It occurred to me that the main thing holding back the Wokification of all media products is what we might call anthropological realism. This includes TRPGs. Film and television period pieces still grasp at casting actors who look like lovers of historical accuracy would expect them to look, e.g., all those White young men on the beach in the film Dunkirk. If this anthropological realism is ever abandoned, which is the direction we're going in, we can expect every media product to look like it was generated by Google Gemini.

Correct me if I'm wrong: Tolkien was the one who introduced anthropological realism into fantasy literature. Before that we had legends and myths and fairy tales, but the grand idea of a Secondary World complete with legendarium, songs, languages, lineages, religions (of a kind), creation myths, and verisimilar histories, didn't exist until he literally wrote the book on it.

TRPGs trace their ancestry to D&D, which was heavily influenced by Tolkien, as we all know. But, there the seeds of their destruction were sown. By making fairy tales anthropologically realistic, the stage was set for inserting Boasian anthropology and Wokism into the literature. The biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins, the ontological reality of good and evil, and the ignorance of ecological ramifications of fantasy elements, we must count down to destruction, as the real-world, contemporary opinions of these things arrogate all gamerdom.

That is, by making our TRPG worlds as, or more, realistic at Tolkien's in their ecologies, and ontological and anthropological assumptions, we open the door to the presently fashionable political agendas on these things that end up removing their fairy tale underpinnings.

This crushes the spirit of the games. If we can't have good versus evil, or wicked categories of monsters, or sexism, or unmixed races, then we can't have fairy tales, legends, and myths that transcend anthropology and connect themselves with real-life foundational histories.

This is not to object to media products being transformed into propaganda. I'd agree that they're already always propaganda. Refusing to indoctrinate someone is indoctrinating them into neutrality, just as refusing to teach children religion is teaching them nullifidianism. The Wokists have that right: most everything reinforces one political narrative or other.

The problem is that the traditionalist European narrative is what is being effaced, and if you're like most gamers, this means that your culture is on the chopping block. White, straight, sexed-normal, Christian, phallologoic, Euro-cultural elements have to go, or be queered or race-mixed or otherwise tortured and mutilated into something other than what they are, not for the sake of improving the game, or reinforcing a healthy Western Euroculture, but in order to score political points for those who hate you--a ruined and terrible form of fiction.

Anthropological realism, now informed by Woke socio-anthropology, has become the undoing of gaming. We're at the point where many young people aren't even aware of the "damsel in distress" trope. Trained by Tolkien to cultivate our sophisticated Secondary Worlds, we lose sight of the very fairy tales, legends, and mythologies that tell us to slay the Woke dragon that seeks to eat us.

So, Tolkien giveth and Tolkien taketh away. Resisters can play in their Aral Seas or Lake Chads of traditionalist gaming, but so long as the political winds blow Woke, they're going to continue to evaporate. The nature of TRPGs as anthropologically realistic obscures the fact that the fairy tale foundations in the minds of youth have been prestidigitated away.

Saving gaming from Woke cultural desertification requires rerouting a veritable Congo river's worth of cultural assumptions, including how we look at gaming itself.

Greetings!

As I recall, the saying is "Politics is downstream from Culture." I forgot who first coined the expression.

Still, this all is absolutely a total culture war. Woke must be totally crushed and destroyed. If the Culture War cannot be won, then everything under the umbrella of "Culture" will continue to be corrupted and or destroyed. The TTRPG gaming hobby will be the least of our worries. It too though, will be corrupted and destroyed, just like every other aspect of our culture.

Tolkien is not at fault for anything. The problem is with the Marxist, Woke scum. They are the filthy, diseased rats, threatening to devour everything in society.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

QuoteThis is not to object to media products being transformed into propaganda. I'd agree that they're already always propaganda. Refusing to indoctrinate someone is indoctrinating them into neutrality, just as refusing to teach children religion is teaching them nullifidianism. The Wokists have that right: most everything reinforces one political narrative or other.

