#We aren’t doing any harm by enjoying ourselves and exploring canon and the characters in a different way

[shima-draws]

Why are people gatekeeping fandoms now I hate it here

[simul16]

The Curious Case of the Original Women of Ravenloft (or Loose Canons Can Be Dangerous)

For many years, we in the Dungeons & Dragons RPG studio have considered things like D&D novels, D&D video games, D&D comic books, as wonderful expressions of D&D storytelling and D&D lore, but they are not canonical for the D&D roleplaying game. -Jeremy Crawford Those among us who are fortunate enough to become shepherds or stewards of the D&D game must train ourselves to become art and lore experts so that we know when we’re being faithful to the game’s past and when we’re moving in a new direction. We decide, based on our understanding of the game’s history and audience, what artwork or lore to pull forward, what artwork or lore needs to change, and what artwork or lore should be buried so deep that it never again sees the light of day. -Chris Perkins There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. - Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"

There's been a bit of a stir in the D&D community over some comments that Jeremy Crawford made at a press briefing prior to the D&D Live event about how only the information published in a WotC Fifth Edition D&D product is 'canonical' for D&D. There was enough of a reaction that Chris Perkins, self-described as "one of the D&D Studio's principal game architects", published an article on the WotC site (linked under Perkins's name above) explaining this statement and explicitly calling out what it means when discussing an intellectual property with a long-standing and vast catalog of lore, where that lore is one of the primary positive features of that property.

On the surface, it seems pretty straight-forward. Crawford's comments focused on not overwhelming partners with lore requirements when producing peripheral products like novels and video games so that they can focus on producing their product rather than meeting arbitrary lore requirements (not that this seems to have helped the most recent video game product release). Perkins mentions this, too, explicitly evoking R.A. Salvatore's novels and how Salvatore (perhaps infamously) used to incorporate elements into his stories that were outright illegal according to the D&D game rules (such as Drizzt's dual-wielding of scimitars, only made legal in 5e, or his creation of Pikel Bouldershoulder, a 'mentally challenged' dwarf who believed himself to be a druid and even eventually displayed druid-like abilities, even though dwarves in the D&D of the era of the Cleric Quintet series, where Pikel appeared, were not allowed to be druids). Perkins's comments also refocused the discussion on players, DMs, and their games, making the point that every campaign develops its own canon, and that the version of the Forgotten Realms run at a given D&D table does not perfectly match either the version of the same world run at a different table, or even as presented in the official published campaign sourcebooks.

This position is easily defensible; I even presented it myself in a response on Twitter to Perkins's own comment on an event in the Acquisitions Incorporated campaign he runs and records for online consumption. A restaurant that exists in the Forgotten Realms of Acquisitions Incorporated might have been shut down for health reasons after a shambling mound attack in a different campaign, or a previous party of PCs might have made a disastrous error during the war with reborn Netheril that led to the fall of Cormyr, with the coastal area of the former kingdom being absorbed by their rivals in Sembia while the interior lands were allowed to be overrun with monsters migrating out of the Stonelands (which makes for a nearly ideal 'starter zone' for a new 5E Realms campaign, IMO).

But just because there are benefits to such an approach to canon doesn't mean that it's the best way to approach canon, particularly with respect to a property which has had a long lifespan and is expected to have an even longer one. There are plenty of ways to criticize such an approach, many of which have been brought up by other commenters:

In any long-lasting intellectual property, there is a core of fans that are devoted to the lore and canon of that property -- see Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. 'Loosening up' the lore not only convinces your existing super-fans not to continue to support and evangelize your property, but also prevents the creation of a new generation of such fans to continue your property's life into a new generation of fans.

Since much of what is on offer in a published sourcebook is the current 'canon' (despite Perkins's statement that "we don't produce sourcebooks that spool out a ton of backstory", the reality is that much of the content of sourcebooks like the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is setting material: i.e.: "backstory"), if you're not going to stand up for the lore of prior editions, and by implication make it clear that future editions aren't going to be beholden to the lore of even this edition, then why get heavily invested in the lore at all? (This ties into the above point, as the fewer people who get invested in the lore of a property, the fewer evangelists for that property you will produce.)

If you have any Organized Play for your game (which D&D does, as does so-called 'living card games' which are based on an advancing storyline), loosened canon makes it easier for those authors to produce content, but simultaneously makes it harder to incorporate the content that players enjoy into the overall game. In addition, the later stories can't take into account all of the potential outcomes that a given group might have taken through a given adventure, so in effect, this turns all adventures into "railroad plots" with respect to the larger campaign narrative, where the best outcome is assumed for each adventure and thus the PCs don't really have the ability to influence the overall metaplot. (This gets complicated, because it necessarily involves different campaign outcomes contesting with one another to become the 'canonical' outcome, which is itself pretty challenging. Regardless, one of the attractions of a 'living campaign' is that the campaign in theory adapts to respond to the actions of the players; a 'living campaign' that doesn't do this is no different than a traditional scripted campaign.)

