jducoeur

In the wake of this weekend's Board meeting to approve the East's variance to try out a Rapier Crown (yay!), I heard lots of reports about Board members saying that this change would damage the SCA's "brand".

Such nonsense deserves some attention.

Let's be clear here: the SCA's public image has never been that focused on armored combat. Yes, the cover photo of publicity tends to be some dude in armor, because it's weird and flashy, and the media like weird and flashy. But scratch just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, and all decent publicity about the Society focuses primarily on the people, and the many different activities we do.

That's always been true. My first personal experience with publicizing the SCA was a fairly long TV segment Carolingia did back around 1984. Yes, there was a brief bit of fighting -- but there was more music, and dance, and calligraphy, and mainly a focus on the way that this is something that reasonably normal people do in their spare time. It was pretty great publicity, frankly -- truthful and sympathetic, exactly the sort of thing we want.

This really cuts to the essence of the argument. Brands aren't just a picture: a good brand is a statement of who you are, and what you mean. Heavy list isn't the brand of the SCA -- it's just one facet.

What the SCA's brand should be focused on is diversity.

Seriously, that's what we're about, and it always has been. I don't just mean diversity of demographics in our membership (which heaven knows is still a work in progress, that we need to keep improving) -- I mean diversity of viewpoint, activity, and focus.

Diversity of activity has always been what distinguishes the Society from re-enactors. We don't focus narrowly and precisely on a specific time and place. Just the opposite: we are (as it's popularly put these days) three hundred hobbies in a trench coat, covering just about everything that everyone did before 1600. That's always really been the spirit of the club, even before the Board finally knuckled under and recognized it officially, by broadening our scope in the rules some years back.

That is the brand we should be leaning into -- it represents us more truthfully, and frankly it's more appealing to our target audience. Most of the younger new folks I talk to nowadays are somewhat uncomfortable with the excessive focus on "dude in armor": that brand isn't just inaccurate, it's probably hurting us in recruiting, precisely because it over-focuses on an aspect that only a fraction of our target market are looking for. The chance to dive deep into lots of different things, all of which are valued -- that's what makes us look cool and fun.

So let's please not tolerate this "heavy list Crown is our brand" bullshit. The notion that armored combatants fighting for the Crown is our "brand" is not true now, it's never really been true, and insofar as we claim it, we're mostly doing ourselves damage inside and out.

Our "brand" should be diversity -- that is both honest and positive, and it's a brand that makes us better.

I was chatting with alexx_kay over lunch about the mess currently going on around the Hugos, and the Gamergate mess that predated it. (tl;dr: the Hugo nominations got somewhat hijacked by a bunch of relatively right-wing fen, who somewhat successfully packed the nominations with authors they approved of. As for Gamergate, it's a gigantic bundle of stupid around the ways videogaming is changing as the audience becomes more diverse, which has exposed just how deep some of the misogyny runs there.)

And it occurred to me: why *hasn't* this wave of stupid hit the SCA? Far as I can tell, this is only two separate controversies on the surface -- they're revealing very similar problems in two wings of geekery. The SCA draws from much the same population, with considerable overlap, and I don't think there's a magical fairy wand that saves us from this craziness. So it's interesting to speculate about the sociological aspects of the SCA that have muted the problem. Here are some offhand thoughts; I invite other observations.


We've already been through it: The Stupid is mainly about diversity, and while the SCA *has* its diversity problems, some of them were addressed a long time ago. Here, I'm thinking of the Women in Combat argument, which as far as I can tell was quite the fight 40 years ago. But by the time I started, it was semi-settled -- still some grumbling, but most people considered it a done deal. And I generally think of the final nail in the coffin of that argument being Duchess Rowan winning the Ansteorran Crown, establishing that you could not only have female fighters and female knights, but Queens by Right of Arms. The issue isn't entirely dead -- far as I can tell, it's still somewhat hard for a woman to get a belt -- but it doesn't seem to be a flashpoint issue any more.


