Do your Political Views shape how your villains and heroes act?

Gradine said:

This makes total sense, and I buy this. I just personally feel people often underestimate the significance and impact of the former.

Click to expand...

Perhaps, but it is also incredibly vague to talk about subconscious influence of politics and culture. I mean, if it is readily apparent sure. But there are definitely games, books and movies where you'd have to strain to conclude anything, and even then, you wouldn't be sure. I think it is pretty speculative is the problem once you get into this territory. And people resent being told by others, that they magically know what they believe about politics 'because its everywhere'.

Bedrockgames said:

Perhaps, but it is also incredibly vague to talk about subconscious influence of politics and culture. I mean, if it is readily apparent sure.

Click to expand...

Just because it's vague and difficult to grasp doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to attempt to do so.

But there are definitely games, books and movies where you'd have to strain to conclude anything, and even then, you wouldn't be sure. I think it is pretty speculative is the problem once you get into this territory. And people resent being told by others, that they magically know what they believe about politics 'because its everywhere'.

Click to expand...

I'm not presuming to know anybody else's politics. I'm suggesting that people who actively try not to think about or engage in politics might not be aware of the political implications that their actions or choices might potentially have, because they are, by definition, trying not to think about it. My argument is that this isn't exactly an ideal way to approach politics.

As an aside, I'd be hard pressed to find a piece of fiction that wasn't trying to say something about something, no matter how ultimately innocuous, whether that thing is political in the specific sense or more broadly in the social/cultural/moral/ethical sense (which, I would again argue, are impossible to disentangle from politics). At least, not any piece of worthwhile fiction. Most often, though, I find that pieces of fiction that try desperately not to say something actually end up saying quite a bit, however unintentionally.

Lanefan said:

Which only happens if there's no conflict or disagreement; otherwise "voluntary co-operation" is just fancyspeak meaning "one or more people intentionally stifling their desires-opinion-viewpoint", which is awful.

And when there is disagreement - e.g. half the party wants to go up the stairs because the tower represents a limited area to explore while the other half wants to go down the stairs because the dungeon is most likely where the best treasure is - then either the party splits in two or politics rears its ugly head in form of debate-compromise-vote-etc. en route to a group decision.

Click to expand...

I think that’s probably too cynical. And I don’t know that debate and compromise are necessary political. Rectangles and squares and whatnot.

Gradine said:

One thing I will dispute is that my argument is not that the opposite of politics is politics...

Click to expand...

Yes, I know, but that wasn't exactly where I was going with that.

I'll also add as an aside that I love that English is a beautifully fluid, flexible, ever-changing work of art as a language (so much so that I'm cursing myself for ever having gotten into a semantic argument where I've felt it necessary to quote the dictionary), so hearing someone tell me their favorite dictionary of the language comes from nearly two centuries ago makes me cringe a little.

Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong. I love that English is a beautiful, vibrant, living language, ever fertile, fecund and adapting words from other languages. I love that it has more words and more shades of meaning than any other language in the world, and that it is ever introducing words for ideas it had not previously known. That a dictionary would be updated doesn't bother me. But, and I think I've hinted at this plenty, I think there that a certain philosophical faction is deliberately abusing lovely English for their own ends, robbing words of their meaning and twisting them until they mean their opposites, or worse, until they mean nothing. If everything is politics, then the word is meaningless, because it doesn't distinguish anything and its use its applicable to everything. Once there was a line of meaning drawn around the thing that was politics, and things lay outside of it. Therefore, it was a useful label which people could use to communicate ideas. Now it is just a tawdry weapon people use to bash on the edifice of logic and reason. This is the Newspeak, and it happens everywhere that vocabulary is diminished and words are made to stand for both something and their opposite, allowing for doublethink.

billd91 said:

Almost certainly. Our core political and moral beliefs inevitably shape our perspectives and thoughts and those affect pretty much everything we perceive, say, and do - some a lot more strongly than others.

