(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* I know nerd culture is obtuse and the real influence of D&D on English speaking pop culture is poorly understood... but I am begging people to at least realize that it's older than Dark Souls and Skyrim.

* I have Hulu for a month or two to have new stuff to watch. I know that there are a lot of things I've wanted to see, but didn't because it was over on Hulu. I will need to comb through the catalogue thoroughly to figure out what.

* Someone should write a horror parody of Mr Beast where he's actively using the current state of the economy to lure people into scenarios that are straight up psych experiments banned in the 70s for... Wait, he's doing that in reality? And being added to the board of Forbes magazine? Him making an estimated 82 mill last year probably only accounts for part of his income not all of it? Yeah, this is fine.

* Do I want to admit that I am trying to get a Bluesky invite? I hate modern social media, spend very little time on it and am very over the whole 'this place sucks, follow me on bluesky instead' posts, but most of the ways I keep tabs on things I care about and feel informed are gone so... fuck.

[Edit] I have codes! Thank you all so much. I post an immediately get invites. That was a surprise because usually any invite type site I can never get a code! Thank you for being so nice as soon as I asked... er... as soon as I grumpily and passive-aggressively implied I wanted one.

Comments

[evilinsanemonkey]

I set up a bluesky but I have done nothing with it yet, lol.

[olivermoss]

I am trying to set it up. I haven't figured out how things work over there yet.

[kavyina]

Everything I learn about Mr. Beast reassures me that my decision to dislike him is definitely warranted. Where'd you learn that stuff about him, by the way? If there's any kind of expose or something, I'd love to read/watch it.

[olivermoss]

Mostly from his own tweets trending on twitter. He got a lot of backlash for these projects:

https://twitter.com/alx/status/1707873146005524487

https://twitter.com/MrBeast/status/1707869557161955744

But for a long time his content has pretty much been exploiting poverty and lack of medical care for content. A lot of people are fine with it because they figure their views on his videos becomes money and that money becomes charity but, uh, he's taking a healthy slice off of the top. He sought a Billion dollar valuation for his production company that he fully owns about a year ago and that is just one of his income streams. He has probably become a billionaire from his 'philanthropy'

Some of his biggest charity gestures happened around when there was increasing backlash against him for involvement in crypto and NFT stuff. He's never had his own project, but he's been involved in some. Then his defenders were all 'why do you hate people who do good in the world'? His criticizers are often dismissed as just wanting to pour hate into the world.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh dear. Yeah... Skyrim and Dark Souls are not the origin of "D&D-like broader appeal".

Every time I hear anything about Mr Beast my horror increases.

I hope you like Bluesky! I keep hearing it's pleasantly chill, which may be temporary as it's relatively limited at the moment, but it'd be nice if that stayed the vibe!

[olivermoss]

Owlbears, mimics, etc come from D&D not FromSoft. As for edgelord skeleton filled dungeons, I don't think that aesthetic started with D&D but they did it a thousand times before FromSoft existed. Some things are just tropes, or classic aesthetics reaching back into European culture.

Yeah, Mr Beast and his following are going more and more off the rails. I don't know if his 'if I watch this he makes money, money goes to charity, I am creating good in the world by binging his content and how dare people say I am not' type followers will ever wake up and smell the grift.

So far Bluesky feels very small? I haven't figured out how feeds work yet, I need to do that.

[mistressofmuses]

I think that's one that surprises me - when people look at certain, specific D&D monsters and think they're... not D&D. Owlbears is the specific one that comes to mind (along with mindflayers), though mimics are probably an even more egregious one.
And sure, D&D drew on a lot of mythology or folkloric traditions, including things like Arthurian myth and such, plus the fantasy trappings of things like LotR. A lot of D&D tropes DO extend farther back, but the particular ways those tropes and monsters and archetypes are utilized in SFF as a whole (maybe especially now in games as opposed to most modern spec-fic) is SO EXTREMELY inspired by the ways in which D&D codified them.

I think you're right. I don't want to say it's a cult, but there's a real strong level of belief among the devoted followers that feels impenetrable.

