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Author Topic: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer  (Read 9034 times)

Ghostmaker

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #30 on: March 23, 2021, 01:15:06 PM »
Has interjecting "queerness" into anything made it better? Anything at all?

Vampires are inhuman monsters. They're about as queer as orcs are black.

Which is to say they are only these things in the addled mind of a leftist.
Well said.

It's very strange watching these lunatics shoehorn their identity politics into the depictions of what are usually villains. You'd think they'd go after the heroes instead.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #31 on: March 23, 2021, 01:56:29 PM »
Has interjecting "queerness" into anything made it better? Anything at all?

Vampires are inhuman monsters. They're about as queer as orcs are black.

Which is to say they are only these things in the addled mind of a leftist.
Both have had increasingly human qualities projected on to them. For better or worse. With varying degrees of success.

IMO, even the most heroic vampire needs to have a darker nature to reject or struggle against. Otherwise there is no point to making them a literal blood-sucking monster as opposed to a straight up superhero.

With orcs, you don't have that same baggage. They're figures of comedy in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, runaway bioweapons in Warhammer 40,000, unfortunately overlooked tragic figures in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the reformed conquistadors of WarCraft, the brooding big-dicked (anti)heroes of Amazon-published romance novels, etc.

IMO, orcs don't have a single point of reference the way that vampires have their hunger. They're vastly more flexible, but at the same time have less identity. Or maybe I'm wrong. (At least post-Tolkien, since they weren't an established trope prior like fairy tale dwarves and elves were. I'd love to see any counter examples, because I've been searching without success. And no, the Greco-Roman chthonic deity of oaths doesn't count.) I'm sure you could well argue that the shared point of reference for all orcs is war, violence, masculinity, and how we handle and view it. Or basically the fantasy genre's Klingons and storm troopers.

Has interjecting "queerness" into anything made it better? Anything at all?

Vampires are inhuman monsters. They're about as queer as orcs are black.

Which is to say they are only these things in the addled mind of a leftist.
Well said.

It's very strange watching these lunatics shoehorn their identity politics into the depictions of what are usually villains. You'd think they'd go after the heroes instead.
Well, postmodernist deconstructionism encourages adherents to reverse interpretations of traditional media: depict the heroes as villains and the villains as heroes. These sorts of people nurse persecution complexes that encourage them to identify with villains (because villains are persecuted for their villainy, rightly so) while downplaying, ignoring, or reversing the villainy. That's why we have movies like Maleficent and Cruella. That attitude feeds into the toxic aspects of the "representation matters" movement.

Of course, most of these people are obviously ignorant millennials and zoomers who somehow missed out on all the representation we did get since the 80s. Geordi LaForge, Static Shock, Ellen Ripley, John Stewart, She-Ra, etc.

But I digress.

Chris24601

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #32 on: March 23, 2021, 04:18:39 PM »
The common mythology of orcs is that for Tolkien it’s just another name for a goblin in the same way you could call a cat either a kitty or a feline. There’s some alternate meaning in terms of seriousness; one wouldn’t expect “kitty” to be used in a science journal; but the terms are all broadly synonymous.

So, basically orc = goblin, ogre, kobold, puck, boggart, etc.; a mischievous to malevolent spirit or fairy.

For a time in my setting goblins, orcs and ogres were all the same species on a continuum of size/ferocity with “orc” as the generally man-sized ones, goblins being notably smaller and ogres notably bigger... in a group they’d generally be referred to by the average... i.e. a group of mostly man-sized would be called orcs (even if the biggest orc in the bunch would be called a small ogre if encountered with other large ones).

Ultimately I peeled goblins off because I had a better story element for them... but I kept the notion that some orcs; now a variety of mutant; just kept growing and became ogres.

For a more general Earth mythology setting, I’d class almost all of the above as a variety of evil spirit... in Christianity all of the above plus the sort of ghosts who’d turn up for seances or necromancy would be demons using various guises to attempt to bedevil and mislead mortals.

