It's Christmas Eve. I have family coming over sometime today as this is when we exchange presents.
No rants, no big thinks, just me wishing you all a Merry Christmas.
So here's Jon Del Arroz and John Trent talking about how big a change the indie sphere has had on the mainstream this year, and that impact happened because the mainstream media did it to itself. This is a moment made possible because the dominant actor in a Network Effect-dependent market niche fucked up and created an opening for an Apprentice to exploit- and exploiting happened.
We'll see if the Master can fix his error before he gets shivved and replaced. Turns out that Network Effects work like a certain fictional order. Oops.
Today Dunder Moose will be back on to talk about the most ambitious Braunstein yet: StarStein!
To say that this is an attempt to take a Non-Game and make a Real Game out of it is an understatement: "A WEG StarWars D6 Braunstein Variant with 27 players!?!?! DM Janeway: Agent of Nod dishes on the most audacious StarStein on the next This Is Dunder Moose!"
Fixing broken and dysfunctional Not-Games requires tinkering. That's a given. But 27 players? In some not-shit-and-pozzed version of Uncle George's Space Opera? That's something worth tuning in for, and that's at 1pm Central Time (2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific, 6pm GMT) today.
If you don't make it live, do watch the replay as soon as possible.
There's something else that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about how Vidya beats Tabletop for a lot of adventure game stuff.
Vidya, for certain games so far, does a far better job realizing how a man in that environment has to think and act to succeed than on Tabletop. The game that illustrates this best is BattleTech. Both the Harebrained Schemes adaptation and the Pirahna Games one handle all of the actual campaign stuff better than tabletop because it's shoved into the faces of the typical player; you have to master logistics to win the game.
Streamer commentary makes the experience so much better.
Notice that both of these games have their own ways of doing Conventional Play's disregard of Strict Timekeeping because both of these are single-player games with no pressure upon them by hostile actors; they are both games with Narrative at their core, so you have to trip Plot Triggers for things to happen that matter- just like Conventional Play.
When you go to an Open World mode of play (which both of these videos do), even that is gone. You can do all the refits, train up pilots, go wherever, and the only costs that matter are time and (sometimes) availability. Yes, this is exactly same thing as the old joke about JRPGs where you have to Save The World Right Now, but you spent as much or more time doing sidequests than the main quest because that's where much or most of the game is.
As JD Sauvage said on Twitter the other day, Operational Tempo matters. Conventional Play does not have this. It cannot because it is taken as Referee cheating players, and due to several infamous episodes that got turned into comic strips and running jokes there is substance to that seeming.
Pressure comes from outside the player. Want your man to get that loot in the dungeon? Got to get down there and grab it before some other man does, and that someone else is run by a player- not a NPC run by the Referee.
That player can be you, as you may be forced to bench your first choice man due to what goes down at the table and have to resort to a backup choice to secure that bag instead. (Get used to the idea of having a roster of mans when you play in a real campaign, rotating them on and off the bench as required.)
That player can also be someone else, whom you do not know, and you will not know until that treasure is taken or otherwise removed from the campaign and thus no longer relevant.
That's how things really work when you play a real tabletop adventure game, and you play it in a proper campaign environment. It will not feel like a Narrative; it is not play-acting. It will feel like war, like business- like the competition that it is. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose- and sometimes you win or lose for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
And the experience is vital to achieving the full power of the tbletop adventure game as a medium.
West End Games is long dead, but its games of note (d6 Star Wars and TORG) endure on used bookstores and game shops around the world, and the former in particular maintains an active online archive of official and unofficial material (starting with the unofficial edition of the game).
Combined with the disgust that Kulty Kathy induced in the fans of Uncle George's Space Opera, you saw an uptick in support for the d6 version of the game despite it being dead before The Phantom Menace released.
"But I can't stand the brand anymore. That was our last hope."
In addition to Traveller (which can do this just fine, and definitely discourages needless violence), Spacemaster (Rolemaster ruleset retooled for Space Adventures), and Star Frontiers (which has the mood, but not the specific substance), there is another forgotten game that is meant for this stuff.
(Note: Please don't buy from DriveThru; if the publisher allows direct sales as is the case for Space Opera do that instead.)
Long before West End got the license from Uncle George to make the official RPG in 1987, there were people filing off the serial numbers to make something that could do it but not get them into legal troubles. Certain other games also serve well to fulfill this function such as Mekton Zeta.