Perkins's final point in his essay, though, seems just as important to the current 'administration' as any of the other explanations, and that's the quote referenced at the top. In effect, what Perkins is saying is that the 5E team wants to be able to take what they consider 'good lore' and keep in in the game, while revising or outright eliminating 'bad lore'. Again, this seems like a defensible position, but it also has a flip side: it assumes that your changes to the lore are not just lazy or arbitrary, but are made consciously and for specific reasons. This could work well if you actually follow through on your intention, but given the realities of publishing on a schedule, it's inevitable that some amount of lazy or arbitrary decision-making will occur, and in those decisions, you can inadvertently (or allow someone without your knowledge to deliberately) make decisions that harm the canon. The statement seems reasonable, but as we'll discover below, it's actually fundamentally dishonest.

With that in mind, let's explore...

The Curious Case of the Original Women of Ravenloft

The original Ravenloft setting as released in the early 1990s, like the game studio that released it, contained a lot of old white guys, and it didn't necessarily get any more diverse with time. The early 3E Ravenloft product "Secrets of the Dread Realms" by Swords & Sorcery Studios lists eighteen Domains of Dread, half of which were unambiguously run by old white dudes. Depending on how you want to define 'old' and 'white', you could even add a few more domains to the list (such as Verbrek, ruled by the son of the former old white dude darklord, and Markovia, depending on whether you consider Markov to still be human enough to qualify as an old white dude). Only five domains were ruled by female darklords, and one of those (Borca) isn't even wholly ruled by the female darklord. Comparing the darklords of Secrets of the Dread Realms to that of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft points out just how much of a priority it was for the 5E team to increase the diversity of darklords in the setting.

Curiously, though, the female characters retained from classic Ravenloft don't appear to have been changed in a manner that fits Perkins's explanation of what they consider when deciding what to bring forward from older lore, as in nearly every case, the character became less interesting and possesses less agency in her current 5E presentation than she did in her original pre-5E incarnation.

Jacqueline Montarri

Let's begin our survey with a character who technically doesn't yet exist in 5E lore, and thus by Crawford's definition doesn't exist in lore at all. It might seem odd to begin my presentation of 'female characters deprived of agency by their 5E presentations' by starting with a character who wasn't presented, but on the other hand, being removed from canon and thus from existence could be argued as the most severe loss of agency possible for a character.

Jacqueline doesn't exist in 5E because the organization she founded, the Red Vardo Traders, doesn't exist in 5E. In older editions, the Red Vardo Traders was both a legitimate trade company as well as a criminal organization engaging in smuggling, assassination, and other crimes, and are based in the Barovian town of Krezk. The version of Krezk presented in Curse of Strahd, however, makes no mention of the Red Vardo Traders, choosing instead to present Krezk as a small village dominated by the Monastery of Saint Markovia*, a location that does not exist in pre-5E Ravenloft. The Red Vardo Traders were founded by Jacqueline for a specific purpose, and thus both their legitimate business operations and their criminal pursuits are but shells for their true purpose: to find Jacqueline Montarri's head.

* - Saint Markovia himself was initially presented in the late 3E reboot adventure "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft", as one of the inhabitants of Castle Ravenloft's crypts; Markovia was changed from a man into a woman as part of Curse of Strahd, and the Sanctuary of First Light, the largest church of the Morninglord in Ravenloft pre-5E and placed in Krezk by its developers, was re-written in Curse of Strahd as the Monastery of Saint Markovia.

Montarri sought the secret of eternal youth, and in doing so, consulted with the Vistani seer Madame Eva to find it. Eva originally resisted, but finally revealed that the secret rested within the library of Castle Ravenloft, and Jacqueline, out of a desire to be the only possessor of such a secret, out of a need to do evil, or perhaps both, murdered Eva before departing for Strahd's castle. Unfortunately, Jacqueline's infiltration of Castle Ravenloft attracted Strahd's attention, and she was captured, turned over to the villagers in Barovia, and beheaded for her crime against Strahd. However, some of Eva's fellow Vistani asked to take custody of the body, explaining that the woman had murdered their leader, and Jacqueline eventually awoke -- wearing Madame Eva's head. She since learned that she could 'wear' the decapitated heads of others, and cannot survive long without one. Jacqueline's body has not aged, but her head ages a year for each day she wears it, requiring her to continually murder (and possibly assume the identities of those she murders) to survive while she searches for her original head, the only thing that can break the curse that Eva's kin placed upon her.

That's a pretty amazing backstory, and one I'd think would be very worth including in a new Ravenloft setting, save for one problem: Madame Eva's death. Now this isn't actually a big problem in the context of classic Ravenloft: both Eva herself and her tribe of Vistani were known to have a 'curious' relationship to time (former Ravenloft writer John W. Mangrum explicitly called Madame Eva a "time traveler" when it was pointed out that Eva's continued existence in Ravenloft canon suggested that she had not actually been killed), but it did cause confusion among those with a more static approach to continuity. Since Eva unambiguously exists in 5E Ravenloft, being referenced in both Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, it appears that the decision to jettison Jacqueline and her Red Vardo Traders comes mainly from a desire to untangle that confusing bit about Eva actually being dead but still walking around.

