For the Gothic Heroine

Lovely ladies and the horrid things they like

[forthegothicheroine]

My ask box is once again open.

I do not respond to fundraising requests from people I do not know, and prefer to give to reputable charities. If you ignore this post, I will assume your message or tagged post is spam.

[hound-and-bear]

Dress made by me, end of 2025, photographed by Casey Kerr and Rory Casey, early 2026. Modelled by Jay Katherine Amusan.

(Thanks Jay (o: )

[historicity-was-already-taken]

some meandering context required for this question, for which i apologise. I’m also sorry if this is just an inappropriate question. ss/anon if u can. I (Asian) grew up upper class in Hong Kong, an incredibly international city, which meant that much emphasis was placed in my education on English and global affairs. I consume(d) more English than Cantonese content, most of which was American. Despite that, my social circle was still overwhelmingly asian. Which meant that i gained a passing theoretical knowledge of anti-black, anti-indigenous raciam in america. I also internalised some anti black racism in the American form presumably from the American movies/tv shows i was consuming, which i had to work on All that to ask: what is anti semitism like today/can you explain anti semitism? From my perspective, it makes no sense. It doesn’t come across strongly in media, or I would’ve picked it up. Jews are also mostly White? ethnically indistinguishable? Look the same is what im trying to say. Religious stereotypes cant be it given how secular america/the world is, and the factually true ones (lawyers etc) are positive. jews also seem fairly assimliated.

Hm. Ok. So let's start on the basics. Jews are a global ethnoreligious minority. There about about 15 million of us left on the planet, at .2% of the global population. About half of us live in Israel, which means that diasporic Jews kind of have to care about what's going on over there. but don't tell any DSA babies; this type of information makes them projectile vomit while spewing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the original Russian and shotgunning beer with Rama Duwaji.

Archaeological, textual, and genetic studies indicate that this ethno-religious group originated in the Central Judean hill country, near present day Jerusalem. Over centuries those early Israelite tribes merged with surrounding Canaanite groups, and slowly developed hegemony over the Southern Levant, as well as--by the 6th century BCE--a form of monotheism.

Now the Levant is a very valuable piece of land as it connects Western Asia to Europe and Northern Africa via the Med, so empires have always wanted it; the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were fighting over it before the Israelites rose as a distinctive group, and the cosmological documents of the Jewish people demonstrate successive empires attempting to capture that piece of land. But when empires do that, they're not like, super enthusiastic about letting the indigenous populations stay, so boom diaspora. this would happen multiple times before Joshua of Nazareth rolled up to yell at the temple Boomers.

So, diaspora. We diasporad out to surrounding empires. Now, ancient governments are a lot like modern governments, in that conformity of ideology and belief are important to maintain official control of the populace. Jews got this memo pretty earlier and many of us preferred not to die, so we assimilated as a means of survival, while maintaining our ethno-religious identity. but, that's never enough. because while maintaining our religion, its laws, its Textual Stuff, we're still believing differently than the majority. Not only that, but we're believing differently in concert with one another over political lines.

So now we're challenging to authority, and untrustworthy. those dynamics showed up VERY early in the game. you know the Purim holiday? That holiday is about a piece of historical fiction written Before Christ about how our insistence in maintaining our culture and beliefs in diaspora WHILE assimilating threatens those in power. and then those in power decide to do a genocide, and sometimes don't if we're hot enough. the enduring ties between far flung diasporic communities, and our insistence upon maintaining our ethnoreligious beliefs, practices, and culture is a threat to any government which relies on ideological homogeneity. which, most governments still do. but, when a ruler says that they are descended from gods, or are a god, or were appointed by god/the grace thereof, or are protected by god, or whatever, our desire to keep doing our own thing is dangerous and unholy. and we keep existing beyond and across political borders while doing it.

this makes some people jumpy. including yourself. but we keep doing it: assimilating, while maintaining our shit and transnational cultural ties. that makes people jumpier. because after all the millennia of expulsions and ethnic cleansings and genocides and lynch mobs shouldn't we have stopped by now? but we haven't, so that must mean we cant be trusted? or maybe we made a pact with satan? there's your anthropological response. i haven't had my breakfast or caffeine yet and my period just rolled up two weeks fucking early and i have a million things on my to do list and my insurance has decided that my chronic migraines aren't bad enough to keep supplying me with goddamn nurtec, so it's a bit less polished and edited multiple times than my usual responses of this nature.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

In my haste to post the greatest paragraph ever written + my anthropological assessment of this question, I neglected to discuss race.