(Star Trek got this explicitly with Starfleet Battles, and yes you can use the above games for Trek-inspired campaigning also.)
All of this follows a theme: a long disdained/underserved audience learns how to work around the lack of Official Product and ends up recreating old norms, thus making Official Product irrelevant at best.
Do give Space Opera a try. They also made Bushido, which is also worth a try, and some other games that should be given a revisiting in light of their use as ways around corporate gatekeeping.
In 1987, West End Games published a licensed tabletop adventure game based on George's space opera as part of the 10 year annivesary of the original film's release.
There was a second edition in the 1990s, which had a Revised edition after that, and today this version of the game endures as a PDF file.
Why investigate a game whose very origins in cinema, with all that entails, means that West End's products embraced all the bad Conventional Play practices?
Why? Because, believe it or not, there is more than enough information and mechanics to run a campaign properly.
Are there legacy issues? You better believe it. West End's version of the game invented the Expanded Universe that the Devil Mouse (and Kulty Kathy) discarded when they bought it from George. For some, this is a benefit; for others, a detriment.
The biggest issue is the Canon Event Problem. Fortunately, using the old EU means that you can safely discard everything the Devil Mouse originated. Unfortunately, this also means that you're having to work around George's own not-so-great ideas that he put into film or television. Furthermore, the big draw for this game depends upon adhering to Canon Events- however stupid they can be. If you're not already good at working with or around these things, you're going to have a bad time.
That said, I think those bold enough to give this a proper investigation will find that you can proper play out of it.
Again, the questions:
Does the game work when played Rules As-Written?
Does the game work best when using 1:1 Timekeeping?
Does having players assume the roles of Faction Leaders improve campaign play?
Does having periodic Braunstein sessions keep the campaign fresh without resorting to publisher diktat via supplements?
Does an affirmative response to the above questions still maintain the promised Star Wars experience?
I think you may need more than just the file provided (or a used rulebook) to get the full experience--this is a game that needs a few key supplements to achieve full power, so to speak--but you'll be surprised at how well it can play. You might even be able to do this with WOTC's editions of the game, believe it or not.
As for working around Canon Events, that's a topic for The Clubhouse. Subscribe now to ensure it's in your Inbox this weekend.
Other Notes:
Support accounts are now live, for your convenience.
As the saying goes, "Amateurs study strategy. Professionals study logistics."
Fantastic adventure wargames are no different, and nowhere does this become more obvious right away than when the adventuring scenario involve mechanization.
Be it Traveller, Twilight 2000, RIFTS, Robotech, Mechwarrior/A Time of War, Battlelords of the 23rd Century, TORG, Heavy Gear/Jovian Chronicles/Gear Krieg, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, etc. you have a milieu where adventures rely on using tools that have significant wear and tear just from intended use as well as consumables like fuel and munitions.
What does this mean? It means that there is an implied economic element to successful play, economics means logistics, and logistics (a) means mandatory downtime and self-generating scenarios for gameplay.
Guns need ammunition. Explosives (including missiles and rockets) need to be replaced. Machines need repairs, great and small alike, which means parts (etc.) need to be sourced and labor employed in spaces capable of allowing (if not improved to facilitate) such work- shops, factories, yards, etc. Vehicles (and some other things) need fuel and have limited range.
The stupid thing to do is to ignore all of this. Conventional play ignores all of this because players whine about it being inconvenient. Conventional play is stupid.
Let's put this past week's posts together in a related context: campaiging in an established IP.
Let's say that you've got a club full of devotees to Uncle George's Space Fantasy, and they want to do this as a tabletop RPG campaign. Let's go a step further and say that they're willing to play a proper campaign. How can you handle the long-running complaint of (a) delivering on both the promise of a satisfying RPG campaign and (b) delivering on the promise of a satisfying fantasy adventure experience in Uncle George's Space Fantasy?
Go back earlier this week, and you'll see what the answer is going to be.
Open Up That Notepad App
You're going to pick a date. You'll get out the timeline and the campaign map and plot who did what where up to that date, focusing on prior events of immediate relevance to the campaign's launch date.
