A Quote

"Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

--Conan the Cimmerian, in Queen of the Black Coast.

My problem with pony haters

So, most of this might be pretty obvious to anyone who reads my blog, but I'm still going to put it up here because it bothers me.

People are being confused, even upset, by the My Little Pony fandom. At first glance, the accusations seem to (sort of) make sense: When grown men watch childrens' cartoons, isn't that a little strange? Grown men should enjoy things for grown men, children should enjoy things for children. Simple.

However, the thing is, nobody seriously applies this principle in a broad sense. Few people really bat an eyelash if a grown man owns Finding Nemo on DVD, or if he has a bunch of Superman* comics, or if he owns a few collectible Transformers. Sure, people might roll their eyes and call him a nerd, but most people still seem to grasp the basic idea: Boys will be boys. It's not strange if a grown man wants to regress to being a little boy from time to time - even your most stuck-up, snobby banker can admit to enjoying some childish activity from time to time.

So the moral outrage and confusion clearly doesn't stem from the idea of grown-ups enjoying something for children. Instead, I think, it's rooted in a deeply anti-feminist statement, which is this: Nobody seriously wants to be a girl.

I'm not saying that pony fans are all transsexual, of course. It's just that we, culturally, still have some idea of "cooties". It's by no means explicit; it's a very subtle idea that we seem to have, that doing or liking feminine things is like a sickness. It's basically the same as fear of "catching the gay". So exposing yourself to something girly (like say, My Little Pony) means that you might turn into a "girl" (very important quote marks there): Effeminate, ornamental, helpless, and so on. Why would anyone want that?

So this contradiction appears in peoples' minds, a contradiction that pits two entirely false ideas against each other: "Girls are worthless" and "Guys who do feminine things become girly". Neither is in any way true. If you believed only one to be true, the behaviour wouldn't seem strange: If you believe, for instance, that it's just fine and peachy to be as much of a girly-girl as you like irrespective of your biological sex, then it won't at all be strange for a guy to wear pink hairbows and giggle and watch My Little Pony. On the other hand, if you believe that being "a girl" is "bad" (irrespective of biological sex), but not that say, wearing pink transforms you into "a girl", then logically you should be fine with anyone wearing pink as well - it's just a color, it has nothing to do with the undesirable qualities of being pretty and helpless.

The strangeness only occurs if you believe both statements to be true. And, as it turns out, both of them are absolute bullshit.

*This example is out of date, admittedly. Comic books are today mostly written for adults. During the Silver Age, though, they were written predominantly for children, and the reason there was a demographic shift was that adults started reading them anyway.

Bizarre workings of the unconscious mind

I had a dream last night. It was a most peculiar dream.

I do not remember where it started, but I remember I was doing something entirely unrelated, walking down the street, when suddenly a group of people dressed as fruits started following me, talking to me about their nutritional value. They were out to teach kindergarden children about fruits and vegetables, when suddenly they had gone insane. They were pursuing me and I knew I had to run.

Unfortunately, I had some sort of strange katamari damacy-condition that meant I had to keep holding on to everything I touched with my hands. I didn't stick to it or anything, it was just this psychological tic that I had to pick it up and keep it. One of the strange fruit-men tried to stop me, and I crashed into him - he was holding a giant pillow which I touched with my hands, and so I had to take it and run away with it. This enraged the fruit-men, for now I had stolen from them - so they all ran after me, shouting loudly about nutritional values and about how Gustav Vasa ate lots of blueberries.

Then, as I was fleeing, I barreled into a group of people dressed as superheroes. These, too, were insane, and I realized to my great horror that some sort of curse or virus or affliction was making everyone who dressed up as something else insane. It wasn't "they believe they are what they are dressed up as", they just became these weird babbling zombie types that pursued people and spewed nonsense at them. Unfortunately my katamari-curse meant I had to steal guy-dressed-as-Spiderman's mask and gloves because I had touched them, and I made a mental note not to put them on, or I would be forever doomed.

Now I was running carrying a mask, some gloves, and a giant pillow, and I was trying very hard not to drop them, but they were slowing me down. As I was running, I got the brilliant idea of putting the pillow on my head, and putting all the Spiderman paraphernalia in my pockets, so that helped. Then I found a third group of people, dressed up as mythical beings. They had captured this woman and were forcefully dressing her up as a mermaid. I decided to use my katamari-curse to save her, so I touched all the mermaid-clothes - because apparently, nobody else could take anything from me once I had picked it up - and left the woman naked, but her soul was intact. This enraged the mythical-creatures people even more than I had enraged the fruit-men, so they left the woman alone and started following me.

I quickly ran inside my apartment, because I had devised a brilliant scheme by which I could keep safe. I camouflaged the door to the apartment with the giant pillow (apparently, I could put it down now, somehow) so that nobody could find it, then I ran inside and hid under the covers. Too late, I realized that hiding under the covers counted as being "disguised", and so the curse afflicted me. I put on the Spiderman mask and gloves, and went permanently insane.

The end. As in, I woke up.

A Quote

"It’s like you’ve become a fan fiction of yourself, with a completely
different life story and endgame"
-- Nobilis, 3rd edition.

That's right. I'm reading Nobilis. Tremble.

L'Art De Jeu?

I really should do more blog posts on the history of my gaming. They're interesting to write and allow me to reflect some upon past adventures and achievements. Anyway, incoming ramble:

I'm reflecting on what I've been doing lately, gaming-wise, and I sort of miss doing more artsy stuff. I'm not exactly sure on what I mean by "artsy", here, and it's not something I can easily define; I just know that in the past I've ran some games which really felt deep and meaningful, games to which you could apply literary analysis and find, well, cool stuff. The old Arcana Evolved game had a solid theme of Free Will vs. Destiny; the Vampires In Berlin game had recurring motifs of juxtaposition between ugly and beautiful.

Basically, some of the games I've been in have really felt like they have meaning, like there is a message to them. Maybe I'm just being pretentious here, I don't know. Don't get me wrong: Roleplaying games are first and foremost about being fun, not about being meaningful. Kicking in doors and killing orcs is every bit as "good" roleplaying as is debating the meaning of (un-)life with an elder vampire, and the former is probably more fun in a direct sense - but still, I feel the latter can be very interesting and I don't know if I've done anything like it for a while.

I'm not sure if there's a point to trying, either. When it happens it's almost always by accident, though it can be consciously planned into existence. It just takes a lot of planning, so much that I don't know if it's worth it.

Art is certainly not the opposite of entertainment - they can exist together, despite the connotations that "art" has to a lot of people today. But in the case of roleplaying games, maybe there's no point in trying to have both? Or at least, not enough of a point to be worth the effort?

I'm not sure. Often times when I've really tried to get a tight, structured, themed game, the effort has failed; and a tight, structured, themed game is kind of what you need for the story to actually tell a message (unless the message is invented and delivered by the players, which is totally awesome; the Mutant game was arguably of this variety, but such game experiences are rare treasures indeed). So there's a lot of work going into it, and a huge risk that the whole thing might just collapse, but...

...I dunno. Somehow I still feel like roleplaying games are still stories, and ought to be treated as such. Crafting a meaningful story is certainly, well, meaningful, and usually well worth the time: In literature, these are the stories we tend to remember. So it is as well, at least for me, concerning RPGs: The games and the characters I remember are those that really had something to say.

Maybe I'm just being pretentious. Trying to craft art out of a medium that was built for "I hit it with my axe" seems a little fruitless, sometimes. Then again, all of the literary tradition of the entire world has grown out of something like "Once there was this guy who killed a really big animal", so...