Understanding race as pure colorism can’t be applied to Jews. With Jews, it’s old-world style. It’s about blood. In the fifteenth century some Spanish priests spoke about Conversos, implying that they can never be trusted because the betrayal and murder of Christ lives on in our blood. And that’s a really spot-on assessment of anti-Semitism: it’s about a set of inherent characteristics which override and transcend skin color.

If you’ve watched short form vids where a non-Jewish creator of any skin color is discussing Holocaust history or issues regarding contemporary anti-Semitism, you will always see comments along the lines of “how much are they paying you bro?” Because that base sentiment that Jews cannot be trusted transcends time and place. It transcends modernity. It transcends contemporary understandings of monotheism.

To be a Jew is to reveal oneself as an Other, who belongs nowhere, and leaves financial carnage wherever they go; who are loyal to one but each other, and who can never be understood as full citizens of any polity. Except their own. But they will never be allowed to have their own (not a commentary on I/P specifically). The Nazis knew that this was about blood and ancestry. The scary inquisition Catholics did too.

And at the edges of this question, I can see the thought forming: “what is so enduringly wrong with you people that everyone hates you?” And the answer is that we keep refusing to fully assimilate while forming our own state-within-a-state structures for transnational survival because we know the state will eventually abandon us. And that’s unacceptable to the non-Jews we live beside. It’s scary. It marks us as enduringly unworthy of trust. And the cycle goes on.

[pagecommando]

IMO there's an aspect of "Jews as pressure release valve" that cultures are just used to which is what made the USA relatively unique historically. People tried that on larger scales and until recently it just didn't stick on a European or MENA level. Still bad, but like. Not that level for most of our history. We could ALSO talk about how Limpieza de sangre is a giant building block of modern racism or we could pretend Spain never had an empire and never committed genocides and never had an unhealthy obsession with the Jews that continues unabated to this day because like most nations who fucked themselves over and everyone around them and have a shitload of trauma from things like Franco and the Catholic church, it's much easier to offload all of that onto the trusty, reliable, Blame Da Joos. Incidentally, Hi Ireland, how's it going reckoning with your own virulent racism and complicity in empire in British military and colonial service and also those magdalene laundries and like in general the amount of damage the Catholic Church did over there in addition to the Brits.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Don’t even talk to me about Ireland. I’m sick to death of their completely fucked up appropriative obsession with I/P. Unionists aren’t just like Israelis, and Republicans are not just like Palestinians. Take down those stupid fucking flags and erase your own history and speak about own your geopolitics on your own terms. NI Catholic individuals consistently treat Jews like we were the ones shooting on Bloody Sunday and I’m sick of it.

Generally, if you have descent in a country which slaughtered millions of Africans for funsies in the 19th century or had an anti-Nazi resistance that simultaneously hated Jews, or said “no thanks stay there and die we don’t want to import a Jewish Problem” I’m not interested in what you have to say about the Jewish people. Wipe your own ass before spraypainting Swastikas on shit.

Oh, “I’m not responsible for the crimes of my ancestors?” you say? Then why the fuck am I responsible for the actions of a country I don’t live in on the other side of the planet.

And before anyone asks, I still have a menstrual migraine and I’m very fucking cranky about it.

[anim-ttrpgs]

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.

[catgirltaxreturndocument]

please. i need to see a nine on the jerk-off scale. rebel scum? old forge games? hyper pretentious osr? i need to see the horrors

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eat the Reich was actually what inspired this post, but Candela Obscura also comes to mind

[anim-ttrpgs]

@batmanisagatewaydrug @utracjuszka

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!

[gupdoo3]

[echo101]

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"

[anim-ttrpgs]

How the hell are all the "play something other than dnd" people finding people to play these games with, especially irl? I have a collection of various indie ttrpgs but finding someone even interested in playing something other than 5e is pulling teeth (and i don't even mind 5e all that much, would just like to explore new systems)

Getting someone to play anything else but D&D5e is usually like pulling teeth yeah, and especially IRL you might be out of luck if you want it to be anything other than a grueling battle of attrition, depending on the pool of people you have access to at least.

