oops! all dndads discourse

 (no literally, just block me if you need to, no hard feelings, it's gonna be All Discourse)

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So somebody sent you here because of dndads discourse

I don’t do much with this account anymore, in part because I realized I was playing the game of “what godawful thing will be bad enough to get some people to get it.” But here’s most of the cards I played in that game before I gave up, by category. 

My main objection: an unfortunately consistent pattern of not being able to pivot quick enough between “rowdy horny podcast” and “I’m talking now to a 12 year old,” and inadequate efforts to rein in a similar problem in their official patreon discord. 

- “It’s weird when your dad calls you baby/Don’t google dadswap!”  -  I’m trying to think of a worse look than “hey, Anthony, you’ve set up a situation where a bunch of minors are going to be sharing kink test results with adults, you understand how that could be bad, right?” him replying “Oh, yeah, shit, definitely,” and then… first doing absolutely nothing, then several days too late, some half-assed rules updates. -  i mean here’s the thing nobody has been able to explain to me at all, so far. why is it so important to be able to talk in great depth about kinks and fucking and p*rn (trying not to get got by the tumblr algorithm there) and bdsm and c*m and orgies and cucking in front of kids. I know why predators want to be able to do it. i just can’t figure out why the fuck so many other people do - Many, many examples of the cast contributing to the problem in show and in the discord, and responding to the idea that there’s nothing they could do that they haven’t done -The whole kink test discussion from the all-ages discord - Various incidents when they’ve talked about Grant masturbating, wrung comedy from Grant being uncomfortable around naked men before changing gears and playing up his attraction to those men, etc. (Yeah, I know teens get crushes on adults, but we know what Grant is like when he has a crush, because we’ve seen it. All he was doing with Glenn and Henry was ogling, for a joke. Never came up unless they were undressed.)  - Patrons discussing Grant and Yeet sexually in front of mods, cast, and a minor asking them to stop.  - A handful of other incidents on the patreon discord when patrons talked about grant’s kinks and sex life in front of mods and cast, unchecked (not comprehensive, because dear god, I have a job and it’s not this) - Me talking about why the Grant stuff needs to stop and why it falls right into an all-too-common and harmful way of talking about GSM youth - “Nobody’s mad because the dndads cast can’t stop minors sneaking in. We’re mad that they welcome minors and then let people talk about Grant’s kinks and Yeet’s dick. Do you see the difference?”  - Examining the assertion that the patreon discord has 18+ channels and/or 18+ roles - Examining the patreon discord’s rules, discussing their lack of enforcement, and discussing what responsibility the cast has in this situation - Responding to “you can always come to us with your concerns.” -  “Ash has left me on read every time I’ve messaged her, and I’m far from the only one. That’s a big part of what broke down my trust that they were taking the concerns seriously and had plans to address them.” - Talking about the personal and professional experiences that have brought me to the point where I just am not cool with this kind of humor.  In that long discussion with Lark, I did finally get to correct some misconceptions and provide evidence for assertions that were being contested. I also got to hear Lark’s perspective, and I appreciate their time and contributions on that.  Where I landed in the replies was: All right my dear, I’ve had some time to think about this as well, and I think what I’ve landed on is that me hammering on this problem with more evidence and receipts isn’t causing any change in how they address the safety of the Patreon discord - but it is clearly hurting you, and I don’t want to do that, so I’m gonna step back from the issue. And then I did. 

Content Warnings

Most of the discussion around content warnings was people other than me, back when they fucked up the child harm warning thing. But my stuff includes: - spreading the word that a major missing content warning in the new ep was setting off abuse survivors  - and, some time later, being unimpressed with their response to the problem

Fully just me being fed up with this garbage, and very likely stuff I wouldn’t have gotten pissed about if I weren’t on my last nerve. 

