How is changed the Moshi clan after entered in the Mantis Clan?

If I've understood correctly, be a matriarchal clan means that males count nothing and all power belongs to females for birthright, but now Moshi males can reach higher status with the rest of the Mantis clan, has this lead to a crisis in the Moshi clan? A Moshi male cant be a shugenja in his clan, even if his blood allows it, for example.

Or its isolation has prevent such changes?

I thought these questions after reading about Daphne (Anima Beyond Fantasy), where the roles of males and females are totally inverted, so females have the power but also they do hard and risky jobs.

First, understand that since you are dealing with the Mantis-- nothing can make sense.

The Mantis Clan really shouldn't exist as it is presented.

The Moshi were literally a group of shugenja that were overseeing one tiny little village on the coast in the mountains that pretty much everyone had forgotten existed. Yes, they were matriarchal... there were also only a couple dozen members.

The Tsuruichi were even worse, they literally consisted of 1 guy and his 6 retainers. They had literally just been dubbed a family a few years before. They probably shouldn't have even had a proper school since Tsuruichi had clearly been trained by someone else and none of his retainers had been trained by him, so there was no possible way they could have set up some sort of unique school with its own special traditions... yet they remain the only skilled archers in all of the land within the RPG because of the screwy school system.

Honestly, it was only because these families were given names and it was decided that Yoritomo's Alliance/the Mantis Clan was made a Great Clan and those were a couple of the actual named families that were part of it-- so instantly the membership of their family was retconned to be probably more than 50x what it had previously been. We are supposed to believe this happened by just untold numbers of Mantis Clan members swearing fealty to those families rather than the Yoritomo family, but... really... even as the largest Minor Clan, there never should have been remotely enough Mantis Clan members to equal the size of a single Great Clan family. Yet, somehow, after the Mantis Clan literally split themselves into thirds to fill out those families that had very few previous members, their actual size didn't seem to shrink at all as a result. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, just appeared out of the ether and grew those families to rival Great Clan families instantaneously.

Point is, that up until the Mantis Clan was made a Great Clan and their membership was retconned in a single generation to suddenly be as large as any other Great Clan family, there were so few Centipede Clan members that you could write the name of every single member who had ever been part of the clan and you could fit it all onto one page with about 3 columns. And that would be everyone who had ever been part of the clan.

With a group that small, not much could be said about their traditions. They probably had the freedom to deal with everything on a case-by-case basis. That being said, given that they were described as a clan of female fire shugenja, it is reasonable to suspect that there were almost no male shugenja in their entire history (which, again, we aren't even talking among 150 people spread across several generations).

But once their family suddenly jumped to 50x its previous size within a couple years without any really good explanation, they clearly allows males to be shugenja. While it is understood that much like the Matsu and Utaku they actively discriminate against males to a degree no clan discriminates against females (one of those odd things that popped up in so many RPGs in the 90s where you remove sexual discrimination as much as possible from something and then put in sexual discrimination against men in one family or clan or tribe or nation), it quite clearly isn't to nearly the same degree as the Utaku or Matsu.... or, just as likely, someone forgot that the Moshi were supposed to be a female-first family when making the artwork and character names and ended up accidentally printing male Moshi shugenja and just kept doing it.

But, again, whatever Matriarchal traditions existed within the comparatively tiny group that had called themselves Centipede Clan before their time was probably completely nullified when they had just a massive influx of adult members who had their own training and background and traditions so that the Moshi had to ultimately adjust and be much more like the Mantis who now made up the vast overwhelming majority of their family.

You are right! I completely forgot about the Utaku! (In a game where authors take space in the core book to tell me that there are no gender discriminations!)

A lot of what the previous posters says goes against canon, so I guess I should try to clarify that.

The Moshi were literally a group of shugenja that were overseeing one tiny little village on the coast in the mountains that pretty much everyone had forgotten existed. Yes, they were matriarchal... there were also only a couple dozen members.

They have been around for centuries, why would they be only a few dozens ? The Atlas shows their valley to be bigger in size than the entire Otosan Uchi and its 4 villages, and description make it way more resourceful than the Suzume hills.

