SJW RPG And Other Acronyms

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness is coming out again, released by Palladium Books. You know, TMNT&OS was the first Palladium game I ever played -- even before I got into Robotech. It was a Palladium game, which means the mechanics were ... ehh, but it was fun, and really - that's all that mattered at the time.

They picked perhaps one of the worst streaming groups to announce this, however -- it's a group that's veering heavily on the Right, and is definitely not LGBT friendly. I won't go into too much detail, except to say that it's enough I'm not going to back the Kickstarter, and I won't be picking up the book.

Palladium, of course, has had a history -- between calling gays and trans folk 'sexual deviants', and being fairly racist in some of their game books (RIFTS Africa being an example), there's a lot there to keep people away from Palladium if they care about that kind of thing.

In the 80s, when I was a teen?  I didn't know better.  AIDS wasn't an epidemic yet, and there wasn't much to tell you about being gay, or trans, or anything else for that matter - sex ed wasn't still way behind, and I was pretty damn naive. I didn't really know what being 'gay' meant, and had no idea what 'trans' was - didn't know what a lesbian was, and had no idea what being bisexual meant (let alone non-binary, gender fluid, or anything else for that matter). There were the odd gay jokes - but the fact was I didn't 'get' them that much, either. All I knew was being gay meant kissing people of the same sex -- and really that's about it. Adults in this day and age really have no excuse, and there's enough out there that proper sex-ed should be taught in schools.

So what's this got to do with gaming?

Let's start with something simple: there's certain communities that make people who enjoy OSR look real bad. They the kind of people who complain about people who want to allow wheelchairs in D&D (why not? They existed as far back as ancient China). They complain when women are given positions of power in games and aren't treated as cheesecake. They complain when there's 'too many' people of colour in fantasy games, or the games focus on groups that aren't your typical European White groups. They're the people who complain when a company makes a game and says 'what if Europe failed to colonize the Americas?'

They complain about SJWs 'ruining' gaming. As if allowing for the full spectrum of the human experience in gaming is, somehow, 'bad'.

These are the people who made 'the red list' -- a list of gaming companies who 'put politics into gaming' - by, you know, making gaming about more than white guys. They come up with all these excuses as to why gaming shouldn't open its doors to other groups -- that it's checking off the list, that it's taking away from real roleplaying, that it's 'SJW nonsense' or catering or whatever.

Here's the thing. Gaming's come a long, long way from its roots in the 70s. That's not a bad thing. And you can totally go old school with dungeon crawls and whatever. I like old school gaming to a certain degree -- where you have to be on your toes, where insta-death can be a thing, where you roll your attributes and hit points and there's no 'death saves' or whatever. Where a Level 1 PC group can run into a nest of 100 goblins.... to me that's fun.

However, I also think the table should be open to everyone, and the game should reflect that diversity. A campaign setting that puts you in Africa and has you deal with the different cultures and mythologies of that continent? Sure. Not a single white guy to be seen? No issue. Oh, how about black people in middle-ages Fantasy Not-Europe? Sure, why not? That's not far-fetched. Oh, there's gays? Non-binary? There's trans folk? Sure, why not? There's people missing hands, or blind, or confined to a wheelchair, and don't want to have this simply 'fixed'? Why not?

What's wrong with running the gamut, and allowing everyone to feel welcome at the table?

"Politics has no place at the gaming table."

I'm sorry, but it's always been at the gaming table. It just happened to be politics you agreed with.

Dungeons and Dragons. Had Christian Saints and had Devils and Demons named from Christian mythology. (Yeah, Baalzebub, etc? Totally mythology). They had holy knights, and cleric spells which pulled from miracles. That is political -- it puts Christianity into the game and sets it above anything else.

The vast, vast, vast majority of characters were white, and male. The women were in chainmail bikinis or were the damsels in distress needing to be rescued. And let's not forget that in AD&D 1e, women were not allowed to have more than 17 Strength.

That's political.

And the main goal in gaming? Going into other lands, slaying the natives en masse, and taking their stuff, if not outright conquering the region and setting up shop there as a ruler. The opposition? Primitive, backwards, evil creatures that breed like rabbits and who are inherently evil and the anathema of civilization.

That's political.

And these people wonder why that's called racist? They don't see the parallels? They say 'it's just fantasy' and that people are reading too much into it?