- just me getting irritated at another goddamn incest joke

- and irritated at what a mean asshole anthony is for the sake of humor

To me, realizing “they talk about kids like this?/they let the discord get like this?” was the deal-breaker that made me go “aw damn, loving this was a bad idea, now there’s a big hole in the trust safety net.” The stuff that has happened since with the content warnings and other issues has confirmed this impression. Having that drop out from underneath you hurts a lot, and I don’t want people to get real deep into the show before they realize the hole in the safety net is there. In my book, it’s a pretty bad one, and I always appreciate getting a heads-up on stuff like that when I’m getting into something. I think something about this show creates a “they’re playing very close to the edge and it’s thrilling, but in a safe way because I trust them” listening relationship. If you take away the trust then you realize you weren’t enjoying a thrill ride, you were in actual danger without realizing it - you just didn’t happen to get hurt so far. I got hurt by getting in pretty deep before I realized that they think stuff is hilarious that I really don’t find okay, like incest, or adults being unnecessarily naked in front of kids and making the kids uncomfortable, or kids checking out naked adults, or turning the word “consent” into a joke. But if people look at the actual facts of the situation - the screenshots, etc., not summaries from people who are trying to “put an end to the discourse” - and can go “that’s fine” or “it’s not great, but it’s not their job to fix it” or “that doesn’t bother me,” then I respect that decision. We all have different things that are deal-breakers. Like my header used to say, “If you love the show I am happy for you and I hope it brings you joy, i just have some... management concerns.” I have no beef with fans of the show. Many of my friends still are fans of the show, and I still like and support the great fanartists and writers that are involved in the fandom.  And if you look at the actual facts of the situation and go “yikes, I’m out,” then I hope it was easier to read it here from somebody else who’s going “yeah, I saw it too and it’s not okay” than it was to get slapped across the face with it when you were just trying to listen to a dumbass show about dungeons and dragons.  Edit: Since it comes up regularly, “Dungeons and Daddies is a rowdy, horny, violent podcast for grown-ups” is a disclaimer that got added in mid-October of 2020, presumably in response to this critique as well as other conversations happening in the listenership. The kink test discussion, the Grant and Yeet discussion, and basically everything in the first section of this post is from before that. I don’t know that it hugely matters, but hey, clarity is good.  Edit 2 to answer the recurring question of “why don’t you also criticize NADDpod or Crit Role or TAZ for their problematic content?” Because I don’t listen to those shows. Edit 3: Cleaning up this desktop, have all the many many relevant receipts for the content warnings issue, featuring such hits as ‘40 episodes of content warnings getting done in 48 hours by a handful of untrained volunteers.’ The daughters thing, in all its glory. Short version: June 2020, on Talking Dad, a listener asked whether having only sons on the show was deliberate. Some of the cast's responses struck listeners as sexist, inconsiderate, or confusing. After discussion on multiple platforms, someone posted a thread on Reddit. Four cast members responded. This was the first time that fans had publicly discussed concerns over female representation with the cast, but the same conversation had happened in the Patreon discord repeatedly, for months. Many fans had sore feelings but were willing to give the show another chance. However, the next few episodes were not received with the same tolerance and assumption of good intention that they would have previously been. (Will’s apology for that is still a great example of how to own your shit and not make excuses for yourself... and would really mean a lot if he had ever responded to anything else again, ever. Like this, for instance. The thing about asking marginalized people to ‘hold you accountable’ as a creator is that you have 99.99% of the power in the situation. If you ask for the feedback, but then don’t actually do anything about it, you’re just asking people to throw their emotional labor down a hole so that you can feel like you’re woke and responsive.) Some folks contact Freddie to see if the show is okay for their kids and he handles it with typical grace and tact.  People are uncomfortable with the idea of Glenn and Canary because she seems young, and instead of just saying “oh, sorry if it came off that way, but no, don’t worry - Glenn wouldn’t flirt with a teenager,” Freddie just kinda argues with everybody about whether it’s fair for someone to interpret her as young and then, when that doesn’t get traction, he switches to arguing about whether Glenn was flirting or not. As is pretty typical, a very small and easily-addressed thing gets blown up hugely by the cast’s breathtaking inability to respond appropriately to stuff that they see as criticism. Then later, a Patreon mod (who still mods) made fun of people who thought Canary was young. Good look.  And when a mod told Anthony that people were getting uncomfortable with it, he said “that’s a fredo problem.” Amazing. 