The Tsuruichi were even worse, they literally consisted of 1 guy and his 6 retainers. They had literally just been dubbed a family a few years before. They probably shouldn't have even had a proper school since Tsuruichi had clearly been trained by someone else and none of his retainers had been trained by him, so there was no possible way they could have set up some sort of unique school with its own special traditions... yet they remain the only skilled archers in all of the land within the RPG because of the screwy school system.

I have to ignore the school problem, which is sadly a result of 2nd edition and can't be fixed now. Tsuruchi trained Mukami, his own sensei, for example. He took over the castle with over twenty followers and had been actively recruiting ronins since. Their family was a few dozens by the time of the founding of the Yoritomo's alliance and they have been recruiting massively once it started (not before, before they did hire ronins to create the blade of the wasp ronin group but they weren't members of the clan, the clan allowed only a handful to join per year).

Honestly, it was only because these families were given names and it was decided that Yoritomo's Alliance/the Mantis Clan was made a Great Clan and those were a couple of the actual named families that were part of it-- so instantly the membership of their family was retconned to be probably more than 50x what it had previously been. We are supposed to believe this happened by just untold numbers of Mantis Clan members swearing fealty to those families rather than the Yoritomo family, but... really... even as the largest Minor Clan, there never should have been remotely enough Mantis Clan members to equal the size of a single Great Clan family. Yet, somehow, after the Mantis Clan literally split themselves into thirds to fill out those families that had very few previous members, their actual size didn't seem to shrink at all as a result. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, just appeared out of the ether and grew those families to rival Great Clan families instantaneously.

Again, the Phoenix, the Scorpion and the Lion all had this number-boosting at the same actual period. But strangely, you don't mention it. It was forced because they didn't do a timejump then and the clans were supposed to be able to continue to fight the War Against the Shadow with nearly full sized armies, despite Clan Wars supposedly nearly depleted them all. But they do mention that the Mantis started a politics of increasing the rate of any samurai having over three children (it mentions a lot got up to seven) after said war. The only other clan mentioned to have a high birthrate during that time period was the Unicorn (with 3-5 kids per couple), which strangely was also the clan who had lost the less people. This problem had been recurrent due to the CCG storylines, the stories describing a mortality rate that should have forced two generations of high rate births to compensate yet never doing so. The Yoritomo had two advantages : they were a bigger family than some great clan families and they hired every able-bodied ronin they found. That sure swelled their numbers, yet they were the second-to-last clan in number (only the Phoenix was smaller, as per the numbers given around masters of).

But, again, whatever Matriarchal traditions existed within the comparatively tiny group that had called themselves Centipede Clan before their time was probably completely nullified when they had just a massive influx of adult members who had their own training and background and traditions so that the Moshi had to ultimately adjust and be much more like the Mantis who now made up the vast overwhelming majority of their family.

According to Secret of the Mantis, the male shugenjas were nearly all trained up in the Yoritomo shugenja school, and males overall tried to increase in rank position in the Mantis clan, not the Moshi family themselves. The ronin band that protected the Moshi was absorbed as a vassal family, but their status didn't increased and all the important social position of the family were left to the females. In the Matsu and Moshi families, the female were given the highest position, but no oppression existed : males were allowed to have everything they aimed for in the overall clan itself. The matriarchal part was mostly a question of stuff like who inherited, who took which name and so on. The three matriarchal families reversed the social roles (the husband stayed at home and was in charge of the money for example) but weren't oppressing the males more than any females were oppressed in any other families. But it's true that the males reaching higher position in the great clan armies created problems with the status of some of the shugenjas, and a cultural clash existed. But again, being absorbed did some cultural clash with everyone.

You try to clarify but now I'm more confused.

In the Matsu and Moshi families, the female were given the highest position, but no oppression existed : males were allowed to have everything they aimed for in the overall clan itself. The matriarchal part was mostly a question of stuff like who inherited, who took which name and so on. The three matriarchal families reversed the social roles (the husband stayed at home and was in charge of the money for example) but weren't oppressing the males more than any females were oppressed in any other families. But it's true that the males reaching higher position in the great clan armies created problems with the status of some of the shugenjas, and a cultural clash existed. But again, being absorbed did some cultural clash with everyone.

Females have higher status by birthright without oppressing the males...this seems to me a little contradictory.