D&D, from the get-go, was a colonial RPG. Humans were the best, the majority of the characters were white, and male, there were strong Christian symbolism in the game, and you went out and crushed other civilizations who were too barbaric to live and took over their lands.

We've come a long way from that, but too often I can still see the roots. And when a game company veers away from that baseline, people scream about the company giving into SJWs or bringing politics into gaming.

It's always been there.

Those people who 'can't identify' with non-white or non-male characters in a game? How about the people who can't identify with playing white, male characters? Aren't they allowed to feel represented too?

I had the excuse in the 1980s that I didn't know better. Palladium had less of an excuse, but again 80s, not much education out there. In the modern age? There's absolutely no excuse for dealing with a gaming mentality stuck in the 80s and 70s when it comes to representation and accepting minorities and the LGBT community. Simply acknowledging these people exist and that it's okay shouldn't produce this kind of hue and cry.

That's my beef.
And if you don't want it at your table -- fine. Don't have it at your table.
But shut the fuck up about it existing, and other people wanting representation.

Just because these people don't want it doesn't mean 1) it shouldn't exist, and 2) nobody else should have it, either.

Or, on the other hand - sure, tell us. It tells us what games we shouldn't be buying - because any company that supports that kind of mentality doesn't deserve to be in the business.

In the Way

Samantha

Nothing ends the day like feeling like you're an inconvenience in someone else's life. Being reminded how much you have to depend on others just to be able to have anything resembling a normal life - being able to do normal things.  Being more than just an afterthought.

Everyone who actually thinks about me as me lives in another province, or another fucking country. The people around me? If I disappeared for a few months, I doubt they'd even notice. Hell, I could probably fall off the planet and I think maybe one person might notice, because that one person actually takes the time to reach out and talk to me from time to time.

I pointed out my little brother, Daryl, is neglected all the time. When he does come up, he's met with behave or no. The kid can't get a break, because there's nobody who's really interested in the same things he's interested in, or has the time to just sit down and play with him and talk with him.  He's got a few toys now, but they 'take up space' and have to be put away for more adult things, so he gets discouraged and just ... stops playing.

Really.  I just want a stable relationship, and friends who see me for me, not as a +1 to Kit's life.  I want to be able to go do things with friends, without feeling like I'm being a burden for simply existing and wanting things.

And I was having such a good weekend, too.

Equal Rights to Existence

 Samantha here, and I've got opinions.

So, a friend of mine mentioned they have a tulpa.

Someone else was personally offended at the very thought.  They don't believe tulpa are people.  They consider tulpa to be a personal affront to people with DID and schizophrenia (which they have both). Kit took exception to that - but his beef was that this personal verbally attacked the other person.

Then they got offended he took the side of the tulpa.

My opinion is sharper. Nobody gets to decide who's a person and who's not a person. That this was dragged started in a public forum with an attack on someone else pisses me off.  If you've got this kind of opinion, you don't drag it out in public - and shouldn't feel affronted if people take exception to you going on the attack.

I've been on the pointy end of the 'you shouldn't exist' and 'you don't exist' not to take this personally. No, nobody gets to say 'you don't exist'. I don't care what kind of trauma you had, you don't get to project it onto other people in front of everyone and not expect some backlash.

Dysphoria

Samantha

Had a series of dysphoric dreams, one after another after another.

Started with me trying a semi-permanent make-up like thing to try to look more feminine, then going into a washroom to pee - and a friend of mine (Zoly) opening the door on me, leaving it open for the public to see me.  So, was hanging out with Zoly and a few others (including a friend named Dana), and she was surprised to see me.  And when I asked if I looked good, she was honest and said 'no', it looks terrible.

Then, I got an e-mail, inviting me to go to an event - if you can give a good reason, they had a means for altering how you looked.  So I hurried there, only to find out it was for people who had taken part in a kind of 'break and win' lottery system.  They were nice enough to give me a ticket to 'be there', and they started showing a film about locally grown fruit and stuff - and I recognized the background music and the voice actor for it.  But ... the video was somewhat trans-unfriendly, so I left.  I needed to find a place to go to the bathroom - wanted to use the woman's stall, but couldn't ... and couldn't find a bathroom anywhere.  Came across Cat and mom, who were there to see me.

Finally found a bathroom, and started scraping the make-up off with some of the face cloths they had here - it was a fitness center, and it felt really hard to find privacy while I did that.  Another friend, (Terrel) was there from the US with family, to celebrate a brother's birthday, but at least he was being supportive, but the make-up was almost impossible to scrape and rub off.

