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Crion posted:Oh hey there, The Twisted Legacy of Roland Barthes. The greatest, most pernicious misunderstanding lazy English professors have ever perpetrated on their students is this idea that the 'death of the author' somehow makes every single reading of a text valid. What was the point of Death of the Author supposed to be, anyway? I never put that much stock in the theme park explanation because I think authorial intent and context kind of 'lights up' the material once you are aware of it, but maybe the real deal is more interesting.
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May 12, 2015 18:16
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GreenMetalSun posted:There's actually fiction in the game where elder Sidereals (one of whom is, you know, Kejak) casually chat about how they go around murdering new Exalts just to assess their fighting styles. Like, that is something they paid a person to write, and artist to make art for, an editor to lay out, and a publisher to print in the book because it was content they thought conveyed the tone of the game and was important. If they really were going to have a problem with people worrying about Sidereals teleport dropping them out of nowhere and didn't want players to think that would happen, maaaaaaybe they shouldn't have written about Sidereals doing it? Okay, now ask yourself how that fiction came to be there and we'll have come full circle.
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May 12, 2015 18:20
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Bedlamdan posted:Which book was this? 1E Dragon-Blooded, page 155. Ferrinus posted:Okay, now ask yourself how that fiction came to be there and we'll have come full circle. It was in there long before the fans got their hands on the game. It's a very, very poor choice for chapter fiction (see also the fiction where a guy talks about mote economy and turn order and combos), but it's not a case of fanon becoming canon.
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May 12, 2015 18:34
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GreenMetalSun posted:1E Dragon-Blooded, page 155. Have you got its actual text anywhere? I don't remember something so overt in the first Dragon-Blooded book. (Mote economy and combos were very much real things, though; you can find Grabowski writing on the topic if you dig around) My suspicion is that that fiction's totally fine and merely looks like its' at odds with the game, because in actuality it's impossible for the Sidereals to catch more than a handful of fresh Exalts and the whole point is that when you make a character it's one who's already been stably Exalted for years, etc. If someone looks at it without actually taking the rest of the game into account, though, they'd acquire a warped impression of the setting that can most easily be corrected by, well, correcting it.
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May 12, 2015 18:49
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Transient People posted:What was the point of Death of the Author supposed to be, anyway? I never put that much stock in the theme park explanation because I think authorial intent and context kind of 'lights up' the material once you are aware of it, but maybe the real deal is more interesting. Death of the Author is when the Ex3 authors publish an Abyssal preview and then literally everybody but them reads it to have rape ghosts in it.
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May 12, 2015 18:53
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Ferrinus posted:Have you got its actual text anywhere? I don't remember something so overt in the first Dragon-Blooded book. (Mote economy and combos were very much real things, though; you can find Grabowski writing on the topic if you dig around) Not where it can be easily copied/pasted, but that's the point. Sidereals are busy people with a huge array of challenges facing them and they really can't take time off to scour the world for starting characters and insta-gib them. But then the books play up the Bronze/Gold rivalry as this hugely important thing (in Cult of the Illuminated it even notes that Gold Faction Sidereals will gladly hunt down and murder Solars who won't get on board with their planned golden age), don't have an especially good outline of what Sidereals are supposed to be doing, and have fiction about them going out and murdering young Exalts to compare fighting styles. Like, my sympathy for the writers shrieking 'you're doing it wroooooooooong' at the fandom and declaring people their 'enemies' is pretty low.
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May 12, 2015 19:02
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Roadie posted:Death of the Author is when the Ex3 authors publish an Abyssal preview and then literally everybody but them reads it to have rape ghosts in it. Nah, I get that, I meant what the academic definition was supposed to be. The Exalted thread is actually really good for learning useful and interesting stuff (see all those conversations about world cultures and colonialism, for example), so I figure it can't hurt to ask!
