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It's almost as if some people don't want the thread to be a place of useful,, informative and interesting discussions of fascists in trad gaming, and how prevalent they actually are, low key or not, but rather just drag it into a never ending series of hyperbolic ice burns and talking point owns.
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May 11, 2019 17:02
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Schadenboner posted:I don't think the article is per se worthless because, like you say, understanding the reasons people become fash or fash-adjacent or fash-apologist is both interesting (from a psychological perspective) and important (from a sociological perspective). I didn't post that article, though. I just commented that Tolkien specifically wasn't a Nazi (and I think is better described as fascist-adjacent, via Catholicism). e: uh jokes ok uh, idk. Sorry. I do think it's interesting, and complicated, that Tolkien's dwarves are really obviously Jewish and are more or less his way of analyzing (sympathetically) the diasporic condition? The guy wanted to oppose racism and antisemitism, and he decided the best way to do that was to make his Jewish equivalents literally created by a different god from humanity or the elves, and fixed on the treasure and homeland that they had lost. That's a joke but it's kind of a bleak one. Pratchett's dwarves are variably Jewish and Muslim depending on the book, and it's a lot hazier of a metaphorical connection, so they mostly just end up standing in for 'a minority religious group with a long philosophical and textual tradition, who have both reformers and hardliners' and that's a lot more comfortable than Tolkien's take on things, imo. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 17:09 on May 11, 2019 |
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May 11, 2019 17:04
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Arivia posted:Man it's not /b/ or whatever the gently caress but it's still SA. It's still our gay dead humour forums. Relax and let people make jokes and be funny, otherwise we end up being the most depressing thread on earth mk. II (mark I is D&D CanPol, which even E/N looks down on as too traumatic.) You're talking arse. Please stop talking arse. I want to learn about fascists in Trad Gaming, not how bad of a poster you are.
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May 11, 2019 17:08
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To go back to the topic of Hard Men Making Hard Choices, one thing that I notice is that in settings like 40K, H.M.M.H.C. is such a default that the writers never stop to consider that in-universe it's no longer really "hard" when everyone's making that decision. It's no longer impressive when Inquisitor Square-Jaw orders an Exterminatus when it's the 100th called this year alone. EDIT: I was rewatching the Ork Intro video to Battlefleet Gothic and the in-universe narrator describes them as a so rooted in war "that peace is utterly incomprehensible to them." Totally glossing over that at this point mankind has been at war for 10,000 years, that I'm more shocked that the narrator knows what the word means. SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 11, 2019 |
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May 11, 2019 17:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:I didn't post that article, though. Sorry, my mistake. 
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May 11, 2019 17:28
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Schadenboner posted:Sorry, my mistake. No problem, these things happen!
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May 11, 2019 17:38
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edit: fascists bad
Regarde Aduck fucked around with this message at 17:46 on May 11, 2019 |
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May 11, 2019 17:41
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Der Waffle Mous posted:No, they got it more or less right. TheDiceMustRoll posted:I honestly can't think of a single ethnic minority in the united states that, upon reawakening to having the vast majority of you be super powerful wizards, would not immediately skullfuck america to pieces. I was thinking more "orksploitation" and the like.
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May 11, 2019 18:01
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Ronwayne posted:I was thinking more "orksploitation" and the like. oh yeah that was weird
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May 11, 2019 18:22
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FactsAreUseless posted:I honestly think it's both. These writers think that characters making Tough Choices makes them into badass (universally male) characters. It also means they never have to wrestle with the realities of what the characters are doing, because it provides an easy moral cover for everything. On the topic of Buck Surdu, I don't know enough about him to have formed any opinions one way or another, but he's a moderately frequent poster at The Miniatures Page - a search of his posts there might be illustrative.