Click to expand...

I'm more of the idea that it's the other way around, one's own perspectives, thoughts, and morals shape our political views. Or at least it goes both ways.

Gradine said:

My larger point is this: when you create art (and all forms of storytelling, even collaborative storytelling, is art; yes, even "beer-and-pretzel D&D",) you are making a statement about yourself and your world. Even if you don't mean to; even if you're actively trying not to. This is because no art, no story, springs forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus. Inspiration is not a bolt of lightning from nowhere. Every aspect of what we put into our storytelling comes from the culture, the world we live in. We like to say that we consume it, but the reality is more that it inundates us. No matter how hard we might try, we cannot escape that fact. And that culture, that world we live in, the one we cannot avoid impacting every part of who we are? Absolutely dripping in politics. It's pervasive. It's unavoidable. Whether we like or not (I would assume for most people that would be not); whether that's the world we want to live or not (again, I'm assuming this is a negative for most); it's the world we've got; the world we're stuck making our way through.

Click to expand...

I have a problem with this -funny how we agree on lots of stuff but this isn't the case-, art is a fuzzy thing, but the one thing that makes art, art is intentionality. No intentionality, no art. No art, no statement. And the onus of the statement falls on the person that intends to make something art. Otherwise no communication is possible. If I DM a game and YOU decide to make it into art, then the statement is yours to make, not mine. What you want to do is to turn what I do into art and then attribute the statement you make to me. And that is just so unkind to do. At least from where I come from, putting words into someone's mouth is just plain rude. And in this case you are putting words into people's mouths when they are silent. That is an extreme overreach.

Hence, my assertion that there is no such thing as apolitical storytelling. The act of avoiding making a political statement through storytelling is, explicitly or not, intentionally or not, an endorsement of the politics of the status quo. There is, of course, always a time and a place for simple fun escapism, but even that very term begs the question: what exactly are you escaping from?

Click to expand...

And again, which/whose status quo? from what point in time? Things aren't exactly black and white, and the status quo isn't uniform across the globe.

Gradine said:

Let's do a case study. Here's a game I like to call Find the Politics:

My fantasy world has a fantasy race of creatures. This race has its own culture, family structure, military structure, language, religion, trade, art, etc. Let's call them... oh, I don't know... Gerblins. By the default rules of the RPG system I am using to play in this fantasy world, this race is also, to every last man, woman, and child, irredeemably evil. The heroes (yes, explicitly heroes) are thus rewarded for their wholesale slaughter. If they find a settlement (sorry, lair)? Bonus treasure!

Don't worry, this is definitely Not Political. It definitely bears no resemblance to any kind of historical Othering or Cultural Genocide! No no, it's just a throwback to a series of popular fantasy stories written in a historical place in time where support for that kind of historical Othering or Cultural Genocide was more the norm. But not for Gerblins, certainly no, those are fake fantasy people! Gerblins have a completely different skin color, and tribal social structures, and shamanistic religion, and, and...

This is just the most egregious example, but look, no one is saying to not enjoy your pop culture fantasy game with your Gerblins and your Orks and your Cobalts or what have you. I'm not, anyway. I'm also not saying it's not possible to enjoy these fantasy tropes completely divorced from their troubling historical-political origins. But to purposefully ignore these politics? To shut your ears and eyes to it, and pretend they don't exist? I'm of the belief that pop culture consumed uncritically is pop culture that risks influencing one's thoughts and beliefs without being aware of it.

My two cents, anyway.

Click to expand...

The problem is that you are assuming too much, for starters that the other person lives in the same culture as you, and that any silence is by need intentional. I could write an adventure that is a subtle dig at something relevant to my immediate environment, but that reference is completely lost on anybody that doesn't share that same environment. Then someone from another country finds that since the adventure lacks a message -that is there but is completely invisible to that person- it automatically tries to be apolitical and thus condones the status quo and ergo I've got to be fully in support of that person's status quo, and that by extension I approve of everything in it. Hey I might even share some of that person's values but this all or nothing has robbed me of my own voice so they will never know.