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May 12, 2015 19:16
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GreenMetalSun posted:Not where it can be easily copied/pasted, but that's the point. Sidereals are busy people with a huge array of challenges facing them and they really can't take time off to scour the world for starting characters and insta-gib them. But then the books play up the Bronze/Gold rivalry as this hugely important thing (in Cult of the Illuminated it even notes that Gold Faction Sidereals will gladly hunt down and murder Solars who won't get on board with their planned golden age), don't have an especially good outline of what Sidereals are supposed to be doing, and have fiction about them going out and murdering young Exalts to compare fighting styles. Like, my sympathy for the writers shrieking 'you're doing it wroooooooooong' at the fandom and declaring people their 'enemies' is pretty low. They are, though. You and I both know why Holok sparring with Kejak or whatever it was shouldn't actually be read as confirmation of omnipresent Sidereal hit squads. If it is, though, the game suffers, both in terms of having a community that frequently misrepresents it and in terms of actual poor writing down the line. I have no reason to doubt that the specific stories Lea told about newly-hired freelancers either incidentally or deliberately searing their misconceptions into canon happened. Transient People posted:Nah, I get that, I meant what the academic definition was supposed to be. The Exalted thread is actually really good for learning useful and interesting stuff (see all those conversations about world cultures and colonialism, for example), so I figure it can't hurt to ask! That's actually what it is. It's that the author might not, themselves, realize what it is they've written, and whether or not they did doesn't matter.
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May 12, 2015 19:27
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Ferrinus posted:That's actually what it is. It's that the author might not, themselves, realize what it is they've written, and whether or not they did doesn't matter. I do this all the time when I read other people's posts.
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May 12, 2015 19:43
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Ferrinus posted:That's actually what it is. It's that the author might not, themselves, realize what it is they've written, and whether or not they did doesn't matter. For a Real Literature™ example, look at Fahrenheit 451 and how Bradbury went over time from saying it was about censorship to saying it was about mass media being too powerful. The book never changed, and Bradbury changing his mind about it didn't suddenly invalidate any readings of it he disagreed with.
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May 12, 2015 20:03
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Ferrinus posted:I have no reason to doubt that the specific stories Lea told about newly-hired freelancers either incidentally or deliberately searing their misconceptions into canon happened. Okay, but isn't Lea the one who gave us the Three Sphere Cataclysm's 90% figure and Dreams of First Age (which was pretty terrible)? ...either way, trying to police the fandom is still loving stupid and a waste of time.
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May 12, 2015 20:09
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GreenMetalSun posted:Okay, but isn't Lea the one who gave us the Three Sphere Cataclysm's 90% figure and Dreams of First Age (which was pretty terrible)? He offered a public apology for the former. That may be why he's so zealous about it, he doesn't want more of that poo poo happening again. Roadie posted:For a Real Literature™ example, look at Fahrenheit 451 and how Bradbury went over time from saying it was about censorship to saying it was about mass media being too powerful. The book never changed, and Bradbury changing his mind about it didn't suddenly invalidate any readings of it he disagreed with. What's interesting to me is that I think the prevalence of those stances is vastly overstated. As a rule, I think writers know what they're writing, even if it's only subconsciously. What they don't know is what their execution will be like because it takes an insane amount of self-discipline to see it. Take the example of The Jungle, for instance. 'I aimed at the country's heart and hit it in the stomach', and so on. That seems more pertinent to the rapeghosts issue than DotTA - Holden and Morke didn't want to write a rape charm, but bungled the execution up and got...something else.
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May 12, 2015 20:13
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Roadie posted:For a Real Literature™ example, look at Fahrenheit 451 and how Bradbury went over time from saying it was about censorship to saying it was about mass media being too powerful. The book never changed, and Bradbury changing his mind about it didn't suddenly invalidate any readings of it he disagreed with. Anyway, sometimes I think death of the author is used as an excuse, but much more often it's used as a rhetorical jab at people who find alternative reading in the material. To use examples from Exalted: I think someone who decided to read 'well, Autocthohn maybe DESERVED to be bullied because he SUCKS and is a NERD, and he's gonna die from being cosmically wedgied by his betters' into the fluff around Exalted, as like an external 'true' reading as opposed to, say, 'the in-character Malfean opinion on that guy,' is not really supported by the text. Even if you want to make the point that his people and creations are about to undertake a colonial project on Creation, this doesn't retroactively justify some kind of supernal bullying. If someone wanted to make the point that Autocthohn may represent the initiator of the "the greater in station are brought low by those beneath them, due to their arrogance and abuses" cycle which Creation deals with, THAT might not specifically intended by the developers but is not "wrong." You can support it out of the text pretty readily.
