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Bodies, Breathers and Funerary Customs
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Blue
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 2:38 pm      Reply with quote

In the thread proposing trash furnaces someone mentioned “some characters” being uncomfortable with breathing human corpses. Now, of course I realize that we are all special snowflakes with our own idiosyncratic take on things, and plenty of wholly justifiable reason to do so, but it reminded me of a situation I found myself in recently in which I had no idea how to respond, because I did not know *what was normal.*

Of course there is no single one-size-fits-all solution, how Families deal with their dead will inevitably be different from the disposal of Indies, and one Family will no doubt vary from the next. The guy who died taking a bullet for his clan lead will probably be treated differently than the guy who went solo-scavving in spite of strong warnings not to. The problem is that the present lack of consistency makes it next to impossible to rely on reference points as cultural standards. Sure, I can come up with a flimsy rationalization for why Jim the Private was buried in state, but Sergeant Jane, who taught me to swing a sword when I was eight, and saved me from barkers, got sent straight to the breathers. The problem is, I can’t actually talk to anyone about it, because those rationalizations are ultimately baseless, and unlikely to be shared by anyone.

Much of this has to do with the general food-splosion. Finding burial a travesty and a waste of resources seems silly in families where you can’t find a place to sit down because every available surface is covered in tubs. Except, if we only started burying people yesterday, what does that mean about all the people we breathed before? Did we bury people six years ago, when things were better, and breathing our beloved friends was an inevitable tragedy of the Starving Times? Is it actually a new custom, and therefore a reasonable point of discomfort for people who don’t like new things?

A degree of backsplanation seems unavoidable, but having a better sense going forward will probably help to avoid confusion and awkwardness. So I’ll pitch my question to the community: What are the expected customs relating to death, memorials, and the disposal of the deceased?


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grandpa
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Entrenched Oldbie

Post Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 3:15 pm      Reply with quote

Blue wrote:
A degree of backsplanation seems unavoidable, but having a better sense going forward will probably help to avoid confusion and awkwardness. So I’ll pitch my question to the community: What are the expected customs relating to death, memorials, and the disposal of the deceased?


General Cultural Norms:
Eating dead bodies is bad, but burying/burning them is odd/unusual. The lower class you are, or the lower class your background, the more likely you are to hold to these societal norms. The higher class you are, the more you can afford to deviate. PCs are generally the top 95-99% of the gameworld, but not the top 1%.


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It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
HAL
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Senior RPA

Post Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 3:31 pm      Reply with quote

I would personally imagine that breathing a body would be looked down upon by anyone who has access to actual meat. Eating paste might be seen as a potential way to consume someone, as you have no idea where that paste actually came from.

The destitute have no choice, of course, it's either that or starve, but that's what makes them slum.

A clan like the Niners then, probably wouldn't care either way. They do what they want, and eat what they want.

A clan like the Reds probably would, preferring greatly to consume actual food over food from paste, but if times got tough they'd probably do it in a pinch. Burials might be reserved for significant individuals, such as sergeants and above.

The NG, on the other hand, might completely abhor eating paste related products, and actually go so far as to bury their dead, separating themselves from the "rubbish" of the other clans. Dead recruits and privates would likely be tossed into some sort of a mass grave, though I imagine that rather intricate murals or monuments might be raised during the burial of a high ranking officer.


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kel
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 4:49 pm      Reply with quote

Another paste-related aspect, is that food isn't the only use for paste. Plenty of chemical needs, as well.

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Bartleby
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 5:09 pm      Reply with quote

grandpa wrote:
General Cultural Norms:
Eating dead bodies is bad, but burying/burning them is odd/unusual. The lower class you are, or the lower class your background, the more likely you are to hold to these societal norms. The higher class you are, the more you can afford to deviate. PCs are generally the top 95-99% of the gameworld, but not the top 1%.


I'm going to have to sort of (respectfully) disagree with some of this. The way these cultural mechanisms actually operate in real life is that yes, the rich and privileged can do what they want in more or less direct proportion to their richness and privilege, up to a point, but it is they, and not the mass of proles, who make the cultural norms. What upper class people do, the poor aspire to, even though they can't actually pull it off (I could go into a lot more detail about why, and give a lot of examples [and this is obviously not addressing sub-cultures or the absolute pinnacle of elitism], but I don't want to totally derail this thread).

Suffice to say that culture isn't a static backdrop that we play on top of. Culture is what people do, and, more specifically, what important people do. As we are the players of the important people in Rust, that means culture is what we do.

Which means, in this context, that what Families choose to do with their dead, the slummers (in general) will feel is normal and correct, even if they themselves (who vastly outnumber the Family elite) can't manage to do it. Those of us with PCs in positions of making decisions about what our Families do with their dead are the culture makers in this regard. And how the poor (and indies, and PCs who used to be poor) relate to their own consumption of human paste will be strongly impacted by their perception of what they should be doing instead. IMO.

So, I agree that the slummers are generally going to be pasting, and that Families have the option of burying/burning/memorializing, but I think that if the Families are doing that, the slummers who are pasting are not going to be feeling "normal" about what they're doing. They're probably going to be feeling rather monstrous, actually. Which, to me, sounds like Good Fun and plenty of emo drama.