The matriarchal families reversed the social roles without oppressing the males members, but there are several examples in other clans where females reach the same status and have the same duties of males, so, where are this "frequent exceptions" in matriarchal families?

In the last sentence you wrote that there are in fact some cultural clashes like I have immaginated, but I don't understand how harsh they are.

For example, are the females of Utaku family trying to prevent their males reach higher status within the rest of Kirin clan?

Thanks for your time.

You try to clarify but now I'm more confused.

In the Matsu and Moshi families, the female were given the highest position, but no oppression existed : males were allowed to have everything they aimed for in the overall clan itself. The matriarchal part was mostly a question of stuff like who inherited, who took which name and so on. The three matriarchal families reversed the social roles (the husband stayed at home and was in charge of the money for example) but weren't oppressing the males more than any females were oppressed in any other families. But it's true that the males reaching higher position in the great clan armies created problems with the status of some of the shugenjas, and a cultural clash existed. But again, being absorbed did some cultural clash with everyone.

Females have higher status by birthright without oppressing the males...this seems to me a little contradictory.

The matriarchal families reversed the social roles without oppressing the males members, but there are several examples in other clans where females reach the same status and have the same duties of males, so, where are this "frequent exceptions" in matriarchal families?

In the last sentence you wrote that there are in fact some cultural clashes like I have immaginated, but I don't understand how harsh they are.

For example, are the females of Utaku family trying to prevent their males reach higher status within the rest of Kirin clan?

Thanks for your time.

Females in matriarchal families don't have higher status. Traditional hereditary families ruled by females have. They have been Matsu male clan champions, showing you that even with the reversed roles and such, they can achieve the top status. It's just the highest positions are usually reserved to the females in those families (the Scorpion had the Bayushi ruled by males until Kachiko, so you can see that they were some gender distinctions), meaning the Moshi family daimyo and master sensei will always be female. And the female Utaku aren't preventing anything from their male counterpart (but to ride the Otaku steed, and that just because the steeds themselves don't allow it... Not because of any tradition or taboo, just the way the ancient deal was made) and many males have become high status officers in the clan itself. And it's the Unicorn clan, since the actual Otaku steed weren't around until really late into the history of the Ki-rin clan, it's likely the Ki-rin as a clan never had to deal with this problem. The cultural clashes from what we saw are barely existing for the Otaku and the Matsu, but they were described as important for the Moshi. Important, meaning that they came along a lot of time and created tensions, not harsh because they were no outbursts of violence ever mentioned about it.

So...males in Utaku and Moshi can gain status and power only if they left their families, because their families are traditionaly ruled by females and so males can't became part of the elite, while in the other clans, there is no gender restriction at all, or very little restrictions like in the Matsu family and in the Bee clan.

And for the Utakus, they really try to prevent the males gain status with the rest of the clan and enter in other school (page 241 The Great Clans - I've just checked), and the Utaku mounted infantry has an inferior status in the family.

In the Bee clan the only restriction is that the chief of the clan is a female, but this doesn't seems a strong tradition.

The Mastu family is usualy led by a female, but if there are not female heirs, a male will be choose instead (page 118 The Great Clans); also, they have a sole female unit, but still males are free to advance equally in other schools and they can gain status and power also in their family.

So, back to the Moshi, you point out that the cultural crisis is stronger there than in other clans, so now I really think that males are even more limited than in Utaku faily.

At the very beginning of L5R, Rokugan was a patriarchal society in a way much similar to Medieval Japan. To compensate, they created matriarchal families for female characters.

Not long after, they scrapped much of the sexism in the setting, but kept the matriarchal families. They also tried to tone down the disparity between males and females in these familiies, but ended up with a weird system in which it is unclear how everything works

A lot of what the previous posters says goes against canon, so I guess I should try to clarify that.

....

They have been around for centuries, why would they be only a few dozens ? The Atlas shows their valley to be bigger in size than the entire Otosan Uchi and its 4 villages, and description make it way more resourceful than the Suzume hills.

......

