I like to refrain from posting in the out of roleplay sections of this cesspool that has been advertised as a community forum. But I feel I simply must speak my mind on a few matters that I have read, observed and meditated on over the past few weeks.
To preface what I am about to say I would like to present what has culminated in me being motivated to share my current thoughts and address this as being what it is.
I have seen multiple people try and fail to rationally explain why the Blood Dragons are best represented as being what they are in vanilla. So I will summarize this succinctly. The Blood Dragons in Freelancer are a product of centuries of evolution, a faction born due to internal strife very early into the game's history. They are introduced to us as being the descendants of the now long dead Shogun's royal guard. A faction that has now become a tightly knit rebellion rather than an organization still rooted in the structure of a now long defunct Government that none of them were alive to be witness to.
I see repeated counterarguments to these contentions by people such as @Jayenbee who state "evolution" as being natural and necessary for factions to continue surviving in the game's universe. And I agree, but then why does the faction decide to devolve into what the faction evolved away from being in the first place? I understand fresh perspectives and approaches are necessary, but the days of the Dragons serving a Shogunate drew to a close centuries ago. And they have in the centuries since then evolved into being a rebellion against a Government they view as illegitimate. There is much political intrigue to be had from that narrative, particularly if the aspect of support from Kusari's highest positions of power were developed upon by the story team as being secretly sympathetic to the cause. As it was suggested in rumors from the base game. But somewhat tragically, the people entrusted with an unwarranted level of power over this representative faction that bears the same name, are more inclined to see the faction regress into being a thing that it very much evolved away from over hundreds of years.
To elucidate what I mean here is a summarized timeline:
The Royal Guard refuse to surrender - > They flee to Chugoku - > They spend centuries slowly reorganizing and readying themselves to fight what they perceive as an internal enemy - > They shift away from simply being remnants of the old royal guard - > They become a tightly knit group of master-less warriors and rebels - > They then ultimately seek to install a more Democratic and left leaning iteration of the Government to defeat Samura's shogunate - > They are now rewritten as being barely literate thugs clinging to the idea of a Government that no longer exists and using the word "simp" in roleplay unironically.
I am therefore left to assume that what people like Jayenbee mean to say is that the faction has evolved to be canonically related to e-girl and simp culture rather than anything tangible or otherwise noteworthy in terms of the narrative. I will keep this in mind for all such future encounters to be had with the faction.
![[Image: JLeXUre.png?1]](https://i.imgur.com/JLeXUre.png?1)