The curse of satire ...

Is that sometimes you don't quite hit your mark. After two very smart men have both said that they found the last post rather unrealistic, I'm clarifying that the previous post included satire. The good peer is not something anyone can actually be all the time, or even most of the time. We do have days when we are out on those limbs and being amazing in our eptitude, but they're very occasional.

The good peer bits are there to represent an end-point, and while some of it is a good goal for normal behaviour, such as the ability to take criticism and the gift of giving it gently and supportively, most of it would make you into a git.

Mynabird, who is as smart as she is lovely, wrote a great post on her great costuming LJ that picked up on the reason for the satire, which is that there genuinely are people out there who expect peers to have no life outside the SCA. They get cranky when knights go home at a reasonable hour because they have to get up for work in the morning. They are outraged when laurels they barely know say they can't spend the next three hours patterning a frock for them and talking them through the construction. They are appalled that a pelican won't run their event for them. They are especially outraged that the same knights they have just been slagging off don't want to be mobile pells for them to practice on (and I increasingly have sympathy for why some heavies are slapped out of the way seconds after lay on is called in tournies and wars, also why some knights direct their light infantry to shoot particular people, even if they're on their side.)

So, I failed in part of my mission, but at least no-one's read it and said "Yes! for the love of bunnies! Why aren't there more selfless peers like that?" Because then I'd have been forced to reveal that while I try and restrict myself to bad, I am quite capable of evil.