I'll have to read "The Doom That Came to Innsmouth." Thanks for the recommendation.

EDIT: I found a review comparing and contrasting the two stories: https://deepcuts.blog/2018/04/21/the-doom-that-came-to-innsmouth-1999-by-brian-mcnaughton-the-litany-of-earth-2014-by-ruthanna-emrys/

Quote from: Reckall on June 09, 2021, 02:33:17 PM
What never ceases to surprise me is how the end result of this... dunno... "Let's take back the classics from the Patriarchy!" or whatever this new wave wants to be, always produces suckage. And there is no reason for it ...

But there is a reason.  I think you really get the reason in your text, because you certainly explain the thought process.  You can do what your "patron" wants or you can do something well.  There is only no conflict when all your patron wants is for you to do the best you can.  That is, the patron effectively takes themselves out of the equation.  Or if you prefer, it's about priorities.

C. S. Lewis talked about this problem in terms of watered-down Christianity, in his essay discussing "Christianity and ", as in "Christianity and the Poor" or "Christianity and Sex" or whatever you want to put after the "and".  Inevitably, when someone starts such a discussion what they mean is how can they change the first thing to accommodate the second thing.  This tends to diminish the first thing since it is not the priority.

However, the issue is much broader than Christianity or whatever else you want to put before the "and" too.  "Woke Little Mermaid" is really "Telling a Good Story" and "Fighting the Patriarchy". To the extent that it makes the latter the priority, it can't do the former well. The more someone tries to square that circle, the more suckage you will get.  Someone might be able to write a great story that happened to be about "Fighting the Patriarchy" (I'm skeptical*), but all I'm asserting here is that if they did it would not be "The Little Mermaid" and the author would have focused first on telling the best story possible, which happened to be about someone having such a fight.

The reason that it sometimes appears to work is that some people are capable of focusing on the priority, which in then informed by their whole life experiences--including, possibly, whatever is after the "and".  The goal is write a good story.  that is the priority.  If the person is Christian or woke or an athlete or a customs official or whatever, then chances are little bits and pieces of their personality is going to affect how it comes out.  More likely, it might affect how they conduct themselves when they promote the book.  For this to happen without damaging the main priority, of course, there has to be some self-awareness and ability to consciously choose that priority.  Not qualities that the woke are particularly known to possess. 

Game design and setting writing are by no means immune to this phenomenon, as it transcends the boundaries of creativity and logic. 

* Concerning skepticism of what is possible and not in great stories, there is a whole other, much deeper and broader discussion to be had about what would make a story great or why certain stories are great.  I think there is a fairly wide agreement that mainly such stories illuminate the human condition.  There's a lot of disagreement about what that might be, but I'd assert that the main problem is that "the woke" as "the woke" don't really have much to tell us about the human condition, except insomuch as they serve as an example of its pitfalls. To the extent that a "woke" person does have something to contribute along those lines, it is a sign of some area where they are not woke or recovering from being woke or are at least carving out a little slice of reality in their otherwise crazy existence. 

In much the same way, a great deal of why "story" in RPGs is such a difficult discussion is that you have often have people providing rules for telling a story when the person providing the rules is deeply confused about what a good story would be--and sometimes what roleplaying is and how games work too, but that's another topic.

The real lie is "we're taking it back".  The people pushing to "subvert" all of western Art, media, stories, games, pop culture, etc are not actually interested in owning any of these things. They just want to kill these things, then peel off their skin and wear it as a suit to pretend they're still the old thing people loved and not  just one more unit of the propaganda machine spilling empty propaganda and nothing more.

Quote from: Simon Fiasco on June 02, 2021, 02:33:10 AM
Am I the only one who...

• ... is an old school gamer...
• ... leans politically incorrect, and...
• ... still had an issue with evil monocultures?

Serious question. Drow always bugged me because it never made sense for a whole race to be evil. Drizzt always bugged me because it never made sense that there was only one good drow. The idea that there are other good drow out there actually makes them make a whole lot more sense in my eyes.

Am I really the only one?

Why is he the only one? It seems to me, the Drow oppress other Drow, the government and culture are controlled by evil men, err evil drow priestess if I understand them correctly. They control the government, schools, businesses, etc., but why would we assume there are not others who are oppressed and trying to get by, or trying to escape? It doesn't imply ubiquity it implies a set of conditions and general trends.

