This is something I poke at from time to time.
Is a waltz a waltz, or is it "a particular type of dance which has similar social (and physical?) characteristics and meaning to an early-21st-century waltz"?
I incline towards saying it's the EVE-universe equivalent of a waltz, not that humans waltzed through 20,000 years. I use "waltz" as a convenient package which sums up a huge amount of information, helps set the scene and allows us to concentrate on other aspects of the interaction. That means that in my RP a waltz might indeed look like a waltz, just as there are strands of Gallente art dance which I describe in terms of current ballet and Isadora-Duncan-style free dance. I want to use the resonances those have: to be able to compare ballet school with RMS basic training, for instance. So there are times when I translate, using modern terms to stand in for their EVE equivalents.
(This is just one thing I do, alongside extrapolation and invention. We have lots of tools in our RP toolboxes. It's fun to give them a workout.)
One of the reasons for using current RL words and concepts is to allow us to extrapolate based on what we know and assume. If someone's a confident dancer -- or not -- that suggests things about their background and personality. If someone's hand is slipping too low, that tells me something that doesn't need huge amounts of explanation. On the whole, I find this very useful.
I think a problem comes when we have different RL assumptions about things and we then draw different conclusions about the significance of an action.
So, for instance, a chain of thought might go "They're waltzing; waltzing is French; French is the stand-in we use for Gallentean; other stuff here is pinging my Gallente-dar: These people are doing Gallente stuff! Soon they'll be doing market research and voting on things!".
I might respond saying "I think they're using 'waltz' to stand on for some sort of formal partner dance: I always thought of the Amarrians as doing minuets, myself", or I might say "Dude, waltzing is German".
I don't think it's a bad thing to derive what you think an action means from assumptions about what's described: given how little canon we have and how much of that is debatable, and how rich our RP lives and relationships can be, I think we need to extrapolate a fair bit. I do think it's awkward when either our assumptions or the layers we build on them turn out to be different, and sometimes opposed.
Sometimes we can work that out by talking about it. Sometimes we just shrug and say "we do things differently in my clan/alliance/planet/polity" or "science must have advanced: isn't that wonderful". Sometimes some pilots end up thinking other pilots are mad, deceived or lying because they insist on things that clearly cannot be so. (That last one can lead to heartache and schisms. Classic bones of contention would be flying pod-ships without a pod, and whether it's possible to provide back-ups of crew.)
No big conclusion here. This is a pattern I see often. Mostly it works okay-to-well. Sometimes it doesn't. Maybe watch for it and think about it.
Author
Topic: Dance and Culture Shift in New eden (Read 5270 times)