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CTGttW Question 4: Relationships and family
Relationships and family are, I think, the driver of events in the book. Marya is driven by her love for her father, then later her love for Suzuki. Weiwei tries to balance her compassion for the stowaway with her duty to the Captain. Grey is driven by his relationship with the wider scientific community.
There's also the communities that form on the train. The crew look out for each other, the passengers form communities in First and Third classes.
Which of these Relationships stuck out for you? Which were important for the story? What's your opinion on whether events were driven by relationships rather than personal, internal drives?
What about all the relationships between things in the Wastelands? How is Elena's changing connection to the Wastelands important, and how does it affect her?
Comments
Lol - no relations stood out to me. Only the roles played by various people. I never thought of relationship as a driver of anything. The train was moving forward regardless. The wasteland was infiltrating the train regardless. I suppose at the end the characters had a choice of whether to stop the train in the station, or break through and bring nature to the world. But who ultimately made that decision?
It seemed to me that most of the plot was driven by people making decisions that they believed to be right regardless of what others might think - Marya for example pursuing the quest to find out about her father, or Henry Grey going after his samples whatever the cost. there weren't all that many decisions which were changed or abandoned because of relationship - the only one which comes to mind is that Weiwei consistently didn't tell people (esp the Captain) about Elena, despite considering it several times.
I'm with @Apocryphal on this. The important relationships were with the dead, or inaccessible, and not among the present and living. Goes with the conception of class. Part of how I recognise a death cult.
Yes, things were carrying regardless. The train was moving, the ecology was asserting itself, the future and adulthood were coming anyway. But most of the people there chose to open themselves to those experiences, and they chose how they behaved in reaction to the events that happened to them. I think the people had more agency than the passive passengers that @Apocryphal experienced!
Weiwei had important relationships with Elena, Alexei, and the Captain. Marya's relationship with Suzuki grew into importance. The connections between The Professor / Artemis and both Weiwei and Marya were important. I don't think the relationships were with people out of reach.
@BarnerCobblewood , "death cult" is something you've mentioned a few times, and I don't know what you mean by it here. Could you please expand on the meaning for you, and why it's appropriate here?
@NeilNjae When I say I see a death cult I'm most often using it in a perjorative sense to refer to the worship of death as necessary and productive of life. All cult/ures have aspects that are about death, but those that suggest that death is some kind of good is what I am talking about, especially a couple of specific ideas:
1) That violence can be justified to protect the dead, which symbolically includes denying to the living the use of the land where the dead have fallen, and that violence is legitimated by appeal to the dead who speak through the cult; and
2) That killing (producing death) will lead to a good result for a community. Mao said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Josef Stalin stated it most crudely - No man, no problem. Death cults actively sacrifice others so the community will flourish, e.g. National Socialism in Germany through the 1930s and 40s sacrificed others, especially Jews but all inferior people, so the Aryans it represented would have "living space." A large part of North America cult/ure is grounded in the same idea. They are very big throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and 21st century too so far.
Saying that toxic pollution is necessary for the well-being of the community is death cult. Saying that truth which harms must be spoken is death cult. Saying that family lines matter more than living creatures is death cult. Saying that directing the death of other people is good for the community is death cult. When the dead are used to define the living, that is death cult. When death is hurried along to make living easier, that is death cult.
When the people on the train decide to break quarantine because their continued existence is more important than the existence of those beyond the wall, that is death cult. When the train community is purified by the killing of the Crows, that is death cult.
Obviously there's a lot more to say.
For me this is a big problem in the structures of TTRPGs. Many of them encode death cults, because let's face it, most people think death and killing can solve our human problems.
Thanks for explaining that.
And yes, I agree with the privileged place violence has in RPGs (and culture more generally).
In another RPG community I'm in, someone ran a game of First Responders (emergency response people). Some people were surprised by the notion of an action-based RPG that didn't revolve around combat.
What a cool idea! You could probably do some good scenarios based on Mountain Rescue or Coastguard teams.
According to TV shows about first responders, their lives are basically filled with first-responding and sex - the later of which gamers usually shy away from in games lol. But I do like the idea of a game about dramatic healing instead of fighting. Did they develop a trauma treatment subsystem to zoom the focus in on it (as they do with fighting)?
I have designed several. In fact the only games I have designed which 'revolve around' violence - as opposed to being a true last option - Are my military/paramilitary RPGs. This is probably one of the many reasons I have few customers.
I don't think that ruleset went into injuries in any more detail than normal: we were focused on firefighting and rescue.
A lot of these games use the idea from Fight Fire of treating the threats as monsters and the rescue incident mechanically as a combat.
I've done more detailed healing in other games. The injury is much like a monster, causing damage to the victim. The healer can either give supportive care (keeping the victim alive) or take action to reduce severity of the injury. For example, if someone has a major wound, the wound would be a "monster" causing damage to the victim and having it's own resilience. The people treating can either give fluids, raise the victims legs, and so on (restoring the victim's health) or stitch up the wound (attacking the monster). If you address just one side of it, the victim may not survive.