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May 11, 2019 18:35
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Ilor posted:While I don't disagree there's some lazy poo poo in some of these genres, I think this criticism in particular is unfair for The Walking Dead. Seven seasons in, it's pretty clear that the hardest hardass in the group is Carol. Considering where she started, that's saying something. But what is specifically NOT lazy writing is the depictions of her own internal struggles with what becoming said hardass has cost her mentally/emotionally, which is exactly that "wrestling with the realities" that you describe.
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May 11, 2019 19:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:e: uh jokes ok uh, idk. Sorry. I do think it's interesting, and complicated, that Tolkien's dwarves are really obviously Jewish and are more or less his way of analyzing (sympathetically) the diasporic condition? The guy wanted to oppose racism and antisemitism, and he decided the best way to do that was to make his Jewish equivalents literally created by a different god from humanity or the elves, and fixed on the treasure and homeland that they had lost. That's a joke but it's kind of a bleak one. That's not quite right. The creation story for the dwarves was supposed to illustrate that capital G God is the one that creates all sentient life, and while the angels could create a facsimile of life it was actually the big guy that made them into real people. A lot of it is based on christian theology and the idea is that there's one actual god and everyone else is just part of his song.
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May 12, 2019 00:57
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You know how every genocidal white supremacist claims they would be happy if all “races” just stuck to their own land and didn’t interact? Tolkien actually was that guy in reality, rather than it just being a deflection against obvious bloodlust. He wanted everybody to live in their own little idealized, ethically-monolithic agrarian societies with rigid, heritable hierarchies and no industrialism. He described himself as an “Anarcho-monarchist” (but not like those crazy leftist anarchists, he was an anarchist in the way right-libertarians are libertarians). He probably didn’t want any of the violence of a genocide because he legitimately believed in the worth of those he considered his genetically incompatible or inferior, but he absolutely wanted ethnic “removal”. Except for “the Huns”. He definitely wanted to wipe every German, Hungarian, and Mongol off of the face of the earth. Basically it makes perfect sense for Tolkien to have supported Franco, he was an extremely religious traditionalist who supported tolerance as long as that tolerance was traditional and didn’t threaten to overturn society as he knew it.
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May 12, 2019 01:37
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Are you... sure about that account of Tolkien's perspective on Germans? I remember him very specifically explaining his immense respect for Germans even post-WWI in correspondence. The only thing he expressed negatively about the Germans that I've read was 'you Nazis are uncouth and lowering my respect for the men I was in a trench shooting at in WWI.' I mean, if this was in some diary or something, that would be fascinating, if grotesque. But it really doesn't comport with anything I've read about his views? He expressed regret at not having Jewish ancestors (admittedly in a letter meant to annoy Nazis, but still). E: I don't mean to claim he had good politics here, just that I never heard more of his anarcho-monarchism than an incredibly basic and thoughtless conservatism. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 02:14 on May 12, 2019 |
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May 12, 2019 02:04
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it would be interesting to look back on how media contemporary to the period portrayed the spanish civil war to outsiders, especially inside the uk the people commentating on it who've been quoted here so far seem to smack of a "this film is dedicated to the brave mujahideen fighters of afghanistan" sentiment that'll obviously age poorly but i'm not sure if it's simple ignorance, foolish simplification of spanish politics or outright malice motivating it
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May 12, 2019 02:27
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hard counter posted:it would be interesting to look back on how media contemporary to the period portrayed the spanish civil war to outsiders, especially inside the uk Ding. A fundamental tenet of history is to not condemn people for having beliefs we now know to be ill-informed. I wouldn't be friends with Tolkien now, but his opinions were not exceptional in any way for his era, and "Tolkien believed in the inherent superiority of some races" is wholly unsurprising given that he came of age during the Scramble for Africa, while the glorious British Empire was stomping all over India. Battletech authors should know better, but we don't need to grind down historical figures for having historically normal belief systems, and what Tolkien believed isn't relevant to trad games (he didn't write any) except insofar as it informs his successors, who should have made the worlds more nuanced
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May 12, 2019 02:35
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hard counter posted:it would be interesting to look back on how media contemporary to the period portrayed the spanish civil war to outsiders, especially inside the uk
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May 12, 2019 02:44
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evol262 posted:Ding. I mean even I’m not really claiming he was incredibly unusual for his time, I just think any reasonable person should accept that people in general were less moral than they are now. Not because we’ve become inherently better or something, we just have fewer harmful brain worms.
