stickandthorn

[stickandthorn]

I think the critical role team has handled moving away from relying on Matt and the OG cast for most of their content exceptionally well. Critical Role started as such a personality based thing, and that’s not only a pretty unsustainable business model, but a pretty hard one to move away from because half the appeal is the real people who are playing. It’s not just Exandria that got famous as a gameworld, it’s Matt Mercer who got famous for GMing. So doing something like taking away The Guy Who Is The GM could be pretty fucking catastrophic if not planned right.

But the cast/crew has spent the last few years slowing laying a foundation of things like long term guest players, GMs who aren’t Matt, important miniseries, playing with the format of the main campaign, and playgroups with very little of the OG cast. And they haven’t just half assed it, they’ve really tried to show us how great these things can be. So now they can do something like announce a new main campaign GM and have it go over incredibly smoothly, when I don’t think it would’ve a few years ago.

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One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

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How it started:

How it went:

How it's going:

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at the end of the day, for me, the most disappointing thing about C3 isn't the poor narrative structure, the bad pacing where everything feels dragged out and rushed at the same time, or never giving the characters the space and focus to breathe and develop their own centric subplots

it is ultimately that Marquet started off very strong as a setting and did feel like it was making strides to properly draw from its Asian and SWANA inspirations, including with good use of work by other authors and consultants, only for that to rapidly fall off as the Ruidus plot became central and for there to be just as little space for Marquet as there was for Bells Hells as characters beyond carriers of The Moon Plot, with no space to develop and explore either to potential and richness. It's disappointing for Marquet especially, given the continued dearth of Asian and SWANA inspirations in Western AP, and I felt C3 started off promising with Marquet as a grounded and rich location in those inspirations.

I think a lot about Ela Lumas, whose sons' murders is the inciting incident, and how her title Ginang is a Tagalog word and how exciting that was for me personally. The fact that we lost this even as smaller notes, and that ultimately Marquet was supplanted in favor of Vasselheim (not even Issylra as a whole) and Ruidus without any real grounding of why Marquet was the setting in the first place or what Marquet's importance was specifically to the narrative other than "it has to be set somewhere", is just so intensely disappointing to me. The biggest disappointment I have with C3.

[stickandthorn]

Honestly the thing I’m most excited to see from the first season of the mighty Nein animated show is Veth disguising self as a small and strangely proportioned version of Fjord and clipping through the water in the bath house.

[stickandthorn]

The thing about fanon for me is that it, at the most basic level, is assigning a characteristic to preexisting character who either explicitly does not possess it, or who is not directly stated to possess it, but theoretically could (or warping a character’s preexisting traits so heavily they are basically a separate character). For example, it is not saying “I’m making a character and I want this character to be fat,” it’s saying “there is something specific about this character that makes me think they should be fat.” And the reasons for fanon can definitely be good or morally neutral, but way more often than people wanna admit, fanon just plays into stereotypes and biases, sometimes while actively trying to combat those very stereotypes and biases.

For instance. Why is fanon Yasha giant and muscular? Now, I do think parts of it come from a genuine lack of clarity from Ashley over how big Yasha was. But in her initial description and all of her art (approved by the cast btw, crazy that I have to say that, but the artists are just executing the player’s vision they do not have control) she is around 5’10 and not especially visibly built. Muscular, certainly, but not massive. Yet fanon Yasha is usually built like Shaq.

Now I think part of this just comes from a desire to see larger women, women who are allowed to be athletic without being skinny, in media, and that’s totally fine. However, I saw a lot of people arguing for fanon Yasha because it was not realistic for a woman to be 5’10 and not exceedingly muscular, and have Yasha’s strength score. She HAD to be physically big. And that is just not true. Strength is not determined by how visible your muscles are, how tall you are, what size you are, none of it. Athletic ability is not a trait that is inherently visible, and not a trait that only belongs to certain body types. And while I don’t think headcanoning a woman as big and buff is somehow playing into conservative stereotypes, assuming that a certain body type cannot possess a trait like physical strength, that “strong woman = big woman” could be. Because while the rhetoric of certain traits being inherent to certain body types is reasonably innocuous here, that rhetoric isn’t in a lot of other places.

Ok, maybe that one’s a bit of a grey area. But why is fanon Beau consistently dumb, aggressive, and poorly spoken?

In the start of the campaign, Beau is impulsive, gets into fights, doesn’t always know how to express herself and her feelings verbally, and has a hard time “sounding nice.” But even in the beginning, she was not as poorly spoken or anywhere NEAR as aggressive as fanon Beau is. And even at the beginning, Beau was smart, Beau was tactical, and Beau was not just some emotionally stunted meathead with the personality of a frat bro.

And that’s just the first few episodes. By the end of the campaign, Beau was incredibly smart in a variety of different ways, she was well spoken, she was quite persuasive at times, she could maintain healthy relationships, and she could express affection verbally and through action. And that wasn’t a loss of personality, Beau was still obviously Beau- because those traits were always a part of her.

