"If the egg's shell does not break... the chick will die without being born. We are the chick; the egg is the world. If the world's shell does not break, we will die without being born. Break the world's shell! For the sake of revolutionizing the world!"
He/They • Queer • Professional Conversation Dropper • Total Liberationist / Anarchist Vegan • Tryhard • Half-Centaur
Me, trying to impress my date with a display of my boundless humility: I would like to order one single, solitary crumb.
Waitress taking my order: Such arrogance! Not only do you presume to boast under the guise of being humble, but your order employs the most decadent of linguistic excesses - the tautology!
My date, who until recently thought "tautology" referred to the study of tensile strengths and upon learning her mistake compensated by reading through its Wikipedia article: That would be more correctly identified as a "pleonasm".
The editor I hired to curate my posts who styles himself as a sort of scheming court advisor: My liege, this one is getting away from us. The punchline loses much of its impact when the rest of the joke is derailed by this increasingly self-indulgent meta humour. Were it up to me, your Grace, which of course it is not, I would cut the others and leave myself as the only supporting character. You need noone else, Your Majesty...
I love when people headcannon Armand as a stern slightly cruel teacher to Leatat, but Lestat secretly really liked it. It was also a highly effective way of teaching Lestat specifically, bc he needs the hard lines and boundaries to focus. Lestat could I interest you in an ADHD diagnosis my love?
happy make a terrible comic day!!! i haven't stopped thinking about this post since i saw it. in 2018 a common merganser was spotted with 76 (SEVENTY SIX!!!) chicks!! that's SOOOO many baby. so much success.
the idea of trying to crawl away during sex for whatever reason, maybe to grab something, maybe your phone rang, something fell on the other side of the room, idk, and you get yoinked by the waist is so fkfnfmfkfkf to me always
i love when a trans person toys with a name change by shortening their birth name for a while so it's the subtlest change because i feel like they end with the most different name possible. like Alex starts going by Lex or Jasmine switches to Jas and then a year later they're like on second thought I'll be going by Betula alleghaniensis from now on, and do not abbreviate it.
Orgasm denial scenario in which it gradually becomes apparent that the dom has forgotten what criteria they set for being allowed to cum and is trying to stall for time.
Louis de Pointe du Lac would be so down for cnc so that he doesn't have to take responsibility for his desires, but he'd never have the necessary conversations w/ Lestat to make it happen.
Louis, king of never getting what he wants for no fault but his own.
ANON!!!!! I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR LITERAL YEARRRSSSSSS
I'm so mad tumblr's search system is ASS because i know i made a little post about my ideas for a cnc loustat fic about 2 years ago and it's not coming up when I look for it but suffice to say I wholeheartedly agree for the exact same reasons!!!!!
His biggest gripe about intimacy in general isn't necessarily the act of it, but the wanting of it. He doesn't want to claim responsibility over that part of himself that harbors all those nasty desires, and I've been wanting to write a rape fantasy fic for sooooooo long now.
And YES, 1,000% agree that Louis would never admit it out loud to Lestat. I think after all the baggage of their first relationship attempt, Lestat is hesitant and overly cautious with Louis many boundaries because he knows he fucked it up really badly in the past (and also!!! Lestat has CHANGED, he's GROWN, I really doubt he would WANT to treat Louis in that manner because it would make him feel like a terrible person).
I do think that realistically Louis could probably needle Lestat into doing it without having any sort of proper conversation first, and it would be messy and cathartic and fuck them both up for a little while :)
if i bring a book someplace it doesn't necessarily mean i want to read it mayb i just want to take her on a walk. Get her some fresh air and a change of scenery
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(Painting Diana Elisabeth Raum, Poem William Blake)
Lestat on Davids Tiger after the Gobi Desert
There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..
(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.
That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel.
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!
I have encountered this firsthand. I'm a massive history nerd, especially about pirates (among other things, but pirates are relevant to the story). I was hanging out in a system agnostic TTRPG server and Pirate Borg was mentioned so I talked about my idea for a historical fantasy campaign set around historical pirates and the Nassau Pirate's Republic. Started explaining some basic ideas, how it's basically about trying to keep this rogue nation together amid external hostility from England, France, and Spain and internal strife caused by a lack of trust and Edward Teach's descent into madness. Naturally this brings up Blackbeard and his crew, which contained several escaped slaves, and that the Queen Anne's revenge was a former slave ship. I immediately get the *several people are typing...* and am welcomed with several messages that Pirate Borg takes place in an alternate history where slavery never happened. I end up trying to have to defend myself, explaining the *true facts* that most pirates were escaped slaves, both native and black, and that a lot of pirate ships were captured slave ships because they had thicker hulls and could take more punishment in a fight. They were like "But you can have diverse crews and sturdy ships without bringing slavery into it." My response was "you *could*, but then you lose valuable historical context and systemic evils to fight against, I like running stories about making the world a better place." Some people understood that, but many of them *literally* shot back "But thinking about slavery makes me uncomfortable, so maybe just write it out of the setting?" That's when I shut up but I was just screaming in my head "YES, THE POINT IS IT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND WANT TO CORRECT IT"
