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How We Talk Past Each Other: understanding how the war over the future of Dungeons and Dragons is the entirety of the culture war in a nutshell
In a thread on Reddit Motte at least six months ago, I became enlightened to the fundamental difference between drag and crossdressing. The latter is fundamentally serious, a personal choice of expressing something important about one’s inner self. The former is a form of playing, specifically, performing a role meant to be absorbed as part of a fiction. It is part of the larger genre of performance known as clowning, which can be described as colorful character archetypes performing bold actions with obvious consequences for an audience. Clowning also includes professional wrestling, F/SF cosplay, Muppets-style puppetry, and political ads.
The same split is seen elsewhere in fiction; genre fiction is considered non-literary because it typically involves stereotyped archetypical characters walking a well-trod path in a specific type of world: Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Sam Spade, Batman, Spider-Man, Elric of Melniboné, and so on. I used words containing the root “typ” three times in that sentence because typing is the core of genre: any individual is an instance of a type.
By contrast, novels focus on individuals as beings-in-themselves, and might use types as something they struggle against. So do graphic novels, explorations and deconstructions of characters in a more realistic or nuanced way, even if they have types. They are more akin to the arthouse spirit of crossdressing than the clowning spirit of drag: the sitcom without the laugh track, the invisible and silent audience who appreciates instead of enjoys. And these two spirits cannot exist in the same world.
That brings us to D&D. Gizmodo/io9 published an article about taking biodiversity typing out of the stats of D&D playable species.
D&D is an RPG which is built on the clowning spirit of types and power levels, using fantastic biodiversity to tell adventure game stories. It is a core nerd culture property, enjoyed historically by oppressed people with autism to imagine being powerful people who don’t just fit into their milieu but who thrive as adventurers and heroes.
This little corner of the culture war turns RPGs from Fun With Action Figures to Serious Representation.
Independently, I concluded a few months ago that gender (the way activists use it) is itself an artsy-fartsy thing for artsy-fartsy people, which is to say, a Serious Thing.
I have definitely encountered the hyper-individualistic idea of gender as a unique creation or performance that every person makes. It never made much sense to me, since I feel like it's a category mismatch. I wouldn't call something that has as many manifestations as there are people "gender" - I would call it something like personality, personal style, or something similar.
I think the other issue I have is that gender must play with the existing stereotypical sex roles in society.
If you can truly convince everyone that pink isn't a girls color, or that particular clothes aren't just for one sex or the other, you haven't created a world full of radical self-expression. Sure, boys will wear dresses and pink, and girls will wear boyfriend jeans and suits, but the meaning, the context of these things will have completely changed. It won't mean anything, because there will be no backdrop or framework to interpret these acts as subversive or unusual. It will just be one of many normal things for people to do, and when that is the case there is no point in actually doing it.
If AOC's "Tax the Rich" dress was something you could buy at Walmart before the Met Gala, she wouldn't have worn it, because the context would have been completely different. She would have gone with some other, completely different form of self expression as a form of protest instead.
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