Yet fanon Beau is consistently inconsiderate and dumb, aggressive and ham fisted, poorly spoken and unable to maintain a healthy relationships. Which are all dangerous stereotypes about real life brown lesbian women. Listen, I’m not here to argue about wether or not Beau in canon is “good rep,” that isn’t my place, but I will argue that the traits that a lot of fanon chooses to amplify (and chooses to discard) are blatantly racist. This is not innocuous in any way. This bias is the same bias that leads to huge amounts of systemic oppression and violence towards brown women and specifically brown lesbians.

And I’m not saying fanon is inherently bad, I’m saying fanon is just as prone to real life bias as any other place, even when you “don’t mean harm.” And sometimes people will act like fanon is inherently progressive, when it truly is not. And we should really analyze that.

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in this essay I will explain why canon Veth is better for plus size representation than fanon jester……

[stickandthorn]

This is coming from a queer person who genuinely enjoys rules light systems, but I’ve noticed a trend in indie/queer ttrpgs I don’t really like, where rules light ttrpgs are associated with the indie/queer space, and rules heavy games are associated with the white male toxic gamer space. Now this is not the reason for this trend, nor intentional on the indie space’s part, but sometimes I sense an underlying subtext of “the queers and the women and the poc players will go play their 2D6 make believe, while only the enlightened white male gamers can understand the vast and complex systems.” And I hate that.

Now my guess as to why this divide happened (totally anecdotally mind you) is that a lot of queer/indie ttrpgs formed in opposition to the toxic gamer ttrpg spaces, kind of using those spaces as a “how not to” guide. And from my experience, those spaces tend to use rules as a means of exclusion.

It’s not just the power gamers or the rules lawyers or the people who play to win combat and not to tell a story. It’s that these types of people will make rules the most important part of play, and then use their detailed understanding of a complex rules system to make sure you cannot interact with the game like they can. You cannot challenge them on rules, and you cannot argue when they say you’ve done something wrong. If you do, you will get into a multi hour debate which you will inevitably lose, because they’re just stating rules as written. And if you understand the rules just as well as them- if not better- they somehow make the threshold of knowledge higher. Because your identity is not one accepted in the space, you will never understand their rules well enough to play on their level.

And yeah, that sucks. I’ve been there, it fucking sucks. And I’ve definitely felt the urge to abandon caring about the rules entirely because of these bad experiences. But that bad behavior is not inherent to play groups that care about the rules, it’s only inherent to bad ones. Rules are what makes the game, they’re an extension of the story and of the role play, they’re the foundation around which the story grows. Not everyone has fun with rules heavy games, I understand that, but I caring about the rules and making really good plays with them is not the dominion of toxic white gamer men. That’s for everyone.

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Indie tabletop RPGs are a fun space to navigate because half of them are trying to appeal to every queer demographic all at once and the other half are so averse to the spectre of marketability that they think having a discernible target audience constitutes selling out, and sometimes it's genuinely unclear which is which.

[stickandthorn]

Animatic from the clip of the Mighty Nein they revealed from Micah Gunnel, the person who boarded this scene.

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I like how the mighty Nein teaser trailer implies Caleb only speaks German and implies Mollymauk ever had a convincing Irish accent.

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Yeah the Mighty Nein show needed years to animate, but if anything inflated their timeline it was teaching Taliesin how to do a passable Irish accent.

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it’s always the no tag off the dome posts I write in under a minute and don’t edit that end up going super saiyan viral. Truly can never predict it and you can bet I never, EVER ask for it.

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Ozzy Osbourne’s death is like the death of a crusty white 3 legged no toothed dog in it’s mid 20s. It’s shocking and heartbreaking, but the shock mostly comes from the fact that it lived so long and through so much bodily strain that you kind of subconsciously assumed it was immortal.

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In all seriousness I am a little worried for the M9 animated series. I truly do want it to go well, but frankly, I wasn’t a huge fan of how tlovm turned out. I’m sure C1 must’ve been a nightmare to try to adapt from actual play to the 22 minute episode format, and that worries me, because I feel like C2 will be even harder to adapt. C2 used its crazy runtime to make each character and their relationships with the characters around them extremely detailed (which is true of a lot of actual plays), and it’s from these intimate character studies and relationships that a lot of the general plot flows (which isn’t always as true). Even if each arc isn’t necessarily critical to an overarching plot in a mechanical beat by beat sense, each arc is critical to the character’s development, and the character’s development is critical to the overarching plot.