Isn't part of the issue here that the Drow are a cartoon society?

A big part of the whole thing of taking the Drow apart and considering them as if they are a real world culture implies that Drow society in some ways resembles a real world culture.

It doesn't, nor was it ever intended to (at least not by Gygax - he wasn't trying to write Tekumel but underground!).

The problem is that saying that if there were a real world society like this they would have dissenters, falls apart because there would never be a real world society like this - and the more you adjust things and rationalise them to resemble a anthropoligcally plausible society the more pointless they become.

This is something the whole SJW movement does so wrong.  It fails to understand basic stuff like metaphor.  It insists we treat non-humans as if they were humans and not as metaphors for aspects of the human condition or aspects of human societies, and then based on that basic functional illiteracy proceeds to pointless erroneous conclusions.

And then we get left with nothing worthwhile.  You have the form of the thing, but not the function and everything gets hollowed out.  The only reason left for non-human races is cosplay costumes for your imaginary avatars.

Patrick Stuart gets it.

Try playing a good one of these!

QuoteImagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North-Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs that churn like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can't see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea. They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief churnings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just-so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass.

This is the Drow.

This is how much the Drow hate you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The offence of your existence cannot be easily expressed.

The Drow are not angry that you live, they are amazed. The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of your existence will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other species could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But the Drow are old, they know much of patience and control. Nothing is done without intent.

They can speak of you. They can name you. They can even see you in the flesh without breaking down. Some can even speak to you as if you were real, as if your name was something other than the froth-flecked gargling of a beast that dreamed it had a soul. As if your language did not taste like shit on their tongue.

Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long.

They know an hour will come when horrors fade. When nothing else thinks or speaks upon the earth or in its veins. When even the memory of any other monstrous thing has been expunged. Then. Finally. There will be only Drow.

And they will be at peace. They will live to see it. They do not die.

Interesting posts.

I'm not a fan of the woke, C S Lewis wrote an essay about Butlmannian interpreters of the New Testament and their discussions of myth, despite a severe lack of understanding mythology in general (its last publication was under the name Fernseeds and Elephants).  There are a number of problems with critical theory, but the problem Lewis notes is true of the woke in this area, they don't seem to understand the source material. They seem to forget how much of an impact Nazi Germany influenced fantasy lit. in the 60s to 80s, the Drow aren't representatives of POCs, but of the.monolithic dictatorships that we faced in that time.

Someone noted though that a lot of us old school guys were the nerds who built worlds to escape socially oppressive environs, so true. The woke are just another set of narcissistic bullies pushing forntheir own feigned social superiority, little different from the high school jocks, I understand why people are upset--the bullies are trying to take over the places we went to get away from their nonsense. Ironically, IRL, I'm back in school hoping to teach, dealing with critical theorists, I've considered looking for a PBP game to get away from that nonsense, myself (2hy I came here after reading posts on another site that were too woke). The woke, like the Bultmannians will wither burn themselves out, or they will start killing people/sending people to camps, there is nothing new under the sun, and historical precisent for both. Either way, gaming is an escape from the pressures of reality, and if overly simplistic at points, that over simplicity serves the escapist purpose. Old editions are increasingly available on line. A number of games have sites, classic Marvel forever for MSH, etc. I think we can get by until the madness passes over.

I've always seen the Drow as in many ways embodying the concept of decadence, arising from 19th Century views of Ancient Rome via Seutonius, the chapters on Byzanitum in Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire, some aspects of orientialist ideas of Eastern society's etc.

In the Conan stories the culture which most closely resembles them is Stygia.  I don't see a particular of influence on the Drow of Nazi Germany (although as you say it was everywhere and ubiquitous so no doubt it's there to some extent).

It's a fair representation of Rome at that period at time, but in the US we have always linked the various dictatorships of history in various ways, usually through the Nazis. Both Rome and the Nazis seem evident in Star Wars as well, Palpatine is a very Byzantine ruler in many ways. But the Germans in general and Nazis have become the lens through which other dictatorships are viewed in popular culture, likely through writers like Tolkien who were shaped as scholars by living through to world wars with English/German Centerpoint.

