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People who expect to be able to find players are more likely to buy a game book. I think the group forms first and then the book is sold to one or more members.
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Dec 29, 2018 00:29
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https://twitter.com/wildwoodsgames/status/1078773161003429889 https://twitter.com/wildwoodsgames/status/1078773185842016257 https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1078791346763321345 https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1078796173136355329
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Dec 29, 2018 03:58
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I hope I don't get fired for saying this ten years from now, as I'm hesitant to dive into this, but... This feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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Dec 29, 2018 04:05
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CitizenKeen posted:I hope I don't get fired for saying this ten years from now, as I'm hesitant to dive into this, but... The language used is actually part of harmful stereotyping about what it means to be non-binary, which tends to identify people purely by their medical conditions rather than by their social function, which is usually tied up into a bunch of nonsense that leads to systematic oppression. This was a bad take and the defense of it was even worse.
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Dec 29, 2018 04:12
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Hey let's not let the good be the enemy of the bad
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Dec 29, 2018 04:14
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CitizenKeen posted:I hope I don't get fired for saying this ten years from now, as I'm hesitant to dive into this, but... Why is it whenever a minority critiques the majority's use of their identity the response has to be 'aw gee aren't you going too far'? Like, can people not even say basic stuff like 'yea don't...call people 'hermaphrodites'...' and simple fact check stuff like 'androgyny isn't typically an identity it's a descriptor'?
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Dec 29, 2018 04:19
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That's fair. I stand corrected, and apologize.
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Dec 29, 2018 04:29
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CitizenKeen posted:I hope I don't get fired for saying this ten years from now, as I'm hesitant to dive into this, but... The thing is it's not the end of the world if you make something that is bad representation or use the wrong terminology. It doesn't reflect well on you, because you didn't do your research, but if you respond to criticism with humility and a commitment to do better going forward (and deliver!), people will generally understand. If you respond with "WELL ACKTUALLY, THE ELVEN DEITY ISNT REAL, CHECKMATE NERDS," it's understandable that people might question your sincerity. Edit: well, that'll teach me to refresh before I respond. Capfalcon fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Dec 29, 2018 |
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Dec 29, 2018 04:32
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Terminology aside, I've always thought that "look, you could be an androgynous elf or, wait for it, a bearded lady dwarf" was an extremely lazy and shallow way of approaching the subject, using a couple of well-worn stereotypes one of which is almost always played up as a joke.
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Dec 29, 2018 04:41
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I kinda like the idea of bearded lady dwarves but only because I like the idea of a society so built around the veneration of elders that your worth is measured in beard inches and everyone has beards and maybe some cuts are considered feminine or masculine and if your group leader has a beard and is not a dwarf you should consult this 800 page manual on beard ettiquette or you'll send mixed signals to the dwarf Queen on your diplomatic mission.
Impermanent fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Dec 29, 2018 |
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Dec 29, 2018 04:46
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Putting aside the harmful speech - which is bad, but I think that's been covered better than I can do - the reasoning for the removal of the word 'hermaphroditic' was that it was[ redundant. With, presumably, the word androgynous. Like, as if they were synonyms. Which is bizarre to say, because while I would call, say, Tilda Swinton or David Bowie androgynous, I would not consider them to be intersex.
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Dec 29, 2018 04:57
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It really comes across as "a dude read 3 Wikipedia articles very quickly and then we published"
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Dec 29, 2018 04:59
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Impermanent posted:I kinda like the idea of bearded lady dwarves but only because I like the idea of a society so built around the veneration of elders that your worth is measured in beard inches and everyone has beards and maybe some cuts are considered feminine or masculine and if your group leader has a beard and is not a dwarf you should consult this 800 page manual on beard ettiquette or you'll send mixed signals to the dwarf Queen on your diplomatic mission. It can be done well...Terry Pratchett did a pretty good take on the concept in his Watch series...but it has to be done well, and usually "bearded lady dwarves" is just kind of a throwaway joke. I just think that for something that was meant to be a welcoming message of inclusiveness they probably could have stretched their imaginations a tad and reached for examples that weren't largely used for cheap laughs by most people who bring them up.
