dukeofankh

[dukeofankh]

My approach with Orc types when I do TTRPGs--which I am hardly holding up as an example of Doing it Correctly as much as its the best I've been able to do, leaving me curious where in this mess it falls--is that Orcs are something between the Predators from the Predator series, and the sort of energy you get off of a adult male chimpanzee who has decided that you should not be alive, actually. I feel like it neatly solves both the general race thing and the more problematic "are some races in this fantasy world inherently evil" thing.

Bluntly, Orcs are carnivorous and love to eat people. Humans can be a lot of trouble in a group, but almost trivial for an orc to take out if the human is alone. It's not due to some primal evil or hateful god, it's straightforwardly that Orcs are, for obvious and familiar reasons, strongly disincentivized to humanize (or Orcanize) a species that they use as food. They are not going to humour a human trying to learn their language, they are not going to make peace. They view humans as prey animals and on some level morally need humans to be considered less worthy of life than they are to sleep at night.

Like, I do tend to have Orcs use slightly simpler technology than humans, but mainly because I enjoy low-fantasy settings and great leaps on technology just haven't been necessary for them. They're huge. They simply don't need to invent a battering ram when they can rip apart most gates with a club and the power of being Hangry, even if they were dumb enough to charge a fortified position from the front, which they aren't. The vast majority of the technological advancements and often dangerous magical tinkering has been on the part of humans, who are much further down the food chain than they are in our world and are doing their damnedest to compensate for that, and it's still not really enough if you're not in a decent-sized and well-fortified city.

This could be approached differently, but if you're designing a monster, you want to think about what behaviour humans would need to defeat it: in this case, teamwork and ingenuity.

But it's legitimately difficult to avoid comparisons to depictions of ravenous tribal stereotypes, because when someone is trying to dehumanize a real group, they tend to compare them to monsters. And careless or hateful people also tend to make their monsters look like nightmares of the racialized other. Hell, theres a decent case that can be made that even the idea of a dangerous other who will kill and/or eat your family and who you need protecting from is an inherently fascist one.

On the other hand, one of my annoyances with more modern TTRPGs is that i feel like a lot of them have almost leaned into the idea that the monsters on some level are the racialized others with which they are often drawn in racist comparison to, which has led to, yeah. Everyone just being different kinds of human. Leaving...nobody who can stand in as an easily identifiable villain? If you're doing cozy fantasy or morally grey warring kingdoms stuff, that's fine, but that's a very different genre than "someone please save me from the monsters who come in the night." If everyone is people, the fact that the majority of the game mechanics are kinda devoted to setting them on fire and taking their loot kinda gross. It's possible to write around it, but it's pretty orthogonal to the intended play experience, and if you're gonna try and achieve that play experience, you do kinda gotta try and find a way to have creatures who are legitimately monstrous and against whom violence is narratively required.

Is that goal in and of itself inherently gross? I dunno. I struggle to reach the conclusion that any and all folkloric monster battling is thematically equivalent to Birth of a Nation. Whether something is theoretically possible to be fine, though, is not necessarily the same thing as any specific example of it being fine.

inspired by the previous question, in writing about these things, how would one go about still having different races like orcs, elves, dwarves, without making them psychologically equivalent to any humans? at least if one doesnt want to just repeat poor ways of going about it.

a second on it, if one wants a faction of fairly intelligent monsters, who are a threat to the heroes, what could be a good approach?

(With reference to this post there.)

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? One of the central pillars of racial pseudoscience is the assertion that there are multiple, materially distinct "species" of humans (or, more broadly, of people). Most refutations of race science don't go any further than pointing out that this is false, because they don't need to go any further – losing that pillar kicks the legs out from under the whole affair. However, if you're designing a fantasy or science fiction setting with alien or non-human sapients that aren't just humans with funny foreheads, you're necessarily describing a world where the assertion that there are multiple, materially distinct species of people is, in fact, true.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you're inherently Doing Race Science, but you do have to face the fact that you're imagining a world where one of race science's central pillars is true. Some people adopt the zero tolerance stance that positing the truth of any part of race science is just as bad as positing the truth of all of it, which is where we end up with the argument that speculative fiction has a moral obligation to depict humanity as alone in the universe. Certainly, this is a hard-line position, but it doesn't come out of nowhere.

Ultimately, there's no magic bullet solution. You just have to think carefully about what you're doing, be conversant in the history of race science in speculative fiction in order to identify the less obvious pitfalls, and be prepared to accept that some people are never going to be satisfied with any solution other than the humans-are-alone-in-the-universe approach.

[dukeofankh]

you have to be able to defend people who are receiving unjust treatment even if they annoy you even if you personally find them extremely annoying you still have to be able to stand up and say "well thats fucked up"

[dukeofankh]

goosebumps as a concept are so funny ur brain is like "oh no we're threatened! quick! make us look bigger!" and your skin, that absolutely does not have the ability to do that, is like "absolutely. right away boss"

[dukeofankh]

using a big pot to cook a fuckton of food is awesome until you need to wash the pot and then its the worst thing ever

[dukeofankh]

being a sports fan must be wild imagine if we had to worry about patrick getting sold to weezer or something

[dukeofankh]

Additionally, framing the issue as one of the corruptive power of using pornography rather than men trying to enforce the pathetic delusional standards they impotently fantasize about as the dividends of patriarchal power, gets it wrong. Is the vibe we want to go with really "sexual desire is the problem" or is it, "patriarchy allows many men to delude themselves into completely nonsensical and incoherent mental images of what they think women owe them to be, to the degree where they lash out with spite and a bizzare false sense of being victimized when reality and even other people's fantasies do not conform to their own?"

People are not being hypnotized into having patriarchal beauty standards due to jorking it to Overwatch porn, as is evidenced by the fact that patriarchal beauty standards have been around since at least 1965, and Overwatch porn did not exist until the mid seventies at the very earliest. Patriarchal beauty standards are due to a combination of pandering to male sexuality to the complete exclusion of anything in reality or humanity that could complicate it, and also men being promised that complete pandering fantasy as their natural birthright as men. The misogyny informs the delusional sexual selfishness, men aren't being brainwashed into being misogynists by jerking off to anime.

i wish i could see this picture for the first time again

[dukeofankh]

[dukeofankh]

Oh hey, it's Granville Island.

So here's the thing folks, yes, drivers can be shit. What you only briefly see in this video, however, is how completely horrific the civil engineering is at these particular crosswalks.

Granville Island is directly under the Granville bridge, and the support columns for the bridge run along both sides of the road onto the island.

Despite the road being a few hundred feet long and there being other options, the crosswalks are directly behind the columns. As in, when you walk out into the street, you are blocked from the view of oncoming traffic until you are literally in the road.

Bricks aren't the fix, because drivers are not the primary issue. The issue is whatever moron decided to place a crosswalk in that dumbass spot. I could also complain about the fact that pedestrians often stand in the middle of the street or loiter by the ends of the crosswalk to take photos of the neon sign, but I'll keep my ire for the people who designed the space.

[dukeofankh]

Does anyone have recommendations on good social norms for beginners? I'm looking to start conforming more but I'm not sure which norms will provide the most social currency. Thanks

[dukeofankh]

every time someone says “look how they’re looking at each other! they’re in love!” about a non-canon ship i just think of the kuleshov effect for a second but then i come to my senses and decide to have fun

[dukeofankh]

My fave part of this tweet is that even though a lot of people are assuming this was an AI thing or whatever

this is the actual lede of their review of the Super Mario movie

"But it is also, if I check the clock, Mario Time". Poetry

[dukeofankh]

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[dukeofankh]

the way ivan aivazovsky looks at the sea…i think…i think that’s what love looks like.