DocJones

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #33 on: March 23, 2021, 11:04:10 PM »
Vampires are inhuman monsters. They're about as queer as orcs are black.
Certainly in D&D and in most of our legends they are inhuman monsters.
Although in the revised versions of Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer, Jim Butcher and others they are not necessarily so.
Are those really vampires (or do they just share the name) if they no longer represent mythical archetypes?
However I don't see porting this into official D&D which already has a "vampire monster".



Wrath of God

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #34 on: March 24, 2021, 09:30:39 AM »
Quote
The common mythology of orcs is that for Tolkien it’s just another name for a goblin in the same way you could call a cat either a kitty or a feline.

I have weird feeling it's not exactly true - like orcs existed in Legendarium under their own name, before Tolkien decided to use term from English folklor - goblin in "Hobbit" (maybe even not linking it clearly with his Legendarium at first, IIRC, when he started to write Hobbit, he did not plan it to be part of Arda, that appeared later.

Here's discussion of etymology from wikipedia:

"The Latin word Orcus is glossed as "Orc, þyrs, oððe hel-deofol"[a] ("Goblin, spectre, or hell-devil") in the 10th century Old English Cleopatra Glossaries, about which Thomas Wright wrote, "Orcus was the name for Pluto, the god of the infernal regions, hence we can easily understand the explanation of hel-deofol. Orc, in Anglo-Saxon, like thyrs, means a spectre, or goblin."[3][4] The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal defines ork in the closely related Old Dutch language as a verslindend monster ("devouring monster"),[5] and points at a possible origin in the Old Dutch nork "petulant, crabbed, evil person".[6]

The term is used just once in Beowulf as the plural compound orcneas, one of the tribes alongside the elves and ettins (giants) condemned by God:

þanon untydras ealle onwocon
eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas
swylce gigantas þa wið gode wunnon
lange þrage he him ðæs lean forgeald
—Beowulf, Fitt I, vv. 111–14[7]   
Thence all evil broods were born,
ogres and elves and evil spirits
—the giants also, who long time fought with God,
for which he gave them their reward
—John R. Clark Hall, tr. (1901)[8]   

Beowulf's eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, "ogres and elves and devil-corpses", inspiring Tolkien to create orcs and other races
Orcneas is translated "evil spirits" above, but its meaning is uncertain. Klaeber suggested it consisted of orc < L. orcus "the underworld" + neas "corpses", which the translation "evil spirits" failed to do justice.[9][c] It is generally supposed to contain an element -né, cognate to Gothic naus and Old Norse nár, both meaning 'corpse'.[10] The usual Old English word for corpse is líc, but -né appears in nebbed 'corpse bed',[11] and in dryhtné 'dead body of a warrior', where dryht is a military unit. If *orcné is to be glossed as orcus 'corpse', the meaning may be "corpse from Orcus (i.e. the underworld)", or "devil-corpse", understood as some sort of walking dead monster.[9]

Early Modern
A monster called Orcus is mentioned in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene.[12] The Oxford English Dictionary records an Early Modern period orke, meaning "ogre", in Samuel Holland's 1656 fairy tale Don Zara, a pastiche of Spanish romances such as Don Quixote.[d][13] It is presumed that 'orke'/'ogre' came into English via continental fairy-tales, especially from the 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault, who borrowed most of his stories and developed his "ogre" from the 16th-century Italian writers Giovanni Francesco Straparola (credited with introducing the literary form of the fairy tale) and Giambattista Basile, who wrote in the Naples dialect, stating that he was passing on oral folktales from his region. In the tales, Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of Italian orco, lit. "Ogre", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast who could speak, lived in a dark forest or garden and might capture and eat humans.[e]"
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Ghostmaker