For instance: while the climatic arc with Lucien does tie into world lore and a larger story, the real core is about The Mighty Nein’s relationships to each other, to Molly, to Lucien, and to concepts like change and redemption. That emotional core holds up because we’ve seen each character change, grow, and wrestle with guilt and forgiving themselves in great detail. We’ve gotten to spend time with each character on their own individual arc relating, and watched the Mighty Nein embrace them at every stage, even when there are bumps in the road. The final fight doesn’t hold weight if we haven’t spent enough time with each character to create that emotional through line, to make having to kill Lucien so fundamentally at odds with the emotional fabric of the M9, yet so critically necessary. It’s not that I think they can’t write well enough to adapt those themes to a TV show, I just don’t think they’ll have enough time.

I’m sure it’s possible to adapt M9 well, I just know that the story will have to change a lot to do so. I’m totally ok with that, I’m just a little hesitant to get as hyped as I want to.

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I’m a holistic Essek lover. He did bad things and not only am I ok with loving a character who did bad things, I’m excited to see him do even worse on the silver screen 👍. If Essek bashes an innocent civilian over the head with a beacon and then makes out with Ludinus with tongue in the new animated series, I’ll sit back and go “awesome sauce.”

[stickandthorn]

I know the horse is already long dead, but a thematic issue with C3 that has stuck out to me more and more as time has passed is class- especially when compared to the C2.

While C2 wasn’t necessarily explicitly about class, class was a huge underlying theme in both the larger narrative and for individual characters. We see a lot of examples of class disparity, like when Caleb was barred for entering the Tri-Spires because he looked too lower class to enter, and then had his cat kicked by the guard barring him. Much of the plot of the early campaign is driven by the Mighty Nein trying to earn enough money to make do, but beyond that, class disparity becomes a crucial part of the ealry plot.

The Knights of Requital are a group fighting against corruption in Zadash, and they explicitly lay out how these corrupt officials create poverty, suffering, and injustice amongst the lower classes of Zadash. While this story line isn’t followed up on iirc, it connects to the larger questions of corruption in Wildmounte and the Cerberus Assembly the campaign deals with on a larger scale.

Class is also baked into many of the character’s backstories. Caleb is a very obvious example, his years of homelessness, his background in a poorer rural area that (at least in part) made him an easy target for Trent, but he isn’t the only one. Fjord and Veth’s struggles with poverty are foundational to their characters, and contrast with Beau and Jester’s wealthier upbringings. We see these disparities in the party dynamics, such as the conflict that arose over Jester seeing 50 gold as nothing, when that amount of money was more than Caleb’s family made in a year.

Even as class becomes less relevant to the characters and the overall plot, the themes of class built up in the early episodes shape how the Mighty Nein interact with the world through the whole campaign. While I’m not arguing C2 does an especially good or thorough examination of class (I have critiques for another post), nor an especially bad one, it’s a clear element of the story and the world that is engaged with.

C3 sets up a lot of the same stuff as C2 does. Jrusar has clear class disparity, with wealthier sections of the city literally being built over the poorer sections of the city lower in the spires, and the characters both see these disparities and interact with the systems that create them. Class is baked explicitly into many character’s backstories. Ashton is an orphan from a very poor area, and is directly coded as a crust punk, a real world subculture that (afaik) largely came out of struggles with real world class disparity. On the other hand, Dorian comes from an extremely wealthy and sheltered upbringing. Laudna was a farm girl killed as a powerplay by the elite of her city, and Imogen comes from a rural background that is comparable to Veth’s.

But all of this set up is completely neglected throughout the larger story. Bells Hells almost immediately get monetary sponsorship and never have to worry about money, the issues with class and the government in Jrusar are abandoned in favor of a large scale fantasy story, and the characters work happily with governments and leadership across the globe without any thought to the systems they run. While there are a lot of nods to class in Bazurus or in the Ruby Vanguard’s recruitment of impoverished and neglected people as a vague metaphor for class or other systematic disparities, these nods never turn into anything more. The character’s don’t even have to think about money for the majority of the story.

I think the best example of this Laudna. When she died and was taken to Whitestone, her story line had nothing to do with why she was killed, it was all about who killed her. Laudna was killed because she, as a poorer citizen of Whitesone, was considered disposable. This theme is nodded to earlier on, but her arc in Whitestone, her murder is fully removed from any larger context. Her death is narratively attributed to Delilah’s cruelty and not any larger systemic issue. The resolution to this arc is fighting the specter of Delilah with the help fo Whitestone’s current rich elite. Therefore her death is framed as the bad deeds of one bad actor, motivated by general villainy, and not any systemic issue that could be connected to the current or past rulers of Whitestone. Class is inherent to her backstory, it is at least implied to be a thematic part of her story by the players and by Matt that will be explored, but it never is.

I’m not saying C3 has to be a story about class. If it hadn’t engaged with class at all, I wouldn’t be mad. But C3 set up class as an element of the story the exact same way C2 did, more so even with the weird vague metaphors of the Gods and the Ruby vanguard that can vaguely be interpreted as about class, and then refused to actually engage with class in any real way.