I would beg to differ on this one, and I think it's better to approach this from a Christian Apologetics angle than from politics or the history of gaming. I will try to circle back after I make my point.

There's one key difference between Atheism and Theism. If you push the Atheistic universe to it's conclusion, you must assume that logic, mathematics, and ethics are self-assembling.  If you push the Theistic universe to its logical conclusion, these could be self-assembling, but it is more consistent with the universe for them to be directly provided by God.

The problem is that since the 1930s and Godel's theorems of incompleteness, we have known that mathematics especially doesn't fit into neat self-assembling boxes. Without this, ethics and epistemology follow suit. This is why pseudoscientific ethics typically resort to non-answers like survival and reproduction and secular ethics fall apart under scrutiny. In this sense I think that it's more accurate to say that as our culture abandoned Christian ethical ideals, it lost the moral fiber to resist Marxism. Marxism also failed--it became Wokeness by switched away from economic arguments to racial and gender arguments--but because the Christian moral authority was exiled from public life and there were were no other moral authorities to call it out, Marxism evolved into Wokism.

And here we come to the rub; Christianity is getting targeted by the Woke because it retains the moral authority to call Wokism out. No one else really does.

So, no, I don't agree with the sentiment that teaching children nothing is actually teaching them nullifidianism. You either teach children functional worldviews or you don't. And if you didn't, chances are they will become Woke, not because they actually believe any of the ideas, but because the only thing which is real to them is the opinions of their peers.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMThe biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins, the ontological reality of good and evil, and the ignorance of ecological ramifications of fantasy elements, we must count down to destruction, as the real-world, contemporary opinions of these things arrogate all gamerdom.

The difference is that nothing in Middle Earth that had its origins in the thought of Eru Ilúvatar COULD be inherently evil (aka Biological Essentialism). Not even 'Satan', aka Melkor, was evil in his beginning. The only creatures that probably were inherently evil were Ungoliant and her spawn (Shelob, etc). That means Orks were not inherently evil since there is enough evidence they were a combination of lesser Maia, Drúedain (Woses) and other Men from their very inception. This partly gets into Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth and The Tale of Adanel which explains a version of the Fall of Man, as recounted in Morgoth's Ring.

Ungoliant is one of the most mysterious of the beings in Middle Earth since she was obviously not a Maia (despite how Iron Crown Enterprises wrote her up), but more an 'Anti-Tom Bombadil', who is himself probably the living embodiment of The Music of the Ainur. Ungoliant (as the best theory to date) is the Discord of Melkor given form, but lacking a Fëa (ie - a soul).

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMCorrect me if I'm wrong: Tolkien was the one who introduced anthropological realism into fantasy literature. Before that we had legends and myths and fairy tales, but the grand idea of a Secondary World complete with legendarium, songs, languages, lineages, religions (of a kind), creation myths, and verisimilar histories, didn't exist until he literally wrote the book on it.

TRPGs trace their ancestry to D&D, which was heavily influenced by Tolkien, as we all know. But, there the seeds of their destruction were sown. By making fairy tales anthropologically realistic, the stage was set for inserting Boasian anthropology and Wokism into the literature. The biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins, the ontological reality of good and evil, and the ignorance of ecological ramifications of fantasy elements, we must count down to destruction, as the real-world, contemporary opinions of these things arrogate all gamerdom.

That is, by making our TRPG worlds as, or more, realistic at Tolkien's in their ecologies, and ontological and anthropological assumptions, we open the door to the presently fashionable political agendas on these things that end up removing their fairy tale underpinnings.

I generally avoid the world of Lit-Crit if I can, so you'll have to pardon me if I misread the terms here.

If by "anthropological realism" you mean writing fantasy as if it was history, that goes back to at least Robert E Howard. As early as the late 1920s and early 30s he was already casting his Thurian and Hyborean ages as a prospective or alternative history of prehistoric Earth. The word "Legendarium" rarely gets used for anyone other than Tolkien, but the first one in modern literature is almost certainly the Cthulhu Mythos as created by Lovecraft, Derleth, Howard etc. in the 30s.

