eromancery

[eromancery]

The one and only thing I could conceivably "thank" jk rowling for is that her gender derangement syndrome at least woke some people up to there being a toxic and evil type of feminism at all. For a while on tumblr you just had to grit your teeth and ignore the "yes all men" thing or people would think you were on the side of the redpill incel gamerbronies, remember those?? I feel kinda bad echoing the yes all men thing just to be mean to those because I'm sure it made some real humans think I was unironically that kind of liberal but on the other hand whats left of those guys continue to avoid me so mission accomplished. Yes they still exist. Remember when they were fucking everywhere though? Remember grown men getting mad that they thought women poisoned their xbox graphics and half of them had fluttershy avatars??? What the fuck was that. At least the radfems have a logic to why they'll wear harry potter icons. I don't think the horse cartoon ever went on twitter rampages about the wickedness and degeneracy of the x chromosome but I never really watched it. They could have done a whole arc of applejack getting redpilled and I'd never have known. Wait probably not applejack, I still know which ones are which because I lived through 2013 and farm girls are usually cool. Would it be rarity? She was the rich white woman. She'd be the tradwife conservative if any of them were, double whammy of redpill brain and rowling brain, real bad combo in an animal that can kick your head off. Well it's a pony so I guess kick someones balls off. Point of this whole post is there's an above zero chance at least rarity would be maga if she were still alive today.

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[eromancery]

bad luck brian meme that says WAKES UP BRIGHT AND EARLY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL | STRANGLED WITH PIANO WIRE WHILE BRUSHING HIS TEETH. THE CRAZIEST PART? HE WASN'T EVEN THE TARGET! THE ASSASSIN WENT TO THE WRONG ADDRESS AND POOR BRIAN JUST SO HAPPENED TO RESEMBLE HIS MARK! UPON REALIZING HIS MISTAKE, THE ASSASSIN COMMITS SUICIDE WITH HIS HANDGUN IN THE SAME ROOM. DUE TO THE DIFFERING NATURE OF THEIR DEATHS, THEY REACH DIVINE JUDGEMENT AT THE SAME TIME. THE ASSASSIN, NATURALLY, IS CONDEMNED TO HELL, WHILE BRIAN, WHO WAS LARGELY A NOBODY IN LIFE, IS GRANTED ENTRY TO HEAVEN AS COMMON COURTESY. HOWEVER, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, GOD MAKES A MISTAKE, AND THEIR SENTENCES ARE SWITCHED JUST BEFORE THEY DEPART; THE ASSASSIN ASCENDS TO HEAVEN, WHILE BRIAN IS DAMNED TO BOIL IN A POT IN HELL FOR ETERNITY. AND GOD DOESN'T CARE ENOUGH TO FIX IT! HE COULD SEND BRIAN TO PARADISE WITH A SNAP OF HIS FINGERS, BUT BRIAN IS SO UTTERLY INSIGNIFICANT THAT EVEN GOD, WITH HIS INFINITE LOVE FOR HUMANITY, CANNOT MUSTER THE EMPATHY TO SAVE HIS IMMORTAL SOUL!

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[eromancery]

Just finished reading Such Sharp Teeth and saw your post on it, and don’t really disagree with anything you said. I wanted to know if you have any recommendations when it comes to werewolf fiction

Uhhh, as far as books go, the only werewolf book we've read that we've enjoyed is Good Dogs by Brian Asman. Clearly written with a love of the genre.

Movies? Ginger snaps and ginger snaps 2 are mandatory viewing. Unironically some of the best werewolf media on the market. Dog Soldiers is also pretty alright.

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ChatGTP rotting away your brain

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out of context transphobic ganon

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You like changeling? (Dreaming or lost)

Not very familiar with dreaming, but CtL is very good.

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If it isn't rude to ask why do you dislike promethean the created's themes?

It's not rude at all! but this is going to be a bit of a long one, we think, and probably pretty rambly, so... apologies in advance!

