The mage of memphis, TN

Transfem. Wizardposting if possible. I am the Cabela's / Bass Pro Shops wizard, to be specific.

[bass-pro-shops-wizard]

i am the bass pro shops/Cabela’s wizard, as seen below. my powers over fish and wildlife are next to none. my familiar, melvin, is a trout.

location: anywhere the wild touches (oftentimes the grand pyramid of memphis)

[prokopetz]

I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.

[prokopetz]

I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:

As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.

The rules of Dungeons & Dragons are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (Again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)

In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.

(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)

The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.

The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.

A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.

Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)

Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.

Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?

So get to work!

i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.

To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).

The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.

Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.

[the-grassy-hill]

The sun is a man and the moon is a woman Spanish is just the only one to have the balls to say it

[bass-pro-shops-wizard]

most (European at least, though I do think that the historic Inca did as well among others) cultures make this distinction actually I think, English just doesn’t have grammatical gender so we don’t have the immediate masc/fem connotation

[a-being-that-just-is]

RCBG Chapter 29 Prediction

[catboybiologist]

hey anon from yesterday. i hadn’t specifically seem the term “transfemme hypervisibility” before so i didn’t realize this until i did a bit more research last night, but the case i was referring to was an incorrect usage of transfemme hypervisibility where it would have been more apt to use transmasc invisibility. i worry it might have come off as me shit talking a trans woman for discussing her own experiences with hypervisibility, but that wasn’t the context at all.

transfemme hypervisibility and transmasc invisibility are two separate phenomena (though highly related) and both deserved to be talked about.

feel free to share your thoughts or just not reply at all. have a lovely day <3

So first off, I do want to say that you're being really lovely and explaining a lot of your thoughts on the matter with respect, and I genuinely appreciate that. The giant wall of text that follows is not pouncing on you, or even necessarily arguing against you. I'm just using your ask as a device to explain my thoughts on the matter in a detailed way.

I do want to take the time to pick apart what's actually going on here with the entire discussion around "visibility".

I'm going to set some clear terms here that might be different than what I've used in other contexts. These may not be the way you interpret these exact terms or define them, however, please just understand this post based on the definitions I use here for clarity.

Transfemmes are invisible too. We just have a parallel phenomena of caricaturization. The problem with using the word "visibility" is that it means two things that I would argue are separate phenomena. They can be entangled, and usually one is an indicator of the state of the other. But they're still largely operating on separate axes.

Representation comes from the community, or from people trying to directly speak about the community using their actual lives. We automatically associate this with a good thing, but it can also be negative. If someone takes actual problems in a community, overrepresents them or removes them from context, its still a representation. Just not good representation, and usually missing a LOT of context.

Characterization is what it sounds like. People creating parallel narratives and caricatures about a community that have nothing to do with the community. This happens both in media and political discourse. Again, this can be positive or negative. Think about the kinds of characters well-meaning but clueless allies make. If you want a cringy but sympathetic example of that, think Topah from The Orville. Important to note that, even if something alleges to be about real events, it can still be "building a narrative" that creates a character.

The entire mismatch in this debate is comparing transfeminine characterization to both transmasculine representation and characterization, but entangling the concepts so much that the comparison doesn't really make sense anymore.

The transfemininity that is "visible" has little or nothing to do with actual transfemininity. Visible transfemininity falls into tropes that have been defined by the media and percolated into the minds of the public. This is characterization. There are negative things about transfemininity and the transfemme community- of course there are. But we're not even talked about along that axis. We're talked about through events that don't exist, through scary images set by the past. Even in laws and executive orders, the supposed goal of "protecting women's spaces" is based on an image of a big, lumbering man in a dress invading bathrooms, an event that has never happened.

Here's where it gets a little weird to think about. Even when transfemmes have positive visibility, it is still usually fighting on the axis of characterization. The positive attention, protection, and advocacy we get is almost solely focused on dismantling the "character" of the trans woman that exists in the eye of the public. Every argument about sports has to "disprove the narrative" about trans women dominating sports. Every fight back against a bathroom bill has to dismantle the character of the trans woman predator.

What is the end result of this? Even allies are pitying us from afar. They're still not seeing us as people with problems to advance, they're seeing us as a target that need to be protected. And even that is EXTREMELY rare.

So yeah, we do get a bit more positive visibility too. But I would argue that the visibility we do get has to be so focused on dismantling our caricatures that it isn't actually visibility at all. It's treading water as floodwaters rise.

Transmasc invisibility is a different flavor. It certainly exists. I'm going to summarize my interpretation of the nasty parts of it, and I'm more than open to correction here from actual transmascs.

