Narrative Warfare: Telling The Table To Stop Taking The Abuse

Coming one more time before the New Year, the Pundit talks about the consequences of the deliberate destruction of culture.

Being Gen-X, I've seen this happen first-hand.

The degradation of the population's comprehension of allegory and metaphor was already apparent when I was in high school 30 years ago, and it's only gotten worse in the decades since, but boy has the degradation become obvious in the last decade as the void left by the dearth of cultural literacy got replaced by the Death Cult's creed. What the Pundit goes on about--the poseur tell of being incapable of seeing non-humans in terms of either allegory or metaphor and play into the themes of represented thereby--has been a weaponized meme used to push Narrative attacks against the entire hobby and its counterparts in other media.

The consequences of this subversion are now apparent, and so are the reactions- primarily in the creation, propigation, and movement towards clones of the big brands of the scene that take up what the converged companies abandon (and reap the benefits thereof). The Cult persists in converging what they can, and choking off what they can't, seething when they can do neither.

Rather than just complain, it's time to point people to the alternatives now arising in abundance to satisfy this unfulfilled demand.

What is increasingly happening is that people such as myself are telling the frustrated that they don't have to put up with the converged companies abuse of their good will, that they have options, and that their hobbies are not at all tied to those busted brands. People like Commissar Garza spread the good word about 3D Printing so others can stop putting up with the abuse of converged miniature pushers, people like me tell others about alternatives to converged games, and we all spread the word about destroying the commercial scene to resuce the hobby from the Death Cult.

In short, do a Return To Monke strategy; destroying the commercial viability of the hobby's businesses in favor of preserving the hobby itself, flushing out the poseurs that make up all of the Death Cultists that matter (and most of those involved at all) as they are bottom-feeding locusts ever chasing easy money and the clout it enables. Flush the cash and the clout goes with it.

People like the Pundit, believe it or not, are actually beneficiaries of such a move and not just due to having a Patreon account; the other word going around is about whom gamers can reliably find clean product from, and Pundit is clean as fresh-fallen snow in untouched wilderness. Sure, he makes a living doing this; he's made the best moves that a man can to make this work given the current and near-future conditions of tabletop gaming, so even if all the converged companies collapse he'll be solid and more than able to live decently off his TRPG catalog alone.

No one's coming to save us, so we have to save what we value ourselves or it won't be saved at all. Do your fellow hobbyists a favor, and point those willing to heed you to alternatives that are not pozzed; we're not taking the abuse, and they don't have to either.