Unpopular opinions go here

[Warpiglet-7]

D&D adventurers do not have much in common with modern adventurers. At best they resemble the late 19th century tomb European tomb robbers -- er, archaeologists who used colonialism as an excuse to raid the relics and treasures of other cultures.

I am running a few shadowdark sessions at Carnage in Killington VT this late October where the goal is to PUT BACK the treasures in the dungeon.

You know that is inspiring.

I am imagining a great evil that is awakened by looting and adventurers are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Novelty and twists make for good adventures.

I am going to steal this premise. Also might give the rogues some fun using stealing skills too…

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Objective quality is a myth

I'm not sure that's an unpopular opinion. At least whenever I say that there is such a thing as objective quality, the folks around me lose their mind.

Generally, I agree with a quote that Roger Ebert attributed to Gene Siskel: "There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact. When you say The Valachi Papers is a better film than The Godfather, you are wrong." Which is not to say that liking The Valachi Papers better is wrong, just that The Godfather is an objectively better-made film than it, using the criteria that we use to evaluate films currently. The criteria we use to make these evaluations can and should evolve as new techiques are developed and we change. And we shouldn't be blinded by our own limited perspectives in evaluating things and how we think and feel about them. Certainly, there are places where we should be and should have been more careful not to excuse things based on notions of objective quality (for instance, I don't think Birth of a Nation should have been routinely taught to first-year film students at my alma mater, regardless of whatever innovations D.W. Griffith may have made). But I think suggesting that quality is entirely subjective is too reductive.

EtA: Taught to film students. It wasn't shown to all first-years. Also, "first-year," not "freshmen."

 

[Faolyn]

Sorry, I'm not familiar with that word.

Gay relationship, particularly in manga and anime.

 

[MGibster]

EtA: Taught to film students. It wasn't shown to all first-years. Also, "first-year," not "freshmen."

I watched Birth of a Nation in my American Cultures class and I couldn't decide what I most more offended by, the bald faced racism or the movie boring me to tears. Be offensive, but don't bore me.

 

[Faolyn]

As in modern sensibilities transplanted onto a game with an old school mentality.

Well, most D&D-type games have worlds that have had medieval stasis for thousands of years and they have races that have different views on morality and ownership and there's long-lived races and undead that were alive when those items were taken. It's not like today where the descendants of the archeologists/thieves are made to return items to the descendants of the people who were stolen from. Nor should we assume that just because the tech level is stuck around Ye Olden Tymes that the philosophies are stuck as well.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I watched Birth of a Nation in my American Cultures class and I couldn't decide what I most more offended by, the bald faced racism or the movie boring me to tears. Be offensive, but don't bore me.

Silent films are hard asks for a lot of folks. The pacing is often languid in ways that doesn't translate well to modern audiences. Which is kind of funny to me, because prose from the same period often feels more modern to me than a lot of mid/late century prose. Like, the default 1960s American fiction style is awful (thankfully, it only seems to survive to this day in the fiction section of The New Yorker).

 

[MGibster]

Silent films are hard asks for a lot of folks. The pacing is often languid in ways that doesn't translate well to modern audiences.

You don't even have to go back that far. Go watch The Changeling from 1980 starring George C. Scott. It's a great ghost story, but, man, would audiences who grew up with YouTube and TikTok have a hard time with the pace of the film.

 

[Reynard]

You know that is inspiring.

I am imagining a great evil that is awakened by looting and adventurers are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Novelty and twists make for good adventures.

I am going to steal this premise. Also might give the rogues some fun using stealing skills too…

My premise is that the previous generation, heroes collected items of power from ancient tombs to stop a Great Evil, but then kept them. Now the original owners want them back

 

[Reynard]

Perhaps I'll check it out. I'd like to know what "modern sensibilities" means in this context. That phrase is something of a trigger for me these days, as it often reads like, "the things you like suck and should be replaced, and you are bad for liking them".

Just go in cold. Read it and see if you like it.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

You don't even have to go back that far. Go watch The Changeling from 1980 starring George C. Scott. It's a great ghost story, but, man, would audiences who grew up with YouTube and TikTok have a hard time with the pace of the film.

As a graduate student, I taught first-year composition, and my students bounced hard off of Citizen Kane. It really bothered me until a colleague pointed out that it's really difficult to get modern audiences, especially post-Internet generations, to see how revolutionary Kane is because so much of what Welles and Tolland did became standard vocabulary for filmmakers. It's like watching someone design the sentence.