Jhelom - Another festival hath come and gone - the Festival of the Ivory Tusks. This particular festival involves celebrating our domination over the creatures of the land. It sounds innocent enough, does it not? But in truth t’is less a celebration than a mere excuse to watch and join in the wholesale slaughter of animals and monsters. Animals and monsters that hath undoubtedly suffered capture and confinement, and now face a fight to the death.

    Pizza, cake, breads, ale, wine, and such accompany the riotous display. Shouts of encouragement as one creature fights another quickly turn to squeals of pleasure at its death. The wail of pain from a wounded creature is drowned by the roar of eager spectators relishing its desperate fight to survive. A fight that will continue mere seconds later if by some almost cruel twist of fate the creature does manage to survive its first battle. And the brawl continues again, and again until at last the animal collapses in final and painful defeat.

    By the end of the festival, the spectators become participants – falling upon the pinned creatures with sword, axe, and magic. In the ensuing chaos, it becomes difficult to discern who is the monster and who is the human. Truly, instead of being a celebration of our dominance over creatures, this festival quickly becomes a violent dance where we descend to the level of those we claim to be dominant over.

    Perhaps a different way to celebrate our supposed dominance would be to have a contest where those who enter would need to find and tame some type of rare or hard to find creature. Another contest could be to tame a fierce and dangerous creature of the wild and lead it to town. These acts would show our true dominance by the strength of our will rather than of our swords.

From the Town Cryer - The Journal of Ultima Online, Thursday, Mar 5