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Queer listeners, looking at how Darryl and Henry interact: 

Matt and Will: 

[ID: Two John Mulaney screenshots. Queer listeners watching how Henry and Darryl interact: “you marked that one gay, right?” Matt and Will: “and it was like, “oh, no! was i supposed to?” /end ID]

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I gather that there are people arguing about whether it's queerbaiting or not and I'm like...  it was weird and retrospectively embarrassing is what it was. They were aware that it drew them a lot of queer listeners, they played it up early on, and then they hit it big in the mainstream and it got dropped. Maybe that was an accident of timing and maybe it was deliberate. Whatever else you want to call it, it was tacky and bad storytelling. But I’ll always have plenty of great fics to read and think about what might have been. 

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At the time, I thought the joke was "Darryl thought the weirdest thing about his day was gonna be getting thrown through an interdimensional portal, but it's actually learning some surprising information about himself that he's gonna have to adapt to.” Turns out the joke was not that. 

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“There is an aspect of toxic masculinity that puts forward death, revenge, and inherited responsibility as a personal journey.”

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brennan and orion both say things regularly that feel like they’re reading dndads but probably aren’t. 

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Right from episode one of dndads, there are strong implications that Carol is cheating on Darryl. This is because originally, she was:

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

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[ID: Tags that say #also worth pointing out #and i think you were the person who first explained it to me even though i did my own reading after #the massive massive amounts of racism tied up in the cuckolding trope #even if the definition as written doesn’t involve race it’s very much a part of the whole thing #tw kink mention #em be careful #long post /end ID]

yeah. 

For thoroughness, since it’s the last piece of this layer cake of garbage and I already have it written up... (Everything below is discussing anti-black racism and sexist tropes.)

I don’t know how it is in Faerun, but over here in the United States, both the slang and the kink meanings of cuckolding have very strong racialized aspects. Specifically, both are strongly associated with the premise of a white woman “cucking” her white husband with a black man. This scenario is presented as the most emasculating iteration of cuckolding for racist reasons: basically it represents the "failure" of a white man to control the bodies and sexualities of two different kinds of people that he's supposed to “own.”

Now before I go any further, cuckolding fantasies do not intrinsically have a racial aspect on a person-to-person basis. I’m sure there are plenty of people who enjoy it and have no racial component to their play. However, there’s really no denying that it’s possibly the most common and popular subgenre of this kink. Everyone from academics to black porn actors to white supremacists agree that these concepts are pretty strongly intertwined:

Donnell Alexander (2016): The Word 'Cuck' Has Always Been About Race: Inside the Alt-Right's Favorite Insult.

Zoe Samudzi (2018): What "Interracial" Cuckold Porn Reveals About White Male Insecurity. 

Dana Schwartz (2016): Why Angry White Men Love Calling People Cucks 

Damon Young (2017): The Racist Roots of 'Cuck' (the White Supremacist's Favorite Insult), Explained. 

Okay, so now to Darnell. Darnell is very much seen in the United States as a “black name”:

Freakonomics counted it among the “twenty blackest-sounding boy names.”

They discuss the name Darnell at around 10:30 of this great video about “Black-Sounding” Names and Their Surprising History. 

It’s here on this list from MadameNoire.com: Darius, Darnell, Dejuan And Other Names You Know Belong To A Black Man Off The Bat 

Discussed in this article: A brief history of black names, from Perlie to Latasha 

And is so widely considered a “black name” that it is used in psychological studies of implicit racial bias.

Just searching “Darnell” in Google images also illustrates a certain trend. Of the first 12 hits I get when I do that, 11 are black men.