I'll be curious to see how you like bluesky! I've heard a lot more positive things about it than negative, but the walled garden aspect makes me a bit wary. (I always like to try and get the vibe of a space before I want to commit to it.) I think what some people have meant by "it's so chill!" might actually be "it's quite small!" lol.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, and also a lot of the dark aesthetic is from old germanic / scandanavian folk lore and myth.

D&D is a weird beast. A lot of the creatures and vibes and tropes came from people's home games then a player would go on to submit monsters or novels or modules, etc. There is some single creator content, I think it's Waterdeep that came out of one person just making a super detailed setting, but a lot of it was very broadly and organically crowdsourced. Then it went on to have massive impacts on a lot of people who made other things.

It's kinda funny that people keep thinking D&D is ripping off Fromsoft, when what Fromsoft has been doing is very purist, old fashioned european / british fantasy, with some 90s D&D vibes and references. Referencing to the point that might have gotten them sued if they where a US company. Soulslike games are hexcrawls. So for a lot of people, their one taste of that is from a Japanese company. They do it well, but the kids just don't get that's going on.

Yeah, I have very little idea of what to do with bluesky. But for now at least I can peek behind the curtain.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh yeah, there's some real dark folklore shit to be found when you dig for it! Even historical epics like Beowulf and such have some influence.

That's true, too - you had a bunch of what was functionally homebrew stuff that got adopted into the canon. It's largely a very cool thing, because it was so crowdsourced, so different things that different groups were into all got brought in together, which I think is a strength. Seeing those ideas ripple out through so many different fantasy (and sci-fi, and horror, and, and, and) properties is very cool.

I feel like that sort of thing happens a lot, where people see their first exposure to a given trope/mechanic/genre convention as The Originator... and then everything else that shares the same influences, or in some cases even pre-dates whatever they saw first feels like a "rip off" or "is just copying..." It's a little amusing, but also annoying because so many of them are SO CONFIDENT when they are SO WRONG, lol.

At least you can actually look at it and see what it's about!

[olivermoss]

It's weird to me because I've always been interested in where ideas, tropes, etc came from and used to spend a lot of time digging up old movies and stuff to see how certain threads developed.

There is so much depth, and weirdness, to D&D from how it developed. Outside of the books it's kinda hard to get into something so sprawling. I always figured part of why D&Ds influence was so hidden was just that you can't just watch a movie or something to see where the source is. It's more complicated than that. Also, sometimes it's just a vibe or a mindset. I've met so many people who all agreed that the original Stargate movie was a very TTRPG vibe film, but it's in how the characters come together and how they approach the problem rather than having mimics or drow. It's all very hard to pin down sometimes.

I've run into people thinking an anime or Japanese game is the source of something so often, when a lot of Japanese media is very into European folklore and also D&D. All that had a major impact. I mean, look at Fullmetal Alchemist! ... I'd give a more recent example but I barely watch any anymore. I am out of the loops. But also it's been a thing that Japanese devs are insulted by the term 'JRPG' because they are like 'no, we are doing RPG games like anyone else'. They see themselves as part of the tradition, not weirdly separate from it.

[mistressofmuses]

It's really cool to see where things originated! That was one of the things I liked best about a film class I took that focused on horror, because we did often start at the beginning of where certain things were first put to film. (Naturally, that's mostly not the beginning of any of the tropes, just their filmed incarnations, but that was a really cool aspect of the class.)

D&D really is a very unique case study in how it came about. There's a lot of stuff that really does kind of fall under the "house style" or "vibes" heading, because it's not codified in the rulebooks or the like, but is just an aspect of the general feeling/vibe/ethos of the whole thing.
I know that plenty of people go on about how "there are other systems than D&D" when it comes to TTRPGs, and while that's true, the influences are still very much there in those "alternatives", too.

Oh yeah! There are so many older anime series (I'm with you; I haven't watched anything newer than about a decade old, lol) that really lean heavily on European folklore and the general dungeon-delving party-building D&D formula. Wasn't it Record of Lodoss War that was *literally* a D&D campaign written out with the thinnest veneer of "this is totally not D&D" paint?
Lately I've seen some weird drama about how those sorts of stories are bad because they aren't "authentically" Japanese, and "must" have been made completely for foreign markets due to evil Western pressures. Which is just... bizarro fucking takes. That feels like the exact sort of attitude that puts JRPGs in a totally different category from "western" RPGs, and acts like they're completely separate things from each other. And I love me some classic JRPGs and the particular vibe they had, and now a lot of THOSE aspects of the most popular Final Fantasy games and their clones (Legend of Dragoon, my beloved) have also fed back into that tradition and become part of what people draw on. And I love that!