Edit: A core principle in Roman style law is that someone who remains silent doesn't state, but doesn't deny either.

Celebrim said:

Don't get me wrong. I love that English is a beautiful, vibrant, living language, ever fertile, fecund and adapting words from other languages. I love that it has more words and more shades of meaning than any other language in the world, and that it is ever introducing words for ideas it had not previously known. That a dictionary would be updated doesn't bother me. But, and I think I've hinted at this plenty, I think there that a certain philosophical faction is deliberately abusing lovely English for their own ends, robbing words of their meaning and twisting them until they mean their opposites, or worse, until they mean nothing. If everything is politics, then the word is meaningless, because it doesn't distinguish anything and its use its applicable to everything. Once there was a line of meaning drawn around the thing that was politics, and things lay outside of it. Therefore, it was a useful label which people could use to communicate ideas. Now it is just a tawdry weapon people use to bash on the edifice of logic and reason. This is the Newspeak, and it happens everywhere that vocabulary is diminished and words are made to stand for both something and their opposite, allowing for doublethink.

Click to expand...

That's fair. This is also a point where we generally find some measure of agreement; you know how I feel about semantics, for instance, and particularly how I feel about the modern academic movement to ascribe purely systemic applications to words that are more commonly used to refer to interpersonal issues (which is what I think is at least part of what you're alluding to). I certainly haven't been very forthcoming with an actual definition of "politics" with a boundary and a limit (or at least I wasn't earlier upthread). When I say, for instance, "everything is political", I'm being hyperbolic, not literal. Obviously there are many things that aren't politics. The point I'm trying to make, poorly in this case, is that there are a lot more aspects to our society and our culture that are actually political (as in, big-p Politics) than people are willing to admit, and that any attempt to disengage from politics is a political act because, if nothing else, it supports the politics of the status quo, intentionally or otherwise, and the politics of the status quo are neither apolitical nor politically neutral. Of course, at this point we could go back and forth for days (or at least as long as the thread survives, and if it came to that I doubt it would be days) about collective versus individual responsibilities and get absolutely nowhere, but I'm not inclined to do so.

MoonSong said:

The problem is that you are assuming too much, for starters that the other person lives in the same culture as you, and that any silence is by need intentional.

Click to expand...

I feel I have been quite clear that I am speaking (a) primarily as an American, and (b) I do not believe that said silence is always or even often intentional. But intent is only part of the equation (I don't believe, as many of my political stripe do, that intent is completely irrelevant); impact matters too.

I could write an adventure that is a subtle dig at something relevant to my immediate environment, but that reference is completely lost on anybody that doesn't share that same environment. Then someone from another country finds that since the adventure lacks a message -that is there but is completely invisible to that person- it automatically tries to be apolitical and thus condones the status quo and ergo I've got to be fully in support of that person's status quo, and that by extension I approve of everything in it. Hey I might even share some of that person's values but this all or nothing has robbed me of my own voice so they will never know.

Click to expand...

Note that the message is always in the eye of the beholder. Again, I don't believe in the "Death of the Author" or that an author's intent is completely irrelevant; but in most cases the themes and message of a piece is fairly self-evident, and usually fairly innocuous (though not, I would propose, apolitical). That said, you've pointed out an exception that I wasn't clear needed to be addressed, but since you bring it up: obviously any big-P Political statement you make in your particular context (time & place) is only going to be relevant to your political context. I don't expect Shakespeare to address the #MeToo movement, for example; I would think that would be a given. I do not read Shakespeare, or ancient Athenian plays, for their takes on their particular context's big-P Politics (at least, I don't outside of academics). These works remain largely relevant because of what they have to say about the human condition; that's a politics of a kind on its own, just... not big-p Politics.

