how attracted one is to this species vs. that. We're neglecting fetishes, for example.

Now, as a secondary, I must also suggest that a Libertine is not one who is incapable of forming emotional connections, but one who is very much more at ease in stepping outside the bounds of their preferences and attractions so long as they get to copulate. To be blunt, I would categorize Libertine as a sub-category of slut. Mostly, my support for this is the suggestion that Libertines may well be capable of forming lasting relationships; names escape me, but Dustweed's lover a century ago was caring, correct?

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

A major problem here is that any system that focuses on brevity and simplicity will pretty much necessarily be at the expense of accuracy. People are complex; oversimplifying will lose a lot of important details. And when that oversimplification is repeated through multiple layers, it becomes even more of a problem - then you have people who don't even realize that there is complexity being lost, because they're taking the simplified version as absolute.

Castle Wrong might be best taken in a different metric entirely: people who are shunned by society, but not for anything that actually harmed anyone else, can have a place where they can be welcome. Or it can be left as "having transaffectionate leanings" without it being an absolute.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't want everyone. One Blenny is enough, for one thing. And having us be mostly traff means that there is a certain common understanding, common flirting, and considerable tolerance for other traff-folk.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

That's fair - you shouldn't be obliged to be everyone's charity. Thus, the second option I said. Mostly what I meant by "not absolute" is "not going to ostracize someone who happens to have some interest in their own species, they will be welcomed so long as they are generally decent people who have some interest in other prime species". Tolerance for traff, at the very least, being a requirement - and by that I mean that if they're hit on/flirted with by someone they're not interested in, they can turn it down in such a manner as though it's just a personal incompatibility, not "ew traff". More comfortable for everyone(or nearly) to have a substantial amount of transaffection - just stop treating it as a harsh, either/or duality. The neat cubbyholes make for simple thought, but as mentioned, they have a way of missing important details.

Short version, then: Keep transaffection as the focus of Castle Wrong, that's entirely fair. Just allow for the possibility that someone who shows interest in zir own species can still be substantially traff(and vice versa) without having "lied" about it.

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

I'm confused shouldn't a classification system be there to describe the way things work? Like the way complexity and power describe properties of spells.

Doesn't your current classification system fit your experience? If it doesn't where did it come from?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Yes to the first, but in a useful way. Classifications like "like Sythyry" and "like Delights-in", one for each person, is accurate but not very helpful.

My current one generally fits my experience; it comes from various philosophers in the traff community of a century or so ago.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Well, if I were you, I'd first try to check out the current philosophical terms, leanings, and debates on the topic, see if the discussion has progressed any in a century or so, and maybe compare that to your current system?

[(Anonymous)]

Mmm.

"Delight-in" and "Sythyry" aren't very useful categories. But "Orren" and "Zi Ri" are right?

Sooo .... bear with me a minute I'm thinking on parchment here:

Orren:
* can shapeshift between biped and waterforms
* go into Wild Rushes in stressful situations
* rarely stay focused on one thing for more than a few months

And those are all useful things for describing an Orren right?

Windigar, Blenny, and me are all Orren.

But Blenny can't shapeshift and Windigar has stayed interested in skypiloting for a really long time and I don't think he rushed even oncein the whole time that Vae was dragging them around and getting them killed. But they're still Orren and it doesn't mean that they're not Orren or that the traits assigned to Orren are *wrong*. It just means that the Orren archetype doesn't fit all Orren perfectly.

Maybe traff and cis and libertine are categories like Orren and Rassy and Khtsoyis and not everyone meets all of the criteria associated with those categories? So like MOST libertines can't love anyone and MOST libertines are attracted to all species equally but SOME libertines might be different from that archetype just the way some Orren are different from our archetype?

So it doesn't mean the category doesn't exist or is wrong just that there are exceptions to it?

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

Are you suggesting Sythyry deserves an entirely new branch of thaumaturgy to describe zir doom? For instance a Complexity 10 (Lusts-after+Is-confused-by)(Zi Ri+Orren) form of doom?

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

Noooo I don't think that would help!

