At the Coronation of Yoan and Eórann, the Trimarian Cooks' Guild presented His Majesty with a gift of his weight in rice, as tribute to his Korean heritage. Yoan, having fun with them, decreed that his Herald (a stout man, and tall) would stand in for him on the balance. Hilarity ensued, especially as the Guild didn't have nearly enough rice.

Recently, upon the Trimarian cooks' mailing list, someone was asserting that the gag had terribly offended His Majesty; rice was very important to Orientals, not a laughing matter, yadda yadda yadda. I found that a little hard to believe, since he'd been laughing about it afterwards. Karen responded to the poster asking if they were sure that he was offended, or if they were just assuming that he was. (I use the grammatically incorrect plural pronoun because I can't tell the poster's gender from his or her name.)

Somebody else leapt to the original poster's defense, saying that the original poster was the event's autocrat, and therefore was in a position to know, no reason to doubt their word, blah blah blah.

So I called Their Majesties and asked. I spoke directly to Her Majesty. No, he wasn't displeased or offended, she said; as a matter of fact, he was rather amused by it.

That's one of the problems with the SCA (well, in Trimaris, at any rate). Rumors fly around willy-nilly, but rather than actually speaking to the individuals involved, people accept the rumors as gospel truth; very rarely do people in the SCA ever take pains to hear both sides of a story before judging someone. For an organization that burbles about its commitment to courtesy and chivalry, many of its members are pretty damned quick to act unjustly.