the emotion i just experienced is kind of indescribable
the funniest part of this post to me is that the reblog:like ratio is nearly 1:1. nobody’s just liking everyone who sees this video goes yeah i gotta inflict it on as many people as possible
Anyway ultimately justifications based on “well that’s how it is in the setting” about stuff in any media will ring hollow if the criticism is approaching it not from the point of view of interrogating it through in-setting logic but from the point of view of an actual human being making a conscious decision to make it like that.
Like yeah we can sit and jerk off all day about how killing cultists is justified through in-game logic because they’re literally trying to make Hell real, but when viewed with even a modicum of media criticism you can maybe start to wonder why cultists are such a common villain in medieval fantasy gaming.
Similarly, yeah, sure, in-universe orcs may have been created by an evil god and that’s why they’re predisposed to evil, but given the already racialized portrayal of orcs in the source material they come from plus the game further adding the reading that they’re actually tribal savages, it suddenly puts into context some of the Fucked Up stuff that the author of the game said later in his life.
Anyway, none of this is to say that if you’re not constantly thinking about this or flagellating yourself while engaging with the game you’re somehow a bad human being, but like the stuff in fiction didn’t just emerge out of The Void but came to as a result of someone’s decision to dedicate it into the writing. Some people just enjoy thinking about this stuff in our free time, like I certainly do, and speaking for myself interrogating media like this rarely affects my ability to enjoy or engage with said media.
That’s right, when you said “let people enjoy things” to my post interrogating how D&D is Fucked Up, did you even stop to consider that maybe I enjoy being a hater?
i do wonder if some of this from the player side is an ouroboros of in game lore with law of the hammer in the mechanics
law of the hammer says, essentially, youre going to use the tools you have to solve the problems you have. if youre given a hammer, you’ll treat everything like a nail
its totally possible to represent antagonists in a nuanced, sympathetic, and culturally sensitive way. i know in my own 5e game i really lean on grey antagonists and complex moral situations. this is not always easy to do when the tools my players have are: Attack Thing. Cast (harmful) Spell Against Thing. Grapple Thing.
like, my players are great. they buy into the fiction, they care about the characters, they really chew on the emotional complexity of the situation. (my group is absolutely not playing dnd “right” but this game has been going for years and we’re branching into more systems now that were being exposed to more of them. we all met because of dimension 20 and you can tell with how we play.) but if my players actually want to Play The Game and not just do freeform roleplay, their options are very limited, and their actions are almost entirely Do Harm because thats what 95% of the mechanics of dnd center around
the lore as written is absolutely a problem, often revealing insidious real world biases and bigotry, either from the creator themself or the tropes theyre drawing on. but also, its very hard to subvert that in a game where your main tool of interaction is violence, and often violence with the intention of eventual death. in a different game with more peaceful mechanics for resolution, maybe presenting, like your example, cultists as an antagonist could be grappled with in a more nuanced way than “booming blade”. you would still be left with how the book itself represents these groups, but theres more you can do easily on a player side
idk i think the ludonarrative dissonance is really interesting with like. the kinds of stories that gaming groups want to tell and then the systems theyre trying to use to tell those stories. which is a much bigger conversation that people love have their head in the sand about but. yeah!! law of the hammer!!
When your genocidal warmongering colonialist imperialistic buff butch milf wolf mom wants you to join your home country’s military industrial complex but you’re too busy being artdeco steampunk fenty beauty mogul diplomat goddess with a buff latino-adjacent boytoy who has a situationship with a sad eastern European 90’s heroine-chic machine herald Czech hunter twink boyfriend
i’ve talked a bit about how musical beetlejuice and lydia share this weird synchronicity beyond the obvious parallels (yknow being invisible and all) that i think are what makes them stand out to me. born to be best frenemies forever. this is what makes them go toe-to-toe. she’s not afraid of him, she can match him easily.
classic bait and switch. oldest trick in the book
all of this is without including them goofing around and scaring the neighbors during That Beautiful Sound like they share the same brain btw. peep the choreo in Beautiful Sound, i hadn’t noticed they even match THAT until recently
