Who is Yvette and may I please know more about their streaming career? š
Comtesse Yvette Preux is, for lack of a better word, one of the āiconicā investigators/PCs in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. She appears in a lot of art in the rulebook, as do many of the PCs of the A.N.I.M. team and our friends.
(both by team artist @chaospyromancy)
Sheās also the first ever monster PC to ever be played in Eureka, back before Eureka even had official monster PC rules. The incredible success of that campaign is what set the precedent for what monster PC gameplay would come to be in Eureka.
You can read a bit of an origin story for her in this post
is there a book series or other piece of fiction youād recommend for someone who really enjoys the way Eureka specifically does its vampires
In the 2010s and 2020s, she has a fairly successful twitch streaming/influencer career, with her gimmick being that she claims to be a real 800+-year-old vampire, and allegedly never breaks character. Her twitch and YouTube channels cover competitive gaming, challenge runs, advanced math, firearms, and urban exploring.
In-person she is.. a little harder to get along with. Sheās.. old-fashioned, and her values are very distinctly those of someone who grew up rich and Catholic in the 1200s, which ironically means she has little in common with a modern ātradcath.ā
The contrast between the modern world, the modern worldās pop culture idea of the Middle Ages, and the actual Middle Ages is a major theme in the parts of her story where sheās actually integrating into the society of the 1990s and 21st century.
Many would expect her to be virulently and openly hateful, but thatās the pop culture Middle Ages. The actual Middle Ages were oppressive in different and more interesting ways.
Iāll give a few interesting examples
In the Middle Ages, women were considered the more ālustfulā and āsexually aggressiveā sex, a bit like men are thought of today. Itās women who were considered basically responsible for lust in the first place, to the point that it was considered a public health issue. Lust with no outlet was thought to be detrimental to oneās overall physical health. Sex or even masturbation was sometimes prescribed by doctors to combat this.
This is a comedic exaggeration/oversimplification but in the medieval world being around women would gradually fill up a Dark Souls-style Lust meter and if you didnāt do anything to reduce it it would take a chunk out of your health, making you sickly and prone to other health problems. Women were more resistant to this because theyāre the source of lust in the first place. Medieval women covered their legs and their hair in particular for everyoneās protection.
This manifests in Yvette as her not caring at all about being naked in front of female friends, but being careful not to look too sexy around male friends. And then awkwardly telling them to masturbate later if they need to because itās better to sin and live than to avoid sin to the detriment of oneās health. (In fact, knowingly damaging oneās health is a sin.)
In the Middle Ages, they did not conceptualize homosexuality like we do now. No one was gay, and neither was anyone straight. Attraction wasnāt a trait of an individual, it was a fact. Homosexuality wasnāt really considered a thing that you were, it was a thing you do. Itās really hard to explain so Iām just going to hope yāall get it along with the example. Sodomy was sodomy, and that was considered to cover basically any irregular form of sex. Irregular sex between a man and woman was as much sodomy as sex between a man and another man. This also means that there was no presumption of homosexuality in the Middle Ages. You didnāt have to say āno homoā before you touched your same sex friendās hand. Close friends would kiss each other on the mouth and stuff, and that was considered normal. (Though something you would want to avoid was spending more than a few minutes alone with an opposite-sex friend, because that could be used to call the womanās virginity into question, which could hurt her eligibility for marriage.)
As Yvette understands it, in the 21st century, people have constructed entire communities around their enjoyment of sodomy, like how sheās a member of the gun club. She has complex feelings about that but it isnāt like sheās never engaged in sodomy before either. (She brought this to confession and did her penance so itās fine.)
What really aggravates her is how she canāt touch or kiss any of her friends in the 21st century without it being considered sexual.
She argues itās not āgayā for her to feel attracted to women either, itās normal. Women are naturally attractive to everyone.
Where it really gets abrasive though is probably the classism. Sheās from the noble class and still considers that to really matter, it makes her a little bit better than everyone else, and more qualified to be making decisions for people.
I'm gonna have to stop listing all her quirks here because if I donāt stop then itāll go on forever. If you want to read some short stories that feature her, subscribe to our Patreon.