Transmascs are both underrepresented, and also negatively characterized, much the same as transfemmes. However, I would argue that the underrepresentation problems are shared between transmascs and transfemmes. They're different, of course, but far more similar than I think most realize. They both stem from not actually looking into the trans community and having any idea of what we're actually like.

The characterization problem exists for transmascs as well, but it is MUCH different than how it is for trans women. Please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, I would value transmasc input on this. But here's how I see it:

The transmasc "character" is someone who can't be taken seriously. Someone who is "woman or girl, but does some masculinity". Lumping every transmasc as a particular flavor of butch or tomboy and creating a character for what those are like instead of actually respecting who transmasculine people are (note that I'm not saying butch and tomboy can't be part of transmasculinity, but generalizing it to all transmascs is bad. Additionally, the characters of "butch" and "tomboy" are much different than what they actually are).

This sucks. I'm not saying it doesn't suck. And much like transfemininity, this reduces the ability to fight for representation.

Transmascs have lots of problems that I will never face and never fully understand. Testosterone being a controlled substance, the horrible ways society punishes people with "female" reproductive systems (including reducing and y'all down to "female reproduction" in the first place as a way of both misgendering and stripping bodily autonomy), the horrible ways that people talk about the femininity of your bodies... its horrific. And those are issues with a uniquely antitransmasculine version. They exist.

But you need to understand that no one is listening to transfemmes either. No one is actually advocating for us. No one is actually elevating our voices.

Which is why this entire debate is so charged. I'm going to be honest, I do have an uncharitable reaction to the phrase "transmasc invisibility". Because it hurts. It hurts so bad, because it feels so flippant. It feels so dismissive of how much transfemmes have cried out and been ignored, discarded, and erased. Our identities and our actual representation is silenced, and then replaced with a boogeyman that doesn't exist.

Comparing these two issues on the same axis just feels like a complete lack of understanding of what's actually happening to transfemmes. When I hear someone talk about "transmasc invisibility", I don't think they're malicious. However, I do get put on edge, because to me it conveys that they may not have thought deeply about the current struggles of transfemmes. It's an instinct that I know isn't the most logical necessarily, but it's why I reacted so negatively to your previous asks.

I hate to overgeneralize issues. I'm all for recognizing when particular communities have unique issues (which is why I'm outspokenly transfeminist in addition to overall trans advocacy). However, in this specific case: a lack of representation is a shared issue. This very much is an issue where it isn't transmascs and transfemmes clamoring for some shared pool of "visibility" that we each get only a piece of. This is cis people putting down and shoving trans realities to the side as a whole, and then filling that void with imagined realities.

Again, I thank you for being gracious about this entire thing, and I'm very glad we can have civil conversations about this. It allows us to move forward as a community.

I'm going to send this to some of my transmasc friends (who will be anonymous) to explicitly ask them to call me out on anything that might be insensitive, but I'm posting this before I do that to show my raw thoughts. I will not edit this post for anything beyond typos.

[cdigoddess]

[bass-pro-shops-wizard]

[cdigoddess]

[cardassiangoodreads]

Previous poll remade because I forgot a whole century the first time, this is what I get for doing this on mobile LOL

Think of the oldest song that you know by heart — can sing the melody and any words it has from memory, without looking it up. Search the name of it in Wikipedia, looking for when it was first documented with both the melody and (if applicable) lyrics you know, together. When is it ACTUALLY from? (If it’s way newer than you think, you can’t switch to an older song. Answer based on this one you initially THOUGHT was the oldest.)

20th century (1900s) or later

19th century (1800s)

18th century (1700s)

17th century (1600s)

15th-16th centuries (1400s-1500s)

13th-14th centuries (1200s-1300s)

11th-12th centuries (1000s-1100s)

First millennium CE (if you are not a musician, no you don't, go back)

It's the Seikilos Epitaph (circa 1st century CE), oldest complete melody found

Voting ended onJan 3

I am a music historian with a PhD and the point of this poll is that the vast majority of people don’t actually know much music from pre-1500s or so, and most music that people think is ancient or medieval is actually far more recent.

There are no options before the first millennium CE because the Epitaph of Seikilos is the oldest complete work of music found anywhere in the world, and it's around 2000 years old. If you think you know something older than that, either only the text was written down (e.g. Biblical, Vedic and Greco-Roman hymns) or it only exists in fragments (e.g. the Hurrian hymns and Orestes stasimon). Which is to say, it does not count for this.

If it fits into a few of these potential time frames, pick the one that's considered the most likely. If historians genuinely have no fucking clue, THEN you can go back and try with another really old song.

[cardassiangoodreads]

Boost this one please! Now that I've finally got it right and the spread actually makes some sense, I'd like to see what happens when more people take it :)

[natequarter]

the wildest thing about people complaining about "religion" when they actually mean christianity is sometimes they're not even complaining about christianity. original sin is not a universal tenet of christianity, to give an example. and yet, here we are, stuck arguing with idiots who think religion is american evangelical protestantism.