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May 12, 2019 02:47
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my high school dedicated a yearbook to Francisco Franco. To be fair it was before he actually attained power, but it's not like he was shy about being a scumbag before he did.
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May 12, 2019 02:51
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Joe Slowboat posted:Are you... sure about that account of Tolkien's perspective on Germans? I remember him very specifically explaining his immense respect for Germans even post-WWI in correspondence. The only thing he expressed negatively about the Germans that I've read was 'you Nazis are uncouth and lowering my respect for the men I was in a trench shooting at in WWI.' It was certainly a harsh interpretation of his writing. Orcs are really, really racist in a way modern people don’t understand because we project our ideas of what “the races” are onto people from the past. I think he might not actually have wanted to kill *all* of them, but you don’t write what he wrote without a certain deep-seated and ugly hatred. jakodee fucked around with this message at 02:57 on May 12, 2019 |
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May 12, 2019 02:52
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evol262 posted:Ding. This is key. It doesn’t mean we should think of people from the past as morally paragons, even if it’s tempting to. But seriously about Archwarhammer.
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May 12, 2019 02:55
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jakodee posted:You know how every genocidal white supremacist claims they would be happy if all “races” just stuck to their own land and didn’t interact? Tolkien actually was that guy in reality, rather than it just being a deflection against obvious bloodlust. He wanted everybody to live in their own little idealized, ethically-monolithic agrarian societies with rigid, heritable hierarchies and no industrialism. He described himself as an “Anarcho-monarchist” (but not like those crazy leftist anarchists, he was an anarchist in the way right-libertarians are libertarians). He probably didn’t want any of the violence of a genocide because he legitimately believed in the worth of those he considered his genetically incompatible or inferior, but he absolutely wanted ethnic “removal”. Edit: I also think that Tolkien had the compassion and intelligence that if you spoke to him today you could quickly persuade him not to be a huge racist. That's not an excuse, because "it was okay back then" is bullshit, I just think Tolkien's an interesting and complex figure.
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May 12, 2019 04:08
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Josef bugman posted:I have my dwarven/ localised mountain species groups as proto-socialists. My own analogue for this are actually non-patronised Kobolds.
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May 12, 2019 04:10
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Ratoslov posted:Better than having the Dwarves be fash or socialists is to have them be both. Stable monocultural societies where everybody agrees on everything and all their conflict comes from the outside are garbage for RPGs. Everything should be in the middle of change, and their history should be a history of changes, bad ideas, and poor compromises. Weimar Germany In Space! is generally more fertile ground for roleplaying games than Nazi Germany In Space!. (And you get to beat up both Nazis and Stalinists!)
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May 12, 2019 04:20
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FactsAreUseless posted:I also think that Tolkien had the compassion and intelligence that if you spoke to him today you could quickly persuade him not to be a huge racist. That's not an excuse, because "it was okay back then" is bullshit, I just think Tolkien's an interesting and complex figure. Well, that's kind of the point. If you spoke to Tolkien today, you wouldn't have to persuade him, because he was an intelligent person, and he wouldn't be likely to hold those beliefs. But "it was okay back then" is critical to analyzing any historical figure or text. Islam was relatively progressive for 636AD. But when we look at it now, of course it seems regressive. Even famously moralizing Roman figures would look at you like you had 2 heads if you complained about selling belligerents into slavery, etc. See Tolkien the same way. This isn't some bullshit equivocating argument, it is the foundation of historical analysis, and Tolkien is a historical figure who was born into and lived through the heyday of social darwinism And, again, the authors of Tolkien-inspired worlds are the ones who should be doing better, and they're working on current trad games, which Tolkien obviously is not
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May 12, 2019 04:21
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LatwPIAT posted:Weimar Germany In Space! is generally more fertile ground for roleplaying games than Nazi Germany In Space!. (And you get to beat up both Nazis and Stalinists!) Eifert Posting posted:my high school dedicated a yearbook to Francisco Franco.
