Silverwolf
June 4, 2021 8:03 AM   Subscribe

Were the group “Victorian cultists?” Were they LARPers? Were they con artists preying on emotionally immature women? Were they a game studio with a very unusual front? Or was there, as one embarrassed Irish reporter asked, “almost a gay element to the activities here?” Answers were not then forthcoming. Few are even today.

From Aaron A. Reed's Substack "50 Years of Text Games"
posted by Hypatia (25 comments total) 45 users marked this as a favorite
 
I heard about the Aristasians several years back, thought they sounded interesting, and gathered some material for an FPP before deciding they might be a bit too obscure and minor to warrant a post. I somehow completely fucking missed any connection to these text adventures and now I wish I still had my notes to provide more info here.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:49 AM on June 4, 2021 [7 favorites]


While much about the Games Mistresses would shift across their decades of fronts and personas, disconnection from the everyday world was a constant theme. “We really, truly are not living in the same place as you,” one once wrote; “I don’t like the modern world, and I don’t live in it,” Scarlett has said. “We don’t concern ourselves with the present at all. We live in a little world inside our house... it’s a world apart, really, where we are.” Perhaps from this perspective, an interest in the transporting power of games, electronic or otherwise, becomes less difficult to understand.
Quarantine helps me better relate to their creating their own world in their own house.
posted by otherchaz at 8:53 AM on June 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


Reminds me of McDermott & McGough.

Always have to love a good story of committed computer weirdos who didn't end up killing anyone. I wonder what interacting with them at a con (not exactly Victorian!) was like.
posted by praemunire at 9:00 AM on June 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


Oh my goodness, these women appear in Mina de Malfois, not very flatteringly portrayed. The Mina Chronicles are an episodic tour of fandom scandals and debates - Snapewives, various pseuicides, etc. The Snapewives are actually major characters and portrayed fairly positively.

A...quality of the series is that it starts off treating a character modeled on Andrew Blake as both basically harmless and "amusingly"/seductively gender-fluid rather than as a trans man and also, unrelatedly, as an abuser. The series judders to a halt rather than resolve the Blake plot, but it judders to a halt with a very clear and didactic denunciation of fandom transphobia. I assume that this is because more came out about Blake late in the series and because the writer started to understand transphobia as a structural problem in fandom.

Anyway, the Games Mistresses appear in it and it's free to download from Lulu.
posted by Frowner at 9:10 AM on June 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


I first heard about the group from the schism, when the main group suddenly announced that there had never been any spanking in Aristasia and definitely no lesbianism, and apparently also went hard into the concept that they were channeling people from a real Aristasia. Leading to another Aristasia fan apparently saying in horror "they've turned into a bunch of hobbit channelers!"
posted by tavella at 9:17 AM on June 4, 2021 [6 favorites]


Every comment on this thread takes me further into WTF-how-deep-does-this-go-ery.
posted by Hypatia at 9:22 AM on June 4, 2021 [17 favorites]




"A discipline book (for commercial reasons)"
posted by praemunire at 9:44 AM on June 4, 2021


This is so fascinating to me and yet I can't seem to follow the thread of what is going on here.
posted by all about eevee at 9:44 AM on June 4, 2021 [6 favorites]


Fandom kinksters, simultaneously trying to reach like-minded souls and necessarily putting up a front because they were wlw. Getting more traction than you might expect because of the scarcity of alternatives. Commercial products probably made some money off dudes into light BDSM and lesbian porn. That's my conclusion.
posted by praemunire at 9:49 AM on June 4, 2021 [5 favorites]


OMG thank you for posting this OP. I was looking for updated information on this group after I read an article about them years ago and could not find any more information.
posted by Selena777 at 9:59 AM on June 4, 2021


My parents rented a cottage on Cruit Island in this area about 30 years ago. We went and visited with them for a week. I had no idea such exciting things were happening there. It was hard to find an open shop there it was so quiet. Very pretty though, pink granite cliffs and little secluded coves with beaches with nobody on them but cows.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:20 AM on June 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


Previously on Metafilter, from twenty years ago.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:21 AM on June 4, 2021 [8 favorites]


oh man, so many threads...

In a house previously occupied by the Atlantis Commune, aka The Screamers, who eventually relocated to Columbia and had some really unpleasant run-ins with the FARC militants in the early aughts.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:35 AM on June 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


I grew up in Donegal at this time and I only heard about this story about 5 years ago.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:52 PM on June 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


Oh my gosh. I heard of the Aristasians years and years ago -- maybe through that very FPP? -- but I had no idea it had anything to do with video games. In fact, just the other day, I was wondering, "what was that whole deal again where brunettes were men and blondes were women? Melan and chelan? Weird shit."