Granted, the need for an organization like the Red Vardo Traders is perhaps less significant in a Ravenloft where the Core doesn't exist and every domain is its own Island of Terror, but given that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft still lists a number of organizations known to be capable of travel between domains, including two that they just invented out of whole cloth, it would seem as though making use of a pre-existing organization might have worked just as well. The other complicating factor is that Montarri is not herself a darklord; with the focus of the 5E Ravenloft experience on darklords as linchpins of the setting, having a compelling NPC who isn't a darklord (but who honestly could be made into one fairly easily, as her curse lends itself to a darklord's punishment and her formation of the Red Vardo Traders into her way of dealing with the limitations of being a darklord) would seem to detract from what the 5E designers were trying to do with the setting.

But this isn't the only or even the worst example of a female character deprived of her agency in the new regime...

Gabrielle Aderre

Unlike Jacqueline, whose elimination from Ravenloft seems like an editorial red pen taken to an otherwise merely irritating issue, anyone familiar with Gabrielle Aderre's backstory realized that her background would have to change significantly given the changes to the Vistani in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

In pre-5E Ravenloft, the Vistani were an exotic human culture of outsiders, driven by their heritage and abilities to make their own way within the Domains of Dread, and having developed mysterious abilities and customs to protect themselves from its dangers. Non-Vistani were viewed with suspicion, to the point where the Vistani had a specific word ("giorgio") for non-Vistani, and those who chose to breed with non-Vistani and their offspring were frequently outcast from Vistani culture. Female Vistani were often gifted with 'The Sight', a precognitive or divination ability, but the Vistani took great pains to ensure that no male children were born with The Sight, lest that child grow up to be a prophesied doom-bringer known as a Dukkar. (One such seer was Hyskosa, whose legendary prophesies eventually led to the Great Conjunction which nearly tore the realms apart.) Because of their separation from mundane society, more traditional settlements tended to fear the Vistani, especially their rumored skill with fashioning deadly curses when wronged, and though Vistani would often trade with such settlements, they were never truly welcome in them; ultimately, the Vistani would follow their wanderlust and move on, leaving even more strange tales and confusing lore in their wake.

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft changed all that. Now, the Vistani are simply a sprawling human culture who "refuses to be captives of a single domain, the Mists, or any terror." Their abilities are no longer unique -- there are a number of Vistani who "possess the Mist Walker Dark Gift" that can be taken by any character -- though they are said to "understand how to employ Mist Talismans" with their "traditional magic". Instead of being seen by others as mysterious outsiders, now "the news and goods Vistani bring ensures a genuine welcome" from more traditional settlements, and only "more dismal communities view Vistani with suspicion"; likewise the Vistani themselves no longer refer to non-Vistani as "giorgio", nor do they seem to have any issues with those of mixed Vistani blood traveling or dwelling among them. Most significantly, the legends of the Dukkar no longer exist, with both male and female Vistani serving as spellcasters "with many favoring divination magic for the practical help if provides in avoiding danger." In fact, Hyskosa is no longer a lost seer prophesying the doom of the Dread Realms, but "a renowned poet and storyteller" who is alive and leads his own caravan of Vistani through the Mists.

Given all of this, Gabrielle's pre-5E backstory would need to change quite drastically. Gabrielle's mother was half-Vistani, and possessed enough of The Sight to prophesy that Gabrielle could never seek to have a family or tragedy would be the inevitable result. Learning to hate the Vistani based on her mother's incessant refusal to acknowledge her desires for a family, Gabrielle eventually abandoned her mother during a werewolf attack, fleeing into Invidia where she was captured and brought before the darklord, who sought to enslave her to command her exotic sensuality. Instead, Gabrielle made use of the traditional Vistani "evil eye" to paralyze the darklord, murdering him and assuming his lordship over Invidia. Not long after, Gabrielle was visited by a 'mysterious gentleman caller', after which she discovered she was pregnant, eventually giving birth to a boy who proved to possess The Sight. Delighted that she had managed to give birth to a Dukkar, she failed to realize how quickly the boy grew or how powerful he proved to be until her son, Malocchio, usurped her throne (but not the dark lordship of Invidia) and cast her out of his court. Though there are definitely some problematic things in this story, it's not so terrible that it couldn't still serve as the foundation of a tragic Darklord's origin.

In Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, Invidia is detailed among the short descriptions of "Other Domains of Dread", and her pre-5E backstory has been utterly thrown out. There's no indication of how Gabrielle became darklord of Invidia, who the father of her child is, or anything from pre-5E lore. Instead, Gabrielle has become one of the parents from the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- a rich, bad mom convinced of her child's greatness and willing to accept anyone who supports that story while turning a blind eye to her child's misbehavior and cruelty toward his servants and teachers.

