#aristasia

[tellurian-in-aristasia]

[witchy-dabblings]

Me falling down the Aristasia rabbit hole like:

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

[msfenriss]

Rayati, honored readers

When I was a baby lesbian in the 80s I frequented the legendary bookstore Lambda Rising, which was located in the rather upscale gayborhood of DuPont Circle in DC. My favorite part of that store was the rack of zines made by queers of all kinds for various queer niches. I picked one up called Artemis, which purported to be for women who like women who look like women. I thought “that kind of sounds like me,” and I avidly read and reread it. It was clear that the community who made this zine were UK-based, and I was a pretty miserable teenager on the east coast of the US, struggling with more than my own share of stuff, so nothing more came of it.

About 10 years later, it was the mid-90s and I was using gopher to read Usenet. I kid you not! That is how ancient I am. I confess that I was poking around a number of groups at that time that fell into the “alt.sex” category. One day there appeared a message on the femdom group about a Feminine Empire where only girls were allowed, and that I must jump through the “shimmering portal” quickly as it would close in short order. There was a URL, which was a thing of which I had only become aware within a year or so of that fateful afternoon.

The site was called Femmeworld, and it was an absolute delight! I won’t go into any detail here about that site, as several very intelligent and competent blogesses here on Tumblr have done that. I learned about blondes and brunettes, and I was struck with a bolt of revelation that I was a brunette, and that explained me! I made sense! Of course I understood that this was all within a fantasy world and that there was no such thing as an Aristasian brunette, but it revealed to me that other women had these feelings and experiences, and had thought about and discussed it enough to invent a fictional designation.

To cut to the chase, here were these women, some of whom were enby, but also female essentialist. They were anti-patriarchal, but anti-feminist. Advocates of complete state welfare (see the “colleges” that girls can choose to live in) but entirely anti-socialist, and in fact monarchical. And of course one can’t hear about “blondes and brunettes” without immediately detecting at least a bit of racism. When questioned about that, they always insisted that in lands where girls were dark-skinned, the blondes simply had hair of silver or white, and honestly it’s a trivial point, and could I please drop the subject?

I won’t go into an extensive discussion of the implications here, but I am sensitive to them. I was raised in an actively anti-racist white family. I always strive to be aware of racism and white supremacy wherever I go in the real world and the virtual. I can only tell you that because all of my interactions were virtual, it would be hard for me to absolve the Aristasians of any such allegations, but I can say that the welcoming, vulnerable, friendly nature of these ladies suggests that hate of any kind would be quite alien to them. There were a couple of girls in Second Life whose avatars appeared to be Black, and they were accepted with as much joy and enthusiasm as all other girls present. More than that I can’t say.

For another 10 years, I popped in and out of Aristasian spaces. I contributed to forums, and even took part for a short time in an online schoolgirl RP by email. Some time in the mid aughts, it was announced that an Aristasian Embassy would be established in the virtual world of Second Life. I immediately started an SL account so I could go there (and how I spent the next 15 or so years in SL is a whoooole other narrative that isn’t particularly relevant.) I attended a couple of balls at the Embassy, and was very graciously complimented on my gown. I was present for Operation Bridgehead, but was privy to very little inside information about the disagreements that ensued. If I knew anything about that, I would not share it here. Despite any philosophical differences with these ladies, I have great respect and affection for them, and would be unwilling to air their dirty laundry, so to speak.

I was privileged to get to know Sushuri Madonna, who was at that time the undisputed leader, at least of the contingent that could be found in SL. She was entirely delightful, intelligent, and kind, and had an extremely delicate nature. Despite my best efforts not to offend, I am sure my most carefully curated speech had to seem terribly coarse to her. We exchanged some email, and she was kind enough to offer editorial assistance with a few bits of Aristasian fiction I was toying with. What little I learned about her personally, I will of course not disclose, but I felt that we were friends, and I cared for her very much. I hope she is still alive and well, and that the demise of the persona called Cure Dolly does not indicate her real life death.

