Azarkon: Fantasy is inherently conservative therefore RPGs don't need overt conservative messaging

[Lambach]

You fail at American history. Republicans and Democrats didn't use to stand for what they stand for today.

Wrong. In spirit, they're still the same they've always been, only the form has changed. Personal freedom and responsibility for the individual - Republicans. Big government and institutionalized systems of exploitation - Democrats. Whether Democrats outright enslave blacks via collars and chains or get them hooked on welfare and thus enslave them to an existence of permanent dependence on government programs, the essence is still the same.

Granted, I'm talking about the general platforms of both parties. How much they're actually realized differs from case to case, from politician to politician.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Isn't he a neanderthal / primitive German tribal?

Description from The Return of the King is probably closer to the Aboriginals.

 

[MRY]

I guess that's right. And the statues sound kind of like the Easter Island Maoi.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Social justice activism is just a symptom of the loss of passion, not the cause. They could substitute it with any ideology and the problem would still remain. As another dude put it, they could be spending their time praising Trump, and while the immediate effects of that on the games would change, the end result would be the same.

I disagree - especially with your first sentence.

SJWs in gaming are a result of a large portion of qualified candidates being SJWs after a thorough brainwashing in their youth - especially via college. It's what they are most passionate about and hence it permeates everything they are involved in.

The problem with their ideology is that they are trained to push it everywhere and to silence disent. So with SJWs, they are actively trying to override the pasions of others in favor of their own. That's a big part of the "loss of passion". That and the even more corporatized gaming economy which only further increases the political correctness that aids SJWs.

SJWs are relatively unique in this. When's the last time you heard of conservatives co-opting any video game?

Turn everyone into a "Trumpist" and you might have some pro-wall jokes in your game, sure, but no one is going o try and hijack the development, turn female characters into males and make entire anti-mexican plotlines.

That argument would fly, but for the fact that we're talking about older developers, who either never went through the liberal college education system, or did but had no interest in social justice activism until the last few years.

People like McComb, Cook, Fargo, Avellone, etc. They're old school developers. Not fresh college graduates. They're also not under the control of fresh college graduates.

Their conversion cannot be explained by the 'brain washing' theory you guys are trying to push. Their early games demonstrated none of the social justice activism that they now espouse. This is a recent trend, probably the result of GamerGate specifically, not a formative years consequence.

I sort of agree with you and understand your point. But part of the problem with modern liberalism is there is no orthodoxy, and everyone is trying to be holier than everyone else. When these guys graduated college being a moral righteous liberal meant being mildly disdainful of consumer culture, patriotism, and racism. Now being a liberal means hating white people with fervent passion and cutting your dick off.

Times change and what is expected of observant liberals changes. You want to stay a member of the congregation in good standing, you get with the white-bashing.

 

[Azarkon]

You fail at American history. Republicans and Democrats didn't use to stand for what they stand for today.

Wrong. In spirit, they're still the same they've always been, only the form has changed. Personal freedom and responsibility for the individual - Republicans. Big government and institutionalized systems of exploitation - Democrats. Whether Democrats outright enslave blacks via collars and chains or get them hooked on welfare and thus enslave them to an existence of permanent dependence on government programs, the essence is still the same.

Granted, I'm talking about the general platforms of both parties. How much they're actually realized differs from case to case, from politician to politician.

I can't even.

Fuck, just look at these maps. Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? None of that Torment wall of text shit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ocrats-and-vice-versa/?utm_term=.47f950bc4213

You can argue that the Democrats just wanted another way to control blacks, etc. But it's a fact that they used to be for small government, while the Republicans used to be for big government. It's the reverse today.

 

[Lambach]

And what exactly are your pictures supposed to prove?

 

[Azarkon]

And what exactly are your pictures supposed to prove?

Both the parties, and the voters that voted for them, have changed, so it's ridiculous to equate Democrats with liberals, and Republicans with conservatives, throughout US history.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Uh, the constant slavery allegories in fantasy are a liberal element

Yep - in some cases I'm sure they are. But they don't make the setting traditionally liberal.