After that date, things are not written in stone. Rather they acquire the same conditionality that using all those White Elephants on your shelf does; it is presumed that, barring intervention by player actions, what is recorded goes down as recorded. You'll want to keep notes on post-launch date events like this for about five years out, adding more as necessary.
When this is complete, and you have the campaign map and calendar prepared, move on to the next step.
So You Want To Conquer The Galaxy...
By the time you have done this, you will also have all of the Factions mapped out and identified their leadership; you can recruit Faction players to run them at this time.
You should also, if necessary, have recruited your assistant Referees and got them working with you as a team to run this grand campaign. They will help you get all this put together for the players faster than you alone would do.
The Faction players should be briefed as soon as you and your team are ready. Let them play two or three rounds of action before you bring the adventurers into the fold to set the wheels in motion and give the ground level of the campaign some context and direction to work with.
I Am But A Humble Freighter Captain Plying My Trade
Faction action should have already pointed out early hotspots for action, attracting the hopeful, the ambitious, the concerned, and the desperate (i.e. typical characters in Uncle George's Space Fantasy). Let them go through Character Generation, sort into the starting areas, and get on with making fantasy space adventures happen while big galaxy-spanning wars go down all around them.
Mandatory downtime, uninterrupted events from the official (or "official") timeline going down disrupting things, players (at either level of play) forcing other players to cope with having to adapt their plans to account for changed situations, and hopefully some princesses get saved somewhere along the way while Evil Rebels get put to the sword by Heroic Action Men as the climax of a massive fleet battle where Dashing Space Aces and Brilliant Fleet Commanders pull off gambits every bit as clever and amazing as the sword duels.
Lather, rinse, repeat until someone wins or everyone loses some years down the road.
Hey, This Seems Familiar
Distinctions of "genre" are irrelevant in RPGs, because they are wargames at their root and thus all that changes are the trappings and the field of battle. Sometimes you have Space Knights and laser swords, sometimes you have giant robots and laser swords, sometimes you have just wizards and warriors. It's still the same fantastic adventure wargame, still filled with evil to smite, dragons to slay, and princesses to rescue. TORG made this explicit in 1990.
In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same.
Don't be surprised to find this pattern repeating regardless of what "genre" you're supposedly dealing it. Gaming is gaming. Genre is for storytelling.
Geek Gab returns today at 1pm Central Time. Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal will be talking about the latest RPG gaming experiences that they've had, some superhero movie stuff, and more. I'll be in the chat. See you there and then.
Geek Gab returns today with author David West as the guest at 1pm Central Time.
The commentary on the final Chris Pratt MCU film fits what Globohomo will allow from mainstream films; women are not allowed be saved, and they are not allowed to get with the hero- and they are not allowed, as the heroine, to win a man's affection either.
The issue with both the Pratt film and the Chris Pine film is that they are Globohomo mindrot demoralization poison coated with sugar to make it palatable to audiences; it's no less insulting as the unsweetened propaganda coming out of the Hellmouth, and it is just as corrosive to cultural cohesion and national unity, but because they bother to half-ass the entertainment it seems like it's clean when it is not.
Digging into the rules of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, seeing what is there, and then assembling it into a working machine as if I were following a blueprint has been quite the experience. The game everyone thinks is there is not what is there; that is the game successive editions iterated their way into creating, and that game sucks harder than a singularity. The game that is on the page, the one I see when I operate the machine, is not what I thought it was- but it was the one promised in the manuals.
Realizing that I'd been playing the game wrong all these decades is not mere eating crow, it's vomiting up a turducken of bullshit.
I am curious now to see what other games I'd been playing wrong- and what games I'd read correctly. Related would be to see which games measure up to what a RPG has been revealed to be, and which is instead conforming to a mistaken impression or a strawman position.
I bet quite a few would surprise people, including myself.
Recently I did a post about AniTube and how it's really a pile of Normies talking about Normie-tier shit. It should be no surprise that the parallel fan scene of channels that deal in Western media--Spacedock, Eckhart's Ladder, Templin Institute, Generation Tech, etc.--are just as useless for anything that is not Normie-tier. (It took years of badgering to get Spacedock to cover any anime, and--again--he stuck to the most Normie-tier stuff: Cowboy Bebop and Space Battleship Yamato.)
