#because it's simultaneously nerd history and normie shit

[eight-freakin-gids]

In light of the Universes Beyond controversies, I started to ruminate on my feelings. Certain UB settings have excited me a lot, whereas others invite my disdain.

I know Wizards has set their guidelines for what is and isn't a good fit for UB, but I feel they're too broad. Additionally, iirc, those guidelines mostly concern set design rather than creative design.

So, here are my super thought out guidelines for what makes a good Universe Beyond:

Does the world have magic / sci-fi / fantasy in abundance?

Is the setting somewhere other than a variant of modern day Earth?

Is it tonally diverse?

If yes to all, than I'm fine with it as a UB setting.

At least, these were my original thoughts. I still like these criteria, but something still was still bugging me. And I think I finally figured out what it is.

I don't know if I can describe it better than "Universes Beyond is bad when it's normie shit"

This still isn't perfect criteria. Lord of the Rings is one of the biggest film trilogies ever, and D&D is more mainstream than ever, but idk. They've at least got history and street cred.

But The Walking Dead? Stranger Things? Fornite? Things that I've seen or feel like I would see YouTube ads for because they're so mainstream.

And as much as I love Spongebob, and it's a cultural touchstone for so many z-llenials, I don't think I'm rocking the boat by saying UB Spongebob is stupid.

The other side of this feeling, I don't have any attachment to Warhammer 40,000, but I feel it worked well for Magic.

If Magic is going to be filled with crossovers, I'd rather it be a hall of fame. Make it the Smash Bros of nerdery. Show us the worlds and stories that helped shape modern day fantasy. Pick established series with staying power.

Magic always has been derivative, and it always will be. I just hope we can get back to the lovingly crafted homages and away from the cash grabs.

[soulvomit]

This is long and rambly and goes nowhere in particular. It has to do with all of my life experiences between my teens and 20s being framed as negatives by the public (but especially by nongeeky women and normie men) when either they were neutrals or even positives. What person actually feels BAD about having had a rockin social life? Or a good career path when they were younger? Or frames these things as something done to them that was a negative? Me, that's who, and I feel like the broader culture- and aspects of the privilege conversation - forced it.

To start, I dated *so many guys* as an emotionally hungry desperate teenager left to my own devices without any adults around and without any access to the world otherwise, and at one point I was constantly in a new relationship, but the broader culture was actually becoming more and more conservative.

And I discovered that my "number" with men mattered to all people but kinky women and younger less hung up men. If I felt good or even neutral about my past in any way then it made other women feel bad. The only way to frame my life that didn't commit the grave moral sin of making even one other woman feel bad, was to find ways to frame myself as a victim.

Which I absolutely wasn't, with regard to anyone perhaps but my mother who left me to myself. Lots of stuff could have happened, but didn't. (And then there's the idea that you're privileged if you've never been sexually harassed on the job or sexually assaulted by men, which is fine because fuck yes I'm more privileged in that regard than most women I know, and this would not be a problem if we weren't also told out of the other side of much of the left's mouth that being privileged makes you bad.)

My number mattered to many LGBTQ women just as much as it did to traditionalist men. It matters to women who didn't have a dating history who are jealous/resentful, so my history - as painful as it was, as rooted in a fucked up space as it was - could also be framed as privilege.

(Painful doesn't mean I conceptualize myself as a victim in my life narrative.)

Up until my 40s, my entire sexual history was handled by almost every fucking person around me in terms of *how it made other people feel.*

It's tbh only people who were directly okay with sexual experimentation as a concept, and were really really secure in their own sexuality, that were okay with my past.

The female lgbtq culture was often almost as traditionalist around female sexuality as the mainline conservative male dominated culture, nobody cared that I'd gone years at a time single as an adult and couldn't hack adult dating.