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May 12, 2015 20:18
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I mean there's seeing a possible message the author might have missed, and then there's doing stuff like holding Tolkien's work as an example of New Age Religion when the dude was trying to be really Catholic when it came to his writing. Dude hated those hippies who made that reading, incidentally.
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May 12, 2015 20:21
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GreenMetalSun posted:Okay, but isn't Lea the one who gave us the Three Sphere Cataclysm's 90% figure and Dreams of First Age (which was pretty terrible)? He might well be, I don't actually remember. Still, that just shows he knows what he's talking about. Obviously, the ideal is to write with such blazing clarity that these misconceptions never arise (and are easily swatted aside when they're presented disingenuously), but talking a lot on forums or other media about what you as a writer are going for, what themes you're trying to keep versus what themes you want to get rid of, etc, can both help you make sure that you put down the right words when the time comes and give your readers a good sense of what to look for and/or expect. It was absolutely the design team's frank appraisals of how 2E went wrong that initially sold me on 3E, for instance. Transient People posted:That seems more pertinent to the rapeghosts issue than DotTA - Holden and Morke didn't want to write a rape charm, but bungled the execution up and got...something else. The really damning thing about that whole debacle wasn't the Charms but the developer response to criticism of the Charms.
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May 12, 2015 20:21
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You could also point to other, more successful instances of the devs trying to steer the discussion in a positive way—Glories of the Most High was an intentional and fairly well-received attempt to move perception of the line to a less cynical place. (Really, I think Ascension is the poster child for games where the creators failed to control the narrative and wish they had succeeded—you can't shake an athame at RPGnet without Technocracy apologists coming out of the woodwork to excoriate an imaginary version of the Traditions. After that I'm not really surprised to see Onyx Path authors trying very hard not to let fanon grow out of control and eclipse the actual text.) There was actually an interesting discussion there about "bad wrong fun" about five years back, about how game companies try to do this and whether it's practical or reasonable.
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May 12, 2015 20:23
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Ferrinus posted:The really damning thing about that whole debacle wasn't the Charms but the developer response to criticism of the Charms. Right before he was banned, Holden was saying stuff like 'yeah we can do better than a rape cascade' but then he had to go and get himself banned. I think the big article that accused the KS backers of explicitly approving of Lillun/child rape also helped poison things considerably.
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May 12, 2015 20:28
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Rand Brittain posted:You could also point to other, more successful instances of the devs trying to steer the discussion in a positive way—Glories of the Most High was an intentional and fairly well-received attempt to move perception of the line to a less cynical place. I don't have an issue with them kicking the ball in a certain direction, so to speak. What bugs me is when it comes off as "No, there is THIS channel, and if you go outside of THIS channel, you're doing it wrong." It reminds me of Cthulhutech, where someone asked "So what if you have a bio-armor guy pilot a giant robot?" and the official response was, "You aren't supposed to do that. But I GUESS if you WANT to go do it WRONG, go ahead." Bedlamdan posted:Right before he was banned, Holden was saying stuff like 'yeah we can do better than a rape cascade' but then he had to go and get himself banned. I think the big article that accused the KS backers of explicitly approving of Lillun/child rape also helped poison things considerably.
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May 12, 2015 20:33
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Nessus posted:Oh boy, I missed THAT one! It's linked in my rap sheet! I wonder what people think about it now in this strange, new, post-Aatrek SA.
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May 12, 2015 20:35
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Bedlamdan posted:It's linked in my rap sheet! On second thought I can kind of imagine the article, probably pretty accurately, so its actual text is not really necessary.
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May 12, 2015 20:40
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Nessus posted:I meant the one accusing all of us of explicit collaboration with child rape, I knew about Holden. No that first one is there too, last I checked. EDIT: Gotta click on the post by Holden
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May 12, 2015 20:41
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Oh the front-page article! OK. I was actually often reading/posting in the Trek threads at the time of Aatrek's exciting revelations so all the "by looking at a webpage connected to Rich Kyanka, you are literally violating a baby" things kind of blurred together in my head.