As with AniTube, analysis of how these channels and their operators talk about what they cover reveals that--with a few exceptions--they don't read. For the gaming channels, that's (more or less) forgivable; for lore/information channels, it is not. As with AniTube, they do not go out of their way for anything; they talk about what they talk about because it got shoved into their face by the mainstream media, and anything that isn't shoved in their face might as well not exist.
That's right, the Trash Taste crew have their counterparts in the Geeks & Gamers crowd.
This is a big problem that plays into why these channels, and the scene they foster, are a holding pen for the Pop Cult and thus for the Death Cult. This holding pen keeps those dissatisfied with mainstream Western pop culture in thrall with the Pop Cult by means of impotent complaining that just makes you a punching bag for the Death Cultists running these rackets, holding out one false hope after the next that "it'll turn around and we'll get our fun thing back", instead of accepting the reality that your fun thing is dead, and is now a zombie run by a necromancer that hates you.
That enabling of delusion is what keeps a lot of people who would be otherwise seeking a solution from doing so. (It also isn't wholly effective; look at how desperate they are to either choke off or corrupt Anime, Manga, and Japanese videogames- those are alternatives that have found a massive audience.)
Marvel, D.C., the Devil Mouse, etc.- they cannot be saved; they must be destroyed.
The enemy knows that Normies don't work for their entertainment; they don't do Git Gud and they aren't curious so they don't seek things out, which means that if you don't toil to thrust what you have to offer into their faces, then they will not even consider the possibility that alternatives even exist--several of the aforementioned channels didn't even know that Japan had long-running Space Opera classics of their own because Normie-tier entertainment media never talked about them.
Our YouTube media fan channels are as feckless, ignorant, and pants-on-head retarded as our governments are. Their only merit is, so far, a lack of malicious intent towards the people they purport to serve. However, due to their Normie-tier content and Normie-acceptable presentation, they possess outsized influence compared to how big these operations actually are- and cunning villains like the Devil Mouse recognize this and exploit it to their advantage.
If the indies are to do more than publish and hold fast for however long it takes for these zombie megacorporations to collapse, then the indie sphere needs to start shoving stuff into Normie faces. That means stepping up the media game--YouTube channels, podcasts, etc. with whatever algorthimic fuckery is required to get that stuff into Normie feeds--and escalating the Narrative Warfare to get the word--which we must control--into their ears and our pictures before their eyes.
The title is misleading. This is really a recap of the Battle of the Atlantic in World War 2, dominated by German U-boats vs. Allied surface and aerial assets.
Indy talks a lot about technology and doctrine, but I can put it simply: the Allies forced the Germans into killzones and pounced upon them. The bait were the convoys and all the goods needed for the United Kingdom to stay in the fight. The killzones were the spaces created between the bait and the escorts, complimented in time by intelligence provided by aerial reconnaisance and signals intelligence intercepts.
It took a lot for this to come together, but the results speak for themselves and if such a similar situation were to arise now you would expect to have all of these elements reassert themselves swiftly to recreate those killboxes and replicate those results.
Therefore, I ask you this question: put in the position of someone looking to do commerce raiding to drive an enemy power out of the fight, and with this history informing your actions, what do you do to avoid this scenario repeating itself?
It's an interesting scenario question, isn't it? Now apply all of this to your campaign--even fantasy games, since they have stealth and piracy is a thing--and you see where I'm going with this. The historical record often has fantastic events in its pages, events that are going to come up organically in your own fantastic adventure gaming and fiction, and the different trappings don't change the fundamentals.
Imagine, for example, that you're playing in Jeffro's Trollopolous and you want to bring a hostile city-state to heel. Choking off the trade that supplies it with what it cannot produce itself is part of a siege campaign, and that's what the Battle of the Atlantic was. Imagine that you're playing a Macross campaign; you're going to want to find out how the enemy is supplying itself with the food, men, and material that it requires to wage war against your heroic Valkyrie squadrons and the idol singers that love them. You can be the First Lord of the Star League, the Emperor of the Galactic Empire, Warchief of the Horde, or a free captain on the Sea of Stars who's skull banner means freedom, dealing with this scenario in this manner is the same process.
Therefore, regardless of what genre your scenario claims to be in, you are dealing with the same things. If you can answer the above hypothetical in real world terms, you can answer it in any fictional context. This is why the better fiction writers always have a handle on real world history and current events, and make reading about it part of their routine; it makes the fiction better by providing it with the vital substance of reality without the drudgery that often comes with it.