But the presence of a few liberal elements in fantasy does not change the fact that the genre as a whole is socially conservative.

Even assuming that you've tallied all of the elements in every work of fantasy in he past 100 years and assigned them values of "liberal" and "conservative" and arrived at a calculation that there are more "conservative" things than "liberal" things - which I very doubt you have - it really wouldn't matter since you are clearly assigning conservative motives to things that may not have been politically motivated at all.

Can someone selectively use historical allegory to paint a world in a given political perspective? Absolutely. But every use of historical allegory isn't necessarily politically motivated.

and in case you weren't following the thread

Nope, I'm entirely new to this thread.

it's what people took issue with in Torment because dogmatic moral opposition to slavery makes no sense in the context of a world in which slavery is legal.

And they're free to take issue with it. I haven't played through it, so reserve the right to judge whether it was hamfistedly implemented or not. Though I would point out that dogmatic moral opposition to slavery arose in the real world despite it being tradition.

I really more took issue with your original statement on SJWs and your constant assertion that fantasy is conservative and that liberal values are more noticeable/unwlecome because they go against that conservatism.

In this respect, AoD is, funny enough, more liberal than Baldur's Gate, because in AoD there are no set definitions of good and evil.

Debate is hopeless as long as you think any work of art is simply 'factual,' as opposed to reflecting the agency and the agenda of the author.

It can and does, however, the motives of the author are not set in stone as conservative or liberal just because they choose to include elements of a particular historical allegory or subject matter. Maybe if they only include certain ones or force the outcome into a certain direction in an obvious way, but that isn't what you initially brought up in that quote. And besides, liberals are rarely so subtle anymore - which is a big part of the problem.

Putting a gay character in your video game isn't necessary liberally motivated. Putting several gay/bi characters in and having entire subplots revolve around them is starting to get a little suspicious.

It's more about the motive for a thing than the thing itself. No one wants to pay to play someone's liberal finfic propaganda that was sold to them as the reboot/remake/sequel/spinoff of a game they liked.

All the while you go around defining liberalism as being the equivalent of third wave feminism and identity politics?

No, not entirely, but these are the most noticeable, blatant and the most necessary to shoehorn in as they are batshit crazy and don't mesh well with most existing settings.

If a liberal chose to introduce and entire civilization to a setting that was a communist utopia, it would be just as blatant. If a liberal portrayed every instance of slavery as chattel slavery it could also be politically liberal - or just lazy writing. But merely including the concepts of slavery or moral opposition to it isn't (unless it is done in a way that is completely incompatible to the setting or was obviously just forced in by someone with a political axe to grind).

I'm using broad definitions because I reject the idea that liberalism is defined by what we hate about video games, not only because it's a circular definition, but also because it's simply wrong.

I don't think anyone is defining liberalism by what we hate about video games. Personally, I hate motion blur, but I'm not blaming feminists for it.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

They've always held the opinions they hold today. Thing is, nowadays it is socially acceptable to push all this progressiveness propaganda in videogames, whereas 20 years ago that wouldn't fly so well.

The problem is when they use their games and their characters to push their agenda. Some writers like Avellone and George Ziets seem to understand this fairly well, while others like Monte Cuck and Matt MacLean completely miss it.

Right exactly. Liberals are always searching for ways to signal virtue; as soon as it became virtuous to promote liberal dogma through videogames, they started doing it almost in unison.

 

[Lambach]

Both the parties, and the voters that voted for them, have changed their platforms, so it's ridiculous to equate Democrats with liberals, and Republicans with conservatives.

Democrats were the slave-owning party then and they're still the slave-owning party today. Blacks have been overwhelmingly voting Dem since the sixties despite the fact that every single objective metric points that the life standard for the average negro has been on the decline since then (home ownership, employment, family cohesion, incarceration rate etc) and they show no signs of reversing that trend because Dems promise them welfare like a heroin dealer promises a "free" hit to a junkie. Dems used them as slaves to pick cotton back in the 19th century, they use them as slaves to pick votes and talking points in the 21st century. Different tactics, same result. The fact that whites changed their opinions on that issue and now vote for different parties has no bearing on the matter discussed.

