Gor Mentioned Withhout Usual Horrified Shreiks In Mainstream Website!!!!!!

A fighting slavegirl of Gor Evolved runs amok, her slave claws extended, wearing a shield for protection (cause she doesn't have so much as a chainmail bikini to protect her), her slings and broom (I THINK that's a broom on her back) ready to deal outrageous fortune to any who cross her path! Image source: Second Life Gor Evolved.

Well paint me purple and call me Barney! Things are really turning around. I've written how Fifty Shades of Grey has, at least temporarily, gotten some elements of mainstream media to stop putting all those "Eeeew" bookends up whenever they discuss BDSM or BDSM-related matters, though of course the real dinosaurs are still at it. It's gotten to where I expect a certain amount of civility in the mainstream discourse about BDSM, something very new to me.

Still, I was AMAZED to see the Gor movies mentioned in this article on I09 as the potential basis for a TV series along the lines of HBO's Game of Thrones and Starz's Spartacus series. This is of course, a brilliant idea, I know this because I had it myself. I just don't typically expect brilliance from writers on mainstream websites. And I don't expect it to be so matter of fact:

However, a Gor TV series would basically be a pay-cable network’s goldmine, seeing how sex and violence is what sells, and Gor has both in ridiculous amounts. A Gor series is tailor-made for the Starz executive who says, “Yes, our Spartacus TV series was could but what it really needed was more tits and violence.”

Wow. The author, Rob Bricken, is totally right of course. Seeing that much simple sanity in a mainstream site writing about the Gor movies is fricking STARTLING. Mostly when Gor is mentioned in mainstream sites, it's heavily bookended with "horrible sexist rapists who wish to enslave and degrade women wholesale and their deeply disturbed female followers!" crap. I'm not exaggerating ... much. Almost anything written about Gor, including the Gor movies, in mainstream sites will almost always include stuff of this nature, if not phrased EXACTLY as I have phrased it.

And that's what makes the simple recommendation of the Gor movies on I09 so startling. Of COURSE there have to be some caveats, but they're fairly mild by mainstream media standards:

John Norman’s long-running fantasy series had two terrible movies, which, depending on how you feel about the series premise that women are naturally subservient to men, and are much happier being dominated by them socially and sexually, is probably fine. ... And, if that executive were not fully on board with Norman’s gender politics, a decent showrunner could subvert the series’ core “values” much like Paul Verhoeven did to Starship Troopers.

These bookends make reference to Norman's "all women are natural slavegirls" philosophy as espoused in the novels (and that's how I know the writer, though referencing the movies for the sake of the article, which is about movies, is thinking about the books, because the movies were anti-slavery in theme and had precious little in the way of sex or violence to recommend them).

And I have to point out (and this is the point of my illustration at the top of the article and below) that Bricken's hypothetical showrunner won't have to expend a lot of creative energy on imagining a more egalitarian Gor, because that has already done -- that is what Gor Evolved IS. In Gor Evolved, women warriors run around with bows shooting male warriors up on an equal footing. To see how a more egalitarian Gor would work, one need only visit a few Gor Evolved sims and see how they work.

A fighting slavegirl (center) and two female warriors pause while wreaking havoc on a Gor Evolved sim. Image source: Second Life Gor Evolved.

Ordinarily, I'd feel very comfortable in predicting that there will be no Gor TV series even on premium channels, given that the Gor novels still make gender feminists shriek in fury, but given how completely I failed to predict the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, I am a bit shy about doing so. And the premium cable channels cannot fail to have noticed the success of Game of Thrones and Spartacus with all their primitive sex, nudity and violence. As Bricken points out, Gor has that in spades.

Second Life Gor Evolved By The Book

First published on 5/15/2012

"Well, I WAS going to roleplay baking some poison-laced cookies for a black caste assassin today, but he IS much better at pointing and clicking his mouse than I am!" Image source: Fucking Dungeon.com.

The original split in Second Life Gor happened about seven years ago, maybe six years. Second Life Gor was in its early stages first characterized by the growth of sims featuring Gorean roleplay, mostly involving cities. Almost as soon as that happened, outlaws, pirates and panther groups arose. Their natural opponents, other than each other, were the cities of Second Life Gor. Because the outlaws, panthers and pirates were more prone to fight, by the nature of their groups, than the cities, which had all kinds of peaceful roles (scribes, merchants, bakers, candlemakers, administrators, etc.) the outlaw groups tended to win fights most of the time. Eventually, they began to win almost all the time.

The problem was exacebated by the tendency of male players to enjoy combat more and for female players to enjoy roleplay more, and the tendency of the pirates, panthers and outlaws to ally to attack the cities. And there were also Xenas, players who disliked Gor and who played Gor, became outlaws, pirates or panthers and expressed their feelings by thoroughly kicking the asses of the big, bad Gorean Masters in the cities, in game. The end result, to hear some tell it, was that cities got rolled over on an almost hourly basis by wave after endless wave of hordes of fighting outlaws, panthers and pirates, making roleplay impossible (ninjas were apparently the only holdout here, though I did hear a rumor that such a raid did occur once).

Eventually, the cities enacted rules on their sims that female outlaws with bows (the most effective weapon in SL Gor you will recall) could not visit their cities, as such women were not seen in the Gor novels. Also, panther bands could not attack cities in large numbers because in the books panther bands and outlaw bands were small, weak groups that could never have matched the warriors who guarded a city in numbers or military prowess. Since in SL Gor it was the outlaws and friends that had the numbers and the fighting prowess, so the Gorean city sims just used their banning powers to kick out anyone who did not play on their terms.