The Board Saves Us From Arguing Amongst Ourselves: I am famously unfond of the SCA's highly-centralized organizational structure, but it does have one curious advantage -- when we *do* have a major diversity fight, much of the vitriol is channeled away from each other, to the Board of Directors instead. The recent same-sex-consorts issue is a good case in point: while there was a fair amount of argument online, most folks know that that accomplishes little. So these sorts of debates necessarily focus on convincing the Board of the rightness of your cause, which drains some of the energy away from flamewars and petty gamesmanship.


We're Not Very Diverse: Not all of these observations are going to be positive. To have a fight over diversity, you have to *have* diversity, and we're not great in that regard. For example, I've noticed for many years that, among probably 500-1000 people I know in the SCA, I can probably count my black friends on the fingers of one hand.

We're fine in some regards -- for example, the SCA's religious diversity is exceptionally broad. (Although we've had our own, sometimes very weird, tolerance problems there.) But as a club, we're conspicuously pretty whitebread.


We Officially Care About Behavior: Say what you will about the problems of the SCA's award system, one real positive is that it reifies the notion that behavior matters. It's far from perfectly enforced -- we've all heard complaints "Why did they give That Jerk Duke Stumblebutt a Pelican?" -- but good behavior *tends* to be rewarded, and bad behavior *tends* to be punished. That's not accidental: the Peerages are downright explicit that courtesy (however you want to interpret that) is expected of a Peer, and the meme trickles down from there.

This was driven home to me at Birka, at the height of the Rapier Peerage argument. While I'm still a bit cranky at the Chivalry for not accepting Rapier Knights (which I still think would have been a far healthier solution for the SCA as a whole), I was impressed that, with just a bit of process-prodding from Countess Meggie, everyone in the debate managed to sit down and have a thoroughly civil and reasonable discussion about it. And moreover, several of the Chivalry went out of their way to make the point that, while they might be opposed to giving a belt to fencers, they were going to throw their weight behind the notion that there *must* be a path to Peerage for the fencers.

Which doesn't mean we don't have flamewars, of course. But as a rule, participating in a flamewar is a good way to get people tsk'ing at you, even people who agree with you. It's rarely lauded, and being known as a flamer (or a troll) tends to cost you politically.


We're Kind of Static: Both Gamergate and the Hugo thing are variously driven by sexist, racist, homophobic and sometimes anti-Semitic impulses. But by and large, you can't *say* those things in public, so they both devolve to a common whine of, "Those People are changing My Geekdom into something I don't recognize!" I'll credit Alexx for pointing out to me that there's a common, deeply reactionary thread underlying all of this.

I'd love to say that the SCA isn't at all reactionary, but that's totally not true. Rather, this cuts to one of my common complaints about the modern SCA -- we're getting kind of stale. Back in what I think of as the club's heyday (late 80s - early 90s), there was a deeply experimental thread in much of the SCA; I thought of it as Carolingia's core ethos. In more recent years, though, I've had a real sense that things have changed very little. It's still *fun*, but we know what the club is, we know how it works, it's all ring-fenced by both cultural habits and an enormous body of rules. Not many people are really pushing the boundaries.

As a result, we aren't changing much these days, so it's hard to complain that it's becoming unrecognizable. Of course, we get that complaint *anyway*, over every little change, but it's usually such obvious catastrophizing that it doesn't carry so much weight.


So -- those are some ideas. Other observations, comments, disputations? I'm mainly interested in this point as an interesting lens to play my traditional game of compare-and-contrast between the various threads of Geekery Assembled...

I was a little mystified, a week or two ago, when I got the Board's letter about changes to the Sanctions and Investigations policy on the SCA Announcements mailing list. My initial reaction -- "okay, somebody's clearly accused the Board of doing something incredibly stupid" -- turns out to have been entirely correct.

