Why is it whenever I try to find any info out about this game I find posts full of edgy “haha I killed that, are U mad?” assholes and borderline “race realists”?
Ffs I just wanted to find a post that would help me avoid killing Kobolds and the one posts I find asking the question is full of edgelords bragging about how they love to kill “vermin” races and gays.
This is what you get when you make a fantasy world were certain races are born evil, it attracts all the racist freaks that want to live out their genocide fantasies.
It’s killing my fun for this game.
Steam forums are where the shitheads too racist and mask off for reddit congregate. Their entire personality is doing “edgy” things in games to make people mad, because they’re so pathetic and have so little agency in their lives that literally any attention is good attention to them.
It’s annoying, I get banned on steam forums for saying we should kill these people, yet they’re all okay with them being racist genocidal freaks? Crazy moderation principles there, Gabe.
Crazy moderation principles there, Gabe.
So weird. When a forum is owned by a guy with
values, it gets filled with fascists. I wonder what happened. 
It’s basically “don’t advocate for violence towards individuals, but towards entire populations? That’s swell!”
I don’t even really know what to say. These people are so stupid.
Like, why do you NEED them to be vermin who are killed on sight?
Would it be so fucking strange if a DM said, “hey, in my world, kobolds aren’t evil”. Seems like a normal fucking choice to make in a fantasy game??
Are there not enough conflicts to resolve in the setting? You NEED racially designated enemies?
Even if you took it to the extreme and said NOTHING in dnd is inherently evil? Would that be bad? Like, you could still kill them because they can still be antagonists.
PS. The one that really gets me is the person talking about them multiplying and killing farmers trying to guilt the person as if any of this is real
PS. The one that really gets me is the person talking about them multiplying and killing farmers trying to guilt the person as if any of this is real
There’s this weird thing that happens when someone is both an uber lore nerd and a “curtains are always blue” fascist. They get into this weird space where they genuinely don’t seem to understand it is a work of fiction anymore. You see it a lot with 40k nerds.
No, see the Emperor had to commit MegaGenocide, because if he didn’t do that, the Rangda would have destroyed the nascent Imperium!
Gamers love choice except when it’s people choosing to not be a sadist
talking about them multiplying and killing farmers trying to guilt the person
They’ve internalized big beef talking points so deeply they think that wolves are real life kobolds
DnD was invited by a wildly rascist guy that couldn’t handle his drugs. The vibes are still there to this day.
yes, it’s fucked up. I was at a convention shortly after Gary gygax died and they held a hastily-assembled panel and someone pointed out that in fact it’s really messed up that someone at some point has to have said “let’s make a race of elves who are evil, they can have black skin”, like WHAT. The biologist in me wants to point out that most things that live underground are pale so they even had to defy reality to make them black.
It’s one of the reasons I think it’s good that newer editions of d&d are moving away from calling them “races” in favour of “species”. Plenty of the d&d “races” are way more distinct than you’d expect human groups to be anyway.
Gary Gygax was…um…more than a bit questionable himself.
In an online forum post he commented that killing goblin babies is normal (if not inherently good) and compared it with…well…so apparently there was a military general responsible for the mass killing of indigenous people who said of the killing of children ‘nits make lice’, and Gary used this quote to explain why killing goblin babies was fine. He used an example of a person saying this about human beings for why he supported killing fictional infants. There are many awful excuses he could have used, but I genuinely don’t think he could have used a worse one than this.
Well, yeah. Gygax fucking sucked ass. I certainly wasn’t trying to say he was GOOD, he ok’d the dark elf bullshit.
To be fair, he didn’t invent the concept, drow are based on the Norse Dökkálfar, including the “dwelling within the earth” and behaving opposite to the “”“good”“” elves who dwelled in Alfheimr in the heavens.
Still, choosing to adapt it verbatim was all him, as well as all the additional traits like being pro slavery (which was not in the Norse dark elf lore) and infanticide.
smh woke took away our evil elves. but of course anti-illithid sentiment is alive and well.