 

[hello friend]

Who's the faggot that split off the thread?

 

[SausageInYourFace]

conservative themes in fantasy literature

I am sorry but apparently that thread got split from a thread that got split or something, so I didn't get an alert and just now coincidentally saw that reply. Gonna reply here cause thats where I saw it.

Well, thanks for the indepth answer and very interesting list. It is more a list about the origins of (high) fantasy literature however and not so much evidence that fantasy is inherently conservative and I can find plenty of counterexamples of quite popular fantasy works with a more liberal approach. Not gonna go through every point in that list but just to address a few ..

-discomfort with many aspects of modernity
Terry Pratchetts lasts few books are a good example of progress in a fantasy world. the move of the Discworld into early modern times is embraced as positive change.

-a belief in natural aristocracy
GRRMs Game of Thrones is probably the best example here that subverts this kind thought. Also reiligious institutions don't exactly get a free pass here.

-violence is (usually) the answer
plenty of examples in Fantasy where that is not actually true. The most sophisticated one would be almost everything by LeGuin, the funniest one probably Sam Vimes arresting a whole army on his own

(High) fantasy literature may have its historical roots in more conservative thought but there is nothing inherently in the genre that makes it conservative by default. Its a mode of writing that offers a certain set of tools that can be applied in much variety to express all kinds of poltical or social issues in various ways, including progressive ones; and there are plenty of authors that do so.

 

[Sentinel]

Who's the faggot

prob Infinitron

 

[Azarkon]

Even assuming that you've tallied all of the elements in every work of fantasy in he past 100 years and assigned them values of "liberal" and "conservative" and arrived at a calculation that there are more "conservative" things than "liberal" things - which I very doubt you have - it really wouldn't matter since you are clearly assigning conservative motives to things that may not have been politically motivated at all.

Explicit motives are not necessary when the argument is about implicit values. I doubt any developer ever said, 'we need to push for traditional masculinity in video games. Nu-males are taking over!' But they took inspiration from the works of a Robert E. Howard and out comes the Conan warrior archetype, well-known in early gaming and an entrenched tradition today. Of course, Howard himself was from the American South and is often accused of being a conservative and a traditionalist with nostalgic views about ancient European history, but even he probably didn't set out to push his conservative agenda through his sword and sandal epics. Rather, Conan & his world simply reflected the implicit values he's always held to be attractive. A liberal writer could very well do the same without noticing it or bragging about it on twitter.

I really more took issue with your original statement on SJWs and your constant assertion that fantasy is conservative and that liberal values are more noticeable/unwlecome because they go against that conservatism.

That's fine, because I'm prepared to defend that statement. Fantasy, as others have argued and as I have accepted, has deep roots in conservative nostalgia & the Romanticist movement, and in an essential longing for the pre-industrial past, a time when knowledge was less systematic, government less ubiquitous, and the individual more significant. Its power comes from its ability to channel tradition and our attachment to it, which is still very much alive, and is the same emotional and psychological force behind conservative movements in general. Yet I don't think the world is divided between conservatives and liberals; rather, I think most people are drawn to both conservative and liberal values to various degrees, and apply a label to themselves only as a matter of necessity. Fact is, politically liberal individuals can still lose themselves in conservative fantasies, because engaging with tradition can be deeply validating & satisfying.

It can and does, however, the motives of the author are not set in stone as conservative or liberal just because they choose to include elements of a particular historical allegory or subject matter. Maybe if they only include certain ones or force the outcome into a certain direction in an obvious way, but that isn't what you initially brought up in that quote. And besides, liberals are rarely so subtle anymore - which is a big part of the problem.

Putting a gay character in your video game isn't necessary liberally motivated. Putting several gay/bi characters in and having entire subplots revolve around them is starting to get a little suspicious.

It's more about the motive for a thing than the thing itself. No one wants to pay to play someone's liberal finfic propaganda that was sold to them as the reboot/remake/sequel/spinoff of a game they liked.

