Posts made by De Villefort

@Prospero said in But Why:

Now tell me how many upright noble truly good redeeming people were on Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly.

I disliked Battlestar for the very reason that everyone was a ***hole.

Farscape’s characters started off pretty bad, but it was a prison ship. Part of the appeal of that story was them becoming better people as the story progressed but they were not part of an elite class who held power over other people. They were criminals on the run.

The same is true for Firefly. Two people on that ship who were born into privilege was the Doctor and his sister and they gave that privilege up to escape the people hunting them.

But if they had not been on the run, if she had never gone to that school, they would still be living their best lives in the core not caring a fig about the people suffering around them or how unjust society is.

Other than Wash, the other truly good person on the ship was Shepard Book.
We never learned the details of it, but he was apparently a high ranking military official who gave up his power when he saw first hand the evil they did. He did what he could to make things better then when he saw that the system was unredeemable he walked away.

@catzilla said in But Why:

Sometimes it’s fun to play the villain.

Yes! It is! I never said people shouldn’t be allowed to play Nobles and Royals. I just don’t understand why you would want to be the bad guy.

Much of this thread is people being baffled that I can’t understand that part of playing the game requires you ignoring all the inconvenient truths about the peasants living in abject poverty and the mass murders of innocent people that are necessary for the institution of Nobility to continue.

I do understand it. I’m just baffled that anyone is able to enjoy a game where that is a requirement.

@spiriferida
The appeal to me is playing someone who is making the world a better place, not someone who wallows in extreme privilege and pretends doing something nice every few months makes it okay that their daily luxury is built on crushing the majority.

You can play a bad guy if you want but I won’t play on a game where the bad guys are white washed as being the heroes. Nobles and Royals are bad people. Even the best of them. You can not participate in noble society and still be a good person any more than you can be a billionaire and be a good person today.

The very word Noble is propaganda to make horrible people seem like they are somehow better than everyone else so they deserve to enjoy every luxury no matter how many people have to suffer for it.

@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:

Or are they doing it because they want to have fun with the rose colored view of nobility?

I’m not saying that you should be mad at them for playing the elites, but it’s pretty degusting.

It took the rich a long time to normalize the propaganda that they are the good guys and we should look up to them. It’s done a lot of harm in the world and this type of genera is furthering that ideal.

If you want to play it, feel free! I just don’t understand why you would want to emulate the scum of humanity.

@Tez
Rich people do nice things for a few poor people some times makes them keeping everyone poor the rest of the time okay?

Like, you get an annual Christmas bonus if you work really, really hard all year long at your job where you are under paid the rest of the year but because you have just enough money with that bonus to not lose your house that makes your CEO taking home 8000% the wages of the hourly workers at your company for his job of showing up twice a week for meetings perfectly okay, right?

Setting up a game where you play nobles and royals is like setting up a game where everyone plays CEOs and you have to optimize the productivity of your company while also putting on the appearance of not being a monster by doing charity events.

Games where you play the elites instead of the people standing up to the elites, are the glorification of everything wrong with the world.

@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:

Trying that doesn’t work for on me, man. I am Native.

If someone built a game where everyone played the people who funded and benefitted from the trail of tears, would you be okay with people saying they wanted to play those rich land barons because they thought it was fun to throw parties and dance with all the pretty daughters of industry?

Injustice is injustice.
I don’t have to be Native to know what those land thieves did to the natives was wrong and that their life style shouldn’t be lauded as a good time.

@icanbeyourmuse
Yeah, Jayne is a scumbag at the start but he gets better over time.
But again, he’s the exception not the standard.
Most of the crew don’t want to kill.

They are often in a situation where they have to in order to stay alive but they don’t go looking to kill. The same could be said for Star Wars rebel alliance, the Jedi, or any other heroic faction.

Nobles and Royals, they aren’t forced to kill. They choose to make war for power. They choose to ignore the suffering of their people for their own comfort. It’s expected for them to be bad people. Them being terrible people is baked into the setting.

@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:

People clearly just want to have fun being a royal or noble.

That’s like saying, “People clearly just want to have fun being a plantation slave-master.”

You’re being one of the worst people in that world to have fun?

Can you see where that might seem problematic from the outside?

@Rinel
Mostly stuff set in the future. Star Trek is good example for the most part.
Star Wars is mostly a good example. The Jedi are for all their many flaws, people who act selflessly for the good of society as a whole.
Super-hero based stories are of course focused on basically good people.
Firefly is a good, well known story with basically good protagonists.
Remember the Knight Rider TV series? That was a good example of good heroic people.

I’m not saying all sci-fi is superior. Even in Sci-fi many of the heroes of the story are kinda shitty people.
Johnny Neumonic was basically a guy who professionally facilitated crime.
Blade Runner was about a guy who did a job he believed was wrong until it broke him.
Dune was just a bunch of rich people having a galactic scale pissing contest.