Teenage narrative is treated like it's the only time you'll ever learn anything new, and for Gen X and later LGBTQ people, it's treated as the only narrative that counts with regard to sexuality, whatever happened as a teenager is treated as something you can't ever undo, and women are just as policed around "experimenting" by other women (even some bi women) as they are by men. As if people never come out LGBTQ after marriage. Which is a narrative that was still semi acceptable as long as I could still frame myself as "having failed at a good traditionalist marriage i entered into as a virgin," but weirdly, having *dated* lots of guys in my teens, wasn't accepted.

And yes this was also a problem even with many bi women, unless I was dating in sex positive spaces. Most people around me had internalized ideas about how much sex women are allowed to have, and around women and attention-seeking (this is another post it's a lot to unpack), and around demonizing women who are attractive to men. And even in LGBTQ culture some women may still have internalized jealousy/competition stuff, and resent other women (while simultaneously wanting to date them, which is a fucked up dynamic.)

People were only okay with my history as long as I framed it as some kind of horrible loss of agency (but for me to do so would involve lying or omitting). It's only in my 40s that the culture has given me permission to own my entire history and permission to feel okay about it.

Because, know what?

YES I fucking made out up and down Mulholland Drive and all up and down Pacific Coast Highway between 1989 and 1994, AND I WON'T FEEL BAD ABOUT IT. I made out all over the 818, the 213, and the 310. I made out stuck in traffic on the 405 and the 101. And when I left Los Angeles, somehow, the wild ride stopped, and I'll never be sure if it's because I got serious about life and slowed my roll (it's at the same time that I started taking my career seriously - it was expected - now every partner had to be the love of my life, which is when shit started to really suck) or if Angelenos just make out more than NorCal people do.

Or if my move was in fact part of reinventing myself as a Serious Adult, which it definitely was. And who I wanted to date while young and broke and under my mom's roof was very different from what I wanted as someone with my own money and my own space. I was 20 when I finally really got serious about my life, and 22 when I began a career and moved out. This is based on a narrative around work and independence that is probably alien to many Millennials and Gen Z for good reasons that should be attacked as part of broad structural inequality instead of defended as some sort of ideal.

And privilege conversation gets brought up too because my dating a lot and making out/having sex as a teen and young adult often gets unpacked that way by other people, even though dating became a difficult shit show once I got a career and got serious about my life, which happened while some of my female friends were still dating. "Well, LAH DEE DAH, nobody finds ME attractive" is how my long-ago dating history was handled by other women.

(By the way, I stopped operating the same way after I left LA, all of that came to an end.)

Framing myself as a complete failure in the social department became an inauthentic way I was living and felt like the only way I could represent myself to, ironically, not be hated by people who felt bad about themselves.

Even my mom forced this shit on me in a really gaslighty way.

"If you feel good about your past experiences, it means you're a slut. You're not a slut, because I didn't raise you to be a slut."

Actually, mom, you barely raised me at all, that was my dad, until 14 when it was myself, but ding ding ding thanks for playing.

And the broader culture judged my social life and my past based upon whether or not it resembled that of the "popular people." I had a full, very active social life, it was just largely with people I met in BBS and tabletop gaming culture and later with LGBTQ people, and somehow that didn't count.

There was a narrative that geek culture and subculture spaces were "the loser's club," something you fell into because you didn't fit in. Just as you still counted as socially awkward if many of your friends were from other cultures, weren't white, weren't "normies," or were LGBTQ. There was no narrative around what you had to fit in with actually not speaking for a majority of people, so somebody with 50 friends and active professional networks who was having all the relationships and sex they could possibly desire to have (not me, but I knew people like this) was still somehow a loser who must be somehow terminally broken. And even more, there was a narrative that computer jobs were for people that were too weird to do anything else, and as a woman, it meant I was too awkward/unfeminine/ugly to do a social job (and then to feminists it meant I wanted male attention, which was also claimed by the most sexist dude bros, but not generally other nerds/geeks) or that my daddy got me the job (actually that last plus imposter syndrome IS why I left computers). Most of the things in my life that were positives were framed as negatives.

So for a long time, I walked around telling myself that I was a socially inept person who sucked at everything because all of my experiences and choices were framed as the product of a lack of agency.