as someone who watches a lot of botc, watching fake marionette david fully mess up the evil teams win by not voting on amy, only for it to turn out that he was on the good team and secured the mayor win was so fucking funny
So Vic has had remarkable chemistry with Elaine and Izzy. But let’s not forget Becca Scott. Sam’s wife, Brennan’s wife and David Kerns’s wife. If you’re high up in the Dropout company, you should probably expect Vic to come for your wife at some point.
Oh and let’s not forget their Bit City appearance with Courtney’s wife on Smosh.
It's so funny to be not informed about performers' private lives because when they randomly drop "husband" "wife" "spouse" your brain just go "*record screechs* what." And then you think back about their references to each other in the past and go "THIS is who they were talking about?" like absolutely no notes. Extremely fun every single time.
Re: blood on the clocktower, I'd love to hear your breakdown. I tend not to critique gameplay (outside of exposing inherent biases) as much as something more produced like VIP (many more people to go through and approve at each step) but I recall it wasn't greeaat
Alright this ask made me parse through the notes I’d taken when I watched the episodes so here’s my rambling and semi-coherent thoughts about the racial dynamics that were distinctly at play within Parlor Room Blood on the Clocktower. Which, to be clear, I am not a theorist nor am I particularly smart or as well read as I would like to be on this topic, but I do notice enough things that it frustrates me and I've done my best to articulate it in a way that is cogent and non-accusatory.
Spoilers below for Parlor Room’s Blood on the Clocktower Part 1 and Part 2.
Okay so it was a cast of eleven performers, six of whom were white and five of whom were people of colour (6/12 if you count Chris Grace as the narrator) which is a pretty decent spread all things considered [provided alphabetically by last name]. and if I’m remembering correctly, their roles in the game:
Demi Adejuyigbe [Fortune Teller - Secret Marionette]
Ally Beardsley [The Saint - Fake Marionette]
Kate Elliott [The Chef]
David Kerns [Fake Investigator / Secret Drunk - Fake Marionette]
Waleed Mansour [The Washer Woman]
Ify Nwadiwe [The Undertaker]
Alexis Rhiannon [The Sam]
Becca Scott [The Baron]
Rekha Shankar [The Empath]
Amy Vorpahl [The Mayor]
Tao Yang [The Rekha]
As my lovely and much more clever than me partner pointed out when we first watched the episodes together: there's something interesting about Dropout content in particular because of how diverse they are in their casting. Those dynamics become a lot more obvious in a game like that Parlor Room than with other non-Dropout productions where you're much more likely to see a cast that's 90% white people with maybe one Black person or one or two non-Black people of colour for diversity's sake. It's very much the same thing you see in scientific research: when you change the sample to more accurately reflect real population demographics, you immediately start finding out where the biases are that were missed when you were exclusively testing on white men.
To preface: Chris built an awesome script, he's an extremely talented storyteller, and he often gets the short end of the stick as a player because he knows the game and does strategy so well that people immediately find him suspicious, so it was great to see him in the storyteller role and it was great to see how delighted he was by the way the game played out.
Additionally, I want to be very clear that I do not think any of the performers should receive any hate or accusations of being bigots. I only know them through their work and while there is unconscious bias visible in their gameplay in this and probably present elsewhere in their lives, I don't think they're inherently any more racist than any other well-intentioned white person who isn't actively attempting to deconstruct growing up in/living in a white supremacist patriarchy and decolonise their lives. They are not inherently bad people for this, though it still sucks for the people of colour in their lives who will inevitably be let down by them at some point or another.
However, having watched most of the Goodtime Society episodes that are out so far, the dynamic in them vs in Dropout's production was genuinely jarring to experience.
And like, it's messy and complicated thing to untangle gameplay like this because a lot of it comes down to both strategy and random chance about what roles are given to whom via drawing from a bag and even that multiple players were married to each other (Alexis and Tao, Becca and David) and how their personal dynamics impact the way they play - and I feel like that charlie day meme with the red sting conspiracy board talking about it because it's so subtly woven through the dynamics that if you're white and not keyed in, you're unlikely to notice it because it's exactly how even well meaning white people behave in real life around people of colour.
This is not a complete dissection of the show and is not all inclusive of all dynamics involved, it’s what I noticed and can articulate why it specifically bothers me or that is notable to call out.
I’m also pretty positive Ify was very aware of what was happening before it even become clear it was happening and he was pissed about it, but clearly trying his best to not make it a thing and ruin the game, he was so frustrated playing and rightfully so - though if you weren’t keyed into the dynamic this could be easily misread as him just being frustrated over being killed off so early.
In the first episode, his frustration was tangible and impacted the entire vibe of the game from there because it felt like he was playing a different story genre than everyone else - and by the second episode, it felt like he was reacting more and more to it as it become more obvious that the white people were unconsciously eliminating all of the non-white people.