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May 12, 2015 20:44
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http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons-and-dragons/burn-down-whitewolf/1/ The stub alone really says it all. In fairness, this was literally El Pinto Grande's first exposure to Exalted beyond general awareness of it as A Thing That Exists. He got called into the thread over the Abyssals preview, went looking to see how deep the rabbit hole went, and the first thing he found was...Lillun. Yeah. Yeeeeeah.
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May 12, 2015 20:45
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Thesaurasaurus posted:http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons-and-dragons/burn-down-whitewolf/1/ Yeah but I think you can count the people who like Exalted and also liked Lillun on one hand, and the guys who wrote it in the first place were quietly shitcanned. Not sure what else you could do about that. 
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May 12, 2015 20:48
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Bedlamdan posted:Yeah but I think you can count the people who like Exalted and also liked Lillun on one hand, and the guys who wrote it in the first place were quietly shitcanned. Not sure what else you could do about that. This word. This word is the problem. You don't want to 'quietly' anything with a fuckup this huge. You want public executions and dragging of corpses behind chariots.
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May 12, 2015 20:49
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Bedlamdan posted:Yeah but I think you can count the people who like Exalted and also liked Lillun on one hand, and the guys who wrote it in the first place were quietly shitcanned. Not sure what else you could do about that. Thesaurasaurus posted:This word. This word is the problem. You don't want to 'quietly' anything with a fuckup this huge. You want public executions and dragging of corpses behind chariots. Hilariously, starting a huge public firing and energetic public apologizing that includes "We hosed up, we hosed up" several thousand times might have actually increased sales of Infernals, if only because people would've gone "Wow, what the hell are these guys talking about? Did their RPG book actually include instructions to a Satanic Mass or something?" Nessus fucked around with this message at 20:52 on May 12, 2015 |
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May 12, 2015 20:50
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Thesaurasaurus posted:This word. This word is the problem. You don't want to 'quietly' anything with a fuckup this huge. You want public executions and dragging of corpses behind chariots. *nods* the problem is also that the hobby is super incestuous and everyone has to walk on eggshells. The stuff where Ferrinus said 'being very frank about 2E's problems helped sell him on the game?' It also got the devs into a lot of trouble because apparently whatever you do you better not poo poo-talk your coworkers. Consequentially 4chan is full of anonymous rants with dirt on this Pathfinder writer or that Vampire writer but it's hard to know what's real and what isn't.
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May 12, 2015 20:53
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Nessus posted:Hilariously, starting a huge public firing and energetic public apologizing that includes "We hosed up, we hosed up" several thousand times might have actually increased sales of Infernals, if only because people would've gone "Wow, what the hell are these guys talking about? Did their RPG book actually include instructions to a Satanic Mass or something?" I mean, it's good that they cut the guy and (apparently) made a note to never hire him again to be sure, but the whole rapeghost thing really highlighted the fact that you'd have better luck turning lead into gold than getting "professional RPG designers" to issue a straight-up, unambiguous apology about anything. It was vicariously painful watching that whole trainwreck play out when all that was needed was a simple "Hey you know what, this was poorly thought out and we apologize, won't happen again" and then make sure it doesn't. So simple! Instead it turned into A Thing. The problem with Infernals is, of course, by the time the book went to print a simple apology would have been a bit too late to paper over anything. Really, if you have books going to print with something like Lillun proudly displayed in the opening chapters and nobody bothered to go "hmm, should we NOT print this maybe?" then you have bigger problems going on at a more fundamental level.
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May 12, 2015 21:00
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Kai Tave posted:I mean, it's good that they cut the guy and (apparently) made a note to never hire him again to be sure, but the whole rapeghost thing really highlighted the fact that you'd have better luck turning lead into gold than getting "professional RPG designers" to issue a straight-up, unambiguous apology about anything. It was vicariously painful watching that whole trainwreck play out when all that was needed was a simple "Hey you know what, this was poorly thought out and we apologize, won't happen again" and then make sure it doesn't. So simple! Instead it turned into A Thing.
