"But they wouldn't just steal Jeffro's work without crediting him!"
My brother in Christ, their fellow travelers in TV and film do this routinely, and Cultists in RPGs treat RPGs as a Farm League and IP hothouse for other media.
the netflix show 1899 is a ripoff of black silence, a comic from 2016 by the brazilian comic book artist, @marycagnin.
— hourly nanami (@hourly_nanami) November 20, 2022
she was invited to europe in 2017 where she presented it. her entire story was plagiarized in the new netflix show. and they gave her no credits whatsoever. pic.twitter.com/O8EPpSZNmX
The Hellmouth has long been all about pulling off this stunt, and only rarely is it even acknowledged let alone (partially) remedied. (That's before "Hollywood accounting".)
While the motive remains more Mammon than Molech, the effect--that the masses know the Hellmouth knockoff and not the superior original--remains the case. Even when it's all very legal and (more or less) above-board, such as with anime and tokukatsu adaptations. In the literary world, this would be The Witcher eclipsing Elric.
The aim to do this to Jeffro and the #BROSR is to achieve this effect. The Cultists in tabletop RPGs have a narrative to push in pursuit of a larger objective. That narrative relies on popular myths being unchallenged, and the #BROSR not only challenged those myths but proved them completely false with copious recepits. Removing Wrongthink that threatens this narrative protects their interests.
If you do not even know that an altnerative exists, you cannot access it; you cannot act on a thought that you do not have, and you cannot think a thought that you do not conceive of because you aren't even aware of the possibility.
That's what these Memory-Hole operations are about. It works; describe Elric as a white-haired mercenary swordsman that is skilled at dealing with monsters and magic who wields a special sword to someone and you get "Witcher" most of the time. Ask someone to describe Conan and you'll get the Arnie movie version, not Howard's original.
It is this mythology around RPGs that first allowed the lie that they are a narrative medium to arise, and without that lie the Cult can't execute its RPG-as-Propaganda scheme by way of exploiting the rampant consumerism that the same RPG mythology fostered.
The mythology that put all responsibility on the Game Master, overloading him and thus creating the conditions to sell him solutions to problems he otherwise would not have, which is the root of RPG Consumerism. "Buy this module and be ready to play instantly! Buy this supplement to expand your monster library! Buy this (X) to do (Y) for you!"
The #BROSR's recovery of what was lost destroys all of this by restoring the workload balance of the game to a proper distribution among all participants, fosters perpetual playable content creation in-house because all players can and should contribute (this is a big part of Patron Play), and creates a pro-social environment of collaboration with a large group of people instead of isolated cells connected only to Big Publisher.
It's the difference between the practical anarchism of a small town (#BROSR) vs. the Bugman madness of urbanite corporate pod-dwellers (like most of who got fired from Twitter) and their dependence on fragile big infrastructure networks (SJW D&D).
Yes, once you get into the second and third-order effects, it gets that big. The Cult senses this, which is why they are attacking as they are.
Unfortunately for them, they already lost the ability to stop the #BROSR from broadcasting the signal. As the OSR gets the memo, they'll come on-side, after which the momentum will build to an inevitable conclusion of victory.
It will just cost the "industry" its worthless existence, and people will instead either (a) become like the Pundit (able to live well in Uruguay on his work) or (b) become like Gonnerman (do it as a self-sustaining side project), which is where a hobby pursuit belongs.
The Elric - Witcher comparison is not a good one.
ReplyDeleteNo one is trying to memory hole Elric. The reality is that outside of certain geek/S&S circles, Elric is just not popular. At all.
Elric is just being eclipsed by a better character that is more heroic and relatable.
Sapkowski took tropes from a lot of sources for his Witcher books. His Depictions of Dragons & Doppelgangers are straight out of the AD&D monster manual. In fact, a lot of his stuff comes from D&D, Tolkien, mixed with classic fairytales, and native Polish folklore thrown into the mix.
The popularity of the Witcher vs Elric is no different than what happened with Batman vs The Shadow. Batman also is taken from many sources; Scarlet Pimpernel, Spring-heeled jack, Zorro, and especially The Shadow. Kane and Finger stole from the Shadow like motherfuckers.
The Batman eclipsed the Shadow because he is simply a more relatable hero to a wider audience. The same with the Witcher.
If anything Elric has always gotten an advantageous boost over other S&S creations by continually being available in print since his first publication in spite of better loved characters like Conan going out of print for years at a time. A very curious phenomenon, until one accounts for Moorcocks outspoken politics, and the convergence of the publishing industry. Moorcock is just the kind of deconstructionist leftist that the hellmouth loves to promote.
The only reason we have the Witcher is because it came out of Poland. And a Polish videogame developer took a chance and scored. If Sapkowski was an American author, the Witcher would be a short story anthology footnote at best.
And as we have seen with all things that are cool ,and have a wide appeal: the hellmouth will subvert them. We have seen it with the Netfilx series treatment of the Witcher source material, and now that the original dev team is gone, we will see a further deconstruction with the next Witcher videogame made with ESG money.
So yeah, Sapkowski took the few actual cool bits from Elric, and put them in an actual hero that people like. So what. By that standard the Gygax and Tolkien estates should be getting a royalty cut from him as well.
Moorcock ‘fans’ are just butthurt that he got out-penned by a guy whos’ first Witcher story came in 3rd place in a local magazine competition.