Pre-5E Gabrielle wasn't ideal, but at least she had a drive: she wanted a family, and refused to accept that her desire could not overcome the inevitable grinding wheel of fate. 5E Gabrielle arguably isn't even evil, just supernaturally deluded (ironically, her main flaw is her blind acceptance of the rightness of her own privilege), so it's not even clear why she rather than Malocchio is the darklord of Invidia. Rather than wanting a thing she can never have, 'modern' Gabrielle assumes she has a thing that doesn't exist, and is less a tragic figure desperately trying to assert her own agency than a deluded puppet, acting out a part in a drama that makes no sense. Granted, as we noted above, some degree of Gabrielle's old backstory would need to change to accommodate the other changes to Ravenloft lore as part of the 5E transition, but the decision to simply throw out the old Gabrielle and turn her into a character who isn't even aware of her own lack of agency in her situation is, in its own way, even more tragic than Gabrielle's original pre-5E story.

Isolde

Isolde is a fascinating character, because she was created after the Carnival, the group she leads in Ravenloft lore. In pre-5E Ravenloft, the Carnival was the Carnival l'Morai, run by a sinister being known as the Puppetmaster. The events that led to the Carnival breaking free of the Puppetmaster's influence are detailed in the 1993 Ravenloft novel "Carnival of Fear". Then, in the 1999 supplement "Carnival", John W. Mangrum and Steve Miller take the Carnival l'Morai and introduce them to Isolde, a mysterious woman who joins the Carnival and assumes the role of its leader and protector. Much of the internal story within the supplement itself involves the theories that many of the other characters have about who Isolde is and where she comes from, and how various aspects of the Carnival, such as the Twisting (a change that comes over those who remain with the Carnival for any signficant amount of time and seem to bring hidden or secret traits to the surface as exotic abilities or mutations), relate to her. In the end, though (spoiler alert!), Mangrum and Miller reveal Isolde's true backstory -- she is a chaotic good ghaele eladrin who voluntarily chose to enter Ravenloft in pursuit of a fiend named the Gentleman Caller (thus the Carnival supplement is also the origin of the Caller, one of the signature non-darklord villains of the setting). The Twisting is revealed to be a side-effect of Isolde's 'reality wrinkle'; as an outsider, Isolde can re-make reality in a short distance around her, and one of the ways she does this is by bringing someone's inner self out and making it visible to others. Honestly, if you wanted a domain or group whose underlying reason-to-exist seems tailor-made for a modern RPG audience, it would be one where having your inner self revealed to the world, one that you've been taught is freakish and strange, proves to be beautiful to those who accept you.

But that's not what we got in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, perhaps because of the book's insistence on page 6 that "Nowhere Is Safe". Instead of the 3E ghaele eladrin, Isolde is now just an eladrin, a 4E planar elf variant. Instead of entering Ravenloft and finding the Carnival l'Morai in need of a leader and protector, she was manipulated first by a powerful archfey into leading a fey carnival, then inexplicably decided to swap carnivals with a different carnival run by a group of shadar-kai through the Shadowfell, even going so far as to accept the intelligent (and evil) sword Nepenthe, who is the actual darklord of the Carnival.

Again, as with Gabrielle, some simplification of Isolde's backstory was probably inevitable, as the original backstory made use of very specific Ravenloft mechanics that the 5E version simply doesn't want to deal with (mainly Isolde's 'reality wrinkle' which drives the Twisting). But not only did the designers take a character who had explicitly chosen both to enter Ravenloft in pursuit of the Gentleman Caller and to take leadership of the Carnival to serve as its protector and changed her into a character who is manipulated into doing everything she does that gets her into Ravenloft (and leaves her no memory of how or why she got there), the designers didn't even decide to keep Isolde as the most significant character in Carnival, allowing the sword Isolde carries to take that starring role.

Oddly, a lot of the changes to Isolde's story are reminiscent of the classic Ravenloft story of Elena Faith-Hold and how she became the darklord of Nidala in the Shadowlands, which suggested to me that perhaps at one time the Shadowlands were not going to be included in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and the changes to Isolde's story were meant to be a call-out to what would be the missing story of Elena. But the Shadowlands also exist as an "Other Domain of Dread", so in the end, the changes to Isolde served no real positive purpose.

Interlude

It's worth taking a moment to contrast the characters above with the domains in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that gained female darklords who didn't have female darklords previously:

Dementlieu, formerly ruled by Dominic D'Honaire, is now ruled by Saidra D'Honaire; it is hinted but not stated explicitly in Saidra's backstory that she is not actually related to the former darklord, but simply assumed the family name as part of her assumption of the rulership of Dementlieu, in which the Grand Masquerade must be maintained above all else.