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #35 on: March 24, 2021, 09:38:37 AM »
I am oddly reminded of the description, in Valheim, for where greydwarfs come from. They're not dwarves, for one thing.
Quote
Let all who read me beware of the Greydwarfs, the skulkers in darkness, the soulless ones.They are born from rot and rainfall, they spring like mushrooms from the smoking soil. There is nothing on their tongues or behind their eyes, those who fear nothing should still fear them. When the soul of a murderer or a great sinner rots under the ground, it makes a hollow cyst which draws rock and wood and moss to it. It gathers up the peat into flesh, braids reeds into bone and takes rags for skin. It should not walk but when the night comes it walks. Should you who read this see one with a sword to your hand, lance it and let it out. Or put it to the torch, for it fears the flame.

So the variant translations about 'spectres' and 'devil corpses' might be more accurate. The idea of orcs as not a biological race but a horrific natural phenomena would be interesting.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #36 on: March 24, 2021, 02:08:16 PM »
I am oddly reminded of the description, in Valheim, for where greydwarfs come from. They're not dwarves, for one thing.
Quote
Let all who read me beware of the Greydwarfs, the skulkers in darkness, the soulless ones.They are born from rot and rainfall, they spring like mushrooms from the smoking soil. There is nothing on their tongues or behind their eyes, those who fear nothing should still fear them. When the soul of a murderer or a great sinner rots under the ground, it makes a hollow cyst which draws rock and wood and moss to it. It gathers up the peat into flesh, braids reeds into bone and takes rags for skin. It should not walk but when the night comes it walks. Should you who read this see one with a sword to your hand, lance it and let it out. Or put it to the torch, for it fears the flame.

So the variant translations about 'spectres' and 'devil corpses' might be more accurate. The idea of orcs as not a biological race but a horrific natural phenomena would be interesting.

I recall that a number of monsters in folklore are the result of spontaneous generation. For example, the mandrake sprouts from the "drippings" of a hanged man and the basilisk hatches from a "cock egg" incubated by a toad. Then again, the same bestiaries that said that also said that grain produces mice and meat produces maggots.

Ghostmaker

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #37 on: March 24, 2021, 03:34:20 PM »
I am oddly reminded of the description, in Valheim, for where greydwarfs come from. They're not dwarves, for one thing.
Quote
Let all who read me beware of the Greydwarfs, the skulkers in darkness, the soulless ones.They are born from rot and rainfall, they spring like mushrooms from the smoking soil. There is nothing on their tongues or behind their eyes, those who fear nothing should still fear them. When the soul of a murderer or a great sinner rots under the ground, it makes a hollow cyst which draws rock and wood and moss to it. It gathers up the peat into flesh, braids reeds into bone and takes rags for skin. It should not walk but when the night comes it walks. Should you who read this see one with a sword to your hand, lance it and let it out. Or put it to the torch, for it fears the flame.

So the variant translations about 'spectres' and 'devil corpses' might be more accurate. The idea of orcs as not a biological race but a horrific natural phenomena would be interesting.

I recall that a number of monsters in folklore are the result of spontaneous generation. For example, the mandrake sprouts from the "drippings" of a hanged man and the basilisk hatches from a "cock egg" incubated by a toad. Then again, the same bestiaries that said that also said that grain produces mice and meat produces maggots.
Be kind, those authors hadn't quite worked out cause and effect yet :)

But yeah, spontaneous 'spawning' of critters, as opposed to trying to assemble something resembling a coherent life cycle, might be easier in the long run.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #38 on: March 24, 2021, 07:34:51 PM »
I am oddly reminded of the description, in Valheim, for where greydwarfs come from. They're not dwarves, for one thing.
Quote
Let all who read me beware of the Greydwarfs, the skulkers in darkness, the soulless ones.They are born from rot and rainfall, they spring like mushrooms from the smoking soil. There is nothing on their tongues or behind their eyes, those who fear nothing should still fear them. When the soul of a murderer or a great sinner rots under the ground, it makes a hollow cyst which draws rock and wood and moss to it. It gathers up the peat into flesh, braids reeds into bone and takes rags for skin. It should not walk but when the night comes it walks. Should you who read this see one with a sword to your hand, lance it and let it out. Or put it to the torch, for it fears the flame.

