The last episode wasn't dumb because rape is so much worse or more shocking than other things- including other rapes- on the show.

The last episode was dumb because Sansa's character arc being nothing but getting horrifically abused in each of the seven kingdoms is dumb, it undid any empowerment she gained from her story last season, and focusing on Theon instead of Sansa indicates that it's his redemption arc they want us to care about and they're just using Sansa being raped as a tool in a male character's development all of which is super ugh.

I'm still going to watch the next episode but it's dumb writing.

@tragedyjones said:

I will never not post this when given a vague chance:https://youtu.be/68_Y-xh3XAI

Okay I laughed pretty hard at that.

@HelloProject said in Comic book diversity:

My official black person statement re: diversity in comics, is basically this entire Cracked article:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/one-quote-that-explains-why-comics-suck-at-diversity/

In addition to +1'ing this, I would also add that the form of narrative media, especially spec-fic, in the past couple of decades has been steadily shifting towards 1) Big Dumb Epics as the default and almost obligatory plot structure (everything has to be leading to some big central plot resolution that explains and resolves everything and saves the world from being blowed up etc..) and 2) Surprising the audience as the paramount goal of the writers. Usually a far more important goal than actually coherent and consistent world or character building.

There are problems with these trends in general, but they're especially a problem in the American comic book industry, aka, as it relates to super-heroes, because these are not the actual strengths of super-hero stories. The day to day saving-some-nice-old-lady-from-muggings stuff is actually what defines a superhero and sets them apart from any other generic speculative-fiction hero. I mean, I guess the costumes and aliases are part of it, but they don't work by themselves, they only solidify part of the tradition of superhero as crime-fighter; in a slightly more advanced school maybe evil fighter, in a broader sense, like you can have a superhero tackle political corruption, corporate predation etc..

But the form of the super-hero story is such that they are and should be primarily concerned with their job and not a single easily definable, well-demarcated and doable task. Superman's job isn't over when he defeats Lex Luthor, even assuming Luthor won't escape. Batman's job isn't over when he defeated the Joker, even if the Joker is dead. A superhero's job is more nebulous- to fix society, according to whatever meaning that has to that particular superhero. That especially doesn't lend itself well to the sort of condensation that Big Dumb Epic Plots do of making a single Big Bad whose defeat will restore goodness and order etc.. This is why it is dumb to gripe that Batman should just kill the Joker. Batman's enemy isn't the Joker, it's crime, it's violence, it's the powerful preying on the weak. Yeah, locking up the Joker seems futile when you know he'll just escape again, but the entire crusade is largely futile anyway. It can't actually be won or completed, even by heroes that do kill like the Punisher or Wolverine or whoever. In both cases you end up having to ask questions about whether the crusade itself isn't actually causing more problems than not, whether the "hero" isn't becoming a social problem of the same order as the things they fight against. You can't do that with some big evil alien overlord that's going to wipe out humanity or whatever, obviously that outcome is a whole lot worse than just trying to stop it.

I guess the surprise thing is less structural maybe, just that it's become such a pathetic and self-satirizing go-to at this point, starting with the "Death of Superman" and reaching its apex with the death-of-Captain-America-no-really-you-guys-we-mean-it-this-time-for-reals

@Sammi said:

Another way of putting it: this writeup makes those changelings who feel compassion and ethics more keenly than others into the Fairest.

The problem is that that's not all that it makes them. And there are seemings where this problem is more apparent still.

Like, let's take Beasts. The idea is that Beasts now I guess flip out at being caged and confined and love flaunting social norms. Okay. But lots of animal-based concepts might not be about that at all. Lots of communal creatures- wolves, rabbits, ants, whatever- might love the idea of finding people they can trust and pledge with, except that mechanically they're not allowed to do that. Maybe I want to play, for instance, a spider ling as a genteel, refined housekeeper inviting people into her parlor, a woman who's nothing but civilized and refined, except that mechanically is a punished concept basically. Or an actual karma chameleon who blends in everywhere he goes and tries to be exactly what people want him to be but nope not that either apparently.

Like this is actually a pretty big leap backwards, it's basically the Pooka problem all over again. After the always-the-most-popular Sidhe, Pooka were usually the most popular splat on oWoD Changeling games, due to all the variety of animals you could build. Except... whatever animal type you made, you were pretty strong corralled by the mechanics and flavor to make a silly shit-stirring trickster type. "Animal type changeling" wasn't a theme you were free to play around with however you wanted; if you were a trickster type you were supposed to be Pooka, and if you were Pooka you were certainly supposed to be a trickster type, no matter what the actual associations with your animal type were or what themes you wanted to explore.

I once mav'd a serious-rp set-pose into a pwp TS scene and felt strangely really embarrassed about it.

Plot? What Plot?

Basically hardcore butt-banging yaoi scene interrupted by like four paragraphs of florid srs-face purple setting pose.

Singling out rape RP as if it's special makes sense if it is special, which it is.