I did say they were doing it badly, and that they required more nuance. I think that covers what you said above about being able to easily identify liberal agendas. But at the same time, I'd argue that liberal agendas are fundamentally more disruptive in fantasy than they are in genres like science fiction. Again, you probably wouldn't even notice the presence of 'gender fluid' characters in Cyberpunk 2077, as you've been conditioned to accept that the future is probably going to be more 'progressive.' By contrast, Mizhena comes off as blatant propaganda, because a 'gender fluid' cleric in Dungeons and Dragons feels out of place. The problem with much liberal agenda pushing in video games today has to do with it being heavy handed, on one hand, and its inappropriateness, on the other. The former is a consequence of incompetence - of people who simply don't know how to get their messages across without slapping you across the face with it. The latter, however, has to do with the inherent nature of fantasy as a conservative genre.

 

[eggdogg]

this is a great thread, glad i read it.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Explicit motives are not necessary when the argument is about implicit values.

Even if that were true it is doubtful that vague implicit underlying structures would have more effect on the reader than explicit messages on the narrative level. If my feminist fantasy novel is about the rise to power of a strong female character it doesn't really matter that the roots of the setting place it in a traditionally patriacharl society, in fact it may even allow for a particularly powerful message.

 

[Azarkon]

Explicit motives are not necessary when the argument is about implicit values.

Even if that were true it is doubtful that vague implicit underlying structures would have more effect on the reader than explicit messages on the narrative level. If my feminist fantasy novel is about the rise to power of a strong female character it doesn't really matter that the roots of the setting place it in a traditionally patriacharl society, in fact it may even allow for a particularly powerful message.

The conventions of the genre are much more important than the details of the setting. In fact, your example is excellent, because strong female characters are a convention of the fantasy genre that defies the logic of tradition inherent in much of the rest, and we readily accept it because we've been conditioned to do so through decades of fantasy literature, video games, etc. Sure, there are still people who ask 'wait, why the fuck are women able to fight just as well as men?' But by and large the genre no longer questions the idea or expects otherwise. Yet, start inserting gay, lesbian, or gender fluid characters and suddenly the grognards are up in arms. Not because their presence is any less logical than female quality in fighting, but because it violates genre conventions.

 

[Irenaeus]

If fantasy is inherently conservative, RPGs NEED overt conservative messaging. Anything else is perversion.

No more normal human women fighting (some valkyries and shit is ok). No more trannies/faggots!

#DeusVult

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

I doubt any developer ever said, 'we need to push for traditional masculinity in video games.

But that's the whole point. SJWs do that. That's what we're pissed about.

If conservatives were doing it, it would be just as annoying - as you yourself said before switching into this bizarre argument that they haven't because they don't need to because fantasy is implicitly conservative. But conservatives aren't doing it in any genre of games. Not in sci fi games, fantasy games, shooters etc.

But they took inspiration from the works of a Robert E. Howard and out comes the Conan warrior archetype, well-known in early gaming and an entrenched tradition today. Of course, Howard himself was from the American South and is often accused of being a conservative and a traditionalist with nostalgic views about ancient European history

Are we going to play connect the dots now? Because Howard was accussed of being a conservative and game devs put musclemen in their video games, muscle men in video games are a conservative value now? smh

That's fine, because I'm prepared to defend that statement. Fantasy, as others have argued and as I have accepted, has deep roots in conservative nostalgia & the Romanticist movement, and in an essential longing for the pre-industrial past, a time when knowledge was less systematic, government less ubiquitous, and the individual more significant. Its power comes from its ability to channel tradition and our attachment to it, which is still very much alive, and is the same emotional and psychological force behind conservative movements in general. Yet I don't think the world is divided between conservatives and liberals; rather, I think most people are drawn to both conservative and liberal values to various degrees, and apply a label to themselves only as a matter of necessity. Fact is, politically liberal individuals can still lose themselves in conservative fantasies, because engaging with tradition can be deeply validating & satisfying.

Irrelevant. This whole paragraph. You are talking about elements of semi-conservative ideals - individualism etc. But the more specific points that could be shoehorned in the way SJWs do in games and media all the time aren't being shoehorned in and that isn't because they are built into the setting as you claim because they clearly aren't.