Most people envision and portray Darryl as white, and to my knowledge, Matt has never said anything to contradict this or given any guidance otherwise to the artists doing official work. So we have Darryl, a somewhat conservative, very likely white, archetypally “alpha male” American man. And we have his wife Carol, who in the first episodes of this story, was “cucking” him with a man who had one of the most “black” male names in America. Whether intentional or unintentional, using that premise and naming that character Darnell evoked a very stereotypical, very racialized scenario.  To be clear: I’m not calling Anthony racist, I’m saying this trope that he invoked is racist. It’s certainly possible that in his life, he’s never picked up on the “Darnell is a black name” thing or the “cuckolding is racialized” thing. In theory, it’s possible he was thinking of the whitest dude he knows, who happens to be named Darnell, and it was all totally unintentional. If so, that’s... hella unfortunate, but our culture is so steeped in trash that sometimes we step in it without even realizing it. 

Since this is the first time I’ve laid out this part of the discussion in public, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to get anything or anybody attacked or canceled by bringing it up, I just want to articulate why I personally have always found this little subplot gets worse the harder you look at it. If anything, I just hope that maybe one or two people reading this re-evaluate whether the word “cuck” can be sufficiently stripped of its misogyny and racism to safely become a fun new thing you yell at your friends when they roll dice well against you. 

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Right from episode one of dndads, there are strong implications that Carol is cheating on Darryl. This is because originally, she was:

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

[faultlessfinish]

You might know all this already, but in dictionary terms, a “cuck” is a man whose wife is sexually unfaithful to him. When alt-right people call people “cucks,” they generally mean it in that sense: a man who is implicitly weak, powerless, humiliated, and emasculated because he does not control the sexuality of his wife. These days, cucking is also a kink or sexual fetish that eroticizes the humiliation of the cuckold. Depending on context, “cuck” can be interpreted:

In its original sense (a man whose wife has been sexually unfaithful) In its contemporary slang sense (a man who is weak, inadequate, or has been bested in some way)

In its kink sense (a man who enjoys consensually role-playing this sexual scenario)

It gets used on dndads mainly in its slang sense, although the kink sense also appeared during the BDSM episode (11.5). I think they’ve also alluded to Henry as a cuck at least once, and Rocks Rock and other material confirms that the Oak-Garcias have some kind of open arrangement wherein Mercedes sleeps with other men. 

I do want to acknowledge that there's some context to Anthony's use of the term, namely that “cuck” as an insult was leveraged against him extensively during Gamergate and his divorce from his first wife, so there’s presumably an element of reclamation here. That said, I don’t really think you can be “ironically misogynist” any more than you can be “ironically racist,” and reclaiming certain terms in your own home or social circle is different than doing it in a very public forum. All the other cast members have now picked up the tendency to say “cuck” and “cucking” all the time, and a lot of the listenership has as well, and that’s not great. It’s really easy to start out thinking “it’s okay for me to say this because I don’t actually believe it” or even “this is a kink I’m fine with so using it as an insult isn’t that bad.” It gets normalized, and you forget that it’s a term that is rooted in the assumption that a woman’s sexuality is her husband’s responsibility and that if he doesn’t control her adequately, he is less of a man because his wife has lost worth by having more sexual partners. A term that has been called “the alt-right’s favorite insult” because that view of gender and sexuality is still very much alive and well in the world in 2021, even if it’s not expressed out loud by anyone in your particular social circles.  Then the shock of the word wears off, and it just becomes part of your vocabulary, and you continue to live in a structurally sexist society, and you get rewarded with more and more attention for making more and more transgressive jokes, and suddenly a definitional in-joke for your entire show is that it’s funny to use a vicious misogynist term all the time. 