I also just realized Iāve said very little about her actual twitch streaming career. Like I said, her gimmick is that sheās a real vampire. In the 2010s and 2020s, she is more or less āoutā as a vampire, openly identifying herself as such and doing almost nothing to hide any aspect of her vampirism(except the part where she sneaks up on people in the night and drinks their blood, but she doesnāt hide that because itās a vampire thing, she hides that because itās an assault charge). Most people just think sheās weird, or really really dedicated to the persona. And if somebody does actually see her not reflecting in a mirror, or some other unexplainable proof of vampirism, what are they going to do? Go online and say āhey everyone I think that this popular e-celebrity whose gimmick is that she says sheās a vampire actually is a real vampire!ā? Vampires arenāt real, idiot.
If you want to read short stories about her, you can get them with a $5 subscription to our Patreon,
Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators.
Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!
and she and her exploits in Eureka campaigns are also talked about a lot in the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club.
Check out the A.N.I.M. RPG BOOK CLUB community on Discord - hang out with 410 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
The Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook will also have a section that will probably be called āthe making of a vampireā that will detail some of her actual living life and shine a little more light on how a vampire actually comes to be in Eurekaās world.
You can tell a lot about a person by what kind of books they don't think they need to have read in order to criticize them. Unfortunately, 75% of the time what you can tell about them is "They are a misogynist", while the rest of the time it's either "They think literacy should be reserved for "smart" people" or "they hate children".
I've had this conversation 4 times this week but characters in stories aren't SUPPOSED to be bluntly verbally confronted by other characters about their bad behavior.
I get that a lot of people naturally have difficulty with non-literal communication but in *serious* storytelling, the morality of the characters is supposed to be "addressed" symbolically and wordlessly. If a character is mean, and then gets eaten by a dinosaur, that *is* supposed to be enough acknowledgement that they were an asshole. The author, their god, metered out karma.
I scrapped a much longer post about this but it's only mostly in kid's media, and frankly only recently, that characters explain in words what was right or wrong about one another's actions, and that only happens because Disney Channel forces the writers to shoehorn that in against their will. Writers expect you to be smart enough to already know right from wrong, and the "justice" experienced by characters is often expected to be partially or completely meta.
āTransphobes just think trans men are confused girls while they want trans women deadā hey what do you think they do to confused girls? It was only a generation or two ago when they stopped shoving ice picks into our fucking skulls.
I remember I was once talking about drug users, in the context of who needs access to tests which determine whether certain drugs have been cut with fentanyl or nitazenes, and one man I was talking to corrected me because I used the phrase "people struggling with addiction". He told me this label was not only stigmatizing, but also inaccurate because not every person using a drug necessarily has either a physical or mental dependency on it. People who are not considered "addicted", even according to the definitions used in medicine, still need access to tests for their drugs. He also pointed out that not all people who are addicted to drugs in some manner are "struggling" with it.
I don't think he has any idea how often I think about that correction. He didn't moderate his tone or worry about embarrassing me; he was harsh in how he said it and did so in front of others. He knew he was right and there was no good reason to coddle my feelings. I appreciate that, because it make me take it seriously and really reflect on it. I already knew that you could use drugs without becoming addicted (I have) and that you could be addicted to something and have that addiction not be a problem (I have had a physical dependency on drugs which were a net positive for me to use). Yet, despite knowing that, when I was doing advocacy work I was defaulting to language with fucked up implications. Partially to seem respectable and partially because I was mentally distancing myself from other drug users.
I was thinking about him again today, and how he's permanently changed the way I speak about drug use when I do activism. He's had a knock-on effect, for every person I reach, and I'm sure he has done the same thing with many other people he's corrected.
Anyway, shout-out to him for his advocacy for drug users!
like, obviously Paradox games are 'teaching tools' only in a narrow and specific sense, a lot of things are simplified and streamlined for the purposes of making an entertaining video game, but I'll never forget about how many times I read about the Investiture Controversy and tried to understand it, and I always thought "it's about 'secular versus spiritual authority?' it's all about who gets to give a special ring to bishops? Why was this such a big deal?"
and then I played CKIII and went "ugh, it sucks that the Pope gets to appoint my court chaplain. Council positions are so important for managing my large vassals and keeping them happy, and besides, I have so many capable and learned vassals who would be perfect for the job and the Pope keeps sticking me with these Italian midwits who don't even... OH SHIT THAT'S WHY"
god save me from people with a platform being confidently incorrect about my field of study online
this Youtuber best known for (very funny!) videos mocking luxury fashion brands posted a video about the history of "poverty-core" fashion
I was immediately concerned
her thrust was the Consumptive Chic quasi-myth (ARGH NO BAD), but she followed it up with "women were literally taking poison to look like this." End Video.
