Possibly, I’m curious despite not having played this - the Church is one of the main factions in the game. What’s different about this, if it’s not one of those things where you know what you like but can’t explain?
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I’d like to gently disagree with some of the sentiment in this thread that the religiosity is part of the setting and we are powerless to disagree.
Personally, I am uninterested in modern takes on Victoriana that don’t acknowledge a wide range of problems of the time, and I am uninterested in takes who confront those problems by saying “oh though of course today’s leading liberal minds of England have this all solved.” (or “If only everyone would just…,” etc.)
Important background context here for me, I am exhausted by living almost all my life in places where the fact that I am not a Christian and also unwilling to accept Christian traditions merely to play nice is a regular source of surprise, a tiringly consistent uphill climb against assumptions and convention. From my first day, Fallen London has been on thin ice with me regarding the presence of its Anglicanism. It may be honest to the setting to have it, but that doesn’t mean I need to stick around for it.
I suspect many of us are happy that the writers have successfully pushed back against representative aspects we could easily argue are just part of the setting.
I tried to research some historical examples that FL doesn't stay true to. Click here if you're interested in those details.
Cambridge and Oxford did not lift their ban on admitting women until the 20th century. The University in this game did not have this problem.
Take Frances Power Cobbe as an example. She published, in 1878, a damning pamphlet on the abuse husbands visited on their wives. Cobbe was at that time basically, her contemporaries conceded, married to another woman named (coincidentally) Mary Lloyd. In Fallen London, you can be officially gay married. I intend to take advantage of this. I can have an official in-game ceremony recognized by the legal authorities and everything! This was not legally recognized in England until 2014. And to the point of Cobbe’s writings, while the game is rife with tales physical violence, injury, unwise romantic decisions, and being trapped by dint of position or station; with people taking unfair advantage of others, abusing positions of power, and coercing others to conform to their will; yet the game wisely does not regularly combine these themes to depict spousal violence and abuse as rampant and common as it was at the time and as Cobbe documented. Additional, heavily establishment-oriented characters in Fallen London are not rolling their eyes in the game about Suffragettes (Cobbe was one) being ludicrous. That sexist, dismissive stance was incredibly common at the time, and there are many public and well-documented expressions of it if anyone is interested.
The staff of Fallen London has used to good effect external influences novel to the game — the Masters, The Khanate (I have not reached it in-game yet but I understand e.g. that a prominent character is non-binary), the in-canon anachronisms of Hell, etc. — and juxtaposed them with a fantasy of Victorian London to query and push back against Victorian perspectives from interesting angles.
Also there’s a story where you can tell the Bishop of Southwark he’s a bloody idiot. I sure did.
My point is, even though they’re part of the setting, these are works of fiction more than anything else and the writers of Fallen London can and have used their authorial voice to challenge the received historical context.
That said, I have only started on this particular story and am not yet near the parts I’m most likely to resent. I also have not experienced a Christmas in Fallen London, either. I would not be surprised if doing both is enough for me to sour on the game completely. I would be equally unsurprised if I’m fine and stick around for years.
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I personally would be surprised if either one of those caused you to sour on the game. Christmas in Fallen London is not particularly Christian… and in this story, if you don’t like the Christian characters, you can tell ‘em to shove it. It does have more Christian content than most of FL but it doesn’t require the character to agree.
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I mean I wasn’t saying it’s part of any given Victorian setting. I was saying it has been so baked into the past 15 years of Fallen London writing and lore that like it or not you can’t exactly act like it’s a surprise or not part of the expected, that’s all.
Begging your pardon, but surely the mere existence of Christianity is not equivalent to sexism, homophobia, abuse, et al.? We can point to bigotry and abuse and say ‘these are evil and should not exist’, but to do so to an entire faith seems… well, like a bigotry in itself.
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Listen, I’m 100% an atheist and the Christian parts of actual Victorian literature do hold little appeal for me in and of themselves. George Eliot was also an atheist, and yet Dorothea’s arc in Middlemarch would be unthinkable without the Christian themes.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that if you had your druthers, FL writers would be forbidden from including Christian elements and Biblical language entirely. I think that’s entirely unreasonable, though. I don’t want the writers to artificially restrict themselves on what subject matter they’re allowed to explore. Part of the appeal of FL is precisely that the various stories explore such a huge range of topics. If your personal issues with religion are so severe that you can’t enjoy any work of fiction that engages with—not endorses!—the topic, that sounds like a you problem, not a problem with the fiction.