I've never been particularly invested into D&D settings where Drow are prevalent. But it's hard not to see Drow as a mirror-universe reflection of the mass-conception (Tolkein-inspired) Elves. Asking how Drow society works is basically like asking how Mirror Universe Star Trek works. It doesn't really, its entire purpose is to be a dark mirror and if it' deviates too much from that template then it's failing, even if that failing might be richer and more authentic in presentation.

These kinds of idealized societies always seem to be draw out the need to contrast them with a dark & twisted version. Ironically human societies don't often get this treatment (unless envisioning a type of romanticized / mythologized society, e.g. Camelot) due to the inherent understanding of flaws that you're going to encounter in something closer to home.

Not to mix metaphors, but there is also Dalrymple's The Wilder Shores of Marx. Whether the Gestapo, the Stassi, the allies of the Triumvirate, etc., in the real world people exist in totalitarian societies and simply go along with the program, in part from fear, in part because control of propaganda and education by governments prevents free discourse, and in part because the corrupting influence from the banality of evil in such societies kills and stifles the soul. One need not view every drow as innately a chaotic evil twerp in a social Darwinist struggle for power, one can assume the authorities are chaotic evil tqerps in a social darwinist struggle for power, and the rest are caught in the spider's web. Too few have the energy, courage, will or ability to challenge the system.

Quote from: Toran Ironfinder on June 09, 2021, 11:27:59 PM
It's a fair representation of Rome at that period at time, but in the US we have always linked the various dictatorships of history in various ways, usually through the Nazis. Both Rome and the Nazis seem evident in Star Wars as well, Palpatine is a very Byzantine ruler in many ways. But the Germans in general and Nazis have become the lens through which other dictatorships are viewed in popular culture, likely through writers like Tolkien who were shaped as scholars by living through to world wars with English/German Centerpoint.

It's not a representation of Rome, it's just playing around with some of the ideas that people had of Rome, slavery, unnnecessary cruelty and the enjoyment thereof, sexual licentiousness, a completely amoral sense of sophistication.   I'm talking about how people saw the morals of Rome - not it's governance.
.
I have a hard time seeing the Drow as totalitarian.  They're more along the line of decadent aristocrats.  Think of Melnibone, they had an empire once, but they squandered it in their self-absorption.  The evil they represent is that of nihilism.

I tend to view most totalitarian societies as having a decadent aristocracy of sorts, they sometimes tend to hide it, however. I'm not an expert in DnD, though I've read a few novels, and the Social Darwinism in the soceity seemed clear; of course, I expect things have been mixed and flavored to taste. Anyway, I'm out, more than put my two cents in.

Quote from: Toran Ironfinder on June 10, 2021, 12:26:37 AM
I tend to view most totalitarian societies as having a decadent aristocracy of sorts, they sometimes tend to hide it, however. I'm not an expert in DnD, though I've read a few novels, and the Social Darwinism in the soceity seemed clear; of course, I expect things have been mixed and flavored to taste. Anyway, I'm out, more than put my two cents in.

It's complicated.  The ideology of totalitarianism, in particular fascism, is often viewed as a response to decadence - see the rise of Nazisnm in the Weimar republic for example.  (But it's there in communism too in the idea that the down to earth working class will bring vigor back once put in charge of society).  And the idea that the west had become decadent was quite prevalent in the early 20th century.

So on the one level it's explicitly a rejection of decadence and an attempt to overcome it that gave rise to totalitarianism as an attempt to bring back meaning and redirect society towards some kind of cause or goal (I don't think you can have totalitarianism without this existing at the ideological level). 

On the other hand, because noone is actually sympathetic to totalitariansim it tends to be viewed quite cynically, and part of that is the belief that it's ideology is a hollow one, that not even it's ruling class truly believe in what it's selling - so in the end totalitarian masks a deeper nihlism.

I struggle to see the Drow as totalitarian because what is the cause or ideology that they must at least pretend to believe in?  Where is the idea that all the Drow are one body in lockstep in progress towards some glorious goal?

(There's elements of a spider queen ideology in Salvatore's work, but it's such a muddled confused dull mess it doesn't really add up to much.  In part because the spider queen is actually real and in part because she is chaotic evil - so completely nihlistic anyway - which means there would be nothing to actually believe in one way or another.).

Reckall's rant reminds me of the laughter at the graphic novel 'Calexit' (not to be confused with the anthology by Jim Curtis).

Who knew that Californians were heavily armed and trained to resist military occupation? Not I. LOL.