I am sympathetic to the idea that theoretically storylines involving rape could be interesting and worth exploring.

The actual practice I've seen and apparently most other people have seen is an endless succession of clusterfucks and drama bombs that make prohibiting all rape storylines out of hand the eminently sensible decision.

One can speculate why it's so constantly a source of friction that actively harms games while contributing nothing of value, while other storylines with equally horrific and horrible things happening to PCs and NPCs aren't, but it's just pretty much an empirical observation. Rape storylines are awful and harm games.

It's basically the same reason most games don't allow underage PCs, right? In theory those can be played well. But this is mostly not what happens.

Also Dex-Starr is great. Dex-Starr good kitty.

@Sammi said:

@Thenomain said:

And this is where I roll my eyes and sigh. With the decision now out of my hands once I choose a Seeming, it limits exactly the kinds of things I like to RP.

Your Seeming is supposed to be a representation of your character's personality. If you make morally grey choices, you're a Darkling. If you hide your weakness, you're an Ogre. If you lead by example, you might be Fairest.

Why is that a good thing though? Why is that an improvement?

The enormous freedom of creativity in character creation was one of the big draws to me for 1st Ed Lost. It was the main thing that compensated for the constant drumming on trauma-drama theme stuff, actually.

And it looks a lot like they're reducing creative freedom and intensifying the trauma drama, which is the exact opposite of the way I was hoping the new edition would go.

I mean sometimes "a power ring did it" is a stupid answer, but the reason it's stupid is because of theme issues and what makes for a satisfying story that's easy to understand, not actual physics or "realism."

I agree that the conversations at the speed of light thing is not one of those things though.

Characters in narrative fiction can always talk to each other over barriers of language, culture, and raw physics because characters talking to each other is for the audience, not for the characters.

If you're trying to reduce toxicity and badfeels I would recommend people play Secret Hitler rather than Mafia.

I thought Changeling was one of the original five games? Or are they bumping it for Hunter or something.

Honestly if they were going to dump one of the original five I'd think they'd start with Wraith though. I mean it was a cool game but it never had much interaction with the other lines.

@HelloProject said in Comic book diversity:

My official black person statement re: diversity in comics, is basically this entire Cracked article:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/one-quote-that-explains-why-comics-suck-at-diversity/

In addition to +1'ing this, I would also add that the form of narrative media, especially spec-fic, in the past couple of decades has been steadily shifting towards 1) Big Dumb Epics as the default and almost obligatory plot structure (everything has to be leading to some big central plot resolution that explains and resolves everything and saves the world from being blowed up etc..) and 2) Surprising the audience as the paramount goal of the writers. Usually a far more important goal than actually coherent and consistent world or character building.

There are problems with these trends in general, but they're especially a problem in the American comic book industry, aka, as it relates to super-heroes, because these are not the actual strengths of super-hero stories. The day to day saving-some-nice-old-lady-from-muggings stuff is actually what defines a superhero and sets them apart from any other generic speculative-fiction hero. I mean, I guess the costumes and aliases are part of it, but they don't work by themselves, they only solidify part of the tradition of superhero as crime-fighter; in a slightly more advanced school maybe evil fighter, in a broader sense, like you can have a superhero tackle political corruption, corporate predation etc..

But the form of the super-hero story is such that they are and should be primarily concerned with their job and not a single easily definable, well-demarcated and doable task. Superman's job isn't over when he defeats Lex Luthor, even assuming Luthor won't escape. Batman's job isn't over when he defeated the Joker, even if the Joker is dead. A superhero's job is more nebulous- to fix society, according to whatever meaning that has to that particular superhero. That especially doesn't lend itself well to the sort of condensation that Big Dumb Epic Plots do of making a single Big Bad whose defeat will restore goodness and order etc.. This is why it is dumb to gripe that Batman should just kill the Joker. Batman's enemy isn't the Joker, it's crime, it's violence, it's the powerful preying on the weak. Yeah, locking up the Joker seems futile when you know he'll just escape again, but the entire crusade is largely futile anyway. It can't actually be won or completed, even by heroes that do kill like the Punisher or Wolverine or whoever. In both cases you end up having to ask questions about whether the crusade itself isn't actually causing more problems than not, whether the "hero" isn't becoming a social problem of the same order as the things they fight against. You can't do that with some big evil alien overlord that's going to wipe out humanity or whatever, obviously that outcome is a whole lot worse than just trying to stop it.

I guess the surprise thing is less structural maybe, just that it's become such a pathetic and self-satirizing go-to at this point, starting with the "Death of Superman" and reaching its apex with the death-of-Captain-America-no-really-you-guys-we-mean-it-this-time-for-reals

I remember my favorite thing about Xena was that they both were mucking around with Isaac and Jacob with the whole sacrifice thing, but then they also protected Mary when she was giving birth to Jesus or something? So like, okay, those events are three thousand years apart on a Biblical timeline.