I can invite you to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club where the whole point is to play things that are not D&D5e, but as for how to convince your friends to play other games, I might have a strategy I can offer. Granted, pure logic arguments are not often likely to have immediate effect if these were people you already tried and failed to convince, but that doesn’t mean they won’t work ever. Changing someone’s mind takes a lot of time, sometimes exponentially more time if they don’t know what they’re talking about (like talking TTRPGs with someone who has only played one single TTRPG).

The Two-Pronged Approach to D&D5e Extraction

Which one of these “prongs” should come first is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself based on the friend.

There is also a little mini-spike at the end you could also try but I’m assuming that if you have to come to me with this message that that already hasn’t worked.

The “Appeal to Fun” Prong

Ask them what they like about playing D&D5e. People who stubbornly only play D&D5e will usually have one or more of the following answers, paraphrased.

“I like that you can play a character and be anyone you want and tell a story in a fantasy world.”

As anyone who has played more than one TTRPG will tell you, this describes almost every TTRPG in existence.

Tell them playing a character and playing a game resulting in a story is not something unique to D&D5e, it is the case for just about every TTRPG and certainly the one you’re trying to get them to play.

In fact, different TTRPGs support kinds of characters and stories that D&D5e doesn’t.

The idea that different TTRPGs (and D&D5e as well) has a lot of say over what type of character and story they produce and it is best to make characters tailored to the setting rather than just drop a blorbo in with no consideration for the situations the rules support might be a little bit advanced for them right now but you should try to get there gradually if you want to make sure they have a good time playing other TTRPGs.

“I like that you can problem-solve in creative ways that are not constrained by the limitations of programming like a video game.”

Same answer as above, just about all TTRPGs are like this.

“I like that it is a social activity you can do with friends.”

Same answer is above, just about all TTRPGs are like this.

“I like the tactical combat and character building.”

This is the first one that is not completely universal to all TTRPGs, and something D&D5e actually focuses very hard on. Ordinarily I would say that Pathfinder does the same thing just a little better, but it is absolutely imperative that a stubborn D&D5e holdout not play Pathfinder as their second ever TTRPG.

The fact that Pathfinder is just a tuned up version of modern D&D will often teach people that all TTRPGs are basically the same. They’ll just get stuck in Pathfinder the same way they were stuck in D&D5e and it'll be considerably harder to pull them out the second time.

I’d really strongly suggest a game that has tactical combat to some degree or another but in a very different way and/or setting.

Not all of these are “indie,” nor do they all have a significant focus on tactical combat, but my suggestions off the top of my head are:

Call of Cthulhu

Delta Green

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy (we made this one)

Mothership

Lancer

“I like that it’s a game that is not just combat.”

You and I know that D&D5e actually is almost exclusively just combat because the rules, character abilities, and the situations the combination of these things incentivize are almost entirely consisting of combat, but don’t say this right away, you’ll lose them, because if they’re saying this then they’re probably having a D&D5e experience that at least partially ignoring/avoiding the rules in favor of, like, running a pizza shop or something and don’t realize that this is an at-best inefficient use of a game with such a heavy focus on combat.

What you tell them instead is that many TTRPGs are not just combat and in fact many even have no combat at all or otherwise primarily support scenes/stories/adventures with minimal combat.

I’d recommend off the top of my head:

Delta Green

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG (we also made this one)

Burning Wheel (this one might be a little scary for them actually but I’m still mentioning it)

Monster Hearts

Apocalypse World

HOWEVER, before you make the above argument, make sure you ask them some questions about what exactly they mean by “combat.” Many people, especially people who only play D&D5e, say “combat” not to mean “the PCs engage in physical violence” but to mean “any situation where gameplay directly intersects with any rules at all,” and consider the opposite to be “roleplay,” meaning (to them) “the parts of the gameplay that do not directly intersect with the rules." They learn this false dichotomy because “combat” AKA violence is the main time the rules intersect with gameplay in a combat-focused game like D&D5e and that’s all they know.