Thank you for reading, and I would very much welcome discussion on the topic from anyone interested.

[racinated-dreams]

Some of the work I've done is on this Neocities webpage, which is a collaborative project about Culveria, the Aristasian world that got left behind when Operation Bridgehead was enacted. This website is a work in progress and contains a lot of placeholder text.

[general-radix]

Something described as "Aristasia Megaman" was gonna need a rival character, as it so happened that I got the idea to use Valencia for something beyond "being R63!Vince".

Reina (the protag) and her family are all androids; Valencia is a cyborg who lacks fancy powers, but is reasonably good with guns. Encountering her is where things start shifting for Reina.

[her-stars-and-flowers]

While digging around, I found out there is an article about Aristasia in an old italian gay monthly magazine from 1998. I happened to found a copy of said magazine on ebay. I am pondering if I should buy it, scan it and translate it for archival purposes. What is stopping me from doing it for now is the price, as I'm trying to save money at the moment (and also the fact that it might be a "naughty"type of magazine... and I would prefer to not have that type of stuff in my possession). Will keep you updated if I end up purchasing it.

[aristonaut]

Culverian enby by day, Quirrie-Vintessan brunette by night.

Adores big band swing and dark EDM. Rejects the banal same-ism of the Pit and the confining hierarchy of the Empire. Doesn’t bite, but is most certainly the 50s-dress-with-workman’s-boots-wearer your ‘londie and ‘nettie warned you about.

Keeping this corner of Elektraspace to explore the world(s) of Aristasia. Neither a defense nor an attack (though you may find opinions of one such kind or another here), simply an aristonautic venture.

- Miss Avis Finch

[themiscyreian]

All of this is true, and so disheartening.

I have always hated phrases like "just friends", and the idea that non-romantic relationships will never reach quite the same level as romantic ones. Infuriating, and false.

I am so lucky to have a group of friends who are deeply close emotionally, and all committed to building a life together, despite not being romantically involved. It helps, I think, that we are all likely autistic and tend not to relate to others in so-called "normal" fashion, but in any case I am glad for it.

This is an area where I appreciate the Chelouranyan conception of Amity (notable because I agree with very few of their ideas lmao).

Amae are those we love, closer than "friends", according to social convention, but not romantic or at all sexual.

These people are not "just friends"; they are my amae, my beloved.

being on the aro spectrum would be a lot easier if being single wasn't made to feel like a literal death sentence

[ashinbrigid]

Miss Minako Farshore spends a quiet afternoon with Miss Sushuri on the college's lovely porch

[tellurian-in-aristasia]

Good news, everypette! Filianic Studies appears to be back online for the time being! This doesn't appear to be just a reupload of the archived Wayback Machine either, because I see pages that never got archived are available again. This is an incredible resource to have available again, and I encourage everyone to save copies of whatever they're interested in for themselves, as well as manually save these pages to the Wayback Machine, just incase.

[iyashikeivixen]

The fact that I’ve found other beings online who actually know what Aristasia *is* is just absolutely *mindblowing* :3 *Totally* wasn’t expecting that!

[msfenriss]

Operation Bridgehead

I’ve been asked what I can recall about Operation Bridgehead. I think it must have been 2006, and at that time there were still active text forums as well as the growing community who met in Second Life. SL was a real bandwidth hog at the time, and few girls had systems that could run it at a tolerable frame rate, so much of the conversation was still in text.

There was already an Embassy established in SL when the Operation Bridgehead announcement appeared on the forum. It may have been the Blue Camellia Club, but my memory is a sieve, and I could be wrong. I remember that the accompanying graphic was a screenshot from SL of a military brunette avatar silhouetted in front of the flag of the Empire. The gist of it was that Operation Bridgehead was a formal declaration that the community of Aristasians who existed in Elektraspace were a protectorate of the Empress.