But I mean then again the stuff in ancient Japan and Ireland was all like five or six centuries after Julius Caesar anyway so

Actually, Imperial Rome was a lot friendlier to women than Republican-era Rome, esp. in Late Antiquity. But even in the Republican period life could be vaguely tolerable if you were rich and/or had super powers, which is really a pre-requisite for life not being terrible in any historical setting and honestly largely in modern-day settings too. I mean about half the population was also literally actual slaves, no one really wants to play the life of the "average" person in the Roman Empire.

The other big problem with historical settings though is that no one will do the research and even more informed people will disagree on meaning and interpretations. But most people will apply only a vague pastiche of cultural osmosis learned aesthetic from shit like Gladiator and Spartacus, and then play basically the characters they play in modern games with a wardrobe change.

Which like yeah is just reifying what others have been said, but to the extent that some of that could still be fun it's easier/less frustrating to do it as Roman-esque fantasy and then ban the rapists and pedophiles etc..

Also while Robert and Cersei were not exactly parents of the year, it is a lot more understandable how you would end up a serial killer with Roose Bolton as your dad.

@tragedyjones said:

I will never not post this when given a vague chance:https://youtu.be/68_Y-xh3XAI

Okay I laughed pretty hard at that.

To make a point a bit clearer that's maybe a bit buried there:

To actually feel free to take different actions in a metaplot, I have to both feel a) That these actions will be okay with staff and will not run the risk of OOC conflict or basically vindictive IC punishment of some kind. b ) That these actions will not muck up the plot for everyone else in some way or ruin existing plans etc..

And it's very, very easy to not feel that way, especially if some staff are going around being abusive coercive dicks about other things.

I pre-emptively acknowledge that it's not really a fair comparison per se, but that reply makes me think of this comic and Sartre's promise to expand freedom.

Sure, I can do all kinds of things in a game and in a relation to staff, but in any real and meaningful sense, that does not mean that I feel free to do them. Nor even that I should. If the storyteller says, your party stands before the troll cave dungeon, the stench of mildew emanating from the walls, I am free to say I betray and murder the rest of the PCs present, but I do not feel free to do so. Gaming is a social activity and social activities have rules, explicit or otherwise, that we tend to want to follow as social creatures.

My feelings don't necessarily reflect what the storytellers and leads in question were willing and even desiring to encourage, it just reflects what I felt. It may not even be that typical; maybe I'm unusually paranoid due to some bad past experiences. I don't think that is actually so unusual though. And I was aware of several players that were either ran off or had a PC killed etc. for doing something or other to irk various staff.

Also like everything about the fucking native lodges.

So, I don't actually think feeling like that sphere was a fairly coercive metaplot environment was particularly unreasonable based on evidence. And like, if you shove a fae-killing gun in my hand and say "whoops here's a fae's face" I would have not doubted for an instant that I was expected to empty said gun into said face. For me the calculation of risk of crossing staff on such an obvious plot setup versus any remotely plausible reward of potentially crossing your plans would have been trivially easy. I would have just shot face and moved on and tried to ignore, "But woe, your character's foolish actions have advanced the EotW plotline further" which you were going to advance anyway so why the fuck bother to fight it, like you're not going to wake up the sleeping giant evil or something.

In fairness some of that is also probably on WW because the whole "True Fae are always and everywhere 100% pure alien evil" is like the kind of boring and useless setting element they mostly abandoned after 2nd ed oWoD and for good reason.

But yeah tl;dr you can shout "Radical freedom, radical freedom" all you want, but it takes very little to make players feel like this thing you're setting up as the obvious path is what they're supposed to do, and they're not wrong to feel that way based on common experiences and social conventions.

Like ffs that's actually such a perfect example of what not to do, if you want a plot not to feel rails don't say "Here's a gazebo-slaying knife, there's a wild rampaging gazebo, you make your own life choices" and act like that's freedom of plot development or something.

As a mostly casual player my largest exposure I can think of to metaplot on a major scale was in the Changeling sphere on the Reach. I felt very strongly that it was easy for me to get involved in the metaplot and that all kinds of staff were eager and happy to help me do so. I also felt like my potential role in building the metaplot was and could only be moving these giant blocks of sandstone along this track of wooden rollers and that if I tried to do anything else or push in any other direction I would be summarily executed and dumped in a ditch.

I wouldn't have minded that there were awesome and more intricate plots available for people who were able and willing to commit to that sort of thing, but I did kind of mind the existence of this giant plot which I felt guilt-induced and expected to participate in as basically one of the slaves building the pyramids as a giant eternal monument to someone else's awesome ideas.

(*Historian note: the pyramids were not actually built with slave labor.)

Or, if I wasn't participating, that I was constantly expected to know what was going on and respond IC and sidetrack my character's own personal plotlines and interactions with people appropriately.

So I guess the tl;dr is that my feeling is that what the casual player actually wants out of metaplot is just the ability to ignore it without repercussion. Feel free to argue that that is reasonable or not.

(*They were built by aliens.)