[bass-pro-shops-wizard]

wait which denominations don’t have original sin? I thought that was like the whole point of baptism

[sigmund-freud-offical]

Cw: freud, pshychoanalysis, pshychiatry

I'll edit this later if this blog develops, which I doubt

[bass-pro-shops-wizard]

I gotta tell ya sigmund, if you ever said anything about penis envy near me I’d probably start strangling you

[landsccape]

[horsegirlestrogen]

sometimes a character is a trans woman but the writers didn't know that so they misgender her and deadname her the entire story. very sad, many such cases

[horsegirlestrogen]

i have decided to review some of the blorbo tags on this post, if i skipped you i dont recognize whoever you tagged joshua bright (trails in the sky) - my tag, thus correct emiya shirou (fate) - yes, glad so many tgirls with correct opinions read fate/ laios (dungeon meshi) - i can see it. marcille thinks shes cute inazuma eleven character - dont watch that one various sonic characters - not in the fandom but go off, i get it harry potter character - blocked, jk rowlings terf particles prevent anyone in hp from being transfem batman- battinson definitely, only other batman im familiar with is absolute, which i say yes because it'd be funny ralsei (deltarune) - chance toby fox knows this alastor (hazbin hotel) - im a hazbin hotel hater so im gonna say that like how with the lesbian is named fucking vaggie, any tgirl in hazbin hotel would have several really tone-deaf penis jokes written about her june egbert (homestuck) - canonically trans, andrew hussie knew (eventually)

denji (chainsaw man) - decent chance fujimoto knows, either way denji is tma. also makima is probably a chaser, wanting to fuck makima is like wanting to fuck halimede in that i kinda get it but you REALLY SHOULDN'T marco diaz (star vs) - iirc intended but shut down by disney, creators knew, still tma 9th doctor- only who season ive watched so yeah, i can see her as a butch lesbian corvo attano (dishonored) - true also the fandom should stop making her white scott pilgrim - so true fox mulder (x files) - also true sam and dean winchester (supernatural) - i didnt watch this but i want to imagine what this wouldve done to mid 2010s fandom

kirito (sword art online) - dont watch this but i hear its true various jojo characters - hmmm.... wise. cloud strife (final fantasy 7) - my wife agrees zenos ff14- estrogen WOULD NOT fix her but itd be funny

char and amuro (gundam) - estrogen probably doesnt fix them but its funny hypnos (hades) - i mean they did basically fridge her in hades ii so she could be tma rain o'fire frazier (ward) - true, fits with wildbow's blind spot of not knowing if his own characters are lgbt, see also tgirl lesbian taylor hebert n pokemon - true! eizen tales of berseria - god i played berseria so long ago but ill tentatively agree. velvet is definitely trans though kim dokja (omniscient reader's viewpoint) - interesting shout! not too far into ORV so i'll add it to my worldview going forward ratchet + starscream (transformers) - which continuity...? did you know though: canonically all female transformers are transfem wilson (house) - It Would Be Funny dark sun gwyndolin - this is canon to me roland deadwife (library of ruina) - hmmm... havent thought of it but i can see it yi sang (limbus company) - only if we also feminize hong lu also on project moon: carmen is tma. imagine carmen but instead of distorting she forcefems you james hurley (twin peaks) - didnt twin peaks have a pretty respectful trans woman on the cast? david lynch might know if he wrote a trans character despite being a man in the 90s, can't comment on this hc since i havent seen it jesse pinkman (breaking bad) - sure akira nishikiyama (like a dragon) - you know who we SHOULD let transition? majima. dr ratio (honkai star rail) - interesting thought but i dont care about star rail men enough to have an opinion The Onimai Girl - i dont like onimai but using any crossdressing/gender transformation manga for this prompt is cheating agnes tachyon - true. guinea pig we need to cook estrogen whittaker (the pitt) - i joked that the trans patient in this show who has barely any interaction aside from having an arm cut bandaged and getting her gender marker fixed by the doctors is one of the most respectful portrayals of a trans woman in western live action tv just because of how bad all the other ones are, so maybe they know!

[f1nishing-cut]

I have found some of the original posts floating around, but I would rather just keep them in one place at this point.

[charl0ttan]

there should be another system like the underwater fiber optic cables but they carry meat and viscera between places for faster transportation for that kind of thing

[zeitghost]

[sees a fly on my food] waiter theres a marty in my food!

Back to the Future Humor | “Follow” if you “Laughed”! | mcfly.com

[assignedmale]

[gaytanic-panic]