Falkovnia, formerly ruled by Vlad Drakov, is now ruled by Vladeska Drakov; Vladeska's backstory makes it plain that she is a female re-skin of the original Vlad Drakov, himself a character from the Dragonlance world of Krynn. Other than her origin, which is now no longer tied to Dragonlance, her backstory is largely the same as her predecessor's, save that instead of the dead rising to battle Drakov's attempted invasions of their northern neighbor, Darkon, now the dead rise to reclaim Falkovnia itself from Vladeska's attempt to 'pacify' it.

Lamordia, formerly ruled by Adam, the creation of the mad doctor Victor Mordenheim, is now ruled by the mad doctor Viktra Mordenheim; Victor's hubris in his attempt to create life are matched by Viktra's attempts to defeat death.

Valachan, formerly ruled by Baron Urik von Kharkov, is now ruled by Chakuna; in one of the few backstories in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that acknowledges a former darklord, Chakuna's backstory is that she had to become a monster (a were-panther, specifically) to defeat a monster (a panther who was polymorphed into a man as part of a revenge plot, fled from the Forgotten Realms into Ravenloft upon realizing what he was, where he was transformed into a vampire...look, not every convoluted backstory for the old Ravenloft darklords was necessarily a good convoluted backstory).

I'd argue that each of the darklords above retains her agency in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, but it's curious to note that each of those darklords seems to have inherited that sense of agency from her relationship to the male darklord that preceded her, sometimes literally (in the cases of Saidra and Chakuna) and sometimes figuratively (in the cases where Vladeska and Viktra are mainly female re-skinnings of the original male darklords). The designers clearly have the capacity to allow a female darklord to exercise agency and have drive and purpose to her existence, if that drive and purpose was inherited from or inspired by an original male character. If the character was a woman all along, though, then agency and drive and purpose are not really important to the designers, if they can fit that character into the specially designed hole the size of the concept they had for the new domain. Which brings us to the character who I feel was done dirtiest by the designers in moving from classic Ravenloft to 5E...

Jacqueline Renier

Jacqueline Renier is one of the original Ravenloft darklords, tracing her origins all the way back to the original "Black Box" campaign setting released by TSR in 1990. She appears in two different places in that boxed set -- once as the chaotic evil darklord of Richemulot in the Realm of Terror booklet, and in a portrait of the Renier family included as a handout in the box. The Renier family was actually an ancient wererat clan in the world they originally came from, and Jacqueline herself was the granddaughter of the patriarch of the clan, Claude Renier. When the Reniers fled into Ravenloft to escape the justice of their original world, they first appeared in Falkovnia, where they ruled the sewers until finally forced out by Vlad Drakov's troops. Fleeing into the Mists, the Reniers found themselves in the new domain of Richemulot, and Claude found himself the domain's darklord.

Jacqueline proved an eager student in the manipulative ways of her elders, however; both her grandfather, who maintained control over the clan through a combination of coercion and sheer force of personality, and her mother, who murdered Jacqueline's father seemingly only so that Jacqueline and her twin sister would not need to lose the Renier name. Jacqueline learned the game so well that one day she manipulated her own grandfather into his destruction at her hands, so cleanly that no one else in the family dared to oppose her ascension. Jacqueline was now the matriarch of the Reniers, and the ruler of Richemulot.

But 3E Ravenloft added a few additional wrinkles to Jacqueline's backstory. In the Ravenloft Gazetteers, it was revealed that Jacqueline's ambition to assume control of her clan and the domain of Richemulot were not just driven by a desire for power, but in the name of a vision of the future where wererats would reigns supreme over all other humanoids. She began encouraging migration into the largely undeveloped and underpopulated lands of Richemulot, while overseeing work in putrid laboratories to develop the Becoming Plague -- a disease that would transform humanoids en-masse into wererats under Jacqueline's ultimate command. In every speech Jacqueline would give about the glorious future of Richemulot, it was not the future of humanity she was referring to, but rather the coming age of the rat.

Jacqueline's backstory wasn't perfect -- as with other female darklords, she also got saddled with the 'she desperately wants to be loved and is terrified of being alone' trope -- but for the most part, this is a truly impressive backstory. And in our age, a domain featuring an ambitious politician pushing nationalism to motivate her partisans, only for that nationalism to not be what her partisans believe it is would seem to be an extremely fitting template for horror. It would certainly seem possible to re-write the few problematic aspects of her character with more modern tropes; make Jacqueline an 'ace' (asexual) but who still craves romance based on her upbringing and is both attracted to and terrified by anyone who might potentially prove to be her equal, and you've got what I'd consider to be one of the best darklords in the setting.

