OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
Well, let me admit that I don't have reliable statistics based on a cross-section of the whole population. I'm not sure any such statistics exist - comparing different 4chan boards is interesting, but 4chan itself is not a neutral sample.
(I apologise but I do not know all the boards you mentioned by name. I'm aware of /d/ by reputation, but I don't know what all the rest are.)
At any rate... I suppose one could look at the popularity of different searches on major porn sites, or one could look at sales in terms of romance content, but I think it'd be hard to find something truly comparable, because men and women not only have different tastes, but consume totally different types of media. If I try to look up best-selling romance novels, it's all books marketed towards women (and predictably the answer is Sarah J. Maas), and just skimming the list it does look like there's a combination of cosy/cute romances and romances with dangerous bad boys with lots of angst. But men generally don't go to romance novels to get the romances they like - it seems more common for men to read books putatively about something else, with a romantic subplot mixed in. And of course that's just books, but I think the same pattern replicates in cinema, where explicitly-marked romance films are for women, whereas men prefer to have their romance mixed in with something else. (Or sometimes not even that; supposedly romantic subplots are sometimes put into movies aimed at men just for the wives and girlfriends.) And then explicit erotica brings in its own issues, though I confess I am not willing to risk googling it.
So I guess I confess that my observation was based on vibes and anecdotes. I'm not sure where to find better than that, though.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
To be fair, how much of this is a genuine reflection of the median female Asian-American experience, and how much of this is just because this is what the publishing industry is willing to pick up?
OliveTapenade
16hr ago
It's true, he was given a slightly different personality for the fifth book. It was hardly a better one, though!
The first few books are very good, and the setting and premise of Hogwarts are fantastic. I completely understand people who want to take that premise and remix it into something more coherent and creatively successful.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
I think that /d/ is clearly a category self-selected for gross perverts.
I agree that on the surface level, male heterosexuality tends to be more raunchy and explicit than female heterosexuality, but that's not where the story ends, it seems to me.
To give an example, a Western criticism you see of Islam sometimes is that it's patriarchal, sexist, obsessed with sensuous pleasures, and so on, and one point of evidence given in favour of that is the allowance for four wives, or the promise of houris in Paradise. However, what you tend to find in practice, on the ground among young men in Muslim countries, is that the idea of a harem, multiple wives, lots of houris, etc., is a fantasy of lecherous old men, and what young men fantasise about is devoted monogamy. I think it's similar in the West, to an extent - harem fantasies exist, but they are generally perceived as being, at best, a bit gross. I'd bet that the most common young heterosexual male fantasy is indeed still a loving, hot girlfriend, singular.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
(Of course it doesn't hurt that Malfoid is coded conservative. I think a lot of men are tired of the very common trend of women being into progressivism.)
I did notice Balioc being confused about this the other day, and I think that's a big part of it? Ginny is of pure-blood ancestry and from a large family, but the Weasleys are coded lower-middle class. They have ordinary interests. They're not classy. The father is a civil servant working for a salary. I'd say they come off as pretty centre-left. Moreover, Ginny is a character who was first introduced as a young girl with a crush on Harry, so in a sense going out with her feels like settling.
There's an element where, for lack of a better way of putting it, picking the Weasley is 'marrying down', while picking the Malfoy is 'marrying up'.
Moreover, I think the implicit message one gets from Ginny is "I love you just the way you are", and the implicit message from Malfoy is "you better shape up", and I think there is something about men that responds to the latter message? We like rising to the challenge. Proving yourself isn't a cost - it's part of the appeal!
(That was why, when I wrote positively about them, I was focused on growth? Both partners overcoming their moral defects?)
The Harry Potter series is sort of shaped like a bildungsroman, right? It is a story about a young man's adolescence and maturity, as he grows from callow child to capable adult. However, the Potter series as published does not really fulfill this potential. It's often been remarked on, I think, that even by the last book, the theoretically-eighteen-year-old Harry is still written the same way he was when he was twelve, where he's a bit passive, a bit incompetent, and has too many of his victories served up to him on a plate. (It is, to be fair, not unique to Harry - almost nobody in the series meaningfully changes.) If you diagnose that problem, well, one of the implications of the Malfoid romance is that Harry is pushed to sort himself out and grow more mature. I think that growth in competence is something male readers really enjoy. The wider genre of stories about male protagonists who start out mediocre-to-incompetent and then achieve self-mastery is a huge one.