[olivermoss]

Yeah, D&Ds influence is weirdly ephemeral because some of it's the culture, the memes, etc. Stuff you can't just get at by reading a source book. If you've played at least one game that helps a lot, but that can be complicated. You need a DM, etc. Also, old school D&D and modern, Matt Mercer influenced D&D have different vibes. Most of the influence on media came from old school, and you don't get that from Real Plays.

The popularity of Real Plays will always baffle me.

The idea of authentic, pure Japanese culture is hilarious if you know anything about the history of Japanese culture. They are unique in that they are using a writing system developed for an entirely different language. Zen / minimalism and Zen style Buddhism are distinctly Japanese, but the roots of most Japanese culture, art, myth, writing system, etc, is China. Post WW2 they deliberately westernized and certain demographics of Japanese people are likely to be insulted if you lump Japan in with the rest of Asia instead of lumping it in with western nations.

I love Japan, and none of this is meant negatively, but, well, a lot of westerners are very weird about Japan and purity and Japan being so incredibly unique. A lot of people who go on about how incredibly unique, distinct, pure, etc Japan is tend to sound exactly like people into nihonjinron, who are the scary racist / nationalist / etc people in Japan. (The more you know about Japan the more uncomfortable some parts of American/UK fandom get, especially if you speak Japanese... which I sort of do. I passed a fluency test ages ago but I am very rusty. I can still translate if not interpret)

Anyway, yeah, D&D got big with the Japanese creative set way back in the day the same way it did with Americans and a lot of the 'RPG style' and other stuff of Japanese culture is from America. I've been accused of being an 'ignorant american' for saying so, but it's true.

Yeah, Record of Lodoss War is someone's home game that become a light novel series and then an anime. I really need to rewatch the whole thing sometimes.

[mistressofmuses]

There is a lot of D&D that isn't just the "canon". Whatever the canon even means, when the whole thing is an exercise in never-the-same collaborative storytelling and random luck and such. (And I know there are a lot of trends and norms that come up that aren't traced to any rulebook.)
I played one full campaign with friends in college, and some one-off characters in an ex's campaign when I was in town, and even those experiences were super different from each other, and that was within a couple years and in cities within the same state. I know there is even more variation and every possible "house rule" and blended homebrew addition out there.
I've got coworkers in games that have gone on for *years*.

Real Plays are an interesting phenomenon. I was pretty into the first series of The Adventure Zone, though never managed to get into any of the others that I've seen people excited over. A lot of the successful ones are (obviously) made by people who have other acting/podcasting/etc. experience, and they leverage that to make the campaigns and characters interesting to an outside perspective... but that's SUCH a different aim and process than the games I was ever a part of, ha.

Oh yeah. Japan really embraced (politically, culturally) a lot of western ideals, and it was a very deliberate thing, especially pointedly rejecting the isolationism that they'd previously gone for.
There are a lot of people (mostly American, though that's just what I encounter most) that are fucking WEIRD about Japan, especially. It's honestly really uncomfortable exoticism when it comes to these attitudes about how... other cultures have to remain static and perform "authenticity" that pleases them as the external audience. How those cultures MUST remain apart from everything else, how there should be absolutely no sharing between cultures, because that would be IMPURE. Yuck.

[olivermoss]

I've played D&D some, but I've played other system more. I know the culture around D&D than like the specifics of the lore. Though, I sort of absorbed a lot over time. I prefer more flexible systems and urban fantasy, though I haven't run it in a while.

I pretty much only like Real Plays when it's like the Stranger Thing casts plays D&D or the BG3 cast play D&D. I remember years ago when people started going nuts for them and I was just baffled. Their influence is big, not bad, but it's a thing. In my current game people communicate in TAZ references and memes and I've stopped even saying 'I literally have no idea what you just said'. We're on break until after the holidays I might just drop it. I don't want to, but it's getting silly.