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May 12, 2019 04:55
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jakodee posted:It was certainly a harsh interpretation of his writing. Orcs are really, really racist in a way modern people don’t understand because we project our ideas of what “the races” are onto people from the past. I think he might not actually have wanted to kill *all* of them, but you don’t write what he wrote without a certain deep-seated and ugly hatred. I don't need think segregation is the goal of Tolkien's setting. The friendship of Legolas and Gimli, the half-elves as core heroic lineage, the necessity of alliance and forgiveness before the battle of Five Armies; I don't disagree that Tolkien's orcs are extremely racist in conception but he also wrote that 'the War made orcs of us all' - they weren't representative of Germans specifically but of the conditions of war. Making 'war' into a dark-skinned race of humanish but inhuman monsters is still racist, but not in the way you were describing.
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May 12, 2019 05:01
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Nessus posted:What do you roll to implement austerity policies? Economics, but you have to fail the roll.
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May 12, 2019 05:05
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Might not exactly be the place for it, but what works do people think successfully avoid the semi-racist monoculture fantasy thing? Off the top of my head I'm quite impressed with Pillars of Eternity's world - Eora has a few countries that are clearly dominated by one or two races but there's almost always a counter-example to be offered, so the player is basically never tempted to conflate "this Orc-dominated state" with "Orcs." I also really dig how there are a couple of cultures/ethic subgroups which are considered monocultures by most inhabitants of the setting, because those groups are almost always historically or geographically isolated in a way that makes this perception sense, and because they games STILL go out of their way to offer counter-examples. So "what are Elves like?" is pretty meaningless, but "What are Pale Elves like?" isn't, because Pale Elves colonized fantasy-Antarctica millennia ago and basically no one else ever bothered to. And yet the one Pale Elf character you can recruit is an immigrant who supports the ideals of her adopted homeland with the zeal of a convert, and the DLC about Pale Elves and the god they tend to prioritize worship of offers a plethora of individual responses to what it means to worship the god of entropy.
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May 12, 2019 09:23
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Digital Osmosis posted:Might not exactly be the place for it, but what works do people think successfully avoid the semi-racist monoculture fantasy thing?
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May 12, 2019 09:33
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Loomer posted:It's a shame they never take the route of 'we're tough men taking tough choices, and the tough choice we make is to respect basic human dignity and to take the hard road that works, not the easy road that doesn't'. It's part of a generalized ideology that democracy is weakness, rather than strength, that's taken pernicious root even in supposed champions of democratic ideals. Yeah, this is an excellent and oft-ignored point. "We're making the tough choice to go to war" is usually portrayed in exactly that light, for instance, and that ignores that peace is a lot of work. Look at Vietnam, for instance. Look at Afghanistan now. It's far, far easier to just muddle along than admit mistakes were made. On the other hand, you can look at the whole cold war in general; there was a lot of harm caused by it regardless, but a massive amount of effort was put into diplomacy between the US and USSR. The heroic feats of that time aren't the moments people sent in the marines to shoot some communists, they're the moments people took a step back and a deep breath before glassing Germany. I'm sure similarly true examples of things happened in other hard-men arenas, but I can't think of a more obvious example than America's multiple endless, pointless hell-wars.
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May 12, 2019 11:32
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FactsAreUseless posted:Elder Scrolls, weirdly enough Who knew that “The Lusty Argonian Maid” would break down so many barriers?