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May 12, 2015 21:03
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The problem is that Lillun can properly be placed as the nadir of a long-running trend. It wasn't the sole blemish on a flawless game line, it was the dog making GBS threads on the carpet for the fiftieth time (conservative estimate). Publicly executing the guy responsible isn't really all that helpful when a couple of years later critically acclaimed books include spousal abuse Charms and rape camps. It's absolutely right to castigate the entire game for that poo poo, because it's merely the grossest expression of an underlying problem, not some poo poo snowflake.
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May 12, 2015 21:06
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Kai Tave posted:I mean, it's good that they cut the guy and (apparently) made a note to never hire him again to be sure, but the whole rapeghost thing really highlighted the fact that you'd have better luck turning lead into gold than getting "professional RPG designers" to issue a straight-up, unambiguous apology about anything. It was vicariously painful watching that whole trainwreck play out when all that was needed was a simple "Hey you know what, this was poorly thought out and we apologize, won't happen again" and then make sure it doesn't. So simple! Instead it turned into A Thing. Yeah, nobody really likes to take criticism, and it gets worse the more heinous the accusations are. I mean, eh, the only one who really had an okay response to the Aatrek thing was Deadpool and the most I remembered was mass bannings for anyone too critical of it with the reason listed "dssfsfd" or some variation. Not even 'we'll do better at vetting our mods,' just stuff like new-GBS
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May 12, 2015 21:08
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Bedlamdan posted:Yeah, nobody really likes to take criticism, and it gets worse the more heinous the accusations are. It was kind of weird, though I guess now GBS is returned to its proper and natural state.
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May 12, 2015 21:11
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Nessus posted:My impression at the time is that the common rhetorical argument was, "If you don't support my preferred posting style, which is justified by some vague rosy memories of the halcyon days of FYAD, you're probably a child molester like Aatrek, or a supporter of child molesters like Aatrek." Effed up! Anyways I'm still playing with the leak but now I want the drat corebook out so they can release Dragonblooded or something. 
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May 12, 2015 21:18
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I think the (incredibly low) reading skills of most posters on rpgnet which incidentally was a place where freelancers came from really did a lot to gently caress with Exalted2. I mean it's a different game line but there's a "where i read mummy" thread there that's amazing and a testament to how poor at reading and thinking your average rpgnet poster is, apply that to people drafted to read, think critically, and then write in a short period of time and well
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May 12, 2015 21:48
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I hear RPGnet is in league with the reptoid menace too.
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May 12, 2015 21:54
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Kai Tave posted:I hear RPGnet is in league with the reptoid menace too. i mean u post there so disinformation would probably be in your best interests u illiterate reptoid
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May 12, 2015 21:59
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Bedlamdan posted:Effed up! I can't believe you'd run Exalted using the leak while honest backers are in ANGUISH at not knowing what a single one of those [redacted]s meant. Have you no decency, Bedlamdan? At long last, have you no sense of decency?
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May 12, 2015 22:00
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Mexcillent posted:i mean u post there so disinformation would probably be in your best interests I DO enjoy eating live mice, it's true.
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May 12, 2015 22:04
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Mexcillent posted:I think the (incredibly low) reading skills of most posters on rpgnet which incidentally was a place where freelancers came from really did a lot to gently caress with Exalted2. This got me to start reading that thread, and so far the person doing the reading seems pretty good. Are the comments about to get cringe-inducing? Or, looking at your wording, does it make everything else look bad by comparison?
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May 12, 2015 22:56
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Attorney at Funk posted:I can't believe you'd run Exalted using the leak while honest backers are in ANGUISH at not knowing what a single one of those [redacted]s meant. Have you no decency, Bedlamdan? At long last, have you no sense of decency? It helps that the Devs have apparently okayed leak discussion on that one Exalted IRC they're on. I don't know why it can't happen on their forums, but I guess that's just White Wolf policy just like with the Beast leaks??? I know they thought about throwing up their hands and just make the leak publically available in a KS update, but that apparently was a no-go because they needed to cut stuff from the final document, as what they wrote so far was literally too big to feasibly ship out. Oh and also I can run an Exalted game with a system I like, and to be honest everything before this line is just me rationalizing it 
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May 12, 2015 22:57
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