If you mean applying that realistic approach to fairytale creature like elves, trolls and so forth, then it's a stronger attribution to Tolkien, but it's worth noting that other authors were moving in the same direction at the same time. Poul Anderson is the obvious example. Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953, expanded/republished in 1961) casts elves and dwarfs in science-fiction terms, with nebulous scientific reasons for why they are the way they are. The Broken Sword (1954) keeps more to fairytale/mythic logic, but still takes what could be argued to be a relatively realistic approach by delving into the politics and culture of elves and trolls. But even C.S. Lewis could be argued to have been moving in that direction with the way he treats creatures like fauns and dwarfs in the Narnia series. I haven't read Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924), but from what I've heard, it's possible the approach has its roots that far back.

This is relevant, because both the 20s/30s pulp witers like Lovecraft, Howard and Derleth, and the 50s/60s ones like Poul Anderson are inspirations expressly cited by the creators of D&D. It's highly speculative, but I think it's reasonable to say that even without Tolkien's influence, D&D might have emerged in a substantially similar form to the one we actually got.

I also think it's a bit unfair to Tolkien to assert that Middle Earth is anthropologically realistic. Middle Earth is highly detailed, but its style and themes are still firmly grounded in the fairytale and mythic traditions. This is more clear in The Hobbit and The Silmarillion than it is in The Lord of the Rings, but even then it's still the case. Tolkien's background was as a professor of languages with a specialty in Anglo-Saxon literature. He famously despised allegory and was not charitable when asked about realist writers like Frank Herbert.

The development of a "realist" perspective on things like elves and orcs is I think more fairly laid at the feet of writers that followed Tolkien without understanding him. Though he doesn't use elves in his books, the best example is George R.R. Martin asking what Aragorn's tax policy is, obviously not understanding why the question is entirely irrelevant. Sadly, I have to say that Gary Gygax and Ed Greenwood are probably major contributors to this, as the needs of developing a game world require that you look at things like social organization and economics, where a novelist doesn't need to.

At the end of the day, Wokists are going to find an entry point into anything. The non-Tolkien school of fantasy novelists generally come from a more science-fiction or historical-fiction influenced background. That approach is, if anything, even easier insert a Woke crowbar into, since it has a greater implied grounding in real world logic. Absent Tolkien's influence, I think it likely that fantasy literature develops more heavily into a rationalist approach rather than a fairytale one.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMThe biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins,

The thing that people who compare the idea of evil orcs to biological essentialism can't grasp is that fantasy worlds do not necessarily follow biological or evolutionary principles.  Things can be as they are for other reasons.  The supernatural is real and evident.  Races can be created by gods or other supernatural beings, not evolved.  Dragons didn't evolve in LotR.  They aren't biological organisms.  They were magical creatures created by Morgoth to be weapons.  Orcs weren't naturally occurring organisms.  They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers.  Biology was not a factor.     

Bearing in mind that they are censoring Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl, no, I don't really think Tolkien set us up for anything.

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 09:54:41 PMOrcs weren't naturally occurring organisms.  They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers.  Biology was not a factor.

Well, no. Orks were biological. They 'multiplied after the manner of the Children of Eru' after all. Its just they were genetically manipulated Men.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMIt occurred to me that the main thing holding back the Wokification of all media products is what we might call anthropological realism. This includes TRPGs. Film and television period pieces still grasp at casting actors who look like lovers of historical accuracy would expect them to look, e.g., all those White young men on the beach in the film Dunkirk. If this anthropological realism is ever abandoned, which is the direction we're going in, we can expect every media product to look like it was generated by Google Gemini.

