mods are asleep, post opinions on the value of diversity in SCA Crowns 🌶

Why does it matter that this crown happened?

Know that even though I’m not pulling punches I say this with love: The SCA has spent the vast majority of its 60 years as an overgrown and ahistorical party hosted by science fiction authors who fetishized western Europe, bolted to a 501c3 so we can get liability insurance and better event sites. It is only in the relatively recent past that it has started to successfully fulfill its mission and become an education-focused group interested in the material reality of pre-17th-century life. One example of this: we only removed Western Europe as a primary area of focus in our mission statement in 2020: https://www.sca.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020-07-19-Proposed-Change-to-Corpora-Introduction.pdf. There is no real reason for us to have ever had, or to today stick with (pun intended), the tradition of rattan armored combat to determine a king. It’s fun to have some sort of hierarchy and to give each other awards I guess? But this shapes us in all kinds of counterproductive ways. Do I think that expanding just ever so slightly into how you can be appointed to the crown will meaningfully change the bad parts? Honestly, probably not, even though as a rapier fighter who isn’t OK with taking the personal physical risks of armored combat I’m thrilled to maybe someday compete by my own hand for the throne. It’s more a stopgap and a a symbolic victory in the war towards building the Known World I want to see. If we can do this with just cracking the door of change a tiny bit, imagine what we could do if we threw it wide open!

What do I want to see next?

Two main things would happen in my dream world:

  1. We should take ourselves seriously as a LARP and completely separate in-game considerations (who is crown) from out-of-game considerations (how we handle harassment complaints and kingdom-level governance documents).

  2. In-game, we should have a crown who ascends the throne both for their peer-like qualities, and via means which everyone has a reasonable chance to attain.

Out-of-game considerations should be entirely out-of-game

It is not OK that the primary determinant for whether a harassment complaint successfully leads to denial of attendance at a regional level is the approval and public announcement of it by someone whose only qualification is that they’re good at niche martial arts. I can list several examples of this going extremely poorly in my local community. There are approximately zero guardrails at scale in the SCA to ensure a kingdom will end up with someone who even tries to have the best interests of their regional community at heart, much less succeeds with their actions at improving their group. When it happens, it’s because we got lucky.

In-game crowns should be our best, and should be attainable by all of us

The most common rebuttal to alternative crown formats that I’ve heard is, effectively, “we could elect crowns if we wanted, or just pick a member at random to be crown, but that would miss the magic and joy of it”. I disagree that our current method is meaningfully better than picking someone at random from those who sign up to compete. Personally, if it were up to me, I would require all crown entrants to enter by submitting a two to five page proposal for the theme of their reign, covering items such as: what parts of history they’re interested in addressing and recreating with their consort, what they want people to learn from it, what they will do to engage their populace, who will support them, and so on. After that, of everyone who is a paid member and writes at least two pages at 12pt font, they can be elected, we can pick one from a hat, we can do whatever feels suitably joyful and magical to people who care more about that. (I personally think we should pick a top 8 or 16 by populace vote and then do subsequent rounds as random draws.) We can hold the champions tournaments day-of after we pick from the hat if we want to watch some niche martial arts.