[Censorship]/[Ethics] Prostasia Foundation: "Internet reporting hotlines are censoring art"

Oh fuck my life, here we go again with this bullshit.

So USA Today, of all things, posted an article (under their "video games" section, I shit you not) about the new Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel book. And while I've seen pieces that were more cringe-inducing, this is still an absolute shit-take on a game where you're supposed to roll dice with your friends while pretending to be fantasy heroes. But you'd have a hard time figuring that out after reading this ass-stain of an article.

Just look at how they're talking about a fucking D&D book:

Erin Roberts knows the lived experiences we bring to the table shape the stories we tell.

Fuck off, Erin. I'm sick to death of this whole "your lived experiences subconsciously shape everything you do, meaning that you're a helpless puppet who cannot help but recreate the systemic biases of your society in everything you create" bullshit. That's the premise that the moral authoritarians have used to inject themselves into absolutely every facet of our hobbies and tear them to the fucking ground, and I'm seriously questioning the validity of it.

If I feel like playing a fucking lizardman aboard a sailing ship that flies between worlds, I feel pretty fucking confident that my background and personal upbringing have fuck all to do with that!

Roberts is a Black woman who loves the South. That passion comes through in the stories she wants to tell as an author – even when that story is told in a fantasy game based entirely on a group of people fighting monsters in a world of make-believe.

Then Roberts doesn't sound like she has very much imagination at all, does she? Because most people who play D&D that I know enjoy doing things that are radically different when it's time for a new campaign, rather than bringing the same idea into the game over and over again. At what point do you decide that you're tired of doing the same thing endlessly, and say that you want something different?

Roberts is one of 16 writers who had a chance to tell a new story in the latest Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook, "Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel." All are people of color, a first for D&D after nearly 50 years. The book hit shelves Tuesday and carries adventurers through an anthology of tales shaped by the lived experiences of the most diverse group of writers ever assembled by Wizards of the Coast.

To give credit where it's due, at least USA Today has broken away from the old "the authors are all black and brown people" that other outlets were spouting back when this book was first announced. Maybe they got the message that it's not true. Though I suppose now they'll need to defend the idea that people of, say, Korean or Japanese heritage are "people of color."

“The cultures we're raised in, the types of stories we're told growing up, are different from group to group, from culture to culture,” she said, adding representation “makes deeper and broader the types of stories we're telling.”

Fucking bullshit. This fetish for "representation" is limiting, because it starkly defines what you're not allowed to do, which is anything that the moral entrepreneurs classify as offensive to their sensibilities. You need look no further than the Galbrush Paradox to see how this ends up strangling creativity rather than helping it.

Bringing those lived experiences to the table is exactly what co-project lead and writer Ajit A. George wanted. An Indian American, he knows all too well the struggle of trying to see yourself in a fantasy world written by someone who doesn’t have diversity front-of-mind.

I'm going to skip past "why the fuck would you want to see yourself in a fantasy world?" and instead move right along to "if you can't see yourself represented by heroic virtues such as honor, courage, loyalty, determination, compassion, and numerous other traits that are universally lauded among human cultures, then perhaps games of heroic fantasy aren't for you."

That’s why he pitched the idea in the first place. He was frustrated after he attended a convention 10 years ago and struggled to find Black and Brown people in attendance.

Real quality reporting here; forget picking out the specific convention, they don't even seem to have determined what type of convention it was. Was this a comic convention, an anime convention, a fucking My Little Pony convention, what? Because nothing in this paragraph tells me that D&D and other tabletop RPGs have anything to do with this.

And that's without getting into the fact that conventions are perhaps the single most expensive part of an expensive hobby, which highlights that this is an economic issue rather than a social one! I get it; the financial reforms that created America's middle class were mostly passed as reactions to the Great Depression and two World Wars, all of which happened during the era of Jim Crow, so it's no surprise that African-Americans were largely left out, but that's not the fault of D&D or any other aspect of recreational media!

“It made me reflect about how often I saw myself or people who looked anything like me in D&D products or in just larger geekdom,” he said.

I can't help but note the irony in the fact that, right below this quote, there's a picture in which the foreground is taken up by a kobold with red scales.

After working on other projects, George met with D&D senior designer F. Wesley Schneider. George, also the director of operations of the nonprofit Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project, was given the chance to work on another D&D product, he said, and during that time, he thought about what would eventually become “Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel.”

You know, I was mostly being snarky about that "great reporting" comment before, but this really is shit reporting. Notice how they say "another D&D product" here without first laying down that Ajit George worked on a previous D&D product? Newflash, asshole: Ajit George previously worked on the absolute fucking trainwreck that was 5E Ravenloft, a job which he landed despite having no TTRPG experience before (that I've been able to tell) except for babbling about diversity as some awards presentation a few years back.

“As I’m writing, I’m thinking, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be awesome to have an entire D&D book written by people of color talking about our own cultures, our own people, our own histories, our own myths, the foods we eat, the arts we appreciated – what would that look like?” George said.

The foods you eat and the arts you like...because that's what you think of when you sit down to play Dungeons & Dragons? Really? Most groups I know don't even bother to write down that they've got iron rations, and the GMs will only barely think to include various objets d'art among the treasure they find. But yeah, why sit back and blow off some steam with your buddies when you could instead hold an impromptu anthropology class?

The idea was quickly green-lit by Jeremy Crawford, game architect of Dungeons & Dragons. Schneider, who became the project’s other co-lead, said he wanted diversity at the forefront of the book.

Which showcases the entire problem in a nutshell: he wanted diversity at the forefront of the book, and not adventure, game mechanics, lore, playability, or anything that was otherwise entertaining.

“Even when playing with fantasy, so often writers are drawing upon what their experiences are,” Schneider said. “Tolkien pastiche is practically a genre. The high-fantasy knights against ‘spooky evil thing,’ and there’s probably a MacGuffin to be destroyed. We’ve seen it thousands of times.”

Yeah, because it fucking works, Schneider you absolute tool. The entire idea that's being presented in this paragraph, that an established idea is inherently less worthwhile than an original one (even if you grant the premise that this diversity shit is about originality, which it isn't) is inherently flawed, because execution matters more than innovation. We don't judge these things by "how new is the idea?" We judge them by "how fun are they?"

It goes on from there, but quite frankly this is where I ran out of patience, because it was clear that there's absolutely nothing of value here. It's not until near the end of the article that it even begins talking about how this is actually supposed to be used in play, and even then it's entirely predicated on the idea that this is all going to help marginalized people in real life, contributing to a more just, more inclusive, more diverse society, which is so fucking stupid it makes me want to scream. This is how you help make a better world? By writing shit for fucking D&D?

This is why SJWs are complete and utter lunatics. Because they insist on bringing the culture war into everything, mostly by saying that it was already there, while the rest of us just want to play our fucking games and relax for a little while.