The Culture: The Consequences Of Memory-Holing The Past

Yesterday we had a one-two punch of Why Your Conception Of Fantasy Is Pants-On-Head Retarded.

One came from Cirsova and the other from Grames Barnaby. I'll put both threads' first posts here; click through to the linked threads for the rest.

Something I've observed and repeated is that most people's idea of "Tolkienian Fantasy" and the modern state of the fantasy genre is actually Warhammer filtered through the lens of Warcraft. https://t.co/jGb44EPdxH

— Cirsova - JD Cowan's Star Wanderers Live Now on KS (@cirsova) May 11, 2024

Daddy Warpig's post starting all this, regarding Tieflings, had in turn exposed just how degraded our culture has become.

Modern day “Twee & D” isn’t for me.

It makes epic evil into something cute, harmless, and twee.

Tieflings are Demonspawn and Demonspawn GET THE KNIFE.#BringBackActualEvil pic.twitter.com/d3BmNdilSP

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) May 9, 2024

Which feeds back to Jeffro Johnson's quip: "Don't read anything after 1980."

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play coincided with the latter generation of the Fanatics in American adventure literature ("fantasy" and "science fiction") taking over OldPub during the 1970s, with 1980 being the tipping point. You did not see today's "fantasy" and "science fiction" before then.

This older, better literature is what Gygax put into Appendix N. This is also literature which most Cargo Cultists have never read, as we have seen after Jeffro Johnson wrote his book on the subject years ago- something so threatening that there's been deliberate attempts to gaslight people away from Jeffro's book.

That includes many of those making deratives of the game, in any medium, and that definitely includes Fightstick and Fightcraft. The most charitable take is that this is the result of information degredation via a long game of Telephone (aka Chinese Whispers).

The more likely take, given the histories involved, is deliberate Memory Holing by a few and the exploitation of the laziness of the many; it is no surprise that every edition of D&D after AD&D1e deliberately went further from its literary (and thus cultural) roots, sometimes for crash and petty reasons (e.g. anything to do with Lorraine Williams and the Blumes) and sometimes for ideological ones (e.g. the latest gaslighting out of Sorcerors By The Sea).

Severing a people from their roots takes many forms, but one manifestation is persistent across incidences: making it easier to gaslight the targetted people into believing lies that their forefathers knew to be such.

"It's not evil. It's just misunderstood and unfortunate."

"Alignment is just a personality marker."

Both of these are lies, and it would not be possible to say them with a straight face had the culture of yesteryear not been deliberately hijacked, suborned, shivved, and tossed into the Memory Hole. This is what Daddy Warpig got at, and thus what Grames and Cirsova followed up with, to predictable blathering from Death Cultists (arguing in bad faith, as usual) and others engaging in Normie-style Ego Defense freakouts.

In short, non-answers. Just bullshit and tantrums.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the same Memory Holing that threw the real game--and thus the real hobby--into a dank dungeon of its own until Jeffro rescued it was also the same process that pulled a Satanic inversion of morality on the hobbyist subculture as part of the larger cultural inversion via lesser successors of a great original game.

The literature that persists is that which is grounded in the real. Fantastic literature is no different. Folks already forgot about Westeros, but remember Middle-Earth.

The same thing will be true when Globe of Gankcraft finally dies; no one will remember it for long. The same has, to a great degree, already happened with the "legendary fantasies" and "epic science fiction tales" from 1980 to the present.

They are built on lies, from the cornerstone on up, across all media. No one wants to watch, or play, a Humiliation Ritual- which is what Death Cultists make everything they take over into.

This is why AD&D1e is one of the few games that are worth playing, long after it was Current Thing; it is rooted in the real, while its successors are not and thus why they fade ever-faster once they are replaced by a new Current Thing.

This is why Call of Cthulhu persists, above and beyond Network Effects, while others like Chill and All Flesh Must Be Eaten are forgotten.

This is why Traveller persists. This is why BattleTech persists. This is why RIFTS (and all things Palladium) are in deep shit once Siembiedia is gone.

That rooting in the real, in a real more real than mere material existence, matters.

And that's why severing that connection, even in something that seems so inconsequential as tabletop adventure games, matters. It's not the only thing that matters, but it is often the decisive thing, and too many find out too late why that connection matters when they're ruined due to something that their severed connections would have prevented.

Your game sucks because it's fake. Simple as.