So, first we have to establish what promethean's main themes are. Luckily, the book is kind enough to spell it out for us!

(Promethean the Created 2e, page 11) Now, we're going to get one thing out of the way first: We're a transhumanist. We fully believe that "humanity" as a category is, at most, a series of base pairs, and slavish obedience to them as some sort of arbiter of Goodness is absurd. Compassion is not stored in the hairless ape. Plenty of animals in real life display compassion! And for this to be in the Chronicles of fucking Darkness? The gameline where you play as a bunch of monsters, who are still very much capable of great good and great evil, despite not being human? It's kind of a weird pull. But hey, a game about pinocchio wanting to be a real boy. It makes sense for prometheans to want to be human - they have it pretty bad!

(Promethean the Created 2e, page 12) After all, they suffer from uh.... Chronic pain and dysphoria? Ok, let's be charitable here and assume that this isn't making a statement about people who actually have those in real life and their connection to humanity. Maybe it's just an obvious thread to pull, what with being created from dead people! But besides torment, Prometheans have one other big thing that makes their lives bad.

(Promethean the Created 2e, pages 172 and 173)

Being around humans too long makes them FUCKING HATE prometheans. Which is pretty bad! We can see why you'd want to stop this from happening to you! Great motivation to go on a quest to become a real boy and all that! So let's say you do it. You complete the pilgrimage and become a human!

(Promethean the Created 2e, pages 186 and 187)

You become a human and, depending on how many refinements you've completed, you may or may not remember your time as a teenage meat robot. Sounds great! Except, wait. Scroll back up to the disquiet section. Does anything pop out to you? Let us give you a hint.

(Promethean the Created 2e, page 173) Once you become human, you're no longer immune to disquiet. The end goal of every promethean is to become human, possibly forget their friends, and become just as dangerous to them as people used to be to you. Promethean is a game where the only way to stop the pain, the only way to get people to not hate you, the only way to stop being a potential face under a boot, is to become the boot itself. Promethean: The Created is a game about assimilation.

and this isn't some absurd hypothetical! Official fiction has identified this as a thing!

Family Reunion, a short story in The Primordial Feast, a fiction anthology for Beast: The Primordial, follows a throng of prometheans (and a beast) as they observe the life of a former member who achieved the new dawn. Here are some excerpts.

(The Primordial Feast, pages 102, 105 and 106)

Explicitly, Textually, the Good End for Prometheans is leaving their friends behind and becoming a potential threat to them. You must forget who you were, undergo a complete ego death so someone else who shares your flesh can live a "normal" life.

But what if you don't want to? What if, after being treated like shit by humans for so long, your character has decided that maybe they don't want to be human? You have two options, and the book is quite clear about how it feels about them both. Option one: You stay on the pilgrimage forever. Sure you have torment and disquiet to deal with, but what if you just treated your life as one big road trip, never staying in one place too long? That's discussed in the supplement Night Horrors: The Tormented, as the sinister goal of an entity known only as The Jovian.

(Night Horrors: The Tormented, pages 156 and 161)

Note how insistent the book is that the Jovian is an evil liar, a tempter, a real rat bastard who makes things worse for the players. The pilgrimage HAS to be good. it HAS to be worth it. Staying as a promethean forever is in fact, either misguided or just flat out evil. Why? Because Promethean is not only about how being human is good, it's about how not wanting to be human is evil. But more on that a bit later. For now, we need to talk about the other option when it comes to not wanting to be human: The Centimani.

(Promethean the Created 2e, page 249) The Centimani are what happens when a promethean decides to go "fuck it. They want to treat me like a monster? I'll be their monster" If the pilgrimage is about assimilation, becoming a centimani is about refusing to assimilate, and openly daring others to try and make you.