So the variant translations about 'spectres' and 'devil corpses' might be more accurate. The idea of orcs as not a biological race but a horrific natural phenomena would be interesting.

I recall that a number of monsters in folklore are the result of spontaneous generation. For example, the mandrake sprouts from the "drippings" of a hanged man and the basilisk hatches from a "cock egg" incubated by a toad. Then again, the same bestiaries that said that also said that grain produces mice and meat produces maggots.
Be kind, those authors hadn't quite worked out cause and effect yet :)

But yeah, spontaneous 'spawning' of critters, as opposed to trying to assemble something resembling a coherent life cycle, might be easier in the long run.
The thing is, the basis of the fantasy genre is in obsolete scientific beliefs and folktales. The problem is that the people writing fantasy don’t grow up in the context that gave rise to those beliefs and stories. Thus, authors project modern pop-sci onto fantasy concepts inherited from pre-industrial cultures for impressively unscientific results.

Coherent life cycles never made sense for fantasy settings, no matter how much old D&D and PF ecology articles tried. The typical mythological monsters are going to destroy any Earth-like ecosystem they enter, especially if they can reproduce themselves. You’d need spontaneous generation and other kinds of maintenance (probably run by all those nature gods imported from Greek mythology) to avoid a rapid extinction event. Your other option is to structure the ecology into a death world a la scifi novels... which then raises the question of why humans (and other races) aren’t extinct or adapted into Catachan Jungle Fighters.

But I digress. The rabbit hole of “do fantasy worlds make sense?” is way too much for me right now. This article neatly summarizes what happens when you think that far: http://jbr.me.uk/mytho.html

Quote
Settings that are explicitly alternate versions of Earth with added magic are a different matter; it may be unclear what kind of spell is keeping the two dimensions in sync, but whatever it is, there's clearly nothing coincidental about para‐Paris being inhabited by speakers of para‐French.  However, if this makes you think that the most plausible way of getting an epic fantasy world would be to adopt a compromise solution and sprinkle magic fairy dust on top of an evolving biosphere, beware!  When you're planning a trip to some corner of the multiverse where wizardry is an inheritable ability to focus willpower and emotions to warp reality, it's vital to check that it doesn't also have evolution via natural selection, because the combination is bad news.  After all, there's no reason to imagine the first appearance of the “gene for magic” would be in a sapient species.  And genes aren't trying to make life nicer for their carriers; they aren't even working for the benefit of their species; no, the only thing a gene “wants” is to maximise the dispersal of copies of that gene itself.  So feel free to go and visit some biosphere where the wildlife has developed thaumaturgical powers, but don't come back.  If you arrive early enough to find it ruled by parasitic para‐wasps that can turn you into a willing host for their larvae, you're relatively lucky, because all the non‐magical parts of that insect are vestigial.  Give it another million years and the place will be a witch's cauldron of cell cultures whose sole purpose is to pump out clouds of retroviral hex‐chromosomes.  As you step through the portal, they'll be rewriting your genome as a new pool of octarine goo.

Ghostmaker

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #39 on: March 24, 2021, 07:54:32 PM »
This is why reciting the MST3K mantra is practically mandatory for fantasy games :)

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #40 on: March 24, 2021, 09:10:36 PM »
This is why reciting the MST3K mantra is practically mandatory for fantasy games :)
I was just about to say that.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #41 on: March 26, 2021, 03:48:55 PM »
It's very strange watching these lunatics shoehorn their identity politics into the depictions of what are usually villains. You'd think they'd go after the heroes instead.