HAL wrote:
I would personally imagine that breathing a body would be looked down upon by anyone who has access to actual meat.


The whole gato-butchering-yielding-less-than-gato-pasting from the past has muddied the issue somewhat, I think, at least up to this point. Though it might be that we just have to live with some of the things that happened in the past, such as relatively important PCs being pasted because there wasn't an abundance of food at the time, and because it's impossible to tell whether any given tub is gato- or people-paste (which I assume to be an IC thing as well as an OOC one, but if it's not please clarify).

HAL wrote:
Burials might be reserved for significant individuals, such as sergeants and above.


If generally people wouldn't want to eat people-paste (for obvious reasons) if they could avoid it, and they would only have the space/go to the trouble to bury significant individuals, the question becomes: what does one do with the rest of the bodies?


It seems to me that "insignificant" (clan-wise) individuals are far more numerous and die far more often. You suggested mass graves only for the New Guard, but did you have other options in mind for the Reds and/or Niners? Does anyone?

ETA: Also I'm not sure of the logistics of common burial, given that people die more in a slow trickle than all at once. If you don't, say, dissolve them in acid, doesn't that just mean you have a big creepy rotting corpse hole somewhere on your turf? How is that less squicky than pasting? And if you close the hole and open up a new one each time, that's really just burying them individually, isn't it?


Maybe, like, some kind of "house of bones" or somesuch thing, would work, but I suppose you'd still need a way of removing the meat that didn't seem too disrespectful to the dead. The desert has preserving properties and "burial at wastes" would make a lot of sense if not for the fact that standing around trying to eulogize while shredders might be headed your way is likely to greatly increase the need for burials. Cool

So, perhaps the Families need to get together among themselves and agree on a system suited to their Family specifically. But if that happens, IMO, those systems should really be made known to playerbase at large as soon as possible, because they will need to incorporate an awareness of "what is done" into their play, even if they don't have the luxury of doing that. Also because PCs and vNPCs will probably be heavily influenced by the Family they live in closest proximity to -- slummers on the south west side will probably consider Niner customs more correct (or desirable) than slummers on the east side, for instance.

I think it's a question that we could really benefit from answering as soon as possible, and having some general agreement on, because people die often. You have to do something with them, and once you have, if you change your mind later about what should be done with people, the past of doing something else with them becomes increasingly more awkward.


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I would prefer not to.
Angrboda
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Post Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 12:19 am      Reply with quote

I don't see it like that at all. Cultural cannibalism has been a thing for a long, long time. I can only imagine it would be even -more- prevalent with a mechanism to prevent the health deteriorating factors involved in consuming the dead.

Oh, sure, we've 'evolved past' that, but when it becomes a survival necessity, I can see old taboos being overwritten in favor of ideas that make the practice more acceptable.

Eating enemies, eating loved ones. It was ingrained in a good few old societies. Eventually they grew out of that, but who's to say it wasn't for health reasons? You could say there's as much argument for respect being not letting a body rot in the ground as it is for letting a body rot in the ground.

In fact, eating people may be seen as the more evolved choice, since burial is an 'old' thing. 'Joe Bob would want his family to survive and thrive, because we're poor slummers. It would be offensive and wasteful to stick him in the ground. He'd be horrified and offended.'


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wilde
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Over Emote-tional

Post Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 4:47 am      Reply with quote

I agree we do need to decide on something pretty quickly.

What about pasting being the norm, but the paste being buried by the upper classes/those that can afford to spare it? Maybe desperate people might secretly eat the paste still, but either feel awful about it or a whole range of emotions.

I can totally picture some slummer going home to her family with a tub of people-paste, lying to the kids about it being their dead uncle, everybody eating it and secretly knowing but nobody saying.

This would make dealing with past pastings easy to explain and makes sense to me- maybe back in the colony days, prisoners were simply pasted and eaten. After the rebellion, when they salvaged the breathers and moved them into the market, there would have been a hell of a lot of dead bodies around after the fighting and it probably felt pretty good to them to eat the guards.

I imagine they wouldn't have wanted to eat their fellow convicts, but there would have been a lot of bodies to get rid of and burying them would probably have been impractical- they could have pasted them, then buried the tubs later.


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padweld999
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Post Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 5:43 am      Reply with quote

^ like cremation, but creamier..interesting.

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Bartleby
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Post Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 6:01 am      Reply with quote

wilde wrote:
I can totally picture some slummer going home to her family with a tub of people-paste, lying to the kids about it being their dead uncle, everybody eating it and secretly knowing but nobody saying.


Love this.


padweld999 wrote:
^ like cremation, but creamier..interesting.


Perhaps the meat breather could have an alternate, INCINERATE option, and people could have funerals there and leave with nothing, or perhaps some ashes? Though obviously this could be hampered by people speedwalking in and out, so maybe it's not a good idea, but it's just a thought.


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I would prefer not to.
padweld999
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Post Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 6:07 am      Reply with quote

well, to be fair, people can speedwalk in and out with corpses right now and just leave with tubs, if that's the concern. However, I do think I love the idea of a sort of family culture regarding these things, with the baseline being a sort of grudging acceptance of the whole process.

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