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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.
There are two separate issues with fantasy races here:
biodiversity of stats, which I won't discuss in this comment
biodiversity of alignment, which I will
Since most campaigns are technically about a bunch of murderhobos slaughtering their way to the BBG the DM needs a way to give mass murder an acceptable coating. Aggressive fauna and animated corpses can only take you so far, at some point you might want to start killing sapient opponents. And how do you justify the killing of sapient opponents? Making them evil is the simplest choice.
Most realistic "evil" opponents exist somewhere on the scale of "voluntary choice <--> victim of circumstances". The further an opponent is to the left, the easier it is to justify killing them. The further it's to the right, the more hoops you have to jump through: making them attack you first, turning them into faceless mooks, even letting the players derail the story by trying to redeem them.
D&D tried to avoid this whole conundrum by making whole races "inherently evil". Not even just "culturally evil", which would place them firmly in the "victim of circumstances" corner. Kobolds steal, orcs raid and mindflayers enslave simply because it's in their blood. You can't fix them or reason with them, extermination is the only solution.
Of course this leads back to the classical decoupling vs contextualizing problem.
Contextualizers say, "can't you see how this kind of portraial of races as inherently flawed is problematic? Would you play a game where you are a SWAT team gunning down Blacks because Blacks are criminals?"
Decoupling grogrnards reply, "But we aren't playing that! We're deliberately playing a group of fictional heroes in a fictional world killing fictional sapient creatures that are inherently evil to avoid any unfortunate implications and have fun without worrying about the ethical side of the game!"
Contextualizers say, "But you can't avoid unfortunate implications! By repeating the same claim about the nature of evil in every fictional world you play in you demonstrate that you are comfortable with this claim, that it you've internalized it, that you wouldn't mind if the real world worked that way."
Decoupling grognards reply, "What do you want us to do? Play campaigns where we have to investigate the violations of tribal land rights of orcish clans that caused their raids on human settlers?"
Contextualizers reply, "Well, this still sounds kinda problematic, with you transforming indigenous humans into non-humans. I bet you have some offensive stereotypes about feather headdresses and peace pipes in your DM notes"
Decoupling grodnards say, "You know what, why don't you fuck off and let us play the games we want in peace?"
Contextualizers say, "That's it, I'm outing you on Twitter. Prepare to get cancelled!"
Umm... They give experience and have loot. That justifies killing them enough. Why complicate things.
Thank you, Belkar Bitterleaf.
Now that Order of the Stick has entered the CW thread, I'll say that I always think of Xykon's legendary "power equals power" monologue to V whenever someone on here discusses conflict theory or institutional capture.
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