Scumbase

It's been a strange world of Asia for me this week.  Kamisama's introduction to the delightful kookiness of Japan, the addition of r34lg33k to guild and he and Kami's decidedly ramen noodle flavor of gchat have highlighted a world that is ancient beyond our imagining.  In the past week, World of Warcraft announced its new expansion called Mists of Pandaria and it is based on Oriental culture, specifically the Chinese monks.

These thoughts were in my mind as I picked one of the sites that I have labelled under webcomics to share with you this week.  What I touched upon was a site that I followed avidly, but the writer had just stopped in the middle of her story and left it for months.  When I clicked a few minutes ago, I found that she has picked up her keyboard and settled in to continue quite seamlessly from the point she left.  This is going back on my reader.

This isn't a webcomic, although I've stuffed it under that category so I remember to check for updates.  It's a webstory of an Oriental woman, Lady Uru (Suki to her friends), who journals her life and hides the journal, lest she be caught doing something so unseemly.  In Book One:  Threads of Fate, she writes of her husband Sev, a minor lord who holds military rank, her twin children, the friends and society that surrounds their well-to-do life.  Book Two:  Hidden Weavings follows the family as their life path diverges from its carefully manicured destiny.

The author explains the premise:


The Empire grows by leaps and bounds. Here they conquer a populace composed entirely of women who engage in self-mutilation. There they swallow whole a country of fishermen. Why should the empire care, as long as they pay their taxes and serve their new masters faithfully? The autocracy is composed of servants and slaves, officials whose only power stems from their overseers.

Then there is the army. The army is vicious, destroying the infrastructure of a country and bringing it to its knees. The army is gentle, rescuing refugees from the annual flooding of the great river, saving lives (saving workers). Men and women join the army for money, for advancement, for glory, or because they are given no choice in the matter.

There are stories out there about the gallant heroes that fight the Empire and win. Most of those end with the hero’s valiant death. There are stories out there about the glorious little countries that take on Goliath and win. This story, though, is not quite so simple. This is the story of a woman and her family, trying to make a life that’s not a mockery from a social system based on whim and birth, where a word in the right ear can leave you begging in the street (if you’re lucky). Juries and judges have no say in this world. Yet somehow, against this backdrop of low-grade paranoia, people carve out stable lives. They do their best, they keep their heads down, they stay far away from politics and they do their jobs.

Of course, the big picture still exists, and it has a story to tell.

Because maybe, just maybe. Things are going to change.

The author notes:  The story contains sexual coercion, descriptions of adult or violent situations, slavery, relationships with strong power differentials, and prejudice enough to fill any bingo card you like, including but not limited to sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism and ageism. If I’ve missed any, I’m happy to update this list.
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I've enjoyed the read and hope that you will too.  Click the site masthead above or the link in our webcomics section below.