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Dec 29, 2018 05:01
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No see it's cool to be a trans or NB character as long as you're a joke I've been hearing since the 80s. "What?" I exclaimed, "That bearded dwarf is ordering a white wine spritzer! That's the drink of a lady!" Then i guffawed like Paul F. Tompkins. Representation!
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Dec 29, 2018 05:02
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Impermanent posted:I kinda like the idea of bearded lady dwarves but only because I like the idea of a society so built around the veneration of elders that your worth is measured in beard inches and everyone has beards and maybe some cuts are considered feminine or masculine and if your group leader has a beard and is not a dwarf you should consult this 800 page manual on beard ettiquette or you'll send mixed signals to the dwarf Queen on your diplomatic mission. Not gonna lie, that kinda owns.
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Dec 29, 2018 05:02
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I feel like I've been saying this a lot recently: it's possible to hurt people without meaning to hurt. It's possible to think you're helping without realizing who you've trod on along the way. Recognize, apologize, and do better next time. People are fallible and the bar of being better than nothing is absurdly low. A bit of humility can take care of not even passing that. Instead a lot of folks double down. I get getting defensive over a creation or even a single decision, that's human nature, but that's an instinct you need to fight and evaluate if you care about what you're saying. Ignore your instinct to "well actually", take a step back, look at it, and THEN decide if it's the side you're actually trying to fight for.
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Dec 29, 2018 05:05
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Yeah precisely like theres a time and a place for like "dwarf women have beards" and it's when you're in a groove of setting your anthropological stuff down in your collaborative fantasy setting. The time that it is super inappropriate is during " we are trying to be inclusive of nb and trans people" time because it is pretty associated with lazy stereotyping and hacky mean jokes that somehow still get play. I want to clarify, that is what I was trying to get across with my post earlier. There are cool ideas inherent to building alternate constructs of how masculinity and femininity are expressed in your elf games' cultures but they need to work towards inclusivity of lgbtq ideas and people, not against them.
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Dec 29, 2018 05:52
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Dwarven word for hair and beard are the same. There you go.
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Dec 29, 2018 05:58
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It's basically too late to fix now. It'd be like saying "In Greyhawk human being just means 'wise leader.'" Damage is done, players can't be trusted, if anything you're just enabling more old stereotype jokes. Oh, and everyone's going to read it as some sort of half-rear end dodge.
theironjef fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Dec 29, 2018 |
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Dec 29, 2018 06:19
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Plutonis posted:Dwarven word for hair and beard are the same. There you go. I'm reminded of how in Japanese there's no seperate word for 'beard' from other facial hair, leading to some confusion in One Piece where Whitebeard doesn't actually have a beard (but does have a nice stache). Also Blackbeard didn't have a beard at all to start with. theironjef posted:No see it's cool to be a trans or NB character as long as you're a joke I've been hearing since the 80s. "What?" I exclaimed, "That bearded dwarf is ordering a white wine spritzer! That's the drink of a lady!" Then i guffawed like Paul F. Tompkins. Representation! Discworld got weird about that, yeah. Though there was the implication that the burgeoning openly female dwarf movement gets a lot of their ideas about femininity from humans, which has its own kettle of worms. (one woman does say that a lot of human women wouldn't mind doing things the dwarf way) Cross-cultural pollination ends up in some wacky places. Bruceski posted:I feel like I've been saying this a lot recently: it's possible to hurt people without meaning to hurt. It's possible to think you're helping without realizing who you've trod on along the way. Recognize, apologize, and do better next time. People are fallible and the bar of being better than nothing is absurdly low. A bit of humility can take care of not even passing that. I think a lot of people get defensive because they assume modern social criticism is basically the same as the religious right's bad-faith misreadings and paranoia, which RPG designers are justifiably touchy about, and assume it's quickly going to turn into demands for book bannings and book burnings unless they cut it off at the pass. Doesn't help that you already have cases of the religious right using the language of feminism and modern social criticism to demand what amounts to the same old censorship. (IIRC there was a big kerfuffle on Steam with Morality in Media shortly before they gave up and opened the porngates, with people only realising it was fundies in disguise when they started calling for censorship of LBGT media in the same terms)
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Dec 29, 2018 06:35
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certainly it would have helped if their staff and consultants for 5e's writing were people who were knowledgeable in such things, instead of ... the opposite of that
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Dec 29, 2018 07:05
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I don't actually think it's that justifiable that rpg writers are sensitive about criticism. They got called satanic once in the 80s. Have you seen what churches have called satanic in the interim? It strikes me as nerd siege mentality more than anything else.