I know I am making a hash of this. I can’t recall the language, or even how the scope of it was defined. As far as I can tell, the Embassy in SL was considered the center of operations, but all girls who identified as Aristasians-in-Telluria and had some means of connecting with us should be considered under this protection, SL account or no. I wish there were someone I could ask to correct me if I have this wrong. There seemed to always be a philosophy that what truly made an Aristasian was her sincere desire to be one, and little else mattered. That inclusivity is why I spent so much time with them. And it’s a bit ironic, now that I think of it. They always seemed to pride themselves on their elitism, but when it came to interacting with any person who identified as a girl, and wanted to visit and learn what it was all about, there could never have been warmer, more pleasant hostesses.

I say “they,” and I should clarify. It was often noted that Aristasia-in-Telluria consisted of concentric rings, and most girls never made it very far into the center, which was perfectly ok. The great majority of girls, myself included, had no wish to live full time Aristasian lives. I felt that I was a part of the outermost ring. So collective pronouns may vary.

I think it can’t have been very long after this announcement that there was strife of some kind. I know that there were disagreements among core members of the group, but as you can imagine, they were very private about conflict, and I do not know specifics. I think my memories of that time are happier without that knowledge. I do know that a few individuals seemed not to be around anymore, even as the population of new girls seemed to be burgeoning.

The school established for newcomers may have been called Sai Thame. Again, atrocious memory, but given that Janya’s purview it tracks. It didn’t exist for very long I’m sad to say, but the time I got to spend there was pure fun and pleasure for me. I loved feeling so safe from the disturbing content you sometimes run across in virtual worlds. The wooden desks lined up in the classroom felt strangely comforting. I got giddy little flushes of gender euphoria from standing to let a blonde sit. The tea garden was full of the sort of flowers you’d find in an English cottage garden, and there were always butterflies, and it was all the wonderful parts of Virtualia without the ugly parts. I’m forever grateful for that.

[racinated-dreams]

I intend to use this Tumblr blog to share some art I've made that was inspired by the girls from Aristasia. My work ranges from digital collages, to illustrations. Hopefully in the future I wanted to do some miniature work, as I was recently gifted an antique doll house and have found the idea of a miniature world quite inspiring.

[general-radix]

"Mother Maria will not smile upon you."

The House of Iris, main characters/problems of Deiamachy Opera (oh hey, it has a name now). It's under the control of Governess Adelaide, an Aristasian gynoid who possesses a rare "prismatic crystal" and an explosive temper; eight of her nine daughters serve her faithfully.

Reina is the ninth.

[drmobiusvanch]

me normally: :(

me when i remember the blog from the conservative bdsm lesbian subculture that knew nothing about fate stay night but were just like 'oh yeah saber is a sub' :)

[canmom]

so. PMG's coverage is very hit and miss as we all know (not to relitigate the za/um video or anything) but this time they really landed on a big one.

it's like - you know aristasia, that lesbian bdsm cult that briefly became a game developer? so this outsourcing studio Brandoville in indonesia basically did the reverse, with someone called Cherry Lai (the wife of the CEO Ken Lai, and the one in charge of hiring/firing) rapidly speedrunning it into 'high control group' as if she had a checklist to follow. the worst of the abuse focused on this one employee Christa who was made to beat herself to concussion, assume publicly humiliating stress positions, apologise for random imagined infractions, eventually just fully get beaten up after the company had dissolved. there's clips in here where you can see she's just completely dissociated to shit as she does some weird punishment ritual for Cherry. (of course there's also all the usual shit of like, constant abusive tirades, extreme hours, financial fraud and wage theft, etc. etc.)

if this all happened in fiction it would be like "that's some kinky shit all right" but no, this is just regular miserable old Geopolitics making it so that someone can have petty little overseer power and nobody really cares to notice because hey, the cost of living is much lower in Indonesia so it's cheaper to make art assets over there. even if the virality of this story leads to Cherry Lai getting sent to prison or some shit, the conditions that enabled Cherry Lai will certainly continue. (the same is just as true of other outsourcing-heavy industries, such as animation, with DR Movie in South Korea whose work holds up half the anime industry and a lot of Western animation too boasting of how their employees sleep under desks - I wouldn't be surprised if some similar story eventually breaks there.)