Also, not all works need to say everything at all times. It would be impossible for any work to actually do this. This is another point where I tend to break with others I share a political inclination with; but I don't feel that it's necessary for a work that addresses racism to necessarily also address sexism, for instance. A work can focus on, be about, one single big thing. Nor does it have to focus on any hot-button big-P Political issue. A story might not have anything to say about modern identity politics, but it might have a lot to say about, say, mutual respect, or empathy, or the virtues of the communal good, or individualism.

A work that is very conspicuously not trying to say anything, however? That, I feel, speaks volumes.

fjw70 said:

No, no real world politics influence my game. My orange skinned demon that wants to Make The Realms Great Again has nothing to do with real world politics.

Click to expand...

An Imp with delusions of grandeur, perhaps?

Umbran said:

The former is merely ignorance. It is uninteresting.

The latter is entirely human, based in interesting human psychology, visible in many places in human history, and also textbook capital-E Evil.

Click to expand...

I’d argue that the complete and exact opposite is true. The first is genuinely interesting, because you have a Good character who is unambiguously the villain, but also has perhaps very similar goals as the PCs and their allies, and who believes with a Paladin’s faith that what they are Right. It’s both more interesting and more terrifying than the alternative.

OTOH, you’ve got the second option, which I find completely boring on nearly every level. The only thing that salvaged such characters is charisma. Thanos and Emperor Palpatine and Vader are satisfying villains in spite of fitting in category 2, IMO, not because of it.

Umbran said:

Popular or not, I think it is simply incorrect. Politics are those things concerned with governance of large bodies of people. The content of a game in your home, that is only seen by a half-dozen people, is not political. It has no impact or bearing on the governance of a nation, state, or even a town. When the impact of the choice is negligible on the scale of governance of our groupings, then the choice is aesthetic or personal, rather than political.

Click to expand...

That’s...pretty much objectively false, though. It doesn’t hold up to its own qualifications. By this measure, literally nothing is political unless there are large numbers of people in agreement about it, or the specific people talking about or doing it are public figures. Suddenly a casual discussion with friends about economic policy and the ethics thereof can’t be political, which is obviously absurd.

More importantly, a person’s political leanings are created by their moral, ethical, social, beliefs, biases, and priorities. Does anyone really believe that it is possible to completely remove those from how they think?

doctorbadwolf said:

a person’s political leanings are created by their moral, ethical, social, beliefs, biases, and priorities. Does anyone really believe that it is possible to completely remove those from how they think?

Click to expand...

Completely remove? No. Minimize and become aware of, as when searching for objective truth? Yes.

doctorbadwolf said:

An Imp with delusions of grandeur, perhaps?



I’d argue that the complete and exact opposite is true. The first is genuinely interesting, because you have a Good character who is unambiguously the villain, but also has perhaps very similar goals as the PCs and their allies, and who believes with a Paladin’s faith that what they are Right. It’s both more interesting and more terrifying than the alternative.

OTOH, you’ve got the second option, which I find completely boring on nearly every level. The only thing that salvaged such characters is charisma. Thanos and Emperor Palpatine and Vader are satisfying villains in spite of fitting in category 2, IMO, not because of it.



That’s...pretty much objectively false, though. It doesn’t hold up to its own qualifications. By this measure, literally nothing is political unless there are large numbers of people in agreement about it, or the specific people talking about or doing it are public figures. Suddenly a casual discussion with friends about economic policy and the ethics thereof can’t be political, which is obviously absurd.

More importantly, a person’s political leanings are created by their moral, ethical, social, beliefs, biases, and priorities. Does anyone really believe that it is possible to completely remove those from how they think?

Click to expand...

I absolutely think it’s possible to completely remove those things and imagine something alien. I suppose that ability to imagine things that are very different is kind of a core component to fantasy. Leaving behind what you know is probably the start: “if things weren’t like this... they might be like THAT.”