And that is why real RPGs--real gaming--as the #BROSR lays out--is the real hobby; real gaming is wargaming.
Every once in a while, a Pop Cult figure comes up with something useful. This is modeller EC Henry, and his video essay on Star Wars vehicle design is worth your time.
It is the constraints that define the creativity of the series, as they had to work around the limitations those constraints imposed. Combine that with other influences dancing around in Uncle George's head--Flash Gordon being most explicit--and you get this Art Deco aesthetic of the Prequels and the Used Future of the Originals that combine to show a clear cultural decline between the two- itself a powerful statement.
Consider what Henry says when you create your own setting aesthetic, and this is something that both authors and setting designers should spend some time figuring out. There is a lot you can tell a reader by, say, telling him that everyone in a place has their clothes made by skilled artisans instead of purchased off the rack at a mass market corporate retail outlet.
Consider what you tell someone when you have a panel in a comic that shows your giant robot half-stripped and being worked upon by technicians as if it were an ordinary tank or bomber in the background while your pilot protagonist engages in a dialog scene with another character. Compare that against a panel where the giant robot repairs itself autonomously, or in an automated repair bay, while the pilot does the same thing. Decisions like this communicate massive information efficiently to the viewer.
The language of a medium is a very powerful tool. We speak highly of those with mastery of the language of film, or of the novel, and so on. That means it can be taught, and that it can be taught means that you can learn it- learn it and master it.
The greats of the Pulps were just such efficient masters, as they grasped their form and their medium with the firm confidence of someone that not only achieved mastery but also self-awareness of that mastery- they KNEW that they knew. The greats of film were likewise self-aware in their mastery. This is something to strive for, not disdain and shun, and it is good to see that there are those that find joy in the chase.
I'm taking this Pop Cult video as a jumping off point for a very common Space Opera problem: Bad Scaling.
That's a lot of cope. It's this simple: most writers have no clue what they're talking about. Uncle George has real limits that his chosen medium imposes, reinforced further by deadlines and financial constraints, but novelists and comic authors do not.
The sort of "major fleet action" that constitutes climatic battles marking the apex of a narrative arc in Uncle George's Space Opera (and the Mouse Wars knock-offs) are skirmishes in E.E. Smith's Lensman series and Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. By the time those series reach narrative peaks, we're looking at hundreds of thousands or millions of capital ships per side with tens or hundreds of millions of combatants.
That is the sort of scale that truly epic Space Opera requires, and very few authors even comprehend what that is- nevermind how it would work or what two competing forces of that size and scale would do to defeat the other. Uncle George, and others in his sphere like Battlestar Galactica (both versions), didn't even try- and George, at most, implied it was possible.
The problem is that these writers fail to see that combat--at any scale, from man-to-man all the way up to universal scale--is nothing more (in narrative terms) than a stage to develop character and advance plot. The difference is that you do so by action--what someone does and how they do it--instead of by dialog. In film or comic terms, this leads to the ideal of a scene where the entire narrative unfolds without a single word or grunt uttered; all character development, and plot advancement, occur silently.
This, by the way, is hardly impossible. Ryan vs. Dorkman did this on a lark 16 years ago, and you'll see others with experience in stunt work or fight choreography do short films like that on the regular- both to stay in practice and to add to their film reels for big boy work.
And no, Hellmouth and OldPub writers as a class don't do Git Gud so they won't put in the work required to make their Space Opera better. They rely on nepotism and corruption to get paid, just like their fellow travelers elsewhere in the Death Cult, so you're going to have to go old-school, go Indie, or go East to get your eyeballs on stuff that doesn't suck.
The Devil Mouse's current Mouse Wars show about Inexplicably Popular Side Character From 1980 took a turn into being a backdoor continuation for the other show about a silent tactiturn bounty hunter, which just recursed again into continuing its 'Memberberry Mining of the original trilogy of films.
The trick? Take the showrunner's original character from his time being mentored by George Lucas and have her share screentime with the original trilogy's farmboy protagaonist turned Magic Knight in a manner that is nothing but pure (but wholesome) fan service.
That, folks, is Mining the 'Memberberries: the deliberate use--one might call it weaponization--of the nostalgia that the audience has for the past entries in the franchise in order to bolster present entries' esteem and with it their commercial viability. It's not a good sign.
