rydude17

[rydude17]

The moment FNV's Caesar fully clicked for me was when I heard him pronounce "et cetera" as "et ketera".

Think about it for a second. This is a post-apocalyptic future where most knowledge of ancient civilizations has faded into obscurity. It's not gone, thanks to the efforts of the Followers and other factions, but even if you're a Follower you have to really go and look for it.

Now, our boy Edward here didn't just learn the broad strokes of Roman history - he's familiar with niche and intricate aspects of its political and military structure as well as its cultural practices. He knows the original meaning of "decimation". He knows the difference between a legate and a centurion. He knows the general appearance of a Roman legionary. And he knows Classical Latin, in its Classical pronunciation. Think how deep into the weeds you would have to look to find out that "Caesar" was actually pronounced "kye-sar" and not "seezer" like any English speaker would instinctively say it. And then how invested you would have to be that your whole army adopt this incredibly archaic pronunciation.

But the "et ketera" bit really takes this to the next level. "Et cetera" has been a common set phrase in the English language for centuries. It's not a fancy word from a long-dead language that Caesar exhumed from the depths of the Followers' archives. It's a regular part of casual speech that Caesar bothered to learn the etymology of and decided to retroactively apply the original pronunciation to. For no reason other than commitment to the bit.

This is not the approach of a scholar interested in learning the deep lessons of history. This is the borderline unhealthy obsession of a fanboy. He's the caricature of the teenage boy whose gateway into fascism is thinking a bit too much about the Roman Empire. An archetype that barely existed when FNV came out but has gotten awfully common since then. This game was really ahead of its time.

(Also in further support to this read, it's quite telling which things Edward Sallow did NOT bother to learn about Rome. Like very salient and well-researched points of historical analysis that help explain its rise and decline. For example the fact that Rome did not in fact typically stamp out local cultures, but actually often borrowed from them, allowing people to generally live in peace as long as they paid their taxes. Or their heavy emphasis on infrastructure building which meant people could see their lives materially improve as a result of Roman presence. Or conversely, how concentrating power in one man drawing his legitimacy from the military led to recurring civil wars which critically weakened the empire. All factors that directly run counter to Caesar's governing philosophy. Because his understanding of Rome is fundamentally aesthetic rather than political or historical.)

[rydude17]

[rydude17]

someone please stop naming these characters so similarly 😭 ↳ bonus:

[rydude17]

[rydude17]

You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.

[rydude17]

thank god anything at all useful is being torn down and made illegal so that the computer can just be a box you turn on to watch ads for fake phone games

[rydude17]

Reblog to make it die faster

[rydude17]

Remind me later.

[rydude17]

My favourite thing about the D&D movie is it never stops trying to be a D&D movie even down to the most minute, unsung details. There's initiative order gags (I'll go last!) there's rolling a 1 gags (setting off the trap on the bridge by inexplicably just walking up to it) there's stat gags (nobody had high enough Intelligence to be in danger from the Intellect Devourers). Almost every spell is identifiable, from Xenk using smite to Sofina whipping out Finger of Death. Simon's character arc is about his self-confidence being tied to his mastery of magic because Charisma is the spellcasting stat for sorcerers. The era of movies based on games being afraid of their source material is over.

[rydude17]

i think perhaps the most annoying/exhausting phenomenon in existence is when something kind of genuinely sucks but it has, like, a female lead or whatever so half the people that are saying it sucks are nightmare people that unironically call things "woke garbage" and the other half are people that just like. have a basic sense of story structure and knowledge of character arcs as a concept that quite reasonable think this thing sucks. BUT it gets assumed that 100% of people who think it sucks are in that first half and then there's a backlash TO the backlash and all along it's still not a good fucking story. I call this "The twilight phenomena" because it got a lot of hate because of a mockery of teenage girls when it had well deserved hate for the like racism and misogyny and the throwaway detail that a grown ass man is somehow romantic soulmates with a quite literal baby.

[rydude17]

Imagine a person who only consumes Batman-related media. That is, they only watch movies and TV shows that have Batman in them, only read books that are novelisations of Batman media, only play licensed Batman video games, and so forth. This is not so absurd an idea; Batman-related media is sufficiently popular, varied and widespread that restricting one's media consumption in this way is completely feasible. However, I trust we can agree that if you actually do this, you will be left with very strange ideas about what popular media looks like.

The next step in this analogy is undestanding that if the only tabletop RPG you're acquainted with is Dungeons & Dragons, you have the same grasp of the tabletop roleplaying hobby as our hypothetical Batman Guy has of popular media.

[rydude17]

While I don't disagree that many iterations of Dungeons & Dragons have mechanical balance problems with respect to spellcasting classes versus non-spellcasting classes, you can't overlook that a big part of the problem also stems from the fact that D&D as a culture of play is rife with people who will happily deny the rogue their Sneak Attack damage on the basis that "ranged weapon attack" and "attack with a ranged weapon" mean slightly different things, then immediately turn around and let the wizard casually destroy an army with a second-level spell because they forgot that the spell in question has a weight limit. The propensity to be exacting to the point of absurdity when adjudicating the actions of non-wizards while simultaneously adopting a purely vibes-based approach to deciding what wizard spells can do isn't something you can fix with better wording!

[rydude17]

"fuck it we ball" is for stress about the future "it is what it is" is for stress about the past and "this too shall pass" is for stress about the present thank you for coming to my TED talk

[rydude17]

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[rydude17]

Everyone's already ragged on that "woke videogames" list, but I do want to note the ridiculousness of the fact that Darkest Dungeon (Lovecraftian dungeon crawler where some of the characters are black and/or women) is "woke", Fallout New Vegas (RPG about what political system you think is the best to fight fascism) is "slightly woke", and Frostpunk (city builder about the moral compromises that come up in dire circumstances and whether or not it leads to tyranny) is "not woke."

[rydude17]