My problem with the fantasy genera is that the stories who have terrible people for heroes is the standard not the exception.
There were no good people in Game of Thrones. (Except Hodor but he wasn’t a main character.)

@Faraday
In Star Wars, the Empire are the bad guys. People can play as them if they want but no one is mistaking them for the heroes.

In fantasy stories the Knight born into privilege and the Princess born into power are seen as the good guys while they ride their majestic white steed past the peasants dying in the streets.

You’re also correct about the wild-west was a terrible setting that glorified some of the worst people in history. Cowboys, real cowboys were the working class of cattle ranchers but the genera of Cowboy stories paints corrupt, mass murdering cops, thieves, and outlaws as the heroes of the story.

There are very few Wild West or Fantasy settings where the protagonist is in any way a good person. They are usually the lesser evil, at best.

It’s the propagation of the belief that the worst examples of humanity are the heroes of the story I have a problem with.

Maybe I’m just a liberal snowflake but I am sick and tired of bad people being held up as icons and getting away with doing terrible things while people cheer. I don’t see how anyone could enjoy pretending to be one of those vile people.

@Jenn
I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.

It’s like making a game where everyone is a billionaire out to maximize their portfolio. Much more horrific than WoD ever could be.

@Jumpscare
My mother is disabled and has extensive medical bills.
We are eating 58 cent burritos and 68 cent boxes of mac’n cheese to survive. It’s very much:

@Gashlycrumb
“Blahblahblah reasoned, structured, and logical statement, blah!”

Counter argument: Playing as pirates.

Re: Furries.
Given the dwindling size of the player base for text games in general, can you really afford to ostracize a large fan base like them?

It’s much more likely that people will play an active game in spite of it having furries than furries will play a game that doesn’t at least partially cater to their fetish.

Look at what happens to WoD games that don’t allow shape shifter. They are practically stillborn right out of the gate because the lack of part-time-furries drives away those players who want to get their fuzzy freak on in private.

What was that game that recently shut down because of drama that had shifters? The Pack? It was popular because it was part-time-furry. Even if they don’t use the furry stuff very often, I think a lot of them will avoid any game that doesn’t give them the option.

@Arkandel
“Bath tub full of d6s” - Ah, the memories!

@Aria
The world would be a better place if more comic book stores hired women to station their front counters.
It might ease the nerds into being normal around women by giving them regular exposure to girl-cooties.

@Duke-Whisky said in But Why:

What’s the anime from the first post?

Sword Art Online (The Abridged version)
It’s a fan made parody of the anime series Sword Art Online.
It’s much better than the original and you can watch it for free.
Here is a playlist of the episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6kJKxvbgZ0&list=PLuAOJfsMefuej06Q3n4QrSSC7qYjQ-FlU

@Tez
I’ve always wondered why no one ever created a Disney’s Robinhood MUSH. You know you would get players! It’s furry, it’s knights and bandits, it’s cartoons so it has the childhood nostalgia angle. Set it in a town near the coast where Robinhood the cartoon takes place. That way you can have sea related characters and all the traditional Robinhood types.

Set it in the same Disney world, have some local nobles being greedy and some rebels trying to stop them. A church trying to keep the peace. It would be a simple, fun little game.

Heck, I would build it myself if I had the money but I have to work for a living.

@Pavel
Hahaha!
Switches and buttons (Penis and vagina), not switches and bottoms.
But also, I agree.

I was trying not to be crude while saying that the comic book fan base is a total sausage fest.

@Pavel
And to be fair, most of the comic book consumer base is switches not buttons.
The studios are probably just targeting the people they think will give them the most money.
Horny teenage toggles just waiting for someone to turn them on.

@Evilgrayson
If Elon Musk had all his billions stolen by Jeff Bezos then raised a mercenary army of criminals to kill Bezos and steal everything he had, would you consider that a heroic story?

Well that’s the story of Robinhood with the names changed. He was the son of a nobleman who had all his wealth taken by the corrupt Sheriff while the king was away fighting a war. He only became an outlaw because he was suddenly poor. He didn’t give a wet squirt about the poor people until he was one of them.

In some versions of the story the Sheriff killed his father, in some versions he was a knight who returned from the crusades to find his home had been plundered, but the one thing that holds true is that the start of the story is rich-guy-on-rich-guy violence and the rest of the story is all about taking back what was stolen from him.

Disney may have romanticized it with adorable foxes but make no mistake, this was a story about a wealthy lord standing along side a band of thieves to take what they felt they were owed.

Even in the Disney version he didn’t start giving away money until the Sheriff started squeezing the peasants and offering high rewards for Robin’s head. His generosity was a move made out of tactical necessity, not out of kindness.