kaiju3

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the man contains multitudes

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“It’s good to know when to hit pause [and completely miss your last opportunity to lead a meaningful, satisfying existence]. You gotta take a break at some point, after all [and resign yourself to a life of dreary mediocrity that will ultimately leave you feeling hollow and regretful while your peers all excel beyond their wildest imaginations].” At press time, Aniston turned off his phone to unplug for a while, causing him to miss a call that would’ve forever altered the course of his life by putting him on a path towards achieving his destiny.

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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.

[kaiju3]

so how did DnD get the race science bs in it? was that just a norm when it was made or was one of the devs racist or something?

A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.

In the "A" column, it's important to understand that Dungeons & Dragons isn't anything close to being a generic fantasy game: it's very specifically inspired by American literary sword and sorcery fantasy in the period roughly spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the late 1960s and early 1970s strand of the genre. Other inspirations have crept in over time, but that core has remained largely unchanged.

Like most Western pulp fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy frequently featured scenes of lantern-jawed heroes manfully slaughtering their way through nameless hordes of jabbering, spear-chucking, dark-skinned savages. Even at this early date, however, the explicitly racist dimension of this trope wasn't necessarily playing well with contemporary audiences, so over time, depictions of these groups tended to drift away from direct stand-ins for real-world "races" and toward fictional ethnic groups, eventually culminating in the tribes of swarthy hobgoblins and degenerate lizard-men and such populating the pages of the Monster Manual. Such literature freely invoked the assertions of race science to explain why these creatures were morally okay to kill, and that carried over into Dungeons & Dragons.

In the "B" column, Gary Gygax was the kind of person you might invent as a cartoon parody of a racist game designer if he didn't already exist. Like, this is a guy who was quoting John Chivington's infamous "nits make lice" remarks in order to explain why it was okay for paladins to kill orc babies in forum threads as recently as 2005; one might think "not citing the Sand Creek Massacre as an example of morally praiseworthy conduct" would be a very low bar to clear, but he managed to tunnel right under it. Certainly, he didn't originate the race science that's present in D&D's worldbuilding, which is also amply present in its core inspirational media, but he also had no interest in pushing back against it!

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Update from the man himself

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houseplant type friend

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A small price to pay for (Tiffany) crab

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Oh fuck dude, you smoked that weed? That's the forever weed. The weed that makes you high forever. Hope you're having a good time because it's permanent. Also I hope it's okay, but I just invited 100 people over, and if they find out you're high you're FUCKED.

[kaiju3]

annie appreciation post✨

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It's a little bit wild how much of a swerve the Moralist political alignment quest in Disco Elysium is. For most of its length the game is dunking on centrism for being pathetic and ineffectual, and the endings of all the other political alignment quests are just goofy or sad, but then you do the centrism quest and it's like "political centrism might actually, literally be the mask of a cosmic evil that's physically devouring the world, and also you have to fail this quest on purpose or you get a non-standard game over". Like, tell us how you really feel!

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Really cool day at the rainforest cafe

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Running from Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One.

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the original leeroy jenkins video was posted may 11th 2005… 10 years ago today… yowee

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hellspawn redraw from that cartoon😎.