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May 12, 2019 12:35
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SirPhoebos posted:To go back to the topic of Hard Men Making Hard Choices, one thing that I notice is that in settings like 40K, H.M.M.H.C. is such a default that the writers never stop to consider that in-universe it's no longer really "hard" when everyone's making that decision. It's no longer impressive when Inquisitor Square-Jaw orders an Exterminatus when it's the 100th called this year alone. In the case of orks, this is also because the basic writing of them is hilariously bad if you try to take it remotely seriously. They're a fungal bioweapon whose primary food source is down their own evolutionary chain, and they quite literally exist to fight because their creators made them to gently caress with the Necrontyr, who wanted to wipe out all organic life. 40k is a setting that only really makes worthwhile sense if you look at it as 'we're playing as the cover of a 1980's metal album'.
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May 12, 2019 14:21
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FactsAreUseless posted:Elder Scrolls, weirdly enough Are TES generally Considered Harmful? They have fashie elves and scandos oppressing/attempting secession from a multicultural state, it seems like a potentially useful set of metaphors? 
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May 12, 2019 14:26
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Digital Osmosis posted:Might not exactly be the place for it, but what works do people think successfully avoid the semi-racist monoculture fantasy thing? Final Fantasy XIV. The storyline is heavily oriented around city-states versus an aggressively expansionist empire, but very few of said groups are monoracial or monocultural. All the PC-facing city states have a greater percentage of their populace along one or two races, but all of them are multicultural, and its treated as not much of a thing. The core of the evil empire is a single race, which is kind of a plot point, but its expansion has been going on for a long time and so you encounter members of all races who were born and raised as imperial citizens. There's also some good stuff in the most recent expac exploring how two provinces dealt with occupation, the choices between seeking citizenship, resisting the empire, or just keeping your head down. The only races that have monocultural elements are the beast tribes, and there its very much a plot point. The beast tribes have historically been marginalized and oppressed, so there's a strong subtext that their "monocultural" nature is a result of their status in society. Plus one of their main ways to resist, summoning a primal (basically a powerful spirit embodying their myths about deities), also turns around and magically brainwashes its followers. In locations in the game where beast tribes are not being harassed, they're a lot more diverse and pursue more individual interests.
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May 12, 2019 15:03
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I think it’s telling that both of the examples of games that handle multi-culturalism in fantasy right are video games. I feel like, to a very serious degree, that the legacy of Dungeons and Dragons has encouraged monoculturalism in TTRPGs in traditional fantasy settings. Even in Glorantha, one of the best fantasy RPG settings for presenting a living, vibrant world, has most of its nonhuman species live in cultural isolation and has its human nations have relatively little ethnic diversity, except in the case of the conquered peoples living under imperial rule. Of course, part of the problem is the way that the OSR has poisoned the well of fantasy settings in TTRPGs. The OSR clings especially strongly to the legacy of D&D, and thus perpetuates much of its inherently racist ideology. There has been less of a push into the traditional fantasy milieu by other branches of the TTRPG world, which assures that the OSR maintains a dominant market share there.
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May 12, 2019 15:54
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I mean, the Orks in Skyrim live pretty monoculturally but that’s because the Nords are by-and-large racist pieces of poo poo?
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May 12, 2019 16:36
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Meinberg posted:Of course, part of the problem is the way that the OSR has poisoned the well of fantasy settings in TTRPGs. The OSR clings especially strongly to the legacy of D&D, and thus perpetuates much of its inherently racist ideology. There has been less of a push into the traditional fantasy milieu by other branches of the TTRPG world, which assures that the OSR maintains a dominant market share there. Oh yeah, that's a fair and accuratedescription.Not biased at all. Edit: Removed one TheDiceMustRoll fucked around with this message at 17:17 on May 12, 2019 |
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May 12, 2019 16:38
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Linking Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa in defense of accusations of racism in OSR products is some ninth-dimensional chess poo poo.
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May 12, 2019 16:48
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isn't that the one where the one of the evil magic rituals involves the repeated rape, murder, and resurrection of, and I remember it being incredibly specific about this, a white child?
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May 12, 2019 16:55
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