That's the whole point: to take what "normal society" would "reflexively" look at as a villain and show how that person's really just a misunderstood hero, or at least as worthy of moral sympathy as any more typical protagonist.  Nobody needs to improve anyone's opinion of a hero. It's all about the moral rush of championing the underdog against ignorance-born prejudice and hostility.

The thing about fantasy is that it can create beings and characters where the hostility is neither ignorant nor prejudicial. SJ philosophy rejects this idea because they believe people given too much exposure to this concept start believing it possible in real life, which is where they think bigotry comes from.
 
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RandyB

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #42 on: March 26, 2021, 05:33:46 PM »
It's very strange watching these lunatics shoehorn their identity politics into the depictions of what are usually villains. You'd think they'd go after the heroes instead.

That's the whole point: to take what "normal society" would "reflexively" look at as a villain and show how that person's really just a misunderstood hero, or at least as worthy of moral sympathy as any more typical protagonist.  Nobody needs to improve anyone's opinion of a hero. It's all about the moral rush of championing the underdog against ignorance-born prejudice and hostility.

The thing about fantasy is that it can create beings and characters where the hostility is neither ignorant nor prejudicial. SJ philosophy rejects this idea because they believe people given too much exposure to this concept start believing it possible in real life, which is where they think bigotry comes from.
 

They believe that fiction can become real, because they want their favorite fiction to become real. Therefore, they must suppress fiction that does not 100% agree with their favorite fiction, lest some other fiction become real instead of their favorite.

Brad

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #43 on: March 26, 2021, 06:55:28 PM »
They believe that fiction can become real, because they want their favorite fiction to become real. Therefore, they must suppress fiction that does not 100% agree with their favorite fiction, lest some other fiction become real instead of their favorite.

Is this some fucked up Neverending Story crap?
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: SJWs say Queer D&D Book is "Wrong Kind" of Queer
« Reply #44 on: March 26, 2021, 07:07:12 PM »
It's very strange watching these lunatics shoehorn their identity politics into the depictions of what are usually villains. You'd think they'd go after the heroes instead.

That's the whole point: to take what "normal society" would "reflexively" look at as a villain and show how that person's really just a misunderstood hero, or at least as worthy of moral sympathy as any more typical protagonist.  Nobody needs to improve anyone's opinion of a hero. It's all about the moral rush of championing the underdog against ignorance-born prejudice and hostility.

The thing about fantasy is that it can create beings and characters where the hostility is neither ignorant nor prejudicial. SJ philosophy rejects this idea because they believe people given too much exposure to this concept start believing it possible in real life, which is where they think bigotry comes from.

In a nutshell. It also isn't true.

People are clearly able to distinguish between fictional orcs and real-life persecuted minorities. Watching The Lord of the Rings or playing Dungeons & Dragons is not going to make people racist if they weren't already.

Bigotry doesn't arise from reading stories about blue team fighting red team. Bigotry arises from people being actively taught to hate others. When slavery was first exported to the Americas, people of any race were enslaved. As time passed, the slave population in the Americas came to be composed entirely of African people and their descendants. The masters invented racism as a justification for the slavery, saying that blacks were inferior to whites and this justified whites owning blacks. Over time this lack of empathy became increasingly virulent until we had lynch mobs.

Racism isn't an inherent property of human beings. Racism isn't propagated by stories about imaginary monsters. Racism is propagated deliberately by constructed narratives that are not remotely subtle in order to advance an agenda that benefits from it.

These SJWs would know that if they studied the subject before the SJW takeover of the 2010s like I did. My old textbooks literally stated this stuff. It's terrifying to imagine what I would have been taught if I went now.

They believe that fiction can become real, because they want their favorite fiction to become real. Therefore, they must suppress fiction that does not 100% agree with their favorite fiction, lest some other fiction become real instead of their favorite.

Is this some fucked up Neverending Story crap?
No, it's just typical fandom toxicity. The tumblr crowd is really bad about it. There are many horror stories about stuff like giving cookies containing needles to crew members who worked on Steven Universe, for example.