I have to ignore the school problem, which is sadly a result of 2nd edition and can't be fixed now. Tsuruchi trained Mukami, his own sensei, for example. He took over the castle with over twenty followers and had been actively recruiting ronins since. Their family was a few dozens by the time of the founding of the Yoritomo's alliance and they have been recruiting massively once it started (not before, before they did hire ronins to create the blade of the wasp ronin group but they weren't members of the clan, the clan allowed only a handful to join per year).

.....

Again, the Phoenix, the Scorpion and the Lion all had this number-boosting at the same actual period. But strangely, you don't mention it. It was forced because they didn't do a timejump then and the clans were supposed to be able to continue to fight the War Against the Shadow with nearly full sized armies, despite Clan Wars supposedly nearly depleted them all. But they do mention that the Mantis started a politics of increasing the rate of any samurai having over three children (it mentions a lot got up to seven) after said war. The only other clan mentioned to have a high birthrate during that time period was the Unicorn (with 3-5 kids per couple), which strangely was also the clan who had lost the less people. This problem had been recurrent due to the CCG storylines, the stories describing a mortality rate that should have forced two generations of high rate births to compensate yet never doing so. The Yoritomo had two advantages : they were a bigger family than some great clan families and they hired every able-bodied ronin they found. That sure swelled their numbers, yet they were the second-to-last clan in number (only the Phoenix was smaller, as per the numbers given around masters of).

....

According to Secret of the Mantis, the male shugenjas were nearly all trained up in the Yoritomo shugenja school, and males overall tried to increase in rank position in the Mantis clan, not the Moshi family themselves. The ronin band that protected the Moshi was absorbed as a vassal family, but their status didn't increased and all the important social position of the family were left to the females. In the Matsu and Moshi families, the female were given the highest position, but no oppression existed : males were allowed to have everything they aimed for in the overall clan itself. The matriarchal part was mostly a question of stuff like who inherited, who took which name and so on. The three matriarchal families reversed the social roles (the husband stayed at home and was in charge of the money for example) but weren't oppressing the males more than any females were oppressed in any other families. But it's true that the males reaching higher position in the great clan armies created problems with the status of some of the shugenjas, and a cultural clash existed. But again, being absorbed did some cultural clash with everyone.

Okay, to break this down....

First, a valley being bigger than a city hardly matters. First, a city is supposed by all the land around it. Second, Otosan Uchi in particular is the central government. You clearly forgot that samurai are an aristocratic class. They are not the average citizen. In the city where the central government is, you are going to have it filled with bureaucratic, officials, magistrates, priests and officers-- those who make up the samurai class.

Not every single person living in those small mountain villages, regardless of whether they could theoretically produce food, was a member of the samurai caste. Not even 1/100th of them were and since they started with a tiny handful of members, less than 10, and there was no particular pressure for them to ever expand beyond that-- there is no reason to think they had. In fact, being matriarchal pretty much guarantees they never would. The original depiction of them in the 1s Edition Minor Clans book made it very clear that they were an insignificant tiny little family that was hardly worth any note. Moreover, even if the valley could potentially be productive, it means very little given that it is invariably described as an isolated location-- meaning that even if potentially the peasants could grow more food than they could eat by a significant margin, there are no traders moving in and out and getting them all the other supplies they would have needed to prosper. Yes, once they hooked up with Yoritomo and joined the Mantis Clan, that only would have increased their productivity and there is still no reason to think a family where women are apparently doing all the real work is also going to have all of its women constantly pregnant throughout their lives. Seriously-- the whole reason to have women in the household taking care of the household is if you figure they are going to be pregnant as often as not and therefore having them perform any other duties would mean having those duties constantly interrupted for year-long stretches, perhaps as often as every year. If women have the power and are doing the real work, then you can be certain their clan is never going to expand rapidly regardless of potential wealth flow.

Similarly-- Tsuruichi was just one guy. Literally one guy. And I am pretty certain I recall the Wasp Clan originally being stated to be precisely 7 members. Even if after he started giving his name away to every Ichiro, Tetsu and Ryousuke who wandered into his camp, the idea that literally within a single generation that 7 expanded to hundreds is really ridiculous. And, also, note that once again there would be no unified Tsuruichi school since you are proposing that most of its members consist of pretrained Ronin and Mantis Clan members. It doesn't much matter how high the birthrate supposedly was-- these were people actively engaged in life of death battles who are starting with half a dozen members. Even if every single last one miraculously had 7 children and none of them died, the next generation would only be 49. And past that first generation, I think it has been a pretty solid block of maybe 100 years of **** hitting the empire that would have cost lives at least as fast as anyone could be born and trained.