No anti-gun control messaging, no pro-life messaging, nothing. The issues aren't brought up or talked about - which you would want if you had a political agenda.

government less ubiquitous

I just wanted to pull this out specifically. Do you think modern American conservatives want to go back to when kings and queens ruled? Are these their ideals and they are already built into the fantasy setting? I mean, these are the forms of government often present in fantasy settings, so it's "implicit", right?

Again:

We've gone through this discussion before. Video games, especially fantasy video games, are fundamentally conservative to begin with, so it's not surprising to see a lack of subversion from the right.

I did say they were doing it badly, and that they required more nuance.

Actually you said "nuisance".

Frankly, although I agree that they need more nuance, it's not just that for me. It's motive. I don't want to pay for propaganda. I don't want people altering a setting I am paying to enjoy just because they had a fat catlady feminism teacher who help drill these ideals into them in college.

I think that covers what you said above about being able to easily identify liberal agendas. But at the same time, I'd argue that liberal agendas are fundamentally more disruptive in fantasy than they are in genres like science fiction.

Yeah, because as you just said, they hearken back to a medieval setting with different values etc and it strains verisimilitude the further away you get from that because people know history and have a concept for how that time was based on what they know of history and reality.

Slavery and rape aren't modern conservative values, but your setting becomes less and less true to form without them. Similarly, if you set a fantasy game in 14th century Poland or whatever and then fill it with a multicultural population, it's going to be noticed.

This doesn't make fantasy conservative any more than it makes history conservative though.

Again, you probably wouldn't even notice the presence of 'gender fluid' characters in Cyberpunk 2077

I don't develop blindness and deafness when a setting changes. I already pointed out that Star Trek is filled with liberalism - kinda suggests I noticed it.

Yes, it's more in-keeping with the setting, but I still don't like it. If every episode of Star Trek suddenly shifted to gender fluidity etc, I wouldn't watch it. I'd also be pissed at the SJW writers fr co-opting one of my favorite series instead of just creating their own.

By contrast, Mizhena comes off as blatant propaganda, because a 'gender fluid' cleric in Dungeons and Dragons feels out of place.

Because it's a modern political issue that is newer than the setting (D&D, just not fantasy in general) itself.

In DA: Inquisition or even Origins there is tons of gay stuff etc, but that's their setting. I didn't buy Inquisition because I saw that it would be far more central than in Origins and I don't like it, but I wasn't as pissed at them because it's their own IP and they've put that sort of thing in from the beginning of the series and been public about it.

They weren't co-opting another IP marketed to fans of a game series that predated this SJW nightmare and packaging their "gender fluidity" propaganda into it.

Yet, start inserting gay, lesbian, or gender fluid characters and suddenly the grognards are up in arms. Not because their presence is any less logical than female quality in fighting, but because it violates genre conventions.

A genre convention isn't inherently conservative. Again, we're going back to your overbroad use of the words "traditional" and "conservative".

 

[SausageInYourFace]

The conventions of the genre are much more important than the details of the setting.

What we consider conventions are a byproduct of the origin of the genre, they can be and have been easily subverted in many ways, as has been done by several popular fantasy authors, some of which I have mentioned. I don't want to get into a What's an RPG What's Fantasy discussion but I doubt there is much needed beyond 1) a fictional but vaguely medieval setting and 2) some kind of magic. And that the setting has to be vaguely medieval (with considerable possible alterations, since its fantasy) does not mean it inherently transports some kind of conservative message, it simply dictates the tools an author will have at his disposal. How he approaches the setting, positions himself towards it and to what end is what is important in determining the message, explicit or otherwise. He will be at liberty to express all kinds of ideas, conservative ones as well as progressive ones or whatever else.

start inserting gay, lesbian, or gender fluid characters and suddenly the grognards are up in arms.

Malazan has some of all of those, albeit relatively understated, and is exceedingly popular, even on the Codex.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Guys, can we all just agree that swords are inherently conservative and photon torpedoes are inherently liberal?

