So this weekend I attended an interesting conference on the future of feminism. I’d like to present some of the most insightful papers from it.
Clarification: When I said I “attended a conference” I meant I “took a look at the Men’s Rights subreddit.” By “interesting” I meant “tedious” and by “insightful” I meant “ridiculous.” And by “papers” of course I meant “comments.”
So here, without further ado, are some of the pearls of wisdom I found in a thread asking the twin questions “What, in your opinion, is Feminism’s ultimate goal? When do you think they’ll consider their job ‘done?’” (Each yellow comment is a direct answer to one or both of the questions.)
Boy, these “feminists” sound like terrible people!
Oh, yeah, there’s that, too. I didn’t mention it because this is a forum about misogyny.
I’m sure there have been defenses of the drow’s coloration. They’re
ebony pitch black and they have white hair and they have purple eyes HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY MISTAKE THEM FOR REAL PEOPLEwhen it isn’t that simple.
Shakra! I borked those tags.
do i need a reason? no
I’ll sign up for the horde any time. Do I need to bring my own horse? Or do we ride subjugated men?
All races that are what they are because of the evilz are non-functional. Try explaining that to a dark-elves obsessed 19-year-old Cradle of Filth-fan who was assigned to write the dark-elves for the LARP-campaign you are trying to rescue from years of unstructured playing and bad, nepotist gamemastering. Argh.
Even the LDS church started accepting black priests in the 1970s, and their holy book practically codified dark skin = evil.
I like that they chose Equilibrium, a movie about a man fighting against a government controlled entirely by men, as their example for a feminist dystopia.
I gotta admit, that’s a far better name than Wee Jass. To my recollection, it seemed like it was implied that was the same deity. I no longer have my books, though.
Well, about the cages, OK. But to suggest that we’ll complain about feeding them seems a bit harsh. I mean, it’s not that hard to throw a handful of dry food through the bars every now and then, is it?
Falconer: Yeah, probably the “spiders are freaky” thing. Though, it works well (at least I think so, even though spiders don’t bother me). Especially with Driders – in the realm of centaur-like creatures, they’re one of the most awesome!
Also, the D&D Online thing sounds hilarious. 😀 I did play D&D Online for a bit years ago (it’s free; i’m not going to say no 😛 ), but I didn’t get far. I didn’t find it too friendly to my playstyle (i’m the guy that plays MMOs on his own). Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, is awesome for my playstyle. You can help and get help from other people without all that scary social interaction stuff! 😀 Haven’t played it in a while though, got distracted by Borderlands 2 (53 hours in and i’ve almost completed it @.@), and a bit of Torchlight 2.
On the racism: Yeah, disappointing stuff. Not sure if there’s been improvements in that area (pesky lack of lore knowledge again). If no one’s realised that just adding a wider variety of good and bad races without tying it to skin colour* would be easy, i’d be sad. Or not tying specific races to specific alignments, even. The less Drow (and other evil underground races, or any race in general for that matter) are stuck with usually being evil the better really. More neutral and good Drow for all!
Oh, and that defense you mentioned is probably common, at least i’ve seen it a few times before. Drow are a pretty big thing, people don’t want them to change. Why they think that people are just going to go “Drow having black skin and being evil is racist! They now have white skin!”, I don’t know (not that that’s not a valid option, it’s just not the only one).
*I expect originally it was done unconsciously. I’d imagine it was just the whole light/good vs dark/evil, which gets incredibly problematic very quickly if applied to skin colour.
What amuses me about the D&D 3.5 pantheon is how unlike any real, organic paganism it is. There’s practically a one-to-one mapping between the good and neutral deities and the PC character classes and non-human races. Ehlonna is not the goddess of the woodlands, people; she’s the goddess of rangers. Hieroneous is the god of paladins, Fharlangn (sp? Don’t have the books on me atm) is the god of bards, etc.
@Shade: I tried a bit of Borderlands 1, got bored fighting the same fights over and over and over again. I’ve never tried an MMO, but I feel like if they’re anything like Borderlands I wouldn’t like them.
I’m waiting on XCOM, which comes out tomorrow. I seem to be the only one 🙁
The twin scimitars and angst come factory-installed.