The problem is that this betrays a lack of confindence in the quality of the storycraft. It's a bad sign when you engage in recursive narrative to sideline your star in favor of another series' star, but to then sideline that guy in favor of a franchise icon specifically to rehabiliate that icon then you're demonstrating that you have no faith in your present project at all.
And Pop Cultists gotta Cult, as the fan reactions to this development demonstrate, because this icon rehabilitation is exactly what those Pop Cult holdouts want to see and now that they're getting what they want they're ready to forget everything and once more pour out their purses to tithe to the Cult.
These are the very people who heard Lucas explain why his Magic Knights eschew attatchment, and yet now are clearly bound by such--confined in chains of their own making--that they could not act on that wisdom if Lucas beat their faces bloody with a brick and screamed it at them like a drill sergeant.
Treat them as you would any other addict. Pray for them, but otherwise keep your distance; they won't be helped until they hit rock-bottom and decide it's either they let their devotion die or they let their flesh die. Then, and only then, are they ready to come out from under the thrall.
The Pop Cult is not new. It's been around since your parents were young. Even at the time of the late 1970s, it was an issue that the wise took issue with.
The image here is a quote by the late Sir Alec Guinness, reflecting on the Special Edition release of the original trilogy of George Lucas' space opera series. Time proved his concern correct, and now we have a work of popular fiction being treated as a psuedo-religious cult with the media itself as the object of cult worship.
Now the Death Cult, seeing the vulnerability that adherants to this Pop Cult have between their ears, move in to destroy the idol of worship in the aims of driving the cultists from their idols and into their arms by offering their own cult doctrine as a substitute for the very idols they destroyed.
We should have listened to Sir Alec and others like him.
We did not, and now we suffer the consequences of our folly.
We could have prevented this. Now we have to clean up this mess and pass on this lesson to our successors.
The Dark Herald at Arkhaven explains what many of us indie authors and creators have talked about for some time: The fans lost.
Now, I understand there is going to be a certain number of people who can’t understand it.
Why are the goblins at Lucasfilm are so determined to cut their own throats? I mean, it has to be obvious at this point isn’t it? The Reylo trilogy was an utter disaster and by any reasonable standard, the high Republic is an abject failure. If they are going to keep their jobs, they need to assure that their company is healthy, and to do that they need to have products people will pay money for. Making Star Wars fans happy and engaged is in their own self-interest. LucasFilm needs to be profitable right? Right?
Oh, that is so adorable.
At this point, LucasFilm has settled comfortably into the model of corporate parasitism. And the uber-Woke senior executives at Disney are delighted to be fed upon by the incompetent.
You have to remember an SJW infestation is a convergence of grasshopper-people.
They create nothing, preserve nothing and leave nothing behind.
When grasshoppers have finished devastating and devouring a once-productive ant colony, do they sit around trying to rebuild it? After all, that would be in their self-interest wouldn’t it? To have a healthy ant colony that they could regularly harvest makes more sense than destroying it. But no, grasshoppers are grasshoppers, they destroy and move on to the next target.
The Woke are no different. When LucasFilm collapses under its own weight due to their undermining they will move on to another property and begin the process all over again. Unconcerned by lessons of failure because they are fundamentally unable to face the lessons of their own mistakes.
So what is the future of Star Wars? Well, it doesn’t have one.
Where the Menace erred is exactly in this presupposition that the Death Cult cares about the health of its host. It doesn't. IT WANTS EVERYTHING TO DIE! This is why they're accurately called "grasshopper people". They are parasitic in nature, and that nature cannot be denied.
And why does the Death Cult keep a vice grip? Because they turn every last thing they control into a vector for spreading the disease. That means profits and losses DO NOT MATTER! This is a religious zeal, a fanatical devotion, beyond all reason and material sensibility- and that's why they are referred to as The Death Cult.
They are pleased beyond measure to see the subjects of their attacks suffer as they kill those whom they cannot turn, and again when those they turn die off anyway.
The purpose behind maintaining that vice grip is to maintain control over the Narrative they promote. It doesn't matter if it's badly done, or if it offends, or whatever. They shamelessly corrupt what they can, destroy what they cannot corrupt, and cut off access to what they cannot destroy. Once all competition to their Narrative control is eliminated, they are free to flood your brainmeats until you submit or die; if you think this isn't effective, look at how well they do with your children now that they control public schools and the universities.
