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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/dungeons-and-dragons-elon-musk/684828/
In This Thread, 2D3D Wonders Why Race Concern Shit In Pop Culture Still Matters
So, Elon Musk apparently had a spergout over WOTC because WOTC apparently did a faerun land acknowledgment and apologized for racially essentializing... well, anything (or everything, I can't tell).
Per the article,
And that made Musk tweet an implied consideration to buy out Hasbro, owner of WOTC. Perhaps he should keep away from napkins and lawyers for a few weeks, but WOTC staff and progressives have more to lose from a Musk takeover than Musks does if he accidentally commits to the sale.
My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.
I trust this forum understands the broad strokes enough to make a culture war summary unnecessary. Anything white nerds love must have more women and minorities and it must explicitly come at the expense of the white nerd favourites. Duke out details in the comments if necessary, the battle itself isn't the point.
The progressives won the previous round already. They got the victory lap of defeating racial essentialism by incorporating noble blacks, I mean orcs, in the rulebook a few years back. Vice, Kotaku, Polygon spammed articles about how this proves the rejection of white supremacy by the powers that be. Hooray for the Resistance, we are now the New Republic. Did I mix my factions? It doesn't matter, and apparently neither did the battle. Because WOTC still saw fit to dig up ancient corpses and put them on trial for heresy.
Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore. The volume of pop media culture wars has deflated in the face of victory, and perhaps Sydney Sweeney deadeyeing a millennial journo hoping for self abasement to atone for even being proximate to white advocacy is emblematic of how irrelevant this public opinion war is. You can, in fact, yeschad someone trying to make you feel guilty for not grovelling for zillenial approval.
But what exactly is the battlefield now? Racial/sexual/gender/whateverfuck representation? Moral ambiguity of 'bad' people unless the bad guy is generational trauma/white supremacy? Sinecures for adherents via "narrative consultancy"? Is the objective to win a battle or just to make noise.
Theres a destructive incentive structure here that I can't parse out fully. The unwoke are perfectly happy to sit back and be gradually edged out, as seen from the ready faggification of media starting with Will and Grace and reaching a high point (maybe) in Bridgerton where intraracial relationships are the enemy (maybe, I don't watch Shondaland slop). Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.
Back to topic. The unwoke are silent dragged along consumers, the woke think they can accelerate the slide or celebrate the slide, suddenly reactionaries Notice and generate backlash, and the woke get smacked in. Retreating in confusion, they conclude that the issue is the message not being made clear enough, and the message is doubled down despite vocal opposition.
Rinse and repeat, but always back into defeat. Social justice went fucking nuts in 2016 because Trump descended from his golden staircase to snatch victory from Hilary Clintons anointed hands, and without the popular vote it seemed that this was merely a technical mistake, one that needed to be message disciplined to ensure the course of history is maintained. Biden won as a moderate but governed as a progressive because his brain turned to soup about a year in and the entire white house was Jill roleplaying Eleanor except without enough balls to lead a relatively competent cabinet, so the progressive staffers wrote every communique and channeled The Groups. Opposition was simply the last gasp of straight white men (and blacks and gays and women and asians and latinos and....)
Then Trump won, the illusion shattered for about a year. But now the same dead fights are being rehashed.
I don't really have a concrete point to interrogate in this culture war. My stance that any media featuring a minority front and center being likely to suck because it always means the writers room can't have room to criticize stupidity is enough for me to optimize my consumption because I'm an old moron and nostalgia for old shows from my youth gives me enough tinglies. Yet the strength of reactionary pushback to culture war attempts clearly shows that this is a conflict progressives seem intent on reigniting, and it should be clear that they not only lost the previous rounds but the upcoming battlefield is likely lost. The Dispatch sold a million copies and none of their characters were "body positive" in any way. Contrast that with Concord that literally was dead on arrival with their fat ugly minorities, making me wonder if the skirmishes being reignited are just masochists indulging in a public humiliation/victimization kink.
They would 100% not put out today the version of D&D that Gygax put out in 1974. No sane business that wanted to make lots of money would. And you know exactly why. It would offend way too many customers for no good reason. Not a good business reason and not a good artistic reason, (unless you squint really hard).
So, I think this means it's not a dead battleground. Though I would go on and say it's different; this isn't the same stuff as making elves black.
Just because Trump won an election doesn't mean you can ignore the racial demographcs of your potential customer base (>30% black or hispanic, 50% female) along with half of the white people stressing out about things they see as bigoted.
I'm mostly not up to date on this issue though, and found this discussion on r/KotakuInAction informative albeit a bit circle jerky.
From that link
and
The slipping demography of white America and the not-exclusively-for-hideous-neckbeardedness of D&D anymore explains the behavior a lot better than progressive dead-battlegrounding, IMO. Though of course the woke ideological shit-tests are a part of this too.
In order for women to mock men for playing D&D, they'd have had to know what it is, and plenty of women plainly like some element or other of the concept of the game (they like roleplaying tea parties).
The main issue was that they wanted nothing to do with the men that played it.
Women who play dnd roleplay alot more than munchkin. Killing baddies is the boring part for girls, just like dialogue filler is boring for guys. The girls (including autogynephiliac men) I dm'ed for back in college were really into their female characters being put into near rape scenarios ("I remove my clothes in this prison to increase my stealth check roll!" "uh... ok...you can just stay in your enchanted leather..." "I roll for wisdom check if I remember that the enchanted leather is stealthy enough" "pass" "fuck roll again"). I know that a pbp forum had to offload all ERP because the main threads were getting clogged with sex roleplay and wasting turns for the rest of the party.
True that the girls never wanted anything to do with the guys playing. Creeps or munchkins are equally irritating. and the presence of a woman just makes that much worse. Though I have seen relatively healthy dnd groups among younger kids where girlfriends tag along just for shits and giggles, and thats honestly one of the best outcomes for an irl dnd session. Getting epic failstreaks to be funny requires good DM and good players and thats generally pretty rare.
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I think it is possible to overstate this thesis. I think D&D has a Star Wars-like thing going on with it: Star Wars was a massive blockbuster, watched and enjoyed by tons of men and women. It is also the case that autistic men gravitated towards it as a long-term special interest at a much higher rate, and so they became the core of the Star Wars fandom.
D&D Red Box was a huge Christmas smash hit the year it came out. While I have no doubt that male players outnumbered female players back then, I would find it extremely plausible that tons of kids, male and female, got D&D Red Box in their Christmas stockings, tried to start a campaign and had it peter out after a few weeks or months, and that this group constituted the majority of all D&D players back then. The ones who stuck around were probably disproportionately autistic men, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you subtracted them you would have a much more gender-balanced (though still skewing male) early audience for D&D than you might expect.
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