I was playing a D&D group recently with someone who’d only encountered dark elves in the Elder Scrolls. We had to explain that dark elves in Forgotten Realms were different, but we allowed as how he could have a dark-toned elf well enough.
I’ve never understood why the drow didn’t end up like the Falmer, or like cave fish, all pale and blind. Instead of losing all their melanin, they got a whole bunch. Is it camouflage? In an environment where predators hunted by sensing body heat? (Before 3rd Edition, elves and dwarves and some halflings had infravision, which was specifically the ability to sense heat, like thermal imaging, or the ability of pit vipers. 3rd Edition replaced that with low-light vision — like light amplification — and darkvision — the ability to see despite a total lack of light.)
Am I the hoary 2nd Edition veteran on this website? I do believe I am! And me without an onion tied to my belt.
@Karalora — well, the core rulebooks have only so much space. The gods in there are the core of the Greyhawk pantheon. The Greyhawk accessories — there’s a Living Greyhawk Gazetteer for 3E — describe many more deities. And the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting has a six or eight page table of all the major gods found on Faerun. So I’m inclined to cut the core books some slack.
Hey, guess what happens to atheists in the Forgotten Realms after they die? Their souls get cemented into a wall for all eternity. Gee, thanks, Ed Greenwood!
Hell, they already took their “Wikipedia wants non-biased information and not your FEMINIST OVERLORD CONSPIRACY CRAP” and turned it into “the feminist masses are suppressing dissenting voices on Wikipedia”.
I tried a bit of Borderlands 1, got bored fighting the same fights over and over and over again.
Yeah, sometimes it suffers from stuff like having to go back to areas you’ve already been (which doesn’t bother me personally, I live for sidequests, and shooting bandits in the face never gets old). I wouldn’t say it’s any more repetitive than the average actiony game with RPG bits (both games also have awesome storylines).
But it’s not like there’s a law saying you have to enjoy everything someone else enjoys. 😛 (Though sometimes if you look at gamers and see the amount of whining that goes on about whatever’s popular, you’d think that there was).
I’m waiting on XCOM, which comes out tomorrow. I seem to be the only one
I’ve been keeping my eye on it. 😀 I wouldn’t say i’m super excited for it or anything, but i’ll probably pick it up at some point (i’ve played some of the old, old, old X-Com before, very fun but ferociously hard sometimes). It’s mostly just because my genre preference for games I really want to play go on rotation, and at the minute it’s shooters rather than strategy. 😛
I’m just finishing off Borderlands 2, then i’m waiting for the new character (Gaige) to be released so I can try her out in another playthrough (multiple playthroughs aren’t normally something I do, usually if I know what’s going to happen I don’t feel like doing it again, but there’s just something about the Borderlands games that make me want to).
The only other thing I have on my gaming agenda (which makes it sound more official than it is 😛 ) is Dishonoured, which comes out the end of the week.
The twin scimitars and angst come factory-installed.
Hah. 😛 Yeah, he did kind of ruin the concept of good Drow for a lot of people.
I’ve never understood why the drow didn’t end up like the Falmer, or like cave fish, all pale and blind. Instead of losing all their melanin, they got a whole bunch. Is it camouflage? In an environment where predators hunted by sensing body heat?
I think it was all about when Lolth turned on the other Elven deities, she and her people were cursed in a now-your-outward-appearance-matches-your-evil-black-heart sort of way. And instead of going blind, they just got the ability to see in the dark instead.
I just tend to put all that down, instead, to them living in the Underdark. It’s a hugely magical place; stick an already magical race there and weird shit is bound to happen. Just be glad they didn’t sprout tentacles out of everywhere like everything else did. 😛
Hey, guess what happens to atheists in the Forgotten Realms after they die? Their souls get cemented into a wall for all eternity. Gee, thanks, Ed Greenwood!
Yeah, what a big meaniepants. Even though it’s kind of silly to be an atheist in a setting where clerics perform divine deeds without breaking a sweat, or a deity could come along and bop you on the nose in the street, throwing you in a wall for the rest of time for that is just plain evil.
I prefer the idea that you’d go to wherever is best suited for how you acted in life if you aren’t a follower of a deity. Most D&D deities don’t really “push” you for worship after all (at least the non-evil ones), so as long as you aren’t crapping up their realm i’m not sure they’d care that much that you’re there.