Please remind us of them.
That would be both useless and pretentious. I apologize for mentioning that they exist. I was probably tired and not thinking correctly.
https://www.flyingmice.com/flyingmice.html
Hmmm - I haven't bothered updating my website in a few years. There are more out there now... I just throw them up on Drive Thru and let them wither.
I felt like most of the decisions being made were mostly selfish and done at the expense of relationships with others. The one with the highest stakes was I guess Weiwei and Elena, and her hiding Elena made little sense to me given the story. I felt like it would have made far more sense for her to immediately report Elena's existence, but then ... no plot I suppose!
@BarnerCobblewood I don't want to derail things too much (particularly since this is a book about trains!) but the death cult idea is one I have struggled with as it seems to be the default of human nature for the most part, so it's hard to fault people too much on one hand, while on the other its terrible! Then you have movements like effective altruism (particularly the parts focused on extreme long termism) that seem to have elements designed to push back against the death cult idea, but are also so unrealistic and have some bad outcomes themselves. It's an interesting topic though
I suppose Weiwei's motives for not reporting Elena were a) it was another person of (seemingly) about her own age so there's an identification with the plight, and b) there are some hints that Weiwei's relationships with the crew had drifted to become more distant, so she was motivated to find a new friend
True, but it felt like there was very little actual struggle with what she should do.
@kcaryths Actually I should find a better word. You are right - death cults seem to have been an aspect of human culture for as long as we know e.g. ancestor worship, ideas that land continues to belong to those who have died, construction of "housing" etc. for the dead. And people have been consulting the dead for a very long time, e.g. the episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus offers blood, and has to chase away the dead who were not the dead he wished to speak with. Many of these kinds of activities and importances simply seem to be efforts to understand what is I think un-understandable - we know we cease, but somehow also continue, just as our predecessors. This is death as part-and-parcel with life, and thus simply life.
Most of the death-cults I have just mentioned do not see the dead, and especially causing death, as anything other than dangerous helpers who cannot be trusted, and who somehow surpass us and need to be kept at bay - hence they are given space and expected to stay within it (cemeteries), and likewise time (every day is not Hallowe'en). It is peculiar to modern people to think that we can kill without entering into a relationship with the dead, or that killing can produce any kind of enduring well-being. Basically that the worship of death can alter life-and-death so that there it becomes only life, or that death can be transferred to create a life-without-death, or that by taking on the identity of death one can live, or most crazily that death can be removed from the dead. Only life can be removed, and that asymmetry is disturbing.
Also, I don't think it is off-topic. The Wastelands were presented as a new life / Eden / etc. but this entails sorting out what death, and knowledge of death is. What tree or trees stand in Eden now (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biblical) )? I think the author did not yet have the skills to treat the topic with the depth it deserved. In some way the people on the train became a little like Dracula, who brings the killing-field to where the feeding is to be done, and who cannot face that their own end who benefit those who followed - i.e. they cannot face their own end, and so treat everything as means to continue their life, not understanding that life and death are not two different things-in-the-world: There is one thing life-and-death.
I was really disappointed in this book, because I still think the Wasteland could be a rich vein of play with this. For example, the train: Not just a conveyance but some kind of way for the "living" to see the images of the transformations leading to death that are always and continuously characteristic of life. But as none of them could look at the Wasteland directly (she is invisible to them when present in the train, they move around and avoid her without even being aware of it), they are beings who do not face reality. What is admirable about delusion? Tragic maybe, comic more likely.
I wonder - and this is spur of the moment writing so is not fully thought through - if the business of not looking at the Wilderness should again be seen as a metaphor? In the story, there is an injunction in the guidebook not to look at it, which is repeated by the crew, and in actual fact exerts - for some of the travellers - a fascination which compels them to look anyway. This has a range of effects. Some people just zone out and lose track of time. Some people want to immerse themselves more and more, at increasing risk. Some are intent on warning everyone else. Some are rabidly set against looking and heavily defend themselves against the possibility.
Now, in real life people are chock full of things that they won't and (frequently) can't look at, but which are actually of crucial transformative importance. And likewise are chock full of things which compulsively attract attention but which are dangerous. Large chunks of therapeutic practice are focused on helping people to be aware of what they're seeing and not seeing.
So... my musing is that the novel is not describing how things in some abstract sense ought to be, but rather on the human condition as it is. Which may indeed not face reality, and may not be admirable, and it may well be comic or tragic... but if the job that a novel sets itself is to look at the actual rather than the ideal state of things, then that seems to me a reasonable outcome.
@RichardAbbott Yeah, until you get to the end of the book.
Agreed with Barner! If the author had any clue about this, they would have not butchered the ending as they did!