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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38228 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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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.

Having only skimmed the article, is the problem with the alignment for races, or the inherent statline stuff? Shadowrun also has traits and statline differences for each of the different races you can play as, even as recently as 5th Edition (dunno about 6th), but I've never heard anyone complain about that. It can't be because Shadowrun's playerbase isn't big enough to contain the same kinds of players as those who make up D&D's modern audience; I've seen 6th Edition talked about in the official Discord server for Lancer (an RPG by a developer whose politics are very much in line with modern SJ) and in far from any negative tone, IIRC.

The problem is that DnD has not accepted the modern progressive line on race - that it's completely arbitrary and has no impact or meaning in any way that might possibly be contorted into looking like something in the real world.

Kimchi said he was disappointed to see the word ‘race’ used, especially since it’s something that a lot of people have complained about and sought to remedy. “It seemed like the most basic change they could have done so that everyone could move on, but they didn’t go that far,” he said, describing the shift from ‘race’ to ‘species’ as “low-hanging fruit.”

And even if WotC did change from the word race to the word species, Isa said, that would still be a problem, “because there would still be a lot of racial coding.”

The people pushing for this change are not inherently wrong. Changing the term "race" to "species" would probably fit better with modern usage of those terms. But their goal is not to see DnD modernize its vocabulary, it's to effectively see their own beliefs reflected in the media they consume.

But their goal is not to see DnD modernize its vocabulary, it's to effectively see their own beliefs reflected in the media they consume.

...And to ensure that people with other beliefs can't do likewise.

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