all of that is true... but at the same time it's a "fucked up thing that happened somewhere I can't really do anything about it" story - the studio's already dissolved, the employees have escaped the situation, Christa seems to be getting some help to deal with all the traumatic shit she went through. what it does make me think about is like... trying to comprehend how a situation like this provokes this weird kind of fascination that I'd watch through an hour long video about it.

what's alarming about this story is not exactly the specifics of the acts. perhaps someone who's into it could be ordered to slap themselves 100 times as a spurious punishment in a negotiated scene and both parties go away feeling very positively about the interaction (although you know, be very careful about hits to the head, brain damage isn't fun IRL). instead, it's the context in which they took place; the murky difference between fictional, playacted domination and real domination. it's the affective aspects of it; the weird loyalty that Cherry demanded as she broke people down.

the move you see some of the commenters making is like, oh so Cherry was an evil sex pervert (e.g. saying that oh, she definitely watched the 100 slaps video from beginning to end). however, cherry does not resemble my experience of sex perverts. with apologies to the more chuuni among them who like to play otherwise, the sadists I know (either as a sex thing or not) broadly strike me as very conscientious people, and very careful in where they play with that if they do. but, that said, clearly Cherry Lai was getting something out of tormenting and humiliating her employees, and pushing the envelope further and further as she realised what she could get away with. I don't know if I can confidently say that was an entirely different category of feeling she would have been experiencing, merely that the way it was acted out is very different.

so really, when encountering this story, i find my referents are mostly fictional characters created deliberately to embody a particular extreme of sadism, indifference, intensity of relationship etc. - characters like Insul in the extreme, but even in the mainstream, GLaDOS etc. people like this kind of thing in fiction; whether it's eroticism, humour, a way to process painful experiences from reality, etc. in fiction, things that are abhorrent in real life, like abusive relationships, can be explored in all feeling-dimensions relatively safely; this gives us a bouquet of narratives to return to the world with.

because like? there is evidently something eternally fascinating about cruelty, abuse, cults and so on. PMG's argument for covering this story is in part that in Indonesia, there is a sentiment of 'no viral no justice': without widespread attention to shame the authorities into acting, very little is likely to happen in the courts. but we all know what authorities of any sort do with a troubling viral story: find some kind of scapegoat (very easy in this case: that cherry lai, what a monster, who could possibly have known), make some carefully wordsmithed and vague statement, change as little as they can get away with, wait for it to blow over. it's a strategy that works, generally a lot better than trying to really change the broader situation.

instead, presumably, this story gets covered because it's a bit freaky. most workplace abuse is really boring. working way-too-long hours because you don't wanna let the team down or whatever. there's a guy who gets stressed and yells at people all the time. wage theft. it all absolutely sucks shit, but it's quite repetitive, and hard to really feel mad about it unless you know the people involved personally. this one, by contrast, is a bit more intense than usual, it's got some novel dimensions - at points resembling shit like struggle sessions. that is what makes something that happened in Indonesia, a country which most people don't seem to care to think about very much despite being the fourth-most populated country on Earth, break out to a UK-based leftist game journalism outfit and invite them to edit an hour-long video on the subject.

I obviously indulge in a bit of this kind of writing myself. does it add a bit of spice to the story of Takahata's anime Heidi: Girl of the Alps to know that 'bad' drawings were put up on the wall to shame their artists? that Children of the Sea put someone in the hospital? I certainly felt it's worth mentioning when I screened those films, indeed I tend to kind of make a point of digging up historical anecdotes of fucked up things that happened (c.f. the list of jikens I dropped in a visual novel liveblog), just to sort of like construct an ongoing story of 'this is what the world is like', 'people do this shit'.

and I'm still not sure what conclusion to draw from all this.