[faultlessfinish]

Right from episode one of dndads, there are strong implications that Carol is cheating on Darryl. This is because originally, she was:

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

[faultlessfinish]

Sometimes I think about the fact that last year, a minor messaged whoever runs the dndads twitter and asked questions about the safety of the discord server and was just fed straight-up lies in response. Like "we've turned over our mod team" where I guess this meant "occasionally, mods get so disgusted that they quit and leave, so technically our mod team is different than it was" or possibly "for a minute we talked about making all the mods reapply, but it was really just a formal way to get rid of somebody who got bullied off the server before we enacted the plan, and as soon as she left we lost interest." Or, re privacy and safety for minors, "it has been mentioned several times that a good rule of thumb is to edit discord's setting so that you can only receive messages from friends," whereas in fact I looked into this at the time by searching literally all the combinations of "DMs" "settings" "friends only" "privacy" or "private" and there were no posts in the discord that included any combination of those words and mentioning changing your DM settings. From anyone. Ever. Then I remember how many of my other thoroughly-receipted conversations ended with basically: "But you don't have all the facts." "Which are?" "I love them." And I think, yeah... I'm gonna take the energy that I could have used to try to get people to understand why this isn't okay, and instead I'm gonna go take the dog for a walk.

[kkorny]

Hey, those listening to the newest Episode of Dungeons and Daddies (episode 67). Intense drowning trigger warning from 19:45 to 21:30. Stay Safe!

[faultlessfinish]

No Lifeguard On Duty

So apropos of a totally separate conversation involving some people who deeply misunderstand the First Amendment, I was reminded of the attempted policing of the tags during the height of this discussion and had some thoughts on that. At the end of the day, you have to step back and look at the setting of the conversation. Is there some kind of defined boundary within which this conversation is happening and somebody who is in charge of what happens inside that boundary and who gets to be there? If so, it makes total sense to expect that there are rules. If the rules aren't being followed, you can reach out to the person in charge. If the person in charge don't get things under control, you can leave that space. All totally fair. That's a system working as intended. Social media in general? Twitter hashtags? Tumblr tags? There is no 'in charge.' There is no defined boundary within which a certain set of conversational rules apply and will be enforced by an outside referee. You have every right to express your preferences about how people conduct themselves, but what you are talking about is not the rules, it's etiquette. There is no lifeguard on duty. I'm not saying "posts that try to keep negativity out of the tag don't belong in the tag," because my whole point is that telling each other what goes in there doesn't work. What I am saying is that when you're in a space that is unregulated by design, trying to regulate that space is the least efficient way to control your experience within it. You're going to wear yourself out trying to terraform the whole planet. Just put your astronaut helmet on instead. If the platform doesn't offer sufficient tools to accomplish that, maybe it's not a good platform for you. This isn't a request for anyone to do anything differently, we're not even in an active discussion at this point anymore. It's just a bit of unsolicited advice being expressed into the void on the off-chance that it might make somebody else's life easier. If you are counting on a boundary that is everybody else's responsibility to maintain, you are going to be putting a lot of energy into making sure everybody else knows what you expect. If that's what you want to do, you can do it, but I think it's likely to get frustrating. Setting up a contained space where you can define the rules, finding a space where somebody maintains a set of rules that meet your needs, and/or using the built-in tools like blocking tags and users, will work better. In other words, I don't have a guaranteed way to keep you from seeing me say things you don't like. That button is on your screen.

[catmint1]

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

[faultlessfinish]

Somebody forwarded me the list of what they officially warned for in this latest episode, and all I can think is... what gives you the right? What story do you need to tell that's so important that you deserve to invoke these incredibly painful topics in your ttrpg comedy podcast? What tools are you using to ensure that this is being handled safely at the table? What precautions have you taken to ensure that you are minimizing the potential harm to your listeners? Did you actually get somebody who knows what they're doing to do the content warnings this time? (I can tell that you didn't, because 'profanity' is still on the list. Content warnings aren't MPAA ratings.) In other words, are you being even the slightest bit careful and thoughtful in how you approach this? Stories about these topics can and should be told. They can even be explored in the context of ttrpgs and actual plays. But when we've recently hit a full year of people telling you to get your shop in order on the content warnings, because you're seriously hurting people, and you have made no visible moves to do so while the show itself has gotten even more dark and brutal and cruel... all I can conclude is that you want to tell a story about trauma but you don't give a shit about people who actually live with it. Fucking tourists.

