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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.
Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.
But it occurs to me, a few days later, what might really be happening. Because all these adventures are criticized for being too linear, too bare bones, no room for fleshing out a world or inventive problem solving. And I think, not unlike how D&D in the 00's had MMO/Video Game envy, and aspects of it's design leaned into what they thought people wanted in MMOs and other CRPGs, I think D&D in the current era has Youtube envy and is trying to lean into what they think people want when they watch Critical Roll.
Because short, on rails adventures are perfect if all you want to do is play a session about as long as a youtube play session, and act out imitations of what you saw watching other people play D&D on youtube.
I donno, it's a theory. I have no interest in exploring the current era of D&D products to confirm it, on account of them hating me and all.
I mean, D&D is under a Creative Commons license now, so no one needs to care about what WotC does ever again. Doesn't matter if they go woke(r) or if Elon Musk turns it into another chud hobby, the books are free for anyone to modify and change forever.
Even if you want to pay money to companies actively supporting a contemporary game, there's plenty of options across the political spectrum from relatively woke companies that still make decent products (Paizo, Kobold Press) to more right-wing or neutral companies (a fair few OSR publishers.)
This is not a very informative phrasing, because there are several different Creative Commons licenses and some of them are very restrictive. More specifically, D&D is under CC BY 4.0, the Creative Commons attribution-only license, whose restrictions are minimal.
I certainly didn't expect someone to read my comment, and just start publishing D&D content without any further research, but I suppose the further clarification for those interested is nice.
It's just good practice to specify which Creative Commons license you are talking about whenever you mention one, because each of the six different licenses has wildly different implications (the NC option is particularly dangerous). Saying "under a Creative Commons" license is like saying "owns a four legged pet" instead of "a dog", "a hamster", "a pony", etc; it's not as natural of a category as you might think
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