I'm glad I'm cis not that being otherwise is BAD but it does seem very very confusing

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

Think of it as a Venn diagram. There are people who are cisaffectionate, and people who are transaffectionate, and there is some overlap between the two. How large the overlap is might be a lifetime's worth of study material for some energetic Rassimel researcher.

[stryck.livejournal.com]

Certainly in Monster world's sexual mores, there is overlap between those who have the standard attraction and those who have the non-standard one. So, us monsters usually use three categories, one to describe those with the standard attraction, one to describe those with exclusively the non-standard attraction, and one for those who have both.

Note that none of this has anything to do with love- it's all about sexual attraction. Love really has very little to do with sex. We might hope that we can find the two together, but all too frequently, this does not happen.

[rowyn]

That last does not match my personal experience at all, really. There are people that I love without being attracted to them, but almost everyone I've felt a strong sexual attraction to has been someone I love. I may be unusual in this regard, though.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Stop thinking about it as a set of boxes to be placed in and start thinking of it as points on a two-dimensional graph. From left-to-right there's "cisaffectionate" to "transaffectionate"; from bottom to top there's "committed" to "flighty".

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

That would work, but doesn't give zir "three categories that absolutely everyone falls under"

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

A concept with a certain undeniable elegance, but I am afraid I don't know what to do with it. And are those the only axes one might wish to consider? What of, say, "passive" to "aggressive" (in the sense of, some people tend to have passes made at them, and others tend to make passes)? Or "asexual" to "intensely sexual" (some people don't mind going for a few decades without a lover; others find it a hardship to go a few days without.) Or many others, I suppose, that one might want to know.

This approach is a triumph of accuracy and usefulness over simplicity and conciseness. But I seek to balance them.

[bloofox.livejournal.com]

May I suggest a classification system that is as simple as the Ciff/Traff one, more useful, more accurate, and more ethnocentric?

1. Those whose predilictions in love and lust cause them social stigma.
2. Those whose predilications in love and lust do not cause them social stigma.

This seems to encapsulate all the important details, particularly on who should be admitted to Castle Wrong. THough for that purpose it may be desirable to add on a few exceptions for people doing dangerous things like wanting to bring their norren lover into the castle.

[redbird]

That's a useful binary if and only if sythyry agrees that none of that social stigma is inappropriate, and I suspect zie does not.

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

To clear up "canonicity" somewhat you might call it "well-dividedness". You're trying to figure out what ways of dividing the world matter to you, and that's a pretty subjective decision. Your gods clearly divided people into prime and non-prime, and primes by eight species, and there are physical (and magical) differences that play a big role in your lives. Interestingly, they seem to have made sex differences less important than in some other worlds. So you could either search for categories defined by the gods as important to them, or focus on more subjective categories that're important to you for whatever reason. Distinguishing between primes with red and non-red hides would be pretty pointless, but between your species vs. other species there're strong social taboos as well as divinely set rules.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

A difficulty: The concept of "canonicity" might well be somewhat at odds with accuracy. It might indeed be more typical for, say, someone to like all the mammalian primes and none of the others, and vice versa, than for someone to pick and choose across those borders - but it might happen. There might be specific attributes of very particular species that a given person finds attractive, which might not make clear sense on their own - not least because it might not be the same single thing that appeals for all of them. Liking Orren for their exuberance and, oh... Khtsoyis for their multiple limbs, say. You're not too likely to find a single common cause of affection there; only by allowing for several does it get neatly solved.

(And it probably wouldn't be so neat in reality; this is just as an example.)

As for the gods... Is any mode of the heart truly against the gods' will, ultimately? Even some of the priests will say that the way to follow the gods is by listening to your inner desires. They seem to be fond of variety to begin with. If something shows up in a significant portion of the population of a given species, maybe the god in question wanted it to be an option? (And this could be applied to transaffection as well - just because the first-created needed to reproduce to secure the species doesn't mean the gods mind when different species of prime are intimate with each other.)

[This was supposed to be a reply. Deleting the duplicate.]