Correct me if I'm wrong: Tolkien was the one who introduced anthropological realism into fantasy literature. Before that we had legends and myths and fairy tales, but the grand idea of a Secondary World complete with legendarium, songs, languages, lineages, religions (of a kind), creation myths, and verisimilar histories, didn't exist until he literally wrote the book on it.

TRPGs trace their ancestry to D&D, which was heavily influenced by Tolkien, as we all know. But, there the seeds of their destruction were sown. By making fairy tales anthropologically realistic, the stage was set for inserting Boasian anthropology and Wokism into the literature. The biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins, the ontological reality of good and evil, and the ignorance of ecological ramifications of fantasy elements, we must count down to destruction, as the real-world, contemporary opinions of these things arrogate all gamerdom.

That is, by making our TRPG worlds as, or more, realistic at Tolkien's in their ecologies, and ontological and anthropological assumptions, we open the door to the presently fashionable political agendas on these things that end up removing their fairy tale underpinnings.

This crushes the spirit of the games. If we can't have good versus evil, or wicked categories of monsters, or sexism, or unmixed races, then we can't have fairy tales, legends, and myths that transcend anthropology and connect themselves with real-life foundational histories.

This is not to object to media products being transformed into propaganda. I'd agree that they're already always propaganda. Refusing to indoctrinate someone is indoctrinating them into neutrality, just as refusing to teach children religion is teaching them nullifidianism. The Wokists have that right: most everything reinforces one political narrative or other.

The problem is that the traditionalist European narrative is what is being effaced, and if you're like most gamers, this means that your culture is on the chopping block. White, straight, sexed-normal, Christian, phallologoic, Euro-cultural elements have to go, or be queered or race-mixed or otherwise tortured and mutilated into something other than what they are, not for the sake of improving the game, or reinforcing a healthy Western Euroculture, but in order to score political points for those who hate you--a ruined and terrible form of fiction.

Anthropological realism, now informed by Woke socio-anthropology, has become the undoing of gaming. We're at the point where many young people aren't even aware of the "damsel in distress" trope. Trained by Tolkien to cultivate our sophisticated Secondary Worlds, we lose sight of the very fairy tales, legends, and mythologies that tell us to slay the Woke dragon that seeks to eat us.

So, Tolkien giveth and Tolkien taketh away. Resisters can play in their Aral Seas or Lake Chads of traditionalist gaming, but so long as the political winds blow Woke, they're going to continue to evaporate. The nature of TRPGs as anthropologically realistic obscures the fact that the fairy tale foundations in the minds of youth have been prestidigitated away.

Saving gaming from Woke cultural desertification requires rerouting a veritable Congo river's worth of cultural assumptions, including how we look at gaming itself.

Before I touch this subject, I'd like you to define "anthropological realism" because I have not been able to find a definition online.

Quote from: SHARK on April 22, 2024, 03:55:16 PMGreetings!

As I recall, the saying is "Politics is downstream from Culture." I forgot who first coined the expression.

Still, this all is absolutely a total culture war. Woke must be totally crushed and destroyed. If the Culture War cannot be won, then everything under the umbrella of "Culture" will continue to be corrupted and or destroyed. The TTRPG gaming hobby will be the least of our worries. It too though, will be corrupted and destroyed, just like every other aspect of our culture.

Tolkien is not at fault for anything. The problem is with the Marxist, Woke scum. They are the filthy, diseased rats, threatening to devour everything in society.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Greetings SHARK,

What's our basis for opposing Wokism? Is it liberal democracy/secularism/socially contracted human rights, Christianity, fascism, Neo-platonism, or what? If we lack a firm foundation, how can we save the house from the flood?

Neoplatonist1

Quote from: jeff37923 on April 22, 2024, 11:46:37 PM

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMIt occurred to me that the main thing holding back the Wokification of all media products is what we might call anthropological realism...

Before I touch this subject, I'd like you to define "anthropological realism" because I have not been able to find a definition online.