I just nope out of a lot of anime fandom stuff. Replying in actual Japanese when people spoke fandom-Japanese or went 'Nani' at me stopped being amusing a loooong time ago. It gets pretty conspiracy theory-ish with all the 'the ~real~ translation is' stuff and it's like, no... that is not how Japanese works at all... that is not what those words mean... they aren't hiding the gay from you...

Decades of that really explains why Untamed exploded the way it did (exploded so hard AO3 is now banned in China and Russia over their fandom wank) when Untamed was, in reality, what thousands of anime were accused of being: secretly a super gay story with tiny details and symbols trying to point towards the truth, the gay being repressed by the norms of the society/government it came from. Everything US/UK/AUS fandom Wanted To Believe about so many anime was actually true of Untamed.

[mistressofmuses]

I haven't played much else in the realm of TTRPGs, though I've known people very into some other ones, and from what I gather there are a lot of systems that are easier to customize.

Yeah, I don't MIND the existence of Real Play stuff - and like I said, I *did* really enjoy the first series of TAZ - but it's also a very different vibe than my experience when I played was. A lot of the people involved with them are very talented, and bring a lot of showmanship (as actors, voiceactors, podcasters, writers, etc.) to those games, and they are telling compelling stories (since I can SEE how into them people are, even if they haven't grabbed me.) But telling a story for an external audience is inherently at least somewhat different than doing some improv with and for your own group. I don't think it's like... "ruining D&D" or anything, or whatever gatekeepy stuff I've seen about how it's bad that people think it's cool now, but I DO think that it creates a sort of different impression of it.

Ugh, that sounds really annoying to have references to *some other group's game* taking over yours. (Because yeah, TAZ was popular and fun and I did ultimately get really invested in the story, but it's still just some other group's campaign!)

I haven't been into an anime fandom for a pretty long while, and from what I can tell, the general vibes have gotten WORSE, not better. Periodically I get all nostalgic for the old early 00s series that were my introduction to fandom, but I wouldn't even know where to try and start with current series, tbh. While there was plenty of nonsense toxicity at the time when I was a teen, the current brand of purity wank has added new insufferable layers!
But oh yes, the "secret gay" that people were/remain obsessed with claiming as canon, lol. And people could be so CONFIDENTLY wrong.

That's a good point about Untamed. I didn't watch any of it, even though I'd probably genuinely enjoy it if I did, but I remember being a little shocked at how MUCH it exploded... though it does make sense that it actually DID have all the subtext that people have so often obsessed over.

[olivermoss]

Real Plays are great, it's new creative stuff people are doing with the form. But people being weird about it or deciding that 'being familiar with gaming' means knowing TAZ lore are annoying. It's also worth pointing out that modern, Mercer influenced D&D might not what people are after when they get into D&D, especially for knowing themes / history / etc.

The previous campaign I was in turned out to be just a straight up fan-campaign of a Mercer project, but it took me a while to catch on. I was just like 'they are all vibrating on the same frequency and I feel like I am missing something.' I feel like 'are you here for D&D or to engage in TAZ fandom' should be a session 0 question at this point.

I loved the live action show for Untamed. It starts slow because it was such a big deal they knew they had a very set audience. On the show, they are good friends and there is lots of rabbit imagery around them, like really a lot, and in one scene if you screencap at the right moment they are wearing each other's undershirts.

Not spoilers, just a book comparison, but cutting because I like that

In the book not only do they have sex, but there are appendices to the book that are just 'have more scenes of them indulging their noncon roleplay kink'. The swapped-undershirts scene in the show is right after where, in the book timelime, they first had sex.

Since the show came out there's been a backlash against 'unmanly men in media' so the brief window of adapting explicitly gay novels by giving them the thinnest veneer of deniability is over. Also a crackdown on queer media and fanfic in general.

The show hints at the canon gay with traditional symbolism that westerners need explainers for, for real. Yeah, take everything you know about fandom behaviors and add in that being the situation...