[faultlessfinish]

And if these incredibly painful topics are pertinent to the lives of any of the cast, then I am so sorry that you went through that, but this is not a safe or appropriate way to process it.

[faultlessfinish]

Apparently in the uncut episode, Anthony does talk about boundaries and how dark stuff has gotten. Given that he took several years to actually read the PHB, I'm not exactly assuming it was based on a real safety tool and not just something he pulled out of his ass, but I'm going to give him credit for actually trying to have that discussion at the table. And zero points to Freddie for cutting it.

[faultlessfinish]

Somebody forwarded me the list of what they officially warned for in this latest episode, and all I can think is... what gives you the right? What story do you need to tell that's so important that you deserve to invoke these incredibly painful topics in your ttrpg comedy podcast? What tools are you using to ensure that this is being handled safely at the table? What precautions have you taken to ensure that you are minimizing the potential harm to your listeners? Did you actually get somebody who knows what they're doing to do the content warnings this time? (I can tell that you didn't, because 'profanity' is still on the list. Content warnings aren't MPAA ratings.) In other words, are you being even the slightest bit careful and thoughtful in how you approach this? Stories about these topics can and should be told. They can even be explored in the context of ttrpgs and actual plays. But when we've recently hit a full year of people telling you to get your shop in order on the content warnings, because you're seriously hurting people, and you have made no visible moves to do so while the show itself has gotten even more dark and brutal and cruel... all I can conclude is that you want to tell a story about trauma but you don't give a shit about people who actually live with it. Fucking tourists.

[faultlessfinish]

And if these incredibly painful topics are pertinent to the lives of any of the cast, then I am so sorry that you went through that, but this is not a safe or appropriate way to process it.

[faultlessfinish]

Somebody forwarded me the list of what they officially warned for in this latest episode, and all I can think is... what gives you the right? What story do you need to tell that's so important that you deserve to invoke these incredibly painful topics in your ttrpg comedy podcast? What tools are you using to ensure that this is being handled safely at the table? What precautions have you taken to ensure that you are minimizing the potential harm to your listeners? Did you actually get somebody who knows what they're doing to do the content warnings this time? (I can tell that you didn't, because 'profanity' is still on the list. Content warnings aren't MPAA ratings.) In other words, are you being even the slightest bit careful and thoughtful in how you approach this? Stories about these topics can and should be told. They can even be explored in the context of ttrpgs and actual plays. But when we've recently hit a full year of people telling you to get your shop in order on the content warnings, because you're seriously hurting people, and you have made no visible moves to do so while the show itself has gotten even more dark and brutal and cruel... all I can conclude is that you want to tell a story about trauma but you don't give a shit about people who actually live with it. Fucking tourists.

[kineticallyanywhere]

this weeks new dndads is incredible, but also incredibly brutal. There are some excellent laughs, but the back half of the episode also got me crying and there were parts where I couldn’t even multitask or draw while listening, I just sat there with my hands over my mouth. 

all that to say, please make sure to check the content warnings this week. The regular profanity, violence, and sexual content warnings apply, but this week also includes emotional abuse, violence towards children, animal cruelty, and body horror. And I’m going to list some slightly more specific warnings below a cut which may be considered spoilers or are definitely considered spoilers. This episode has a lot stacked on top of each other, and I feel like any small additional warning might help someone be more prepared, so I want to give people that chance to be ready or even wait for the transcript if they have to. 

Please take care of yourself first. I’ll be listening to the episode again later today and I’m willing to provide a summary for anyone who feels they need to–or simply want to–skip this episode. 

I also encourage people to add other possible warnings to this post, or message me and I can edit some more in. 

More specific warnings include: 

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