I woke up feeling very dissatisfied with myself and the world as a whole, though..

The Tulpa Experiment

Samantha:  Tonight, my brother made his first attempt at turning me into a tulpa.  It was an a literal thought-experiment, the idea of giving me my own body, my own voice, my own presence, that was completely separate from his.

You see, we recently learned what a tulpa was.  It's kinda like a combination of self-hypnosis, along with some honest-to-the-goddess summoning techniques.  The idea is that you create a thought-form of the entity you want, and then you shape the appearance, the personality, and then you train your thought form into thinking as an individual, apart from yourself.

Or, in our case, we create the visualization, and I try to inhabit it.

We've got a bit of a headache / neck-ache, and the first run didn't go as well as we could.  It's actually pretty damn hard for our brother to achieve a hypnotic state - in three tries so far, it's only worked once.  But we're gonna try to plug at it until it works, to see what results we get.  I really want to get my own body, even if it's made of imagination.  It's more than what I've got now, and if it helps me to break off and be more independent, that's awesome.

The one thing that kinda worries me - does this mean losing my online presence, or do I have to work through my siblings?  Dunno.

If You Can't Control the Others..

Samantha:  Kit got some flack from our earlier post.  It may have cost him at least one friendship.  I'm not going to go into too much detail, because the drama-llama is not why I'm writing tonight.  No, this is about a thing that was said to Kit - and peripherally, related to how some people among his friends and family relate to us - or fail to.

"Well, if you can't control the others, talk to them."

The thing is, Kit does talk to us.  We talk to each other.  That's part of the bargain with Legion - we have to talk with one another to co-exist.  Without communication, we'd be like in the bad old days - the days when I didn't exist.  When Kit was curled up in a ball in his room, screaming for the "others" to stop talking to him, and for Shawn to stop trying to torment him.

We talk.  We argue.  We debate.  Communication with us is pretty quick usually.  Sometimes we agree, and sometimes we don't.  Sometimes we try to find common ground, and sometimes one or more of us will dig in our heels to get our way.  Control?  No, that's not how we function.  Do you control your brother and your sister?  Do you control your friends?  No.  You can talk with them, or argue with them, or try to find some sort of middle ground with them, but you don't control them.

Kit doesn't control us.  Nor should he try.  The only time we try to "control" anyone, is when we're dealing with Dark, and he's deciding to come up at a bad time.  And that isn't "control", that's us clinging to him and preventing him from manifesting - and that's something that takes all of us together to do.  And if he is on one of his more persistent attempts, that's a delaying tactic - not something we tend to succeed at.

This blog here?  This was a gift from Kit to us.  It was something where we could write about how we feel, what we think, and how we react to the world around us.  We don't get many ways to voice our thoughts, or to interact with the world around us, but this is our space, and we can use it however we want.  Kit can say he's uncomfortable with what we write - and that's fine, but that's all he's allowed to do.  Anything else would be censorship.  And that would be a betrayal of our trust.

Sadly, Kit gets flack sometimes for things we do.  Some people just don't comprehend - I'm not him.  He's not me.  What I value isn't necessarily what he values.  And what Kit values is definitely not what Shawn values.  So yes, I'm going to continue to speak my mind here, and I'm going to be thankful Kit gave me this kind of space to talk.  I'm sad that he's taking the blame for things he's not said, and I'm sad he's losing some of his friends over this, but I think that's more a statement about his friends, and not him.

Shawn:  I don't have much to add.  Not related to this anyway.  Funny enough, related to this kind of thing, I sent off an e-mail.  I think it was my very first e-mail, ever.  I had to use Kit's e-mail to do it, since it is kind of obvious I'd not have my own e-mail address.  I'm not as chatty as the rest of the group are.  I didn't get a reply.  That was probably for the best, the conversation would have turned decidedly unpleasant if I had, I bet.  But I needed to drive a point home.  Doubt it worked.

But yeah.  Short form.  I'm me.  She's she.  He's he.  If I sign my name to something, that makes it mine.  If she signs her name to something, that makes it hers.  If he signs his name to something, that makes it his.  And you know what?  It's fucking insulting when that's ignored.  It's even more fucking insulting when we're talking to someone, and they decided to ignore us and talk about us in the third person.  But yeah, maybe some people are thick.