[mistressofmuses]

The Mercer-influenced Critical Role stuff seems to be VERY MUCH a lot of peoples' idea of What D&D Is, and I'm not familiar enough with it to know how much of it is more or less fully accurate to wider D&D "canon" such as it is vs. how much stuff is unique to those campaigns. And that's cool - it's not all that dissimilar to what we were talking about regarding how D&D even came about, with various people adding their own things that were later functionally canonized, and the fact that an individual story can BE so compelling and interesting that it inspires others to play with it as well is great. BUUUUT... not so great when people start to assume a familiarity with THAT particular story and THAT particular worldbuilding and THAT particular history.

I should give Untamed a watch. Or a read, if I can find the book! It really does sound like the sort of thing I'd enjoy, from all I hear.

But it REALLY sucks how there's so much pressure now around what media can be made/how it must portray things. I know there was a lot that could be gotten around previously with that thin veneer of deniability, relying on the symbolism to confirm the things that couldn't be made explicit, and it sucks that now even that is a lot more difficult. I know that queer stuff has gotten extremely censored and attacked in an attempt to pretty much eradicate it. It sucks.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, Mercer has pushed D&D a lot towards wish fulfillment and rule of cool and that's fine. People can play how they want and the game will always change. But don't except me to be understand 'that time in that episode when my blorbo did the thing'

(And I will never understand other people's D&D characters being people's blorbos.)

Yeah, China's crackdown was a big one. It's hard for me to get the full scale, or anyone outside to really know, but it's scary.

[mistressofmuses]

Rule of cool and wish fulfillment can be great - I remember one of the campaigns I did one-offs for had a lot of that as sort of house rules, because that was what the group found fun. Sometimes a game is more fun if it's a lot more understated or feels like the stakes are more real. It's fine if people are inspired by the general feel of a show, or were introduced via a Real Play and then want to do it themselves... but turning it into constant references and quotes and comparisons to what amounts to someone else's game is just... not great, imo.

I mean, I guess someone's D&D character is just... a character... and I've certainly liked some nice fanart for someone's characters and such. But... it still feels like how I've never understood how people almost try to build a following for their particular RPG character - like this is MY Final Fantasy XIV character, or MY New Vegas courier, or MY Skyrim dragonborn. By all means write your fic or make your art of your specially designed protag., but it's weird for those to be strangers' blorbos, lol.

It's really a difficult thing to conceptualize, having that sort of a crackdown happening over a country of SO MANY people, and having so much stuff suddenly forbidden and censored and gotten rid of. It is scary.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, either way can be fun but in general I prefer the more old school way where you really need to engage with the logistics and internal reality of the world settings. Also, the people in the big RPs are being paid a LOT to play D&D. They know the rules really well. Some of what they are pulling off is not because Rule Of Cool, it's because working with the rules set is literally their job. If you really know the rules and understand the probability distribution tables for dice rules, you can be a lot more effective.

[mistressofmuses]

I can see the appeal of both, but I think that really having to engage with the rules tends to be the more satisfying experience. If you understand it well enough, a lot of time you can MAKE it as cool as you want, rather than just going "but it'd be cooooool" and sort of handwaving the how. The former is a lot more satisfying to pull off!

That's also a really good point - someone being paid to do this, someone who basically has an actual *production budget* for game sessions is going to have the time to figure out all of those ways to make the cool shit happen, and how to make the game mechanics work for the story and the players and the audience.

It's also likely to be a pretty different experience than a game run by some friends or acquaintances. There are plenty of people who know every ruleset in and out, but there are also a lot of people who will be the DM because someone has to be, but probably haven't had the chance to make exhaustive knowledge of every bit of lore and every mechanic and every possible multiclass combo their full-time or even part-time job.

[olivermoss]

Also if you play with a group you vibe with, especially long term, the story is going to be more satisfying. It will feel more like wish fulfillment than if the DM just allows random shit for rule of cool, honestly allowing players to do too much just leads to players taking up a lot of table time doing random stuff that isn't very collaborative.

I haven't played a ton in recent years, but it feels like a lot of players really want to take shortcuts to what people in long campaigns with voice actors have and it just doesn't work. During a popularity spike a while ago I knew a lot of people who wanted to experience it themselves. I ran a few one shots but man their expectations were insane. It's like, ya gotta be on board with the collab aspect or this just isn't going to work. I cannot deliver that sort of experience like a short order cook, it takes everyone putting in effort and listening.