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Dec 29, 2018 07:05
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Impermanent posted:It strikes me as nerd siege mentality more than anything else. It pretty much is that, yeah, and it's something that's not going away any time soon because if anyone can hold a grudge for an unnecessarily long time for entirely stupid reasons, it's nerds. If you dare question the insensitivity about something a nerd likes, they're going to double down on their defense and dig in, and will whine about it endlessly for decades. Doesn't matter if they're right or wrong on it either, they've got a personal investment in A Thing and that means it's a part of them now, forever and ever, and to insinuate that the Thing they like is problematic or has issues is like telling them personally that they're problematic or have issues. And at that point they feel personally insulted and they enter siege mode and there's just no hope for any sort of serious discussion about the Thing they like, it's all screaming baboons flinging poo poo at the walls in anger.
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Dec 29, 2018 07:42
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Impermanent posted:I don't actually think it's that justifiable that rpg writers are sensitive about criticism. They got called satanic once in the 80s. Have you seen what churches have called satanic in the interim? It strikes me as nerd siege mentality more than anything else. Books were literally burned, they literally altered the games to take anything that could be seen as a religious reference out of them, and if anything in the age of Facebook propaganda you probably still get people freaking out when hearing their kids play a dice game with dungeons and dragons. The religious right backing off media is a very recent thing and mostly because the corporate right finds it more trouble than its worth, at the grassroots it's still there. You can't expect to skate on 'But you see, the difference is this time we're right'.
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Dec 29, 2018 07:51
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Oh yeah I'm aware of all of that. I grew up in a hard right religious home schooling community. It's just uh, similar things happened to Pokemon, Harry Potter, sailor moon, dragon Ball Z, anime in general, etc. Many of these were bowdlerized in some way to avoid freaking fundies. Many had mass burnings of purchased products (lmao)
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Dec 29, 2018 08:02
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Thing is the controversies around those products didn't impede their popularity for the most part, while a very niche hobby is far more likely to feel under genuine threat as an easy target for moral panics.
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Dec 29, 2018 08:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/wildwoodsgames/status/1078773161003429889 Wait, wait, wait. Did that guy actually use the 'my queer friend' defence with himself as the friend?
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Dec 29, 2018 08:28
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I might be on the wrong side of this but hermaphroditic gods and goddesses are an established tradition that I'm not going to break with. Doesn't make them good NB, trans, or intersex representation of course.
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Dec 29, 2018 08:40
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e: not my call to make.
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Dec 29, 2018 09:18
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Loomer posted:I might be on the wrong side of this but hermaphroditic gods and goddesses are an established tradition that I'm not going to break with. Doesn't make them good NB, trans, or intersex representation of course. The problem in this particular case is the lovely illustration, not "elves have less sexual dimorphism than humans" (which seems to be an established trope) or "this elf god has this particular trait."
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Dec 29, 2018 12:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Books were literally burned, they literally altered the games to take anything that could be seen as a religious reference out of them, and if anything in the age of Facebook propaganda you probably still get people freaking out when hearing their kids play a dice game with dungeons and dragons. The religious right backing off media is a very recent thing and mostly because the corporate right finds it more trouble than its worth, at the grassroots it's still there. You can't expect to skate on 'But you see, the difference is this time we're right'. Okay so assuming we really can't expect people to be able to tell the difference between different things, this applies to boomers who're still writing RPGs; what's the defence the modern tradgames censorship-panic brigade has for reacting to mild and constructive criticism like it was a call for public lynchings?