Your wallet is not effective anymore in coercing them otherwise. They have direct access to the money printer; they can keep operating indefinitely, and as arms of the operations collapse they just pop some champange, celebrate ultimate victory, and move their favored assets to another arm of their Black Crusade to do it all again.
You have to walk away or you're going to get destroyed.
You have to walk away, and if you want what you loved to go on then you have to take that wallet and support the alternatives that actually deliver what you want- unless all you want is the brand, which makes you a cultist in your own right, a Pop Cultist crying about the masters of your cult--the Death Cult--desecrating your idol.
Come out of your cult. Come with us if you want your culture to live.
The Excellence of Elocution cut a rant about the recent Point-and-Shriek attack.
The one-two punch here is a shot at both the Pop Cultists whose reaction made this entire thing possible in the first place followed by a shot at the Cuckservatives going all "Much Principles" about folks telling the Devil Mouse to get thee behind them.
Both are pathetic and childish "Daddy will rescue me!" responses to a situation that clearly calls for actual effective responses, a phenonemon that Aeoli Pera savagely called out as fucking pathetic and ultimately self-destructive the other day at his blog.
The reality here is that (a) Star Wars is done and (b) the corporate owner hates the audience for it despite that audience having made an idol of the property and worshipping it as a substitute for authentic, true religion. The Big Corporate types hate the audience because they behave as mindless paypigs. The Death Cultists hate the audience because they will not conform to the Death Cult.
In both cases, the response is to debase the idol the Pop Cultists adore and worship by sanctioning fanfiction that serves the same function in a cultural sense that debasing coins: reducing the quality by flooding it with quanity of lesser-quality material. Big Corp wants to suck the paypigs dry forever. Death Cultists want to spread the poz. Both see debasement of the Pop Cult's idol as the means to the end, and they are in an untouchable position to do so.
The only effective response is to walk away entirely.
Do not give them your money. Do not give them your time. Do not give them your attention--note that I avoid so much as mentioning the Big Brand or any of its key players just so I can't be SEOed into giving attention to them--and for the love of God watch something else. You're spoiled for choice; you just need to go get it. Walk away from the Devil Mouse.
If you're at all aware of the sad state of Western popular culture, then you know what happened yesterday to Gina Carano. The Devil Mouse--via the Death Cultists in Lucasfilm--finally got around to doing what they've wanted to her thanks to sufficient social media noise from fellow travellers on the outside. Allow me to explain how this works, since I think a lot of people don't get (aside from folks like Vox Day) comprehend how the SJW Point-and-Shriek Swarm actually works.
TLDR: It's a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine, and it works like this.
The target of the pressure campaign is not the audience. The target is the shot-caller in the organization, and the aim is to make that shot-caller the "amenable authority". The Death Cultists within the organization are the Good Cop. Their fellow travellers on the outside are the Bad Cop. The pressure campaign is designed to make the shot-caller increasingly uncomfortable, between the external bad Public Relations damaging what the shot-caller is responsible for and the insiders using that pressure to make the target cave to their demands- whatever they may be.
The lynchpin? Information control. The target--the shot-caller--must have his information feed curated to gaslight him into a Narrative frame that matches what the insiders say is the truth. If this works, then the shot-caller comes to believe that the claims are justified and therefore acquiesing to the insiders' demands will solve the problem, as seen by the release of the pressure.
Rest assured that, whatever goes on in the public square, those offices at Lucasfilm and Disney are breathing a sigh of relief in some quarters while the insiders celebrate yet another scalp and with it yet another step towards Total Victory (i.e. control).
There is, in fact, very little that can be done when talking about a massive corporate target that doesn't involve equally massive mass action. You have to pull off something akin to the absolute cratering of box office and merchandise sales seen with the Sequel Trilogy, and you have to do it hard and fast; insofar as the Fandom Menace are at all doing anything that actually works, it's showing the normies just how bad things really are via showing how little the merch moves as well as how bad the box office is.
That, for the record, doesn't have nearly the punch that the Menace thinks it does because most normies do not care at all and big corporations like Disney have direct access to the money printer so "Get Woke, Go Broke" isn't a thing past a certain size (and with it ties into the Globohomo Network). Author David Stewart explains.