I thought of it because I have had a long-standing interest in conceptions of imaginary worlds without men, or at least publicly visible men. But the thing is, and I cannot stress this enough, it's a nonsexual interest, and sooner or later these imaginary worlds are always built around somebody's kink. It might be a man's or a woman's, but it's generally somebody's. This has been the case since I found out about William Moulton Marston's whole deal. (Possibly Charlotte Perkins Gilman didn't mean it that way, but I don't know.) And where it's not kinky, it's either misogynist or TERF-adjacent. Anyway, although that's all fascinating in its own way, it's not for me.

What is for me is any story about a fandom/SF/fantasy cult, whether it be an outright organization or a cult of personality, that ends up in a bad house or a bad scene. I absolutely collect these, possibly because it's reminiscent of some bullshit that I was on the edges of back in the day. Although thankfully it was not seriously dark, like the Kentucky vampire situation, it still made a mark on me, so that even today I am nervous to so much as write a backstory for my D&D character out of some primal fear of waking up as somebody's metamour in a rotten house.

Thanks for mentioning Mina de Malfois, Frowner -- I had never heard of that, and it sounds like I need to check it out!
posted by Countess Elena at 1:15 PM on June 4, 2021 [8 favorites]


This is fascinating, and I had completely forgotten about Aristasia! I'm grateful for the documentation of a part of feminist history that might otherwise be lost to bitrot, but some of the tone of the article bothers the everliving crap out of me. It has the prurient air of a cisgender man determined to discover what UNNATURAL ACTS OF SAPPHISTRY are being committed in a space that no one will let him into, harrumph! I'm sure the authors/artists at St. Bride's leaned into that narrative when it suited them, but Reed doesn't seem to have spoken to anyone involved before writing this, which is fair since this is historical documentation not journalism, but it does increase the "????" conspiratorial tone.

There's also a thread of transphobia throughout that is just outside of (my) peripheral vision, but saying things like Some reporters printed gleeful gossip that underneath the second Games Mistress’s veil was “a suspicious five o’clock shadow" and that Marianne Scarlett said St. Bride's was in the 1920s a safe-house for IRA gunmen, who would disguise themselves as women to escape notice. As with nearly all details in this story, whether this one is true or not is difficult to say smells like "trans = deception" rhetoric being used to cast aspersions on someone whose notion of the self as a persistent, singular entity already sounds tenuous at best. Like, just c'mon out and ask if Marianne Scarlett is a trans woman and get told it's not your business, dude. It's much more fun to pretend there are So! Many! Unanswered! Questions! than it would be to actually get the answers from people who might know, or admit that many of the answers ultimately don't matter or aren't that interesting. Like the bit where Reed is So Confused that [t]he official story went that Langridge had been a St. Bride’s student who had smuggled in a computer - this is pretty clearly part of their fictionalized narrative, it follows all the conventions you'd need to follow to get a computer-toting Mary Sue into (e.g.) a Harry Potter fic, and it's pretty disappointing that a historian of text-based entertainment doesn't recognize what's going on there.
posted by All hands bury the dead at 1:36 PM on June 4, 2021 [13 favorites]


Previously on Metafilter, from twenty years ago.

The General Index of Aristasian Elektraspace
posted by otherchaz at 2:23 PM on June 4, 2021


There's also a thread of transphobia throughout that is just outside of (my) peripheral vision,

Yes, and a dismissal of a particular strain of BDSM which is... not great?

On the other hand, they may have ridden that strain into fascism-adjacent territory, which, from 2021, I can’t overlook or forgive.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:10 PM on June 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


This is basically the game a younger offalark would have written, based on all the schlock sword and sorcery fiction she was reading in high school, if she'd had the will and the computing power to do so. I so wish this had gotten as wide a release as, say, the original SSI Pool of Radiance.
posted by offalark at 5:26 PM on June 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


This whole thing is so weird and fringe even for weird and fringe. It's not unlike stumbling into the Gorean fandom, which isn't any praise at all.

And I would wager a healthy sum that there were LOTS of spankings going on in weird, cultish disciplinary ways.

I remember some of my goth/industrial/drama Rocky Horror friends getting involved in some really weird, culty, seriously pushing the boundaries of LARPing with Vampire and what is generally considered "bloodlines" RP where people took a paper and pencil tabletop RPG way too seriously.

In hindsight I'm guessing there was some fucked up and dark shit going on with manipulative sex, abuse and/or assault going on. I know for sure there was weird blood play ritual stuff happening.
posted by loquacious at 8:04 PM on June 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


...so this wasn't actually an ARG?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:22 PM on June 4, 2021


Wow, talk about your rabbit hole. I would have eaten this sort of thing up if I’d been aware of it as an isolated young girl.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:48 PM on June 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


It has the prurient air of a cisgender man determined to discover what UNNATURAL ACTS OF SAPPHISTRY are being committed in a space that no one will let him into, harrumph!

for the record Aaron is cis but not het
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:44 AM on June 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


(by that I'm not intending to police your reaction to the article's tone or argue in general, just that as far as I'm aware he's completely comfortable with acts of sapphistry & with not being invited to them)
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:57 AM on June 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


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