As you might expect, given Jacqueline's placement on this list, that's not nearly what we got in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Instead, Jacqueline was born as a noblewoman within Richemulot, and was quick to notice that the rise of the bourgeoise would threaten the power of the nobility and lead to their diminution in society. Jacqueline's grandfather was not the charismatic, sadistic mastermind of a clan of wererats, but an aging nobleman growing infirm in his old age, and he proved unable and/or unwilling to work to change things, so Jacqueline would need to be the person to reverse her family's fortunes and the decline of the nobility in society. Not by doing anything herself, mind, but rather by trying to find an organization of nobles working to maintain the supremacy of the nobility. Finding them, she learned too late that they were secretly a society of wererats when she was forcibly made into one of them, but she quickly adapted, rising to command both the rat and wererat populations before finally unleashing a plague -- the Gnawing Plague -- upon the populace. Rather than converting the population into wererats, the Gnawing Plague just killed them, and when the people begged Jacqueline and the nobles for aid, Jacqueline made helpful noises but did nothing useful (it's not recorded if she uttered the words "Let them eat cake," as she watched the peasants die). Her 'torment' as a darklord is that she wants to return to the privileged life she had as a noblewoman, but can't, as the need to supervise the creation of new, more virulent plagues and unleash them to keep the peasantry from revolting and overthrowing the nobility prevents her from building the kind of society that would actually support a thriving nobility.

Instead of a domain where we have seen the future and humanity has no place in it, we have a one-percenter using every ounce of her privilege to stay above the ranks of the peasants she despises. Instead of an intelligent, ambitious planner capable of executing long-range goals flawlessly, we have a vapid, shallow socialite yearning to return to her days as a debutante. As villains go, Jacqueline has fallen a long, long way from her portrayal in pre-5E Ravenloft.

Probably the most offensive part of the redesign of Richemulot as 'the plague domain' is that we've spent over nineteen months living through a plague of our own, and the kind of horror that is presented as Richemulot's primary adventure cycle, the Cycle of the Plague, bears almost no resemblance to the reality we've lived through. Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft presents a world where common people are to be feared, and authorities abuse their power to heartlessly quarantine the sick to stop the disease from overtaking everyone, yet say nothing about the horror of those who refuse to accept that the plague exists, or who profiteer from bizarre 'cures' and treatments. The designers present Richemulot as an example of 'disaster horror', where "the world has fallen into ruin -- or it's getting there fast," when the domain could be an example of the most classic of all horror tropes: humans are the most horrible of monsters.

Thus, the final quote leading this essay. It's not my place to argue that the folks who wrote Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft are good or bad writers, and as Raymond Chandler noted, it's not really necessary. After all, "[t]he poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know what to be honest about." And ultimately this entire drive, to try to distance the product from the mistakes of the past by also distancing it from its successes, all while presuming that one can correct the deficiencies of the past without committing mistakes that, in hindsight, will seem just as obvious to our successors: that undertaking is fundamentally dishonest. The people writing, editing, and publishing Dungeons & Dragons today grew up on the old tropes that are now being rejected as no longer being relevant, as unnecessary complexity, as potentially harmful, without realizing that the harmful bits aren't just what was written down, but what was learned, such as a woman's motivation and agency meaning little unless they correspond with those of a man.

Yes, there's a lot of stuff published before 2014 that seems bad to us today that, for whatever reason, didn't seem bad to us back when it was published, read, and became part of our fictional worlds. But there's also no reason to assume that process ended in 2014. Update the lore where it's needed, but realize that the process never ends, even with the lore you're writing today to replace it.

[eeveelutionsforequality]

I recently had a conversation with a friend, because they shipped two characters in a piece of media, but it was later revealed that said characters were siblings, and my friend said that they felt bad for shipping them... I wasn't really sure what to say other than that if they liked the characters' interactions then they liked the characters' interactions, that there's nothing wrong with that, that the characters are fictional so no harm done. I feel like I could've said more though, or been more helpful.

It's important to note that, especially when there's that big reveal coming up and the writers don't want to give it away, siblings in fiction aren't always portrayed in such a way that our brain processes their interactions in the same way that it would view our own siblings in relation to ourselves - just saying "they're siblings", especially long after we've gone through the process of emotionally interpreting their relationship, isn't always enough to elicit that emotional reaction.

I know because I write, because I have to try to convey certain relationships between characters, and because I sometimes have to try to alter somebody's interpretation of a relationship or personality through a surprise twist (and I know how easy it is to fail at that). You lead the reader along and make them feel a certain way about a character, then pull the ol' switcheroo and give them a shock and/or conflicting emotions, but if you don't adequately convey that change emotionally to each individual reader then you get "he wasn't a villain, he was just a misunderstood baby" and similar scenarios - only in the case of certain people shipping incest ships, the initial interpretation stems from the writer (possibly unintentionally) not hitting your personal "family" buttons and not them intentionally pulling a bait n' switch, and said reveal may not have gotten you in sync with the writer either. You can view them as siblings logically, but if the emotion isn't there then it isn't there, and it's not your fault (nor anyone's fault, even the writer's) that this specific portrayal just doesn't click right in your head... think about how many people don't gel with certain canon romantic ships - it's not at all uncommon for portions of the audience to react differently to others, because a writer can't hit the right note for everyone when everyone's brain needs a different note.