At any rate, if we're putting a political lens on this, I can see the stereotype that the left, perhaps in a more feminine-coded way, says "we will look after you", and the right, in a more masculine-coded way, says "we will give you opportunity but you have to pull yourself up on your own".
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
It's Gareth and Lady Linet all the way down.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I don't think that story is representative of all of Dramione, which is an incredibly prolific genre all by itself.
In the abstract I don't think Dramione and Malfoid would be mirror images of each other - if nothing else, heterosexual male sexuality and heterosexual female sexuality are different, and I find it plausible that female sexuality is, in some contexts, 'rougher' or 'nastier' than male equivalents. Teratophilia, as far as I can tell, is predominantly female, for instance, whereas you don't have to poke male sexual fantasies too hard to find that, beneath the surface level of porn, big-breasted bimbos, etc., there are some softer yearnings there.
And of course, on top of that, fan artists on Twitter, Pixiv, etc., in 2026 are just a different demographic to the teenage girls on the internet in the 2000s who made Dramione such a big thing that it propelled fan fiction authors into real publishing careers.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Whereas in the case of Dramione or Zutara, Hermione and Katara are already great, and it's only the bad boy who needs to reform? That's a fair comment. That's also one of the issues I have with something like Twilight - minimal character growth is required.
In general what I want from a romance story is for both characters to have an arc, where they grow and change in order to fit together better. In that light I think I'll agree that Malfoid has more potential than these comparisons.
I suppose that's also part of its appeal. It sketches out an alternative character arc for Harry, and since the default, canon arc for Harry is disappointing in several ways (in particular, yes, he never seems to take the initiative or truly grow up), there's a real need for an alternative.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
You're clearly more optimistic about bots and agents than I am...
I agree that this shows the fundamental failure and unseriousness of government at the moment, though. It's okay for governments to occasionally make cute little gestures to things popular in the community (I remember, for instance, the Obama administration responding to a proposal to build a Death Star - I think that was tasteful), but I don't think this is an example of that. I think probably what happened here is that a bunch of people in the Trump administration are too-online Twitterheads who are completely out of touch with the country as a whole.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I mean, fundamentally it's just Dramione for men, isn't it?
It reminds me a bit of a comment (a tweet, I think? or maybe Tumblr?) I saw once describing a gender-flipped Twilight, where an everyman, maybe slightly schlubby, self-insert protagonist meets a hot goth vampire chick who is inexplicably into him and fights a similarly hot wild werewolf chick for his affections, and male replies going, "Oh my gosh. I get it now."
Malfoid feels like that but for Dramione or Zutara or any of the other famous 'bad boy' ships with screaming female fandoms.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Okay, I find this genuinely dispiriting.
Part of what was appealing about the whole Malfoid trend was the explosion of creativity in fan art (i.e. real fan art, drawn by actual humans), and fan fiction. There's a whole online fan artist space that likes to jump on trends, they jumped on this one, and they produced a lot of really sweet material. Moreover, though arguably some of it was politically inflected, for the most part it was apolitical. Cute girl, everyman hero, they get together. It was fun. I'm in favour of romance stories for boys.
It's frustrating for a bunch of highly politicised jackals to jump on that and try to appropriate it, especially when they're doing so with low-effort AI garbage.
Even just in-character, presumably part of the appeal of the Malfoy character and family is that they're meant to be aristocratic and traditional - hearkening back to an older, better way of doing things. They're also meant to be elitist; they have high standards, and so part of the story is the everyman studying and measuring up. Every part of this premise seems like it should cut again populist botslop.
I realise I have no power to accomplish this, but what's in my heart is an offended, "Get this rubbish off the internet. Now."
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It does remind me of the GamerGate-era accusation that a lot of games journalists were actually frustrated culture journalists or lifestyle journalists or something. They wanted to be writing in some more prestigious field, unfortunately had gotten stuck in games, but were still in love with the idea of being a journalist, so they were grudgingly writing about something they disliked and had no real appreciation for.