As ForgottenF put it above, (1) writing fantasy as if it were history, to which I'd add (2) employing races, sexes, cultures, and religions logically as derived from the inspiring mythos or cultures from which the given fantasy comes.

It doesn't make sense to have Africans in Rohan, for example. In fact it defeats the whole purpose. LotR is a European fantasy, the Rohan are an Anglo-Saxon horse culture; the other races of man are geographically and culturally peripheral.

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 09:54:41 PM

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMThe biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins,

The thing that people who compare the idea of evil orcs to biological essentialism can't grasp is that fantasy worlds do not necessarily follow biological or evolutionary principles.  Things can be as they are for other reasons.  The supernatural is real and evident.  Races can be created by gods or other supernatural beings, not evolved.  Dragons didn't evolve in LotR.  They aren't biological organisms.  They were magical creatures created by Morgoth to be weapons.  Orcs weren't naturally occurring organisms.  They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers.  Biology was not a factor.     

It's a good point--dragons in fairy tales have hearts, blood, and bones, but no cells or DNA, because no one in fairy tales has cells or DNA.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 23, 2024, 12:23:34 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 09:54:41 PM

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMThe biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins,

The thing that people who compare the idea of evil orcs to biological essentialism can't grasp is that fantasy worlds do not necessarily follow biological or evolutionary principles.  Things can be as they are for other reasons.  The supernatural is real and evident.  Races can be created by gods or other supernatural beings, not evolved.  Dragons didn't evolve in LotR.  They aren't biological organisms.  They were magical creatures created by Morgoth to be weapons.  Orcs weren't naturally occurring organisms.  They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers.  Biology was not a factor.     

It's a good point--dragons in fairy tales have hearts, blood, and bones, but no cells or DNA, because no one in fairy tales has cells or DNA.

They're also a biological impossibility. The wingspan is never anywhere near enough to lift the mass, and they couldn't possibly intake enough calories to power their fire-breath, etc.

There's a bit in Three Hearts and Three Lions where the hero blows up a dragon by causing a backdraft with its fire breath. I want to say he throws water in its mouth to produce a a steam backup or something, but it's been a while. That's what I meant by approaching fantasy creatures with science fiction logic. There's another bit where the book explains away a giant's treasure being cursed by radiation released due to the process of the giant turning to stone when it dies. That sort of thing would never fly in a pure fairy tale.

Quote from: ForgottenF on April 23, 2024, 12:44:45 AMThey're also a biological impossibility. The wingspan is never anywhere near enough to lift the mass, and they couldn't possibly intake enough calories to power their fire-breath, etc.

Biologically impossible, yes, but not spiritually impossible, particularly if you've been listening to Tucker lately.

That's basically the route I took with my dragons as well, they're spirits who have chosen to take on the form of dragons because it fits their natures. They can fly and breathe fire because, to a spiritual entity, gravity and thermodynamics are more like suggestions than hard rules (the same with the square cube law).

Take it a step further and it is the virtues of the hero that can slay it; the virtuous knight or brave peasant boy can slay what even an army could not.

I reject the premise. Tolkien is just one of many in the field, often from pulp, that elevated the speculative fiction genre with a mash-up of respected classic literary forms. And respected classic literary forms rarely started out so "classic" and were often an experimentation of their own (e.g. "The Tale of Genji" breaks all sorts of classical novel conventions). Thus the development of literature is not a finite, stilted, classified corpus, but a breathing corpus of many inspirations still exploring.

RPGs is just a gaming off-shoot from this bored literati playing with literary entertainment forms old and new. And it too has birthed its own corpus of ideas and molds and breaking of said molds. This latest disestablishmentarianism (triple word score!) is naught but the cycle of disenchanted creativity trying to find breathing room upon the soil by burning the flora atop in a fit of pique. Nothing new, nothing profound, no real revolution.

So who are we rebelling against? And can these new creators create without iconoclastic rebellion? What are they then truly beyond the revolution... nothing? The revolution eats all its children...