Invasion of the emoticons! Ahhh! Apologies to anyone who hates emoticons, I tend to overuse just in case of misunderstandings in meaning and they get everywhere as a result.
*Resists urge to put sticky-outy tongue emoticon on the end of that sentence*
Yeah, I know. It’s still funny. The world revolves around adventurers to such an extent that the very cosmos produces deities to attend to their needs!
For that matter, how do deities like Hextor manage to bill themselves as evil and still get worshippers? The tyrant never considers himself a tyrant; any god who tempts people with promises of power over others is probably going to call itself the god of strength or authority, not tyranny.
Meh. Morality and “alignment” in D&D have never made sense. You just have to roll with it. And hope what you roll is a natural 20.
Karalora: The way I tend to look at it is most of the stuff in the books is coming at it from a meta-perspective (is that even a term?) rather than an in-character one, and that perspective is centred on the player being a relatively decent human being.
So a deity that might be described as the “God of Tyranny” purely because that’s how we (as players) would describe him, in the same way that everything in the game is set up with Humans as the baseline. I figure it makes it easier to understand.
Obviously in-character, that would probably be totally different. Like you say, someone who’s evil is going to see them as not-evil.
(I agree about the class-deity thing though. Luckily it’s not hard to fix, a thesaurus would probably do most of the work 😛 ).
In the core setting, at least, you just go where your alignment dictates; it doesn’t matter whether you follow a deity or not. And I’d assume “atheist” in D&D means “someone who doesn’t follow a deity,” since not believing in their existence would just be silly.
There are also practically no myths in the D&D pantheon. Heironeous and Hextor are brothers, Gruumsh got his eye poked out, Vecna got betrayed and lost some stuff, and that’s about it.
The bigger question would be why characters bill themselves as evil, I’d think. As long as there are evil PCs, the evil deities are just filling a void.
In one campaign I ran, our bard tried to rob the temple of Cuthbert.
The god of retribution.
Book of Vile Darkness, anyone? It has vile in the title and irreparably harms anyone who tries to read it and isn’t evil. So…why would anyone ever read it? You have to picture someone finding it and going “Vile Darkness, that’s the book for me! It’s lucky I’m so evil, or this would be useless to me!”
@katz
Good old St. Cuthbert of the Cudgel. He’s all about smacking down those who have wronged you, but…he hates evil and gives his clerics healing spells but no harming spells? Huh?
Incidentally, the daycare area at the L.A. Renaissance Faire is named after St. Cuthbert. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that…
Funny thing. Apparently the original software was glitched so that all difficulties defaulted to Beginner. So people complained that the game just wasn’t hard enough, even on the highest setting.
So Microprose upped the difficulty for the sequel.
I think the version you can buy off Steam for $5 has the glitch fixed.
I enjoy the old game, but I gotta admit I’m not all that hot at strategy. I can’t even finish most scenarios in Heroes of Might & Magic.
Was Wisdom this guy’s dump stat?
And yeah, gallons of ink have been used arguing about the economy of a medieval world in which the average peasant gets paid (if xe gets paid) in copper or silver, and the heroes can kill a dragon and get enough gold coins to buy a small kingdom.
I’m running a cleric at the moment who’s got the Strength and Destruction domains. I suppose he’d be a good fit for St. Cuthbert, except it’s in the Realms, the DM has jettisoned all of the Realms gods and said that the gods in the PHB are like intercessors, saints and lesser gods serving an all-powerful creator God (the DM’s a youth pastor but Jesus hasn’t come up in the game … yet), and gave me my choice of domains at character creation.
So I got me an old-timey smitin’ cleric. And I can still convert any of my prepared spells into cure spells at a moment’s notice.
Falconer, just want you to know that my husband is really looking forward to the new XCOM, too.
@Katz: Great! I hope it’s everything we’re anticipating.
None of them have ever heard Alan Rickman talk about character motivation?
but I gotta admit I’m not all that hot at strategy
Me either, i’m terrible. 😛 But they’re lots of fun. I’m more a fan of RTS games, but I won’t say no to a good turn based one.