As usual, weird nerds didn’t even read the material and are just looking for an excuse to be racist.
This is what you get when you make a fantasy world were certain races are born evil, it attracts all the racist freaks that want to live out their genocide fantasies.
What’s wild is that Drizz’t appeared in the Icewind Dale books back in 1988, making it canon that in D&D you aren’t born with a certain alignment just because of your race, but some people still cling to this outdated idea thirty-seven years later.
Authors have explored the idea but it’s not really a feature of D&D unfortunately, especially with the mechanics reinforcing it constantly. There’s just the occasional Good member of an Evil species rather than species not being inherently good or evil.
I’m glad Paizo killed that sacred cow, I just wish it hadn’t taken until the remaster.
It was always really inconsistent. Some authors treated Alignment as “just kinda your vibe”, some as “a combination of cultural factors and divine meddling”, and some as “intrinsic cosmic morals”, some both but for different things (humans vs Outsiders, etc). Negative Energy and undead as being an Eeeeevil Spookyforce or Basically Just Radiation.
That kind of unaddressed inconsistency fuelled, and still fuels, endless repeats of the “Is Necromancy evil? What if my skeletons are used as agricultural robots to allow for a higher standard of living?”, where everyone talks past each other based on what part of the texts they read and settings they play in.
Yeah I blame WOTC for keeping the alignment system around through third ed. Even in the 2000s when I learned the game most people thought of alignment as more of an annoyance than something worthwhile.
I get why they kept it in 3rd with them wanting to keep and expand on the lore in order to keep and expand on TSR’s player base, but they scrapped nearly everything for 4th ed and still kept it around for no good reason. You’re right though, even in 3rd it mainly existed in order to trick paladins into falling.
Drizzt is not a good example; the Drow are still explicitly evil in those books and Drizzt hates them and acknowledges that they’re evil. Fantasy is unfortunately terrible for this, but there is a book that’s not only fantastic, but it’s based in a setting that reverberates the sentiment of monsters not being inherently evil: ‘Queen of stone’ set in the Eberron setting by Keith Baker, the setting’s creator.
Annoyingly it’s now available in kindle form; when I searched for it about…ten years ago? There was no digital version of the book at that time.
The main character is a bodyguard sent with a diplomat to a major diplomatic event in the lands of Droaam (a land of monsters; medusas, minotaurs, gnolls, ogres, hags, etc.) and the races there are portrayed very normally; I recall reading an essay by (Keith Baker?) where he explained how in his setting the only inherently evil races are demonic beings (who are made of the evil stuff in the abyss; they are not formed from human souls) or the creatures from the dream realm whose mentality is utterly alien to human thinking who went on to create illithids and other similar creatures. Goblins in Eberron in the ancient times had an extremely advanced empire but were defeated by the numerous barbarian human tribes and eventually their civilization collapsed and now live in poverty in human cities instead.
Unfortunately even though Eberron has much going for it…I’m not a steampunk/entire-cities-are-made-of-artifice/airships guy. I like my fantasy settings basic.
Im trying to work out if Anime has always been like this, or if this is a new trend I’m only now clocking onto as it parallels my increasing awareness of the far-right?
Japan is a very conservative country, so the media there skews very conservative. A lot of anime does focus on “inherently evil” villains, but there’s also some good stuff.
The most low effort slop invariably will just reflect the general cultural attitudes of the people, because the creator doesn’t care enough to think about it or try to challenge it. And anime is an industry with a massive slop problem.
Japan is national socialist. They have socialist vibes which is what attracts us. They are also fash as hell. It’s hard to say how much of that fash shit we imposed on them though
No BuT ThEy WeRe AtYPiCaL
This is something that bothers me a lot with Shounen anime. The evil guys are just goblins or orcs, and the humans see it right, just even, to genocide the everlasting fuck out of these creatures without any remorse.
Goblin Slayer is surprisingly the least guilty of this, in the sense that it sees its inhuman enemy as a cunning equal… whilst having no qualms massacring scores of them, children and all. Same with Frieren to some degree.