Since the Gorean city roleplayers claimed that they were expelling the outlaws on the grounds that they were not "by the book" (I have a lot of reservations with this claim) such city sims because known as "by the book" Gor. The bow-toting female outlaws and pirates and panther girls called themselves Gor Evolved, I guess in the sense that they felt they had evolved into something beyond by the book Gor. (I personally think that it's quite reasonable to assume the existence of female warriors and large bands of outlaws and pirates that might take over a city given the way Gor's culture and level of civilization is described in the Gor novels, so I see no need to add the term "Evolved" for accuracy, though it works just fine as a descriptive term so I use it because it's what everyone uses.)

And you might figure that since I play in Gor Evolved (GE Gor) I might be completely on the side of Gor Evolved, but I'm not. Mainly because I see the roleplayers' point: if you are intent on building up any kind of story type roleplay, being captured and forced to do hostage/prisoner/captive/slave roleplay all the time is a huge pain in the ass (possibly literally, if rape/torture roleplay is involved, as it sometimes is). Bakers and scribes and such probably did not constantly get captured even in as warlike a place as Gor is. And cities probably were able to fend off outlaws gangs most of the time, else they would not be cities for long. If you are trying to build up a complex character with a complex storyline, you can see how it would be annoying to have your roleplay constantly interrupted by someone who feels he had a right to take over your storyline because he (or she) has practiced playing Second Life Gor as an arcade game more than you have.

Some Gor Evolved advocates claim that the real reason that cities outlaws femlaws (female outlaws armed with bows) is that the by the book Gorean warriors were just butthurt over getting their asses kicked repeatedly in battle, which, let's face it, is kind of supported by that particular prohibition about female outlaws using the most powerful weapon in Second Life Gor roleplay. Others call by the book Gor "tea party Gor," which implies that by the book Gor is basically a dress-up tea party using the best dolls ever. There may be elements of truth to both implications, especially "tea party Gor" since cities tend to attract female players to a much greater degree than male players so much so that some female players have played male warriors, not because they found it appealing, but so that the other female players would have male warriors to interact with. Guys just don't want to play in that tea party.

I'm not an advocate of either of these views, Gor Evolved works for me because raiding is the MOST FUN EVAH! And I find that the downtime between raids is great for the other parts of Gorean roleplay, which in my case is doing funny stuff. Sometimes, funny, raunchy stuff, but mostly I enjoy parodying the hell out of the heroic Gorean warrior. My character is greedy, self-serving, loves to claim credit for what others achieve and vain, though he does fight bravely enough, not out of valor, but just because he thinks fighting is fun. Often all it requires is bragging artfully after a raid ... or during one. Easy enough to do between raids, and fun, fun, fun!

I wish the split between by the book cities and Gor Evolved outlaws were not so binary, and it's not really, because here's the dirty little secret of Second Life Gor: practically everyone has alts, that is, they have more than one avatar (Second Life allows players with free accounts to have up to eight avatars with different avatar names). So it's very possible to have a male warrior alt, a panther girl alt and a paga slut alt, if you want to do that. You can play in by the book Gor, Gor Evolved AND anything else you want to, if you have the time.

Wait a minute. Male warrior alt AND panther girl? Sure, I SAID some female players do that. I've even heard they are supposed to be tremendously good at playing male warriors, so much so that slavegirls players fall in love with the character. Which leads us to our next topic: OOC and IC.

Gorean Roleplay and the Gor Movies

First published on 1/29/2010

I recently ran across a post from a fellow who was discouraged because he felt the roleplay in SL Gor wasn't sufficiently Gorean, that it feel far short of what it should be. That got me thinking about other attempts to capture the Gorean spirit, and I wrote a response that may be of interest to all:

Well. one point you may wish to consider is that it is damn hard to do a proper job of creating realistic Gorean roleplay, even with the best will in the world. And even so, I feel that SL Gor is so much better than any other medium that I've pretty much lost all interest in them. Books, movies, plays, nothing else even comes close. The intense pleasure I get from acting out the Gor novels, putting my own stamp on a character, making him move and breathe, making Gorean scenes come to life in conjunction with other people, really brings the experience home to me in a way that nothing else does.

Think of it this way. The people who made the Gor movies: "Gor" and "Outlaw of Gor" were presumably much more motivated than your average SL Gor roleplayer: they were being given money, there is always the promise of much more money and great fame if the project succeeds. They stand to gain fame and fortune if they do well. Presumably they are participating in the movie in hopes of becoming famous movie stars, famous and successful directors, actors and writers, etc. ... just how motivated can you get?

And yet those movies were abysmal horrors, no more true to the Gor novels than the most wretches excesses of Gor Evolved. (And some of the outliers of Gor Evolved are truly bad ... the other day I saw blue avatars on a supposedly Gorean sim. Blue avatars!). The Gor movies were lame-brained, pathetic excuses for movies that completely missed out on the spirit of Gor and also weren't even interesting stories in any respect. They sucked, they sucked hard, despite all that motivation.

The point is ... it's damned hard to capture the essence of the Gor novels and bring it to life even if you have huge RL motivators for doing so.

I feel that SL Gor has huge room for improvement, and yet even as it is, it's beautiful, a wonderful living world, brought to life by the people who have followed Norman's lead and tried in their various ways to fill the roles he unwittingly created for them. Even if many of them are doing it very badly, some are doing it very well, and damn ... most of us are having great fun at it, to be honest.

Recognize that getting Gor right is a very difficult thing and enjoy it on your own terms, is what I would recommend. There's a lot to enjoy.