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ring
@ring

(this is not vagueposting about any current discourse or aimed at any specific story. I'm making up examples and not mentioning individual authors for a reason)

When assessing how successfully a subject is handled in fiction, whether the story approaches it literally or metaphorically is important. The creator is responsible for signaling this in some way; it'd be pretty disingenuous to write a straightforward heroic arc for a character depicted as an actual historical Nazi and then claim after the fact that it was a symbolic representation of some internal struggle, for example.

On the other end, everyone has seen the reviews/critiques that are like, "How Mystica Starlight Magical Adventures Fails to Grapple with the Real Horrors of War" as though abstraction is a fatal flaw and not a necessary tool when using recognizable conflict as a catalyst for characters' personal growth. It does actually trivialize real horrors to give them a protagonist, but stories transform the unfathomable into the personal. It is more respectful to draw clear lines between the play-pretend you are making up for your own entertainment and others' and things real people have suffered, even if your characters are experiencing realistic emotional fallout.


lorenziniforce
@lorenziniforce

at some point you start drowning in games About Fighting Back or Doing A Revolution of some allegorical kind and people start literally adding lines like "your character Cannot be a cop" to the rules in an attempt to stave off so called "bad" engagement with the themes of the work. I've honestly started to miss stuff that's more abstract and allegorical and less in your face about depicting a Perfect society or a So Horrible It Must Be Torn Down society


JackieShark
@JackieShark

Admittedly, I have not engaged with the whole extended universe of Lancer supplements because I don't have people to play the game with and it's just a lot of reading but Lancer does specifically stand out as far and away my favorite TTRPG in premise alone because it has a clear ideology that runs through the setting but never in such a way as to railroad how you the reader engage with it.
Is it a hellish dystopia where characters are expected to be punks and rebels trying to tear it down? No actually humanity is nominally organized under Union to its own collective betterment and it's perfectly viable to basically be heroic space cops going around stopping people who want to make the galaxy a worse place. So is it a perfect utopia with no problems? No there's still oppressive megacorps and humanity is scattered too far and wide for the light of things like "human rights" to be a universal concept so you can explore stuff like the horrors of war and tyranny from the perspective of downtrodden underdogs if you want.
The setting is set up in a way that presents a galaxy of possibilities not as options but merely as vibes, and is careful not to rule out too much. It's incredibly liberating to have a setting that isn't just D&D's "this race are always evil, usually chaotic, just how they are" absolutism or something like Battletech where you have to constantly brace yourself for the possibility that any chunk of the lore could have been written by some racist in the 80s as an ideological wank and gone unchanged cuz that's just how that IP gets managed. (I am kinda contributing to the problem in the OP here, D&D isn't necessarily responsible for being a beacon of how to navigate complex race relations but also D&D is railroading how players are allowed to engage with its content in the worst way possible, essentially requiring "bad" engagement with the themes of a campaign and other characters.)
Of course I don't think Lancer is just being indecisive either since it's not meant to be a game setting about good vs evil it's all just set dressing for the characters to do weird and cool shit with mechs which afaik is really what a lot of community content embraces. Is it kind of an philosophical nightmare to manipulate the flow of time such that somebody watches and experiences their own death in a nuclear fireball and then carries on fighting because that no longer happened? Probably but that debate is a bit beyond the scope of rolling dice and checking sheets so just give me that hull save already. You don't need to think about the politics of existing in a post scarcity society cuz you're here to smash things with robots, you probably are thinking about politics anyways cuz this is an unashamedly leftist game but there's no "theory knowledge" stat for you or your character to worry about.


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in reply to @ring's post:

great points here. I cannot remember the exact specifics, but a while back (i think on Game Studies Study Buddies? idk) one of the hosts brought up some early 1900s art philosophy about being "anti-catharsis" on the grounds that catharsis through art is detrimental to a revolutionary mindset (since it placates the viewer in the moment), and art should be instructive toward revolution whenever possible. I am probably mangling the specifics there but the concept has stuck with me.

I feel like you could probably draw a comparison between modern fantasy that feels obliged to (for good reasons or ill) be Morally Informative with that sort of thing -- the idea that art should ever "be" something is always a weird stance to take, imo. art should "be" whatever the creator/s want it to be, and it feels odd to imply that moral instruction or anything else mark an art piece as "correct" beyond just a subjective opinion of the work.

I think a lot of people misunderstood the meaning of "all art is political" in the same way I did when I first encountered Benjamin in college, they've just taken it as a directive instead of a threat.
"All art is influenced by the social and political context that created it" is almost so obvious it would be not worth saying were it not for so many fascists hiding under a banner of claim to the "apolitical".
"All art is literally propaganda and political polemic and must henceforth be suspect and read in the worst faith possible" however, is a pretty questionable interpretation, to say nothing of being a pretty obnoxious way to interact with anything, and it makes creators (myself included) anxious as fuck, especially when that bad faith so often falls worst on the marginalized.
Hostile reading has become the de facto form of media literacy, and in turn, largely failed to be literacy, because the internet is more concerned with rewarding the "hostile" part than the "reading".

fully agree!! I think a lot of it in the last few years is due to a certain... atmosphere of fear/instability. It's an understandable fear ("[minority group] is under attack, therefore we need to be careful about our actions and present ourselves in [way the speaker believes is right]") but it's not... helpful.

Well-meaning or not, that sort of critical reading can replicate the external cultural anxieties within the internal discourse of the subculture.

To put it another way, if we're really concerned about cops, you really do have to kill the cop in your head.

That second-to-last paragraph really hits me. It's like people are so desperate to avoid a Fight Club situation that they're terrified of writing anything where someone could possibly miss the point and come away agreeing with their Tyler Durden.

in reply to @lorenziniforce's post:

I tried to write one of those kinda games and then I had a nervous breakdown, because I was so terrified of "doing it wrong" and getting the wrong end of the daily outrage. It was also just frankly not a whole lot of fun, and felt weirdly masturbatory as an exercise.

in reply to @JackieShark's post: