So yesterday I talked about racial diversity in Lumberjills, and today I'm doing a thread on telling queer stories with the game. First we need to talk about history games vs. historical fantasy games. A very long 🧵...
A history game invites players to explore history as it existed - it gives them the opportunity to step into the past, live there for a bit, & learn something about it. A historical fantasy game gives players access to the past & invites them to recreate it or remake it.
The awesome @genesisoflegend started a thread a few days ago to dig into why Lumberjills might not be funding as fast as expected. Somebody mentioned that the campaign read as offputtingly white and heteronormative - so I wanted to talk about that.
The whole reason that I created War Birds is because I wanted to reveal and spotlight the obscured and buried histories of women - a desire that very much extends to all women intersectionally.
I take this so seriously that I once threw out an entire Factory Girls game when I learned about the Western Electric hate strike of 1943 where white women discovering economic freedom in factory work went on strike to prevent a Black woman from joining their line.
But it is a truth that some historical times and places are just... overwhelmingly white. The Women's Timber Corps was one such place. I looked hard to find evidence of diversity in the Corps itself, but if there was any, I just could not find it.
So admittedly, yes, if you go by the playable characters in the game, it is pretty white. But Lumberjills as a game is unique in that you don't just have a PC, you also play a host of suitors who are wooing the other Jills.
If you have seen my previous posts about where suitors in Lumberjills come from you start to see that the game is a little more intersectional that it appears at first glance.
Yesterday we posted about the Canadian Forestry Corps, and today we'll do the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit (NOFU)!
But isn't Newfoundland part of Canada? Not in WWII it wasn't!
Until 1949, Newfoundland was an autonomous dominion in the British Empire that, like other Commonwealth nations, Britain called upon for support in wartime. in both WWI and WWII Newfoundlanders responded to the call!
In WWI The Newfoundland Forestry Battalion numbered 500 jacks, and in WWII the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit surged to about 3600. Unlike the CFC, the NOFU was a civilian lumberjack unit - men who volunteered to go to Scotland for the duration of the war.
As part of their contract, the men were to be provided with $2/day plus board, lodging, bedding, tools and medical services. However at many of the camps, the jacks showed up to find they had to build their cabins themselves, with the wood that they harvested and milled.
As a civilian unit, NOFU jacks were often criticized for not doing the correct kind of service in the war (soldiering) but in reality the NOFU members often were serving because age, health, education or other requirements barred them from enlisting.