Throughout, there is a lot more suspicion cast on and discovered over the players of colour vs the white ones, though I’m not equipped to crunch the numbers on this specifically - it also felt like the non-white performers often felt like they had more votes cast on them overall. I could however be wrong about this and applying my own biases.
It opens with a white woman (Amy) immediately trying to take out a Black man (Ify) via a slayer shot. When prompted as to why, she has zero explanation as to why other than that she's "crazy" (her words). On its own, not that weird. They’ve played games before and were in a season of Dimension 20 together (Escape from the Bloodkeep) so I can only presume that they have a decent working relationship and probably like to mess with each other.
Following that, another white woman (Alexis) does the same with an Indian woman (Rekha). I don’t remember if Alexis was asked to give an explanation or not since things went pretty fast after that. She is however an evil team player, so it makes sense that she would be spreading confusion and discord, but it's still interesting who she picked to cast suspicion onto/pretended to try and kill.
The first person executed is a Chinese man (Tao). Among other conversations about other nominees, there is a brief debate over whether killing Tao or Ify will be the better strategic choice which felt jarring, but didn't contain anything especially bad in and of itself.
The first person killed in the night is a Black man (Ify).
The second person executed is a white woman (Kate).
The second person killed in the night is an Indian woman (Rekha).
The third person executed is a Palestinian man (Waleed).
The third person executed in the night is a white nonbinary person (Ally).
Six people are dead either from being chosen in the night to die or voted on collectively during the day: four of them played by performers of colour. There are five people alive before we hit the middle of episode two. The only remaining person of colour still alive in the game is Demi: a Black non-binary person who does not know they are the Marionette and are thus a puppet being controlled by the two evil players. There are four remaining people out of the original six who are white: Alexis, Amy, Becca, and David.
The fourth person to die in the night is a Black nonbinary person (Demi).
There are now only four people left in the game, all of them white. One of them has an ability that puts her in a positive of of power in the town and makes her difficult to kill, two of them are evil and have been conspiring to take everyone out, and the final one of them has been convinced he is evil and has helped sow discord.
To recap: there are five total performers who are people of colour and six who are white, which is (I believe) roughly 45% PoC vs 65% white. Two out of three people voted on for execution have been people of colour (roughly 66%) and three out of four night time executions have also been people of colour (75%) - leaving behind four out of the six original white people.
Roughly 45% of the cast were people of colour and they are fully gone from play and roughly 65% was white and if my calculation is correct, that means that 66.6% of the total number of white performers survived to the final four vs zero of the non-white performers. Counting specifically to the final four as that is when there are no more people of colour in play, with close to a 50/50 split of white to non-white, 100% of the people of colour and only 33.3% of the white people were wiped out
That is, at the very least, statistically interesting.
A white woman (Becca) is killed in the night, leaving three people alive (Alexis, Amy, and David). The good team wins because David only thought he was evil so there were two good players remaining and one of them the mayor.
In summary:
First executed: Tao
Second executed: Kate
Third executed: Waleed
First killed in the night: Ify
Second killed in the night: Rekha
Third killed in the night: Ally
Fourth killed in the night: Demi
Fifth person killed in the night: Becca
Final three: Alexis, Amy, and David
There is a constant, underneath the surface racism that’s baked into even the nicest, shiniest edges of society impacts people unconsciously and it was very noticeable in dropout.tv's production of Blood on the Clocktower.
It definitely was skewed in part by two of the team evil players being white (Alexis and Becca) and absolutely masterful social manipulators who were aided by another white player who thought he was team evil (David) and acting in what they all thought was their own best interest - which is an interesting metaphor in and of itself.
There is a lot to say about the unconscious biases that are constantly at play between white people and their non-white friends and this game was a microcosmic representation of a much broader societal pattern and I’m not really the most equipped to articulate it, but there’s something to be said about how even amongst a diverse friend group of talented improv comedians and performers, the implicit biases that people haven’t deconstructed from their racist societal upbringing are very much in play. These implicit biases not so subtly impact who suspicion is cast on, who is considered disposable, and who can get away with manipulation and deceit.
It's stark to see that in a fairly diverse room (though it’s difficult to say how many of the crew are white vs non-white and that does impact a dynamic on a set) with people who are friendly with each other and are all talented performers, the unconscious biases of even presumably left leaning and non-particularly-racist white people can sway the direction of a game of manipulation to insulate and protect white people without it being overt or even something they're necessarily always conscious of participating in. Or, if they are, they are doing it quietly as part of their strategy to win.
On a side note, at some point I’m probably going to turn this Blood on the Clocktower story into a fanfiction about the events of the game because it was truly a fascinating horror story about being non-white even in a fairly diverse town and having it invaded by evil that uses a puppet and sows discord and distrust and slowly eats them one by one as a result of unacknowledged racism. I think it would be interested to really try and flesh out.