If by “combat” they mean “the PCs engage in physical violence,” go with the above argument. If by “combat” they mean “any time the rules directly intersect with gameplay and they gotta start rolling dice,” well, this is a problem and it’s going to often affect their ability to appreciate, well, almost any game, but immediately trying to tell them them engaging with the rules is roleplay will usually lose them.

There’s a few ways to approach this problem while trying to get them to play other games with you. The first is well, again the fact “there are some times where the gameplay directly intersects with rules and you gotta make a bunch of dice rolls but other times where the PCs’ actions do not directly intersect with rules and you don’t roll dice” describes 99% of all TTRPGs.

The other thing is to ask them if they like “combat” or if they actively dislike and dread that part of the game. If they say they like “combat,” you're golden, return to the beginning of this argument.

If they say they don’t like “combat” - well, they probably would like rules-adjudicated gameplay that has rules that adjudicate situations they actually enjoy playing through, in which case return to the top of this section, but that is also just as likely to lose them. If you think it will lose them, I suggest trying to get them into a PbtA game.

I don’t like them myself, and (good) PbtA games are pretty rules-adjudicated in their own way, but in such a way that doesn’t usually feel like it is to the kind of people who have been conditioned by D&D5e to hate rules.

I’d recommend off the top of my head:

Apocalypse World

Monster Hearts

Dungeon Bitches

Monster of the Week

The “Why Not Play Something Else?” Prong

Ask them why they don’t want to play any other TTRPG than D&D5e. They will usually have one of the following answers.

“I can’t afford it.”

D&D5e is actually a uniquely expensive game, but they wouldn’t know that if it’s the only one they've bought into (and that’s one of the reasons WotC wants to keep it like this). Show them that the vast majority of non-D&D5e TTRPGs are less than half the price of D&D5e, and many are even completely free. Those that aren’t free, if they literally can’t afford it, they can usually be easily pirated although I strongly urge you to support TTRPG creators financially whenever possible.

“I don’t want to/have time to learn a whole new game.”

D&D5e is actually a particularly complicated and difficult-to-learn game compared to most others, but they wouldn’t know that if it’s the only one they've played. Whatever you’re trying to get them to play, it will take less time and effort to learn than D&D5e unless it’s, like, Shadowrun or something. I wouldn’t recommend starting them out with anything seriously sparse on rules, though, as this can often cause people to flounder a bit. Try something with a mid level of complexity and a clearly written rulebook.

“D&D5e can already be adapted to anything.”

This is obviously wrong but just saying “nuh-uh” isn't going to cut it unfortunately. I don’t know if I have the time right now to write out an argument against this particularly snarled piece or D&D5e marketing propaganda, but just about any of the “game design is real” type of arguments i or others in the same circles have posted over the years should at least be a start.

“I am attached to the specific setting/characters/campaign my D&D5e group is already playing.”

The great news is that because of the above arguments about other TTRPGs not being designed to consume your entire life and bank account, they don’t have to completely abandon D&D5e or their campaign to try out a few other games! You can play a variety of TTRPGs, you don’t have to stick to just one forever. That would be like only watching one movie or only reading one book.

“I just don’t want to.”

This is what you’ll usually arrive at once you have exhausted all of the above arguments, the admission that they are just refusing to step outside their comfort zone. At least they are finally being honest with you. This is when you hit them with the friendship spike.

The Friendship Spike

You tell them you’re their friend, you really want to play a particular game with them because you think you’d enjoy it and think they might enjoy it too. You would really appreciate it if they would be willing to step outside their comfort zone and approach this activity that their friend wants to do with them with an open mind. If this doesn’t work then, like, I dunno show them a few episodes of a cartoon for babies that has lessons about sharing and sometimes letting other people pick the activities.

[forthegothicheroine]

Now that I'm getting better at it, where does one get cool looking but functional canes?

[forthegothicheroine]

Young Peter Cushing should have played Reverend Crisparkle. (It also feels like he should have been personal friends with Charles Dickens.)

[forthegothicheroine]

Though my ideal Jasper is Dragonwick era Vincent Price, a version with Cushing would have to have Christopher Lee.

