Mannie

Yeah, ok, why not. This has been on my mind all day and so I'm going to go ahead and express it in order to exorcise it, because then when an impulse brings up "hey what about..." the council can point to the logs and say "we talked about this here and unless someone is interested in speaking to us, directly, about specifics, it is not something that is in our capacity to affect, so let it go", which is useful to the way I personally process stress.

This is about Baldur's Gate 3, but it's not really about Baldur's Gate 3. It's about expressions of bigotry, but it's not about bigotry, specifically, except that it kind of is. It's not about whether or not Baldur's Gate 3 is a good game, or is fun to play, except... honestly, kind of, it is, because all of these things get tangled up together, in real life.

If you're unfamiliar, since the release of Baldur's Gate 3, there's been a lot of noise made and a lot of digital ink spilled surrounding the topic of its racism and the kinds of bigotry displayed. I'm not going to go into detail: if you want to learn more (you should learn more, if you don't already know) here's a link to a post to get you started. https://cohost.org/pleasantlytwstd/post/2565133-the-problem-with-bg3
I'm not going into detail because honestly, I have nothing to add. It's all there. What am I going to do to convince people, point to yet another instance on clear display in the game and the surrounding media, and get met with more people talking over me about how I just don't understand¹, how it's important and necessary in the game world², how it's not really racism if it's true³?

Instead, the thing that keeps on bubbling up in my circles is the fact that it's broken containment, so to speak. That Baldur's Gate 3 has reached outside tabletop gaming bubbles, and that people are asking "how could no one talk about this", "how could Larian do this in the year of our lord 2023", and so on and so forth.

In fanfiction, there's a content warning I've encountered with decent frequency. "Content alert: canon-typical levels of violence". Or gore, or trauma, or what have you. If you're reading a fanfiction from, say, the Magnus Archives or Old Gods of Appalachia fandom, this serves as sort of the kinder version of "Warning: Dead dove, do not eat". Instead of "I don't know what I expected", it's more like "as far as the author can tell, if you are a fan of this thing, you should know what to expect". Hello, this is a psychological horror setting which involves not-infrequent depictions of body horror and gore, what we present is canon-typical.

"How could Larian do this in 2023, of all things? Especially in a game which is so progressive in interpersonal..."
Well, because Baldur's Gate 3 has canon-typical levels of bigotry. Yes, I'm going to provide you a link, because Lu wrote about this already, and you should read that⁴ if you're interested at all: https://splitparty.substack.com/p/power-fantasies-part-2
In a lot of ways, Larian even seems to make an effort to be better than canon-typical: you're given multiple opportunities to bring party members together despite differences, to show people that no, THIS perspective is WRONG and you should care about this PERSON instead of whatever prejudices you have against their kind... and there's a whole bunch of commentary there about who's allowed to be a person, really, under what circumstances, which I'm not going into here.

Because just like PT led her post with, we've beaten the daylights out of this conversation. It's the reason, beyond personal ones, that I just don't engage with any greater D&D-sphere, because so many people who are unaffected by systemic racism are so unwilling to admit, for a second, that maybe they're part of it, that maybe they're complicit in the whole system, that this would make them bad people and they don't want to be bad people that they'll lash out at someone pointing out direct, on-screen facts as though it was directly aimed at them. We've been through this over and over again in the tabletop space, and every year, or every few years, there's a new swell of people who haven't been around for it, and the enshittification of the internet means that there's not a lot of archival for discussions like this, and so we have them cyclically and start from scratch over and over and over.

And then we get moments like the last couple of weeks where people outside of those discussions are speaking up with "why was nobody talking about this during the long early-access period" and they were, it's not unique, this is just part of the background radiation.
"And you're okay with that?"
No, I'm definitely not okay with that. I'm saying it's not uniquely bad. It's not like BG3 came along and dumped a big steaming rancid pile of horrible opinions on everyone's darling D&D. If anything, their attempts at cleaning up the mess of the background radiation in some places just served to highlight the way things are, making it more obvious by contrast. And being able to look at the whole thing, being able to pick the game apart and explain what feels good and what doesn't feel good and why, rather than getting sucked into a "wow, cool robot!" situation, or a "well why aren't you boycotting everything" police trap, that's honestly important. And there are a LOT of people who are more interested in looking like they're performing allyship and being soulcops than they are in actually listening to what people have to say and why.

Gonna stop here before my exorcism-vent gets out of hand, because I could keep going, but I feel like a lot of it would be repetitive, and a lot of just yelling about the same thing. It's worth the analysis. Listen to what people have to say on the subject, especially the people affected.

1. I assure you that yes, I definitely do understand, but given that Wizards has already doxxed me once and I haven't recovered from the actions of an evil M&M and several notoriously litigious alleged abusers, I'm really not eager to repeat the performance to win an internet argument about racism in games.

2. It's not, and if you're going to argue that it is, we aren't going to have a meaningful or fruitful conversation about ways to appropriately use these elements, because if you can't accept "some people would rather not" as a starting point, we can't have that conversation at all.

3. It absolutely is

4. Honestly, you should just read all of Split/Party, it's very good critique. But when you do, please keep in mind that it's critic, not dogma, that's very important in healthy criticism of any kind.