(Promethean the Created 2e, page 249) So then, are Centimani a sort of philosophical counter-argument for the created? An alternate option for those who think humanity isn't worth the meat it's printed on? Nope! They're ugly, insane, friendless monsters who don't feel any empathy, because that's what being human is (Nevermind the fact that humans in Promethean are just as likely to try and lynch you as they are to show you any compassion)

(Promethean the Created 2e, pages 249 and 250)

in Promethean, Not wanting to be human means Wanting to be a puppy-kicking monster. We've left the point of Humanism and entered the point of "Humanity is how nice you are. the nicer you are the more human" And oooooh boy, there's no better proof of that than the opposite of Monsters that want to be human, Alchemists.

(Promeathean the Created 2e, page 257) Look at the language here! Alchemists have "lost sight of love" , have "turned into something monstrous" because they "hate their humanity" (which, of course, the boundary where they stop being "sane and rational") Not Wanting to be Human is evil, and Insane, and Warps you. That is Textual. Which of course, makes you mentally ill and disabled.

(Promethean the Created 2e, page 262)

Like holy shit, they just out and say it! Alchemists, for the crime of not wanting to be human, become Disabled! That's fucking disgusting! And you can argue that what makes Alchemists truly bad is the fact that they capture and harvest prometheans, but if that was the case, why is the book so dead set on talking about how bad it is that they don't want to be human? Kidnapping and organ harvesting are bad when humans do it too! So what great evil desire warps alchemists so badly in Promethean? what could someone so badly desire that it would make them forsake their humanity, the greatest evil the book can imagine?

(Promethean the created 2e, page 263) Not wanting to die of cancer. Of course.

The worst part is they didn't even have to do this! Promethean could have easily been about the fact that you were created to serve the needs of someone else and have the main themes being about learning to identify your own desires and choose your own fate! But instead, all Prometheans have to become human. Or fucking else.

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Every time we think about Promethean: the Created's themes, we hate them just a little bit more.

How did anyone read what they wrote and go "This is thematically good and sound."

[eromancery]

The Contagion Chronicle actually talks about this a little - some characters are going to be better at some things than others, and can do some absolute bullshit that other characters would have no chance of competing with, and that's fine! Players are playing those characters because they want to do that cool shit!

The issue comes when you don't give every character time to shine and someone ends up becoming the main character over everyone else

I think that, if you want to powergame in a ttrpg, there are two questions you need to ask yourself.

First, will this make gameplay less interesting for the other players? Having a character that does awesome stuff is great. Having a character that does awesome stuff so often that the other players get demoted to audience members is not. Sure, your Ordo Dracul vampire could be active during both day and night with the right combination of Coils and equipment, but what are the other vampire players doing from sunrise to sunset? It's not clapping.

Second, even if the combo makes sense mechanically, does it make sense from a roleplay perspective? Player Characters are people in the setting, and the actions they take are things they physically do. Fae Cunning Contract, Defensive Combat Merit, and All-Out Attack Action? Best defense is a strong offense, and the Contract's Catch encourages an aggressive approach to combat anyhow. Larceny Rotes and the Sleight of Hand Merit? That's the sort of shenanigans that not even Mage can make sense of.

Basically, don't sideline the other people at the table, and don't make things confusing to explain. If you can manage that, there's wiggle room for a lot of bullshit. Just be mindful that power can... Have consequences.

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I promise the company isn't releasing a product "to distract from" a recent controversy it's involved in. companies are always releasing products, and companies are always involved in controversies. it's really not that deep

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I'm going to the Hardware Store

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You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to the Grey Frocked

Fan response to Seek has genuinely begun to radicalize us

People will see a reactionary social movement that valorizes suffering and advocates for a return to an idealized pastoralist past and go "but they make some good points actually!" And it makes us want to fucking scream at them

[eromancery]

Fan response to Seek has genuinely begun to radicalize us

People will see a reactionary social movement that valorizes suffering and advocates for a return to an idealized pastoralist past and go "but they make some good points actually!" And it makes us want to fucking scream at them