[forthegothicheroine]

An actual canonical ship would seem to be Rosa/Helena

[forthegothicheroine]

The other one is Crisparkle/Helena- and it's worth noting, for those who know the musical, that he was not in love with Rosa's mother. That was another character, Me. Grewgious, presumably combined so that Crisparkle would have a possible motive.

[forthegothicheroine]

Obviously they're doing the whitebread casting, but I kinda like how hard the 1935 Edwin Drood movie is going on Rosa/Nevil

[forthegothicheroine]

Oh shit, they actually called him dark-skinned! He's not, but still!

[forthegothicheroine]

"We English don't like fellow with dark skin admiring our girls!"

That's way more directly than I thought they'd address it, especially given how sympathetic this version of Nevil is, but I wonder if Drood has had his eyesight checked.

[forthegothicheroine]

Thinking about it, I guess this means it ended in a happy interracial marriage, since he gets together with Rosa despite his (apparently) dark skin. Guess they beat the Hayes Code this way?

[forthegothicheroine]

Claude Rains is hot as John Jasper, though his singing voice is very distractingly dubbed

[forthegothicheroine]

It's not a great movie, but I did like several things:

Claude Rains, always

The big focus on Neville, including him getting to be Datchery

David Manner as Edwin, following up his turns as the most boring ever Jonathan Harker and what's-his-name from The Mummy, continuing a career of Gothic Goobers.

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[forthegothicheroine]

New-to-me movies seen in 2026: The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935)

"Sometimes a glaze comes over his eyes...he seems to wander away into a terrible dream and take me with him."

[fluffysheeple]

christian bad driver: my guardian angel watches over me, I don't need to look before I merge

atheist bad driver: I will rely on my own skill to see myself safely home after a mere 8 drinks

agnostic bad driver: no one knows where all these dents and scratches came from

[awritersbro]

if you see a Jabberwocky in an American National Park i cannot stress this enough you HAVE to report them to the nearest Park ranger. I know, I know, they fill human hearts with terror and whimsy in equal measure, but they are an aggressively invasive species in the Americas. Jackalopes are at risk of becoming extinct because during shedding season they have no natural defences against jaws that bite and claws that catch.

You don't have to worry about them killing it, they're actually endangered in England due to Victorian Era overhunting, so the British government's provided the National Park service with Vorpal Tranquilizer Darts so they can safely transport them to their native British Countryside where they can feast on borogroves and jubjub birds to their hearts' content.

[edgar-allan-possum]

Jabberwocks are starting to really intrude on the territory of the Snallygaster and crowd them out. Please report when you see them and help preserve our American monsters!

[tlaquetzqui]

Biologists prefer the term “fearsome critters”, just FYI. They resemble monsters but only due to convergent evolution.

[fission-mailure]

A lot of people are ragging on the 'cable diverted to avoid Dobby's grave after Harry Potter fans raise a stink' thing and while I also love ragging on Harry Potter fans being weird, in this case it looks like the story was completely made up.

tl;dr: There's no evidence the interview that this was mentioned in even exists, no evidence the route of the cable has ever changed, and the whole story seems to originate from one dude's podcast.

The story also broke into mainstream via the Daily Mail, who are ... rarely if ever honest or accurate.

[z-the-dumb]

The Dobby Grave Story is Probably True, Actually

Transcript: Okay, this is, admittedly, a little story. Part of my process for making these videos is that I read a lot of news and research

Tldr she found real interviews that more or less confirm its real its just from 2018

[jayalaw]

@prismatic-bell

[prismatic-bell]

Why on earth is it breaking NOW then?

[kaijutegu]

Well, the Telegraph's already leveraged it in an op-ed to defend her transphobia. The new tv series is making the series ultra-relevant, and outrage gets ad clicks. It's not about the cable, it's about finding a way to get harry potter into your story so you can a.) make money b.) be transphobic or c.) both.