Shinsekai Yori (From the New World) is the only anime I know that gets this completely right.
Dungeon Meshi represents orcs very well, they’re a society based on raiding and seen as savages, because they were banned from owning land on the surface and forced into dungeons. They turn out to be very reasonable people and are honestly more civilised than Laios, the main character.
Laios isn’t uncivilized, he’s just autistic. Don’t do my boy wrong like this.
I really enjoyed the unexpectantness of this manga. At least until Thistle shown and entire thing turned into classical lib shit.
At least until Thistle shown and entire thing turned into classical lib shit.
It really did just retroactively ruin everything when (spoilers all)
it revealed that all the neat dungeon ecology and magical worldbuilding was fake and just a manifestation of ontologically evil wish magic, and the most dangerous desires weren’t self-serving greed or cruelty but instead a desire to help others and improve things.
spoiler
the most dangerous desires weren’t self-serving greed or cruelty but instead a desire to help others and improve things
To be fair, this is how most manga/anime plots end up lol
Idk. Goblin slayer is one of the most heinous with it. The goblins only procreate byremoved humans. The very first episode they show aremoved scene. They always bring a cute looking girl for this exact purpose. Their only motivation isremoved, pillage, burn. Even the apostles in berserk have some character like the Count saving his daughter and sending himself to hell to do that. Goblin slayer? Shit they went out of their way to show what happens when you spare a goblin. They showed that child killing the person that spared him and it growing into a goblin king,
Its every fascists wet dream. It gets so bad it has to be satire of some sort not to side eye this showIt gets so bad it has to be satire of some sort not to side eye this show
Folding ideas satirized this concept in a video made before goblin slayer became an actual thing(Found the right video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxV8gAGmbtk
It’s like some weird anti-satire, where the satire already existed and people decided to make the unironic version of the satire.
Ahhhh shit
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
There is a plot element where the goblins are an expropriated diaspora used as slaves and that is where the negative externalities come from. This is at odds with the fact that the goblins are written to be like chimpanzees. A better industry could have made an intresting story about class conflict out of this. However the money is from leaning into the latent incoherrent fash vibes
That… That could have made an even more interesting story. Instead they behave like dark eldar. If you know dark eldar welp…
The author didn’t get the point across well but in universe all the races of light see goblin slayer as a crazy rascist monster as well. The crux of the story is class conflict and him being the only one willing to protect the poor at the cost of his own sanity. Which like all anime has fash vibes but those are at least diffrent fash vibes.
Yeah I think I saw hints of that towards the beginning, but then he started to get admiration from the status quo, and I couldnt figure him out after that.
Never go on steam forums, it’s the worst conglomeration of racists because valve doesn’t believe in moderation.
Kobolds are good.
No I’m not biased.
steamfront
i dont use steam
Being really into the concept of evil races in a fantasy setting, to the point of not even accepting criticisms of the concept, is an astonishingly reliable chud marker.
I’ve recently been trying to scour the internet to figure out whether or not Songs of Syx is a game you can roleplay in or if it has a strict meta. I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I want to play a “My society exists to free slaves” game, but everywhere I look it just seems like everyone who plays that game just naturally plays with slavery by default. Not only that but they relish in it, and if you express that you want to play “sub-optimally” they lose their racist minds.
I understand you all like to sack towns and SELL PEOPLE to “KICKSTART YOUR ECONOMY” I’m asking if I can play a different way. STOP TELLING ME I’M THE IDIOT. Fuck.
gnomes ate my son
Gnomes are my son
Checkmate liberal
woe upon thee tiny owl child
Without spoiling, you do meet non-hostile Kobold(s) later on, the ones in Act 1 are just particularly aggressive drunks.
Hell yeah lizards rule
I don’t like rats or mice running around my house either, but that doesn’t inspire a genocidal rage against all mice… :what-the-hell:
It’s such a weird reaction to have about a bunch of lizard fellas just minding their own business.
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