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Dec 29, 2018 12:46
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Nessus posted:Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the esoteric concept of "transcends/includes the entire space of masculine and feminine energies," which is what I think you are speaking of - even if the term "hermaphroditic" would be deprecated nowadays. I'm not sure the word is so easily deprecated, myself, in a mythological and esoteric context. In human terms outside of very limited uses, definitely, but in non-human affairs it's still very much in play. That may change further as time goes by but barring specific cultural terminology being imported en masse or a revival in man-woman/woman-man terminology (itself quite useful for discussing certain third gender arrangements but otherwise on the outs.) In this case I'm definitely in agreement that it's a bad reach, but I disagree with the application of point 3 to divinities and spirits, wherein the terminology predates its medicalised application to intersex and transgender people which only became substantially prevalent and problematic in the 1800s.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:02
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Eh, I feel like one could probably use the original cultural terms for each particular male-female combination (rebis, Ardhanarishvara, etc) in various traditions; unless one holds the English term to have particular value it seems easy enough to avoid.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:Eh, I feel like one could probably use the original cultural terms for each particular male-female combination (rebis, Ardhanarishvara, etc) in various traditions; unless one holds the English term to have particular value it seems easy enough to avoid. That's the thing. The english term does have a particular value as a cultural signifier for a variety of traits when applied to a divinity or a spirit and is easily interpreted. It's a particularly evocative one that was unfortunately badly misapplied to people, but that misapplication has not diminished said value as a signifier of a special combination of male-female/positive-negative dualistic properties that most English speakers will comprehend.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:16
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Impermanent posted:Oh yeah I'm aware of all of that. I grew up in a hard right religious home schooling community. It's just uh, similar things happened to Pokemon, Harry Potter, sailor moon, dragon Ball Z, anime in general, etc. Many of these were bowdlerized in some way to avoid freaking fundies. Many had mass burnings of purchased products (lmao) I was never dragged into the principal's office and forced to explain to nominal adults the difference between fantasy and reality on account of Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, or DBZ, you know?
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Dec 29, 2018 13:32
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Personally I wish my condition wasn't constantly associated with transcendence, magic, and otherness. Being mundane for once would be nice.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:38
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Loomer posted:That's the thing. The english term does have a particular value as a cultural signifier for a variety of traits when applied to a divinity or a spirit and is easily interpreted. It's a particularly evocative one that was unfortunately badly misapplied to people, but that misapplication has not diminished said value as a signifier of a special combination of male-female/positive-negative dualistic properties that most English speakers will comprehend. This may be the case, but, well, when a word is misapplied in a hurtful fashion and becomes a sign of oppression, the various uses of genuine value have to be weighed against the harm the word causes. Ultimately, no word is indispensable that became so charged. I don't mean 'therefore you must abandon it' but I think it's not just a question of 'does this have a particular value for expressing sexual nonduality or the union of dualities.' It's a question of weighing that usage against the harm. ...plus I'll be honest, I suspect most people who hear the word 'hermaphrodite' about a deity or symbol don't immediately assume a true union of dual natures, you know? They probably think more immediately of the (badly misapplied) medical term.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:39
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To me (an English speaker) the word "hermaphrodite" means "has a fully functional set of male and female sexual reproductive organs", without any connotation of "positive-negative dualistic properties" whatever the hell that even means. I've always considered the word to mean something entirely distinct from being intersex or queer (because my understanding, limited though it is, is that actual hermaphroditism is not what being intersex means), but if its used as a slur against those people I'm going to try to avoid using the term because that's simple politeness.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:54
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Joe Slowboat posted:This may be the case, but, well, when a word is misapplied in a hurtful fashion and becomes a sign of oppression, the various uses of genuine value have to be weighed against the harm the word causes. Ultimately, no word is indispensable that became so charged. I disagree. My experience is that most people who hear hermaphrodite in a mythological context are more inclined to picture the duality as expressed in gender unified - but I do recognize my experience is coming from a region rich in hippies and neopagans so it may not be representative. I do agree that we need to weigh the harm vs utility of the term as a whole though and that we can probably ditch it from elfgames except where used very specifically in its proper context without weird fetishization and awkward insinuations about transgender, non-binary and intersex people (and good luck finding that any time soon). My own experiences growing up having been the subject of slurs, gossip, and attacks aimed directly at my perceived violation of the rigid duality also colours my views, so I may not be particularly objective on this one (even if objectivity is overrated).
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Dec 29, 2018 13:57
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Much like the word "niggardly", there are valid and perfectly appropriate usages of the word "hermaphrodite" where, all things taken into consideration, there are better ways of communicating what needs to be said.
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Dec 29, 2018 14:31
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