thing is, if she was talking about what I think she was talking about. it IS an example of Poverty-Core! just a different, more commonplace kind of Poverty-Core!
in 1851, Johann Jakob von tschudi published an article in a Vienna medical journal documenting a village in Styria where the inhabitants took small, regular doses of arsenic. this practice, he claimed, made the women's complexions beautiful (in what way, he didn't specify). cue cosmetics companies in cities jumping on this idea and producing "arsenic complexion wafers"
this ad also specifies that the wafers are free of certain abortifacient herbs. just in case ladies think it's that kind of coded Female Irregularity ad. fascinating
note that these ads generally tout the product as "safe." the idea, not so foreign to us today, was that a tiny dose of a dangerous substance could have a beneficial effect. Botox, anyone?
...except not like Botox, exactly, because a Boston medical journal tested some popular brands in the 1870s and found that they were mostly dried lactose with no detectable arsenic. womp womp.
Oh For the Simple Country Life :3 was a really common kind of Poverty-Core in the 19th century! and it was being used to scam people into buying products they thought contained poison, with only a random ad's assurance that the products were safe! this Youtuber could EASILY have talked about that and been 100% factually correct!
but I guess Oooooh they Wanted to Look terminally Ill!!!!!! gets more views. ugh
someone was talking about how it's weird that their tmasc friend is uncomfortable using the men's restroom when they pass and this is an example of "afab privilege"
like gee i wonder why he would feel uncomfortable
it's almost like transmascs have the highest assault rates
it's almost like the discrimination/misogyny one has faced from not being born a perisex man doesn't go away simply from being trans and transitioning into a man
it's almost like going into spaces that were technically built for cisgender perisex men is subjecting yourself to more situations where abuse can happen due to not being born a perisex man
it's almost like the very idea of "afab privilege" being a thing is misogynistic in itself
This line of transradfem discourse truly truly lost the plot when it introduced "afab privilege" because I know their laser focus is on dunking on trans men (sometimes their fellow trans men), but if you pause for the slightest moment, we are hinging your theory on the idea that includes the notion that cis women have inherent privileges over cis men...like...do you wanna maybe revise something before we continue?
These statements are not even true of trans men, but if you can't be bothered to just say that you mean to target trans men and need to make up some essentialist reason why they are above other trans people in the hierarchy ladder, you instead settle on "being assigned female is a privilege in society"??? pals, be serious.
The toilet thing is especially grim because, at least in the UK (where our one single solitary andrology clinic that does meta and phallo has a backlog of cases stretching back ten years and sporadically closes for years at a time, meaning UL is incredibly rare) it's still common in rough areas to find men's toilets with no doors on the stalls or no stalls at all. So, statistically speaking you're unlikely to have had UL, meaning that if you're using the urinal you're either using an STP, or you have visibly had to pull your trousers right down in order to stand to piss manually (which, incidentally, gets harder as you get bigger bottom growth because the ligaments around the urethra thicken up, making it harder to pull it forward, even if there wasn't also the constant risk of pissing on your own dick!)
So you're generally at greater risk, because if you're using the urinal there is a high chance of someone noticing that you aren't using it "normally", if you're waiting for a cubicle you have to just stand there looking awkward and drawing attention to the fact that you're not using the urinal, if you're using a cubicle with no door, you need to make it look like you're antisocial enough to shit while maintaining eye contact with passers-by, etc. It's not an insurmountable risk - Most of us do it, I've done it for 20 years and have only got in a couple of physical fights in that time, it's mostly just been intimidation or groping otherwise - but it is a real one, and with the new guidance it's going to get worse.
"AFAB privilege" is the incel tenet of "Girls experience life on easy mode" wrapped in a trans flag.
Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:
Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.
Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.
Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.
Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.
"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.
AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".
Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.
Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.
one of the funniest conversations I ever had with my ex was when they were still getting used to Celsius and asked me "what's 20 degrees?" and instead of converting it, I said "it's the highest your dad will ever let you set the thermostat and when you say you're cold he tells you to put on another sweater, we're not made of money" and they went "oh, 68"
the fact that this reference was that fucking precise was something they went on to tell people about for years.
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
dededos
origamiaround
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
snowghoul