In this case, it sounds like Hepler wanted to be a writer, and enjoyed writing, but did not like video games. She probably would have been better off just writing short stories or something. But she might not have been able to make it in that field, or it might not pay the bills as well, so video games it is...
Still, I would want, ideally, games writers to understand and appreciate games, as a medium.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I've lived in Melbourne all my life, though I only know of Shanghai through word of mouth. What I've experienced and heard would suggest to me that it's the other way around, though I admit that I'm 10-15 years out of date on Shanghai.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Are you thinking of any examples?
To be clear, I don't think that modern China is fascist. I'm imagining a fascist China that exaggerates and intensifies some of China's existing pathologies. My understanding of the state of modern China, absorbed mostly from talking to Chinese people, is that everyday life is a lot like everyday life in the West, only everything is a little bit nastier or more corrupt. Cities are a bit dirtier. Officials are slightly more on the take. Little everyday things are just a bit more frustrating. Still, it is perfectly liveable.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I don't think anybody will argue that Australia's approach to indigenous peoples is anything but broken, but the number of Australians in any way affected by our approach to indigenous peoples is very low. I'm Victorian and I encounter approximately zero Aboriginal people on a regular basis. If you don't live in the Northern Territory, you're just not going to run into the issue.
I am by no means defending our Aboriginal policy to say that firstly, even assuming hypothetically that a Chinese fascist government would handle Aboriginal policy better, that is such a minor, insignificant issue that it does not factor into my judgement of whether Chinese fascists would be better for me than the present system; and secondly, I do not think Chinese fascists would handle Aboriginal policy better, neither for Aboriginal people themselves nor for the majority.
My take is basically that today the People's Republic of China is a state run for the benefit of the Han majority, and a hypothetical fascist China would only intensify that. If fascist China conquered Australia, I think that would, in the long term, be worse for people like me than sticking with liberal democracy.
None of that means that I think the present establishment is flawless, or even good. I do, however, think it is less bad than it would be if the Chinese took over. Hell, if nothing else, I prefer a relatively free market to socialism with Chinese characteristics!
OliveTapenade
2d ago
That's broadly been my reaction as well - I am cautiously happy because this is a win for Team Slightly Less Corrupt Than The Other Guy. That is, marginally, a preferable outcome.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
What sort of state are you envisioning?
If I try to imagine a situation where I, a Caucasian Australian person, lived in an East Asian fascist state, the closest examples I can think of are things like 1) WWII Japan conquered my country and took over, 2) I move to North Korea, 3) Somehow China gets a lot more populist and expansionist and either conquers my country or I move there, or something else along those lines.
In all those examples I think I would be worse off than I am currently under liberal democracy. If imperial Japan took over Australia, I think there's a chance they treat European people better than southeast Asians, but realistically we're probably going to become a second Manchukuo, turned into a resource colony. Ethnic Japanese settlers would likely come down and turn into a local aristocracy. That seems bad to me. I don't think I need to explain why the North Korea option is terrible. And as for China, well, I wouldn't want to be an ethnic minority in China now. How much better would it be if China went even more militantly Han-supremacist? You don't even have to bring up the Uighurs or something - look at how, for example, the Manchus went from a majority of the population in multiple northeastern provinces to the small minorities they are right now, and anti-Manchu conspiracy theories are still common. Let's just say that as a laowai I do not think I would be safe under an intensification of the same sort of thing.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I'm a huge fan of BG1 and BG2, which I consider some of the best RPGs ever made, so it would be fair to say that BG3 crapping on BG2 is a deal-breaker for me.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I remember one of the first times it was recommended to me it was from a trans person excitedly telling me that you can be trans in the game, which as far as I can tell just means that you can put a visible penis on your female character. I'm not sure that's a win for diversity so much as being a win for perverts, but there you go.
I believe there was also some excitement in the progressive parts of the internet about a lesbian character in act two? Oh, and I remember something about getting a trans YouTuber (PhilosophyTube?) to voice a significant character, and that also seems like a bad sign.