(Of course, in my friend's case, maybe they felt bad because the characters did hit the sibling buttons after the reveal - but that wasn't the impression that they gave. That said, if you feel bad about a certain ship suddenly after a reveal, maybe it is because the writer effectively altered your interpretation of the characters and intended that reaction - that's something to applaud them for, not condemn yourself for. Don't feel at all as though there's something wrong with you or some kind of problem within you just because you didn't pick up on a cue or see them that way, it's perfectly fine - possibly even intentional - that you didn't. My friend didn't judge the writers, but some people judge writers for causing such reactions - they say that a writer who writes a story that makes you feel disgusted is glorifying that thing... no, you ninny, nine times out of ten you feel disgusted because they were trying to disgust you. But I'm getting sidetracked.)

Shipping two characters that you didn't initially register as siblings doesn't mean that you're attracted to the concept of incest (in fact, it's an indication of the opposite, especially if you feel conflicted about it upon discovery), and it definitely doesn't mean that you're bad in any way, it just means that it wasn't written in a way that led to your brain solely viewing their relationship in that specific way - and that's fine. We all have different experiences and different things that we associate with other things, so it's completely understandable that an interaction that one individual sees as solely platonic and familial can come across as romantic to another.

That said, even if you enjoy the dynamic of them being siblings in a romantic context in fiction, that's fine too. It's fiction.

Part of it being fiction means that you can warp things, leave out the bad bits, explore dynamics that wouldn't actually present in such a way in reality, make them into something that they wouldn't really be - as long as you're aware that it's a (quite possibly romanticized) fantasy and not an attainable reality, as long as you maintain the separation of fiction and reality, then you aren't going to suddenly change your opinions of the real world (and maintaining that differentiation is something that you're likely doing by default right now and constantly, unconsciously, naturally, because of the inherent differences between fiction and reality, and how our brain interprets stimuli from each).

When it comes to shipping "problematic" things, people seem to forget that, and they call it harmful normalizing/romanticizing. In reality things don't work how they work in fiction, the bad bits are still there, so you're not going to start being okay with the reality because it's those very present bad bits that you are not and were never okay with, it was those bad bits that you needed to take away to enjoy the concept at all. They're still there in reality and you're still not okay with them, ergo you're still not okay with it in reality even if you enjoy it in fiction.

Our brains naturally view fiction and reality in different ways, we interpret them differently, we react to them differently, and our brains are aware that we're currently safe and sound while reading a book, that it's not actually happening (excluding in very specific circumstances like certain mental health issues), and our brains have a different emotional reaction to a real physical loved one than to words on a piece of paper (that's why seeing certain violent actions against a loved one in real life was a traumatic event for me, but watching people get their intestines pulled out by zombies was enjoyable - in the latter, I was safe, and nobody was being hurt because they weren't real).

While you can become desensitized to fictional portrayals, without extraneous factors that desensitization doesn't translate into reality or real behaviour - like I said, the bad bits are still there in reality and they still affect you. Sitting alone and reading words on a page - in a safe environment where nobody involved is real or able to get hurt - is a very different scenario to engaging with real people in a potentially harmful manner, and influencing you to do the latter takes a lot more time, power, targeted manipulation, tactics that are effective on your personality, coercion, etc (often alongside things like social ostracizing and severe mental ill health) than that book alone has (and notably the effectiveness and power of any radicalization or manipulation tactics are dependent upon the severity of the intended action, your upbringing, your susceptibility, your vulnerability, your pre-existing morality, and so forth, so if even that is so wildly varied then something like a fictional story, something substantially less targeted or invasive, something that entirely lacks intent and entirely lacks the ability to adapt to the individual's weaknesses, does not have the power to corrupt vast swathes of the population). Scientology would be a lot more popular than it is if humans were that easy to radicalize - there's a reason cults have to put so much effort in, and still often fail - if it was as simple as a good fanfic then we'd see "Dan and Phil ascend to a higher plane through the Church of Scientology (tw dubcon, tw bananas)" because they'd be on that like it was catnip.

The fact that someone, for example (and not the ship that my friend was talking about), thinks that Stan and Ford's character designs and interactions aesthetically suit one and other, and/or make for an interesting dynamic to explore in fiction, doesn't undo years upon years, decades, of interactions and experiences in the real world, it won't undo how they fundamentally feel about their own siblings - those things are far more ingrained in them than a couple of cartoon old men can ever undo.

Most importantly though, fiction (and yes, even shipping... yes, EVEN SHIPPING) can be about creating emotions other than happiness, arousal, or positive emotions - hurt/comfort fics, angst fics, self-harm fics, and so forth, come to mind. You're not just getting sexual gratification from a pairing, you may not even be getting that at all - you're exploring a fictional dynamic and you can be doing that to achieve all sorts of emotions (yes, even disgust). To assume that someone is shipping because "it must turn them on! why else would they ship it!?" is naive to human behaviour and to the nature of entertainment - shipping is not some special area of entertainment that is reserved for only one emotional goal.