I’m imaging a version of FL where the two Bishop characters didn’t exist, we never got the ES “For All the Saints” or “The Sinking Synod”, Hell and the Devils were just generic spooky aliens with some fantasy name rather than, well, Hell, etc. etc., and it seems like a significantly worse version of FL than the one we’re lucky enough to have in reality. Just like it’s hard to imagine “Middlemarch” being a better book without Dorothea’s tragic piety, or “The Way of All Flesh” without Samuel Butler being able to lampoon sanctimonious hypocrisy.
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I mean, the Christian content in this ES is not just largely optional, but even if you do choose the route that engages more heavily with it the plot is explicitly quite critical of the Anglican Church, and allows you to support a character who’s trying to convert people away from Christianity. This is not Failbetter just going “oh well we have to include Christian themes because everyone was Christian” they’re actively pointing out that some people weren’t
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In the ending I had, the leading ratty cleric actually ends up participating in a re-write of the scripture to make it more rat-friendly. That wouldn’t happen in any version of Christianity I am familiar with.
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Geez, if I had known that my tiny comment would drag this thread that far off-topic, I wouldn’t have posted it.
My problem here was that the story asked me to decide which of two silly creeds I wanted to support. I was forced to make that choice, i.e. to support something I find inordinately silly over something else I find inordinately silly. I was missing a third option to tell everyone how silly they are and that I wanted nothing to do with either of them!
Years ago, Our Lady of Pyres did exactly the same thing.
I have said this a lot over the years: I think most, if not all Exceptional Stories should have an “exit door” option that lets the player just walk away when - for whatever personal reasons - they find a particular story unpalatable. I have played almost every Exceptional Story ever released in Fallen London and would have used that option maybe only a handful of times or so. But in those cases it would’ve been really really welcome. Because it’s no fun to be forced to click through a story that absolutely does not engage you at all.
The one story I remember having that exit door option was The Pentecost Predicament - well it was actually a Burn-down-the-house-option, but boy did I enjoy it! xD
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There was something similar in The Stag and the Shark, where you could opt out of part of the zee voyage and avoid the nastiness of the bound sharks episode.
Similarly, on the Tomb Colonies chapter of the Young Naturalist, it was possible to avoid some of the body horror. I was late come to that, so I don’t know whether it was present in the text from the beginning, or added by FL in response to players. But yes, the option is and would be welcome.
Body horror is actually a big no-no for me, so I’m not enjoying that aspect of Firmament, and I dislike it when it occurs in ESs or in the game proper.
If it helps, I don’t feel like that’s what happened here. Your post wasn’t what led me to go off on a rant, and I am writing an apology for my role in this, too. If it’s okay with everyone, I’m going to sleep on it for a day before I post it.
I haven’t gotten to many of the stories yet, so I’m hesitant to weigh in.
Sometimes I like reading a story where nobody is clearly in the right and no good exit exists. I definitely don’t want every story I read to be like that, or even most stories I read. Still, there a place for them.
Should Fallen London not have stories that are difficult like that? I’d be fine with either yes or no as the answer.
There’s some aspects of the game itself that make this question complicated, the nature of player agency, for example, and conflicts inherent in offering an edited choice. (An edited choice is why I like the game, it’s why I’m here! It’s not an easy thing, though.) I won’t get into any of that in detail, though, not here and now because… well, let me sleep on it for a day.
I actually appreciate, that you brought it up. Evolving discussions are a boon this forum offers that I cherish. The idea of going off topic is a weird ordering fetish the internet developed in it’s early years. Who would bring that up in a face to face conversation? It’s refreshing that this forum is open to this (or unregulated?) and that the user base is a compatible type for that.
I really don’t see why you should. But who am I to tell you what not to do?
Probably because it’s closest to dilemmas we experience personally?
One prominent example in free FL is the story of the heiress, which to this day is one of my favourite storys in the whole game. I might not even be playing the game, were it not for this story.
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