You might feel free to dismiss me as just a cranky social conservative, but eventually all of this just gets tiring. Part of what's nice about going back to any video games prior to 2005 or so is that it's just not there. I'm sick of every video game, even games I otherwise quite like, having the mandatory part that I have to ignore. For the entire history of the industry up until the mid-to-late 2000s, we didn't do this. Can we just... not, for five minutes? Can we just have a video game with normal, sane sexual ethics again?
Just once?
(Well, actually, we can, the answer is Japanese games. But it's harder to find in the West.)
OliveTapenade
2d ago
The original context of the Hepler discussion was an interview she did in 2006. Note that this was back when BioWare was unquestionably good, so there isn't much chance that she ruined the games back then. Anyway, here is the relevant part:
What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?
Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn't have a good story, it's very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.
And with a baby on the way in a few months, my minimal free time (which makes it impossible for me to finish a big RPG in less than six months already), will disappear entirely. If there was a fast-forward feature on games which would let me easily review the writing and stories and skip the features that I find more frustrating than fun, I'd find it much easier to keep abreast of what's happening in the field.
I have two conflicting feelings on this.
The first is - okay, fair enough, most RPGs are massive time-sinks, and if you have to play them because part of your job is knowing what the competition are doing, you'd want a way to go through that more quickly. That's completely reasonable. Heaven knows that I've skipped past combat in games to get to more of the writing before. (A hopefully uncontroversial example - does anybody play, say, the last third of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines without using cheats to skip the combat?) Given that her job was game writing and she didn't have endless time, I understand the frustration.
The second feeling, though, is that she probably shouldn't be a video games writer at all. Writing and playing should not be treated as separate; rather, in a well-made video game, they need to support each other. In a good video game, the writing contextualises play, and the play contextualises the story, and they reinforce each other. Yes, I cheat through the last third of Bloodlines, but the fact that I do that is evidence that Bloodlines is a poorly-designed game. (To be fair it was rushed out and probably unfinished; the combat-heavy final act is garbage, but the low-combat first half of the game is excellent.) If I were hiring a writer for my game company, I would absolutely want the writer to understand and appreciate the gameplay. That's part of the writer's job. Gameplay can cause or intensify emotional reactions!
Hepler kind of has a point, especially for games that have terrible combat or a lot of grinding, and in 2006 I think it's fair to say that most RPGs had pretty lousy combat. But she can only have a point at all because of a larger design failure.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Jennifer Hepler was a writer, not a CM.
The thing is, the infamous 'Hepler button' is a perfectly reasonable idea and most older games had it. It's called, as Mantergeistmann points out, a cheat code. I freely admit that I played a bunch of Neverwinter Nights modules by Hepler-buttoning my way through them.
Really, it would not have been hard to put cheats in DA or ME, and in general I think that controversy was just one of communication.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Certainly what I've heard by osmosis is that it's pretty woke?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
My understanding is that BG3 transparently does not give the slightest crap about either BG1 or BG2, or the wider Forgotten Realms canon.
It's Divinity: Original Sin III. From what I hear it is competent at that and perhaps even a good game, but one thing it is definitely not is a sequel to Baldur's Gate II.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I am also firmly on board with RTwP as superior to strictly turn-based, at least for a video game adaptation of something like D&D. It's easy to miss this, because on the purely mechanical level D&D is turn-based, but if you've ever actually played D&D on the tabletop, you'll know that it is constantly speeding up, slowing down, some combats are glossed over, and so on. Playing through every single turn methodically is tedious - some rounds in D&D sound like "okay, so you all hit the guy, right? roll me an attack each - yep, that does it", and some rounds sound like "all right, let's get everyone in initiative order, Luke, you've won initiative, what's your action going to be?"
RTwP, to me, simulates the actual flow of play of D&D much better than strict TBS.
That sounds plausible to me - male and female sexualities must connect at some point, because that's how the human race continues, and the fact that most men and women enjoy sex with each other suggests that it must be possible for the man and the woman to satisfy each other's desires at the same time. That doesn't mean there aren't differences or that there isn't going to be a level of negotiation around any sexual act (that is, you're going to do things that your partner enjoys even if it's not your favourite thing personally, and vice versa), but there must be some large area of overlap.
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