Today's news is much more interesting -- TRM have signed a petition calling for the impeachment of the majority of the Board. From what I've been able to discern so far, I would tend to agree. If you, like me, were kind of wondering what the heck is going on, I recommend following this trail from TRM's letter:

• Their more-detailed letter directly to the Board, which leads to


• A little more on Their reasoning, which leads to


• The page for the petition of impeachment itself, which eventually gets you to


• The summary of what the heck actually happened, with links to various supporting documents.

I suspect that none of this is news to folks who have had more time to keep up with events, but having been following only a modest number of LJs recently, and little other social media, I'd missed the whole kerfluffle. It's a little one-sided, but presents enough documentation to make the chain of events (if not necessarily the original incident) clear.

Basically, it appears that the Board of Directors of the SCA got a scary-sounding letter from a lawyer, alleging some awful behaviour from a Duke and Duchess down in Atenveldt (who, I infer, have made a few enemies over the years). It sounds like the Board panicked; started proceedings to kick them out of the club; didn't get the response they wanted from the investigations; kicked them out of the club *anyway*; and all hell broke loose.

It's all depressingly familiar, frankly.

Those who hang around me will occasionally hear me refer to The Crisis -- when you hear me capitalize the words (and yes, you can hear the capitals), that always means the Membership Crisis of 1994, when the SCA came within a hair of schisming. That was a heady and horrible year, with Carolingia pretty close to the center of the mess simply because we've always been the group that doesn't put up with nonsense. (In the wake of the mess, it led to the creation of the Grand Council of the Society, with three current-or-sometime Carolingians -- me, Tibor and Caroline Forbes -- deeply involved in setting it up.)

In the abstract, the current debacle and the Crisis seem pretty similar -- the Board got panicked about something, made a decision in haste, got its collective pride wounded when folks told them they were committing procedural errors, dug in their heels, rationalized left and right, and turned what *should* have been a self-contained matter into a constitutional crisis. Then as now, the Board was made up of good people doing a performance-art interpretive dance illustrating the old principle that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Because when you get down to it, it's all about Rule of Law. The SCA *loves* Law -- loves it to death, and loves it way too much, as I often rail against. But at the top, the Board has always tended to be a little contemptuous about the idea. It's easy, when you are the ones writing the laws, to suddenly find that the law is inconvenient, sweep it aside and say, "Oh, no -- we just made a mistake there". That seems to be what's going on here: the Board managed to publish laws that they didn't even believe (possibly, didn't even know about), and have been rather too cavalier about brushing them aside.

So -- yeah, the petition. I have to agree with it, albeit more reluctantly than I might once have done. I have a nasty suspicion that it will come to naught unless someone gets as bloody-minded as goldsquare and company did back in '94, using legal action to force the Corporation to follow its own rules. But the situation isn't tolerable: while we may *play* Middle Ages, we demand modern-world accountability from our leaders, and that means things like following the rules and transparency. Above all, it means that the Society needs the ability to demand redress from the Board when they act stupidly, and drive home the lesson that good intentions aren't an excuse.

The Coronation of Edward and Thyra ended with a detail that I think was brilliantly apt -- the Latinized chant of "You rule because we believe". That's absolutely true within the game, and monarchs have occasionally been taught that lesson the hard way. It is every bit as true of the Board, though -- the SCA *works* only if folks actually believe in it, and that demands believing in the folks at the top. By being so blithe about their own rules -- the rules that are the only tiny check on their power -- they've broken faith. I'd like to hope that they will finally get the message from this near-ultimate slap in the face, and start to make some real changes...

[EDIT: a couple of the links above are now broken -- this is apparently because someone got concerned about the postings being on an eastkingdom.org subdomain. Personally, I think that is a *great* example of the sort of stifling over-rationalization and bureaucratic paranoia that causes so many of the SCA's problems, but I'm not really surprised -- it's very typical. I'll update the links once this is resolved.]