[mistressofmuses]

Absolutely! That sort of long-term effort and engagement is always going to be a lot more rewarding in the end than something that's just briefly satisfying because you got to do it without any serious effort or justification.
And oh geez, yeah. Players that just kind of screw around because they're picturing how cool this cut scene looks in their head is... not great. I can see too much "make it cool and I'll let you do it" leading to even more of the frustrating "player who wants to be the only main character" and refuses to participate in the collaborative aspect of the story.
And super frustrating when people want that sort of elaborate, well-seeded story and experience delivered on a platter, but won't put forward the effort to actually help build it.

I think that's a problem with people in EVERY facet of life, tbh. People want to skip all the "boring" intro stuff where they have to put forward effort, because they just want the rewarding outcome... and they struggle to realize that the rewarding outcome is only possible because of the groundwork you have to put in first.
There's a particular meme thing that I feel like every insufferable so-called empath I've ever met has posted. It's something along the lines of "I have no interest in small talk, and am bored by discussing ordinary topics... I only want to engage with REAL topics, like our hopes and fears and dreams and the meaning of the universe, because THAT is the wavelength of my soul, and I refuse to waste my time on anything else". I'm definitely paraphrasing, but that's the gist. Yet these same people then complain about how they struggle to connect with people. When like... those deeper topics are great! But you can't jump to the end! I have zero interest in revealing my greatest fears and hopes to someone I don't know, and it's a red flag if someone else thinks I should HAVE to in order to prove something about my worthiness. It's a lot more satisfying to have those deep conversations with someone you know and have built up a level of trust with, not some rando at a bar willing to overshare.
Or same with people who want to find and live out their "found family" dreams... but refuse to even hold a conversation with anyone, won't go out to meet people, can't manage even the tiniest bit of conflict resolution... and yet seem shocked when that doesn't net them what they thought they wanted.

Wow I went on a tangent there, sorry.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, that's it exactly. Allowing too much rule of cool leads to main character syndrome among the players.

Deeper topics are great, but that's not something to jump to! I haven't dealt with people who say stuff like that in a long time, thankfully. But also that is exactly the problem with the only queer community events being peer support, we skip the 'boring' and hear deep stuff from people whose name we aren't even sure of!

But yeah, those people just act like they can't connect because no one is as high minded or even capable of talking deep stuff, like them.

[mistressofmuses]

Main Character Syndrome can be a serious bane as it is, and doing anything to encourage it isn't great. That can sink a campaign SO hard, if you have even just one or two players that need to be The Specialist One At All Times. Collaborative stories mean that you have to collaborate with your fellow players! They aren't there just to prop you up. Ideally everyone gets some pretty cool and satisfying things they get to do, that also make sense.

Exactly! I very much love those sorts of conversations... with people I know and have a baseline understanding with, and trust to an extent. Unfortunately the goth scene around here was RIFE with that attitude for a while, and so you'd get it in person if you went out to socialize on the smoking patio AND online via reposted memes if you tried to find people on FB/Insta/etc. I've mostly avoided the type, but every once in a while I see it come around again and it's like sandpaper on my brain, lol.
But oof, yes. That's a BIG part of why peer support groups can collapse under the weight of collective trauma, or at the very least wind up not being a great source of friendships... it kind of speedruns to the "let's talk about and share the absolute worst things we've ever faced" without building any real foundation.

And naturally! They only can't connect with other people because they're ~too special~ and unique and no one else understand their deep thoughts. (It is a non-zero overlap between this attitude and people who I have seen claim to be "starseeds" or the like.)

[olivermoss]

Dealing with Main Character types is rough. They can suck up all the oxygen, but if you try to go anything about it, it typically goes bad. I'm sorry you've had to deal with that and still run into it. It is irritating how people just let their own deal run roughshod over community spaces.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah... Main Character Syndrome is rough, in both low- and high-stakes parts of life. Like... I can get behind the idea of being the protagonist of your own life and all - that's a good thing! You are the main character of your own life! Unfortunately, too many people seem to think that means everyone else exists only to orbit them and be their personal cast of NPCs, and refuse to even acknowledge that other people *have* interiority, much less their own 24/7 lives. That's a really hard attitude to deal with, especially within community spaces.