Common, guys, tradition.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I am sorry but apparently that thread got split from a thread that got split or something, so I didn't get an alert and just now coincidentally saw that reply. Gonna reply here cause thats where I saw it.

OK. As mentioned, it was a repost of something I had written back in May.

Well, thanks for the indepth answer and very interesting list. It is more a list about the origins of (high) fantasy literature however and not so much evidence that fantasy is inherently conservative and I can find plenty of counterexamples of quite popular fantasy works with a more liberal approach. Not gonna go through every point in that list but just to address a few ..

-discomfort with many aspects of modernity
Terry Pratchetts lasts few books are a good example of progress in a fantasy world. the move of the Discworld into early modern times is embraced as positive change.

-a belief in natural aristocracy
GRRMs Game of Thrones is probably the best example here that subverts this kind thought. Also reiligious institutions don't exactly get a free pass here.

-violence is (usually) the answer
plenty of examples in Fantasy where that is not actually true. The most sophisticated one would be almost everything by LeGuin, the funniest one probably Sam Vimes arresting a whole army on his own

(High) fantasy literature may have its historical roots in more conservative thought but there is nothing inherently in the genre that makes it conservative by default. Its a mode of writing that offers a certain set of tools that can be applied in much variety to express all kinds of poltical or social issues in various ways, including progressive ones; and there are plenty of authors that do so.

My post was specifically about the fantasy literature that influenced the creation of RPGs (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons), not fantasy literature generally, although it isn't too far off from fantasy literature generally ending circa 1980. I elaborated a number (eleven) of conservative themes that are commonly found in fantasy literature, but you seem to be interpreting this to mean that every single theme will be found in every single fantasy story. It would be expected for any individual story to be lacking some of these themes, and for there to be isolated counterexamples even among the literature that influenced RPGs, but the fact that counterexamples exist does not disprove the frequency in which these themes do appear in fantasy literature. This was true even for some authors whose personal politics were very different (e.g. Michael Moorcock was a left-wing radical but his Elric, Corum, and Hawkmoon stories all share most of these conservative themes). Similarly, it should be noted that these themes in fantasy literature describe a particular sort of conservatism, and some of these themes (e.g. fascination with the Middle Ages) are absent from other sorts of conservatism.

Though out of the three counterexamples you listed, two of them are quite recent, and are therefore meaningless in terms of having influenced D&D. In the last three decades or so, there have been concerted attempts to undermine and subvert fantasy literature, just as also happened in science fiction literature, by people who are either blissfully ignorant of the classics or who detest the classics. You might as well justify the intrusion of progressive politics into video games with a science fiction setting by citing the Nebula Award-winning short story If I Were a Dinosaur My Love.

 

[octavius]

science fiction, as a genre, has always been more liberal,

Not always. It may be today, but it certainly wasn't before the New Wave movement of the 1960s.

 

[FugueLah]

If you have an SJW mindset you are fully committed to both the concept of diversity for diversity's sake and surrounding yourself with like minded individuals. It's not difficult to see how this is going to impact the quality of your hires when you automatically exclude based on these factors.

 

[octavius]

You do know that the end of Eowyn's story arc is that she gives up being a warrior and becomes a housewife and healer, right, and thus finally finds happiness?

If that's the way you want to read it, I guess. But it ignores the fact that she killed a major villain in a major battle that "no man could kill". She proved she could be a warrior. The book didn't have to have that and that's why I brought up that it was a liberal value.

Things like her ending or every black person in the series either siding with evil or being an orc were probably less liberal though.

In LOTR the "racism" is the result of Iluvatar and the Valar giving Morgoth free reign to subvert the humans to the south and east of Gondor, with the Valar hiding in Valinor with their favourite people the Elves. How could the black and many other peoples be good Iluvatar abiding people when they had never been given the choice? It's like the old Christian assumption that people who had never heard about God and Jesus, and thus never being given a choice, automatically went to Hell.
It's the one big flaw in Tolkien's Legendarium IMO, but fortunately religion otherwise taints it very little.