Just remember when you see new potter material: it's more than likely both grift and transphobia.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

some meandering context required for this question, for which i apologise. I’m also sorry if this is just an inappropriate question. ss/anon if u can. I (Asian) grew up upper class in Hong Kong, an incredibly international city, which meant that much emphasis was placed in my education on English and global affairs. I consume(d) more English than Cantonese content, most of which was American. Despite that, my social circle was still overwhelmingly asian. Which meant that i gained a passing theoretical knowledge of anti-black, anti-indigenous raciam in america. I also internalised some anti black racism in the American form presumably from the American movies/tv shows i was consuming, which i had to work on All that to ask: what is anti semitism like today/can you explain anti semitism? From my perspective, it makes no sense. It doesn’t come across strongly in media, or I would’ve picked it up. Jews are also mostly White? ethnically indistinguishable? Look the same is what im trying to say. Religious stereotypes cant be it given how secular america/the world is, and the factually true ones (lawyers etc) are positive. jews also seem fairly assimliated.

Hm. Ok. So let's start on the basics. Jews are a global ethnoreligious minority. There about about 15 million of us left on the planet, at .2% of the global population. About half of us live in Israel, which means that diasporic Jews kind of have to care about what's going on over there. but don't tell any DSA babies; this type of information makes them projectile vomit while spewing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the original Russian and shotgunning beer with Rama Duwaji.

Archaeological, textual, and genetic studies indicate that this ethno-religious group originated in the Central Judean hill country, near present day Jerusalem. Over centuries those early Israelite tribes merged with surrounding Canaanite groups, and slowly developed hegemony over the Southern Levant, as well as--by the 6th century BCE--a form of monotheism.

Now the Levant is a very valuable piece of land as it connects Western Asia to Europe and Northern Africa via the Med, so empires have always wanted it; the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were fighting over it before the Israelites rose as a distinctive group, and the cosmological documents of the Jewish people demonstrate successive empires attempting to capture that piece of land. But when empires do that, they're not like, super enthusiastic about letting the indigenous populations stay, so boom diaspora. this would happen multiple times before Joshua of Nazareth rolled up to yell at the temple Boomers.

So, diaspora. We diasporad out to surrounding empires. Now, ancient governments are a lot like modern governments, in that conformity of ideology and belief are important to maintain official control of the populace. Jews got this memo pretty earlier and many of us preferred not to die, so we assimilated as a means of survival, while maintaining our ethno-religious identity. but, that's never enough. because while maintaining our religion, its laws, its Textual Stuff, we're still believing differently than the majority. Not only that, but we're believing differently in concert with one another over political lines.

So now we're challenging to authority, and untrustworthy. those dynamics showed up VERY early in the game. you know the Purim holiday? That holiday is about a piece of historical fiction written Before Christ about how our insistence in maintaining our culture and beliefs in diaspora WHILE assimilating threatens those in power. and then those in power decide to do a genocide, and sometimes don't if we're hot enough. the enduring ties between far flung diasporic communities, and our insistence upon maintaining our ethnoreligious beliefs, practices, and culture is a threat to any government which relies on ideological homogeneity. which, most governments still do. but, when a ruler says that they are descended from gods, or are a god, or were appointed by god/the grace thereof, or are protected by god, or whatever, our desire to keep doing our own thing is dangerous and unholy. and we keep existing beyond and across political borders while doing it.

this makes some people jumpy. including yourself. but we keep doing it: assimilating, while maintaining our shit and transnational cultural ties. that makes people jumpier. because after all the millennia of expulsions and ethnic cleansings and genocides and lynch mobs shouldn't we have stopped by now? but we haven't, so that must mean we cant be trusted? or maybe we made a pact with satan? there's your anthropological response. i haven't had my breakfast or caffeine yet and my period just rolled up two weeks fucking early and i have a million things on my to do list and my insurance has decided that my chronic migraines aren't bad enough to keep supplying me with goddamn nurtec, so it's a bit less polished and edited multiple times than my usual responses of this nature.

[frostedmagnolias]

Anklet

c. 1898-1899

by René Lalique

Musée des Arts Décoratifs

[marzipanandminutiae]

Belonged to Liane de Pougy, a courtesan. possibly a gift from her lover, actress and writer Natalie Clifford Barney

(Reminder that anklets would not fit over the generally high-top boots back then, or even stockings with low evening pumps, and would seldom be visible under long skirts anyway. So this gift has an erotic component inherently- it only works, given late Belle Epoque clothing, if worn when nude or scantily clad)