On the other hand... where exactly are all these tens of thousands of "Ronin" coming from that keep filling out all these minor clans that pop up with ever more frequency? We never see people being disbarred from their birth clans by the tens of thousands, but again and again it almost seems like there are more ronin running around than proper clan samurai-- and given that be definition, no ronin should be able to live out a full life or have children because they have no household, no income and no food supply.... do you suppose when Rokugani say "Ronin" it is really codeword for "Peasants"? If all these Ronin were really just drawn from the ranks of Ashigaru, it would explain so very much. It would mean much of Rokugani society is a complete fabrication, but it is kind of the only viable explanation. I guess in times of peace they can hold the caste system up as absolute and inviolable, but once a war breaks out and they start running out of proper officers... well, as long as it is all kept secret....

Now, I don't know about the Phoenix, Scorpion or Lion seeing anywhere near that sort of growth. The Scorpion were exiled, but for the most part it was depicted as them all leaving pretty peacefully and only the Champion's elite special forces who infiltrated the palace and killed the sitting Emperor and his family who were killed off. The Scorpion's children were all adopted by the Crane so only the adults had to survive in the desert and it was depicted that they did pretty well out there. When they returned, they returned about as large as they were before they left and their children were returned to them. All in all, the Scorpion were pretty much spared any serious casualties during the Clan Wars because despite them being the inciting factor, they got to avoid all the serious fighting all together.

The Akodo family disbanded... and its return may not have made any sense, but disbanding the Akodo name did not mean executing every last person who was Akodo. They just didn't have a name for a while. It is understood that when the Lying Shadow was named Akodo, somehow transforming all of the ninja into Lion Clan members through... weird plot convenience that has hardly ever been brought up or mentioned again... that the name was valid again and former members rejoined. And, yes, the family did kind of have a civil war... but nonetheless, there was no indication that the clan had ever been reduced to a mere 100 or less standing members. And while the Phoenix, or rather the Isawa, did suffer due to the black scrolls, that again was not an extinction-level event that nearly wiped out the whole clan... and it was mad very clear that they reconstituted by making a big open invitation for all shugenja from across the Empire to come and join their clan.

So none of them are comparable to the Wasp's "There are exactly 7 members" and then within a generation "There are between 500 to 2000 members" or the Centipede's jump from between 60-100 to similarly vast numbers in a single generation.

But, you do bring up an interesting point in regards to how the male Moshi could be trained...

The Yoritomo family seems to stand alone in having a Bushi school, a Courtier school and a Shugenja school to its name. Probably solely due to contrivance, if we are honest. It is entirely possible that all depicted male Moshi were trained in the Yoritomo Shugenja school.

Exept the fact that, if it's worth of mention that the cultural clash is stronger in Moshi family (even than Utaku family), I don't think it's common finding a male Moshi trained in whatever school, unless he is fortunate enough to marry outside his family with a wife of higher status.

Also, I don't think the Moshi family can easily find really interesting husbands for their daughters, since the family discourages the females to marry higher status samurai (page 41 Emerald Empire). So why a samurai would marry a Moshi? It's a minor family, he would no gain ever status or power and even his family wuoldn't gain much to me, giving away one of their member. In the end, to methe Moshi daughters are prize only for starving ronins. [Ok, maybe I'm too extreme here]

We know that even Matsu discourage the females to marry samurai of higher status, but for an outsider, to enter in the Matsu family is not a total block to the career and even his family could gain something of tangible; however, we know NOTHING about the males. We can speculate that they have minor restrictions about the marriage, but this not written anywhere.

The Utaku are the champions of sexism: males can't enter in other schools, females can't marry higher status samurai, probably even males can't marry outside their clan with other females of the samurai caste.

As pointed by Tetsuhiko, the actual situation is confusing, and this is a problem in game with a great component on social interaction.

In the 1200 in Japan there were less sexism than in 1700, why the authors didn't choose that time to gain inspiration, why?