It was really fun being able to trade stories back and forth and I really hope people enjoyed the translations I did to make them fit into the setting of Rokugan! I've got a nice big book of Slavic fairy tales and fables (stuff compiled together equivalent to the Grimm stuff for those countries) that I thought would make for some great storytelling to share if I could translate them well! I'll say this about Slavic stories though: while hopefully I managed to make some enjoyable reads for folks out of a couple classics, there are some other ones that I flipped through and looked over as potential options that for one reason or another I knew I couldn't make them work, and generally they fell into the following:
- Waaaaaaaay too long (these were campfire stories I shared, not big long epics, and I was in no way going to dump 30-45 minutes of reading-text that everyone would skip past anyways just on sheer length)
- Way too abrupt of endings (sometimes these stories are super quick in order to teach a lesson, usually one I didn't find appropriate for campfire sharing since the lesson likely wasn't applicable or was at least unrelated to discussion going on in that moment)
- Has Christian icons and themes (either Catholic or Orthodox depending on which country the story came from) that were too ingrained into the story that it would have been impossible to translate into Rokugan and have them still mean anything
To start out, Miyako wasn't as Kami-skeptic as some in the Chinsei. She didn't jump all-in with the half that signed up with the Scorpion, but she wasn't opposed either and would at least listen and learn for a while, and that I tried to capture both in her background as well as how she came off to folks. I think in talking to folks like Umeno (specifically about Scorpion stuff since the Chinsei somewhat leaned that way) as well as folks like you (about them in general but Dragon in particular) and Ayumu (about some of them in particular, them in general, and stuff in his background as to why he joined when much of the Isawa do not) she's definitely very much open to joining and serving a clan-tribe and the Kami.
Her hang-up throughout the journey ended up not being really her but her big worry about what happens to the rest of the Chinsei and not wanting not only her but her tribe to be left behind in the New World as she saw it. She really likes her tribe-family but recognizes that there's a lot of change afoot and saw the fact that they were still around whereas many tribes had almost wholly joined a clan already as a Really Big Problem that maybe she needed to solve. By the end of this journey and all her interactions, she walks home with two things in mind: that she has a Voice and can use it to discuss and persuade in the Chinsei and help lead them into the future, and if not that then that she is not beholden to the whims of her tribal leadership like she thinks she is and can very well make her own choice if it comes to it: a lot of her village-cousins did, after all, so why couldn't she if she thought it was the right thing to do?
Does she actually join one, though? On her own? Convince the remaining Chinsei to join one? Well... goals are still in the works. We'll see.