Horror movies, Black Mirror, stories about affairs, these things don't exist because we're happy about fictional people being hurt - "entertainment" isn't just about enjoying good things for good reasons in a good way and feeling good as a result, it isn't just about eliciting positive reactions, humans are strange and sometimes we seek out the negative or neutral feelings too (and it's healthy and useful to do so in a safe environment and via fiction that harms nobody). People aren't just watching I'm a Celebrity because they are happy when someone eats a spider - most people are looking away and cringing while that's happening, they're decidedly uncomfortable, and yet they're entertained. We're all weird.

The association of "entertaining" and "eliciting a positive reaction" needs to get on a spaceship and start searching the galaxy for an intelligent species that's actually hardwired for that to be the case... because we're not that species. Things can be gripping, intriguing, profound, hard-hitting, helpful, and even entertaining, specifically because they are dark or distressing, specifically because they do not make you feel good.

Do you even really want to live in a world where you're never allowed to feel disturbed, grossed out, upset, offended by fiction? A world where you're never allowed to learn or explore various premises, feelings, stories in a safe environment? A world where someone has to break the fourth wall and ruin the immersion just to tell you "this is bad, by the way", instead of trusting you and your developed mind (hence age ratings) to interpret morality properly and of your own accord? (...and if you say that "they don't have to break the fourth wall to do that", you should take a look at the number of people arguing that even specific overtly negative portrayals are "romanticizing" or should be censored, because I believe that it shows quite clearly that people who disagree with this stuff often do not give a fuck about how well written it is; and I'd argue that writers/creators shouldn't have to clarify at all, overtly or otherwise, because you should be capable of maintaining your morality even when faced with something that disagrees with it... do you disagree? congrats, you've proven my point, you can indeed maintain your position against something even while reading something seemingly or actually in favour of it.)

If you don't want that world, does that also apply in regards to sexual or romantic content? If you are okay with disturbing content in general, but not with fictional portrayals of sexual taboos, fictional portrayals of unhealthy or abusive relationships, or fictional portrayals of sexual violence, why? Why is it okay to elicit fear or sadness with a fictional brutal death, but not with a fictional rape?

Did you say that it's because "you're using things that traumatize people for entertainment"? So what makes the trauma of losing my loved ones, of being beaten, of nearly dying, different from the trauma of being raped in this scenario? There's no logical reason that stands up to scrutiny for deeming The Human Centipede okay, Rec/Quarantine okay, but Gothika not okay, The Hills Have Eyes not okay.

Or maybe you just said "It's gross" or "Why would you even want to read that!? Surely it speaks ill of you that you want to!" It's gross... and? The others aren't? What makes it special? What makes it more damning than wanting to watch brutal zombie films? The truth, as I've said, is that it has nothing to do with how people feel in reality or what their desires in reality are - but that most of us just aren't built to only seek out uncomplicated, positive feelings in fiction.

And remember that you're not obliged to ship/watch any of these things - they should have age ratings, trigger warnings, adequate tagging, etc, so that people who need/want to avoid them can do so. There's no obligation to enjoy such things - if you're the kind of person that gains nothing from them, that's okay, that's perfectly fine. However, you need to understand that not everybody creates or indulges in content just to feel good - even if you don't relate to doing that or are unable to envision yourself doing that, it's unfair of you to make vast and incorrect assumptions of so many people (which directly contradict what those very people are telling you that they're feeling).

But I got really sidetracked again there, so to summarize:

If you interpret fictional characters in a way that doesn't elicit an emotional sibling reaction to you, that's okay, that's natural, that's understandable, and it doesn't speak ill of you that your brain happens to read certain cues differently to how the brain of the writer reads them.

If you ship them despite reading them as siblings, that's okay, that's natural, that's understandable, and it doesn't speak ill of you that the lack of risk factors and such that would be present in the real world (ie nobody can get hurt in fiction, there's no genetic risk factors because they don't have DNA, etc) meant that you were able to explore an idea.

If you ship them because you enjoy exploring emotions other than arousal or joy, that's okay, that's natural, that's understandable, and it doesn't speak ill of you that (like every human on the planet) you aren't sunshine and daisies 24/7.

If you're out there feeling bad for liking a ship or pairing - whether it's in spite of canon context or because of it, whether it's because it makes you feel good things or otherwise - please remember that it's okay to ship whatever you ship. It's okay to feel bad about the ship sometimes too, to think that it's gross or silly - maybe the canon creator or the fic creator is trying to elicit that reaction, or maybe you're just not in the mood for that pairing today, or whatever - but don't feel bad about yourself for shipping something, and don't ever feel like the potential interpretations of your ship/s dictate or convey your morality whatsoever.