The core problem is that most fans use the franchise as a substitute for religion, which is why author Brian Niemeier rightly (a) calls this The Pop Cult and (b) calls this a front for the Death Cult; the only conclusion for the collapse of a Pop Cultist's false faith is the despair and nihilism that serves you right into the Death Cult's clutches to be fed upon and annilhiated (or worse).
The folks at Disney hate you. The SJWs hate you because you're The Enemy. The Big Corporate folks hate you because you act like mindless sheep that love to be sheered time and again no matter how abusive they are to you. Stop coping. Walk away. Prove that you're actual adults and not overgrown children.
You have more than enough alternatives to the Mouse Wars/Fake Trek/NuWho/etc. that actually respects you to last for the rest of your lives, and more gets made every day.
Stop coping. Stop being a paypig. If you can't do that, then you deserve the boot on your neck; they can't win if you don't pay.
Lueten09 dropped another massive 40K lore video the other day. This is, as usual, pro-level audiobook stuff. If you're a fan, have at it. For the rest of us, skip below.
Lueten09's lore videos, the BattleTech lore Black Pants Legion does, and more like that are evidence that making pro-quality audiobook w/ visual accompanyment (and yes, I say it that way because you don't need the visuals; it's icing on the cake, not part of the cake itself) is no longer prohibitively expensive save in terms of time. This is a big deal, and I'm going to spell it out for you.
The means to make this stuff is now cheap enough to be affordable--if not free--to common users.
Which means the skills to use them competently is now widespread (and growing) so learning is easier than ever before.
The means to distribute them is now easy to acquire, so getting an audience is easier than before.
The means to hire help to cover skill gaps--Lueten doesn't do that VO work--is easier than before.
The means to exploit what you create while maintaining full control and ownership now exists.
I am dead-ass serious when I say that Catalyst Game Labs, Games Workshop, et. al., ought to be cutting these lore channels fat checks for doing their marketing for them. This is time spent, as a hobby, putting together professional-grade productions that attract and retain audiences that then go on to spend real money on the corporate property that these channels promote via their hobby-done lore videos.
Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you do comics. Whatever you've created, if you're making a property--regardless of its medium or product category of origin--that has this sort of lore quality attached to it then you really ought to be thinking about making use of those massive notes that otherwise gets made into content for a wiki and then forgotten about.
These lore videos demonstrates that what formerly was the exclusive domain of Big Corporate entertainment is not any longer. As with merchandise and tie-in products, small indie creators can now pursue these options and add more value to their creative output and extend that long tail even longer so that what you produce today still pays you years down the line (and, hopefully, becomes passive income for your heirs).
This means that you no longer need to sell out. You can keep full ownership of what you create and still exploit it to full effect, and that should scare the hell out of Big Corporate if they were at all paying attention- which they aren't.
To appropriate the enemy's language, you now have full access to the means of production. What are you going to do with it?
Things got you wound up? Need something stupid to laugh at? Eckhart's Ladder--the most fanboyish of fan channel for Space Wizard Fun Time--has you covered.
Of the complaints made here, only one doesn't play: "there are too many superweapons".
We're talking a galaxy-sized setting. Space Is Big. There are too few superweapons, not too many, and the galaxy is stupidly under-populated even for the agranian worlds. A galaxy-spanning civilization, even one riven by competing states, will nontheless be measured in the hundreds of trillions in population and should be expected to field Death Stars as if they were Star Destroyers (and Star Destroyers as if they were actual destroyers and not battleship/carrier hybrids).
This sort of thing is what E.E. Smith--the father of Space Opera--got right with the Lensmen series, and man did the super-weapons in that series get crazy: trans-galactic railguns using dead planets as ammo, weaponizing entire stars as super-lasers, planet-sized webs that disintegrated what they touched, and so on. Compared to what he wrote, the super-weapons of both Western and Eastern Space Opera in comics, film, and television is often pathetic.
(Note: You have to start thinking in terms of Getter Emperor, Mazinger Zero, Ideon, the Third Impact, fully-powered Zeorymer, Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann/Super Anti-Spiral, etc. to get on Smith's level. Iserlohn and Geiserberg from Legend of the Galactic Heroes are entry-level efforts by any galaxy-spanning civilization worth a damn.)
And that's before we start talking biological weapons. That's when things really get nasty.
