Big Changes At White Wolf Following Controversy

Following an online backlash regarding the content of their recent publications, White Wolf Publishing has just announced some big changes, including the suspension of the Vampire 5th Edition Camarilla and Anarch books, and a restructuring of management.

White Wolf's Shams Jorjani made the following announcement about an hour ago:

"Hello everyone,

My name is Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development at Paradox Interactive and interim manager at White Wolf Publishing. I wanted to inform you of some changes that will be implemented at White Wolf, starting immediately.

Sales and printing of the V5 Camarilla and Anarch books will be temporarily suspended. The section on Chechnya will be removed in both the print and PDF versions of the Camarilla book. We anticipate that this will require about three weeks. This means shipping will be delayed; if you have pre-ordered a copy of Camarilla or Anarchs, further information will follow via e-mail.

In practical terms, White Wolf will no longer function as a separate entity. The White Wolf team will be restructured and integrated directly into Paradox Interactive, and I will be temporarily managing things during this process. We are recruiting new leadership to guide White Wolf both creatively and commercially into the future, a process that has been ongoing since September.

Going forward, White Wolf will focus on brand management. This means White Wolf will develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness, and give licensees the tools they need to create new, excellent products in this story world. White Wolf will no longer develop and publish these products internally. This has always been the intended goal for White Wolf as a company, and it is now time to enact it.

The World of Darkness has always been about horror, and horror is about exploring the darkest parts of our society, our culture, and ourselves. Horror should not be afraid to explore difficult or sensitive topics, but it should never do so without understanding who those topics are about and what it means to them. Real evil does exist in the world, and we can’t ever excuse its real perpetrators or cheapen the suffering of its real victims.

In the Chechnya chapter of the V5 Camarilla book, we lost sight of this. The result was a chapter that dealt with a real-world, ongoing tragedy in a crude and disrespectful way. We should have identified this either during the creative process or in editing. This did not happen, and for this we apologize.

We ask for your patience while we implement these changes. In the meantime, let’s keep talking. I’m available for any and all thoughts, comments and feedback, on shams.jorjani@paradoxinteractive.com."

White Wolf is currently own by Paradox Interactive, who acquired the World of Darkness rights in 2015 from previous owner CCP (who you might know from Eve Online) whose plans for a WoD MMO failed to bear fruit.

The recent Camarilla and Anarch books have met widespread criticism. The former, Camarilla, includes a section which appears to trivialise current real-life events in Chechnya, where the LGBTQ community is being persecuted, tortured, and murdered and uses that current tragedy as a backdrop for the setting. This comes after the company was forced to deny links to neo-Nazi ideology. White Wolf recently announced that "White Wolf is currently undergoing some significant transitions up to and including a change in leadership. The team needs a short time to understand what this means, so we ask for your patience as we figure out our next steps" and this appears to be the result of that decision.

 

[Umbran]

We see it happen all the time, without any major consequence to the corporations.

Sure. But they aren't *legally required* to do that. When this happens, it happens by choice.

This should not be surprising. Individual people can have a conscience, or feel empathy. But when humans act as groups (corporation, political party, college fraternity, sci-fi convention committee, or whatever) we often find it a struggle to be empathetic, or apply conscience and thoughtfulness on a consistent basis.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

If someone wrote a similar book about Roman Polanski, humanzing him while describing his crimes, it would create a deserved crap-storm of vociferous negative press.

I would question anyone who criticizes a work on the basis that it humanizes someone when that someone is, in fact, human. I mentioned Downfall earlier. That film humanizes the goddamn Führer. And it would have been a far worse film if it had not. Humanizing evil is not the same thing as excusing evil, but it is the first step in grasping the reality of it.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Sure. But they aren't *legally required* to do that. When this happens, it happens by choice.

This should not be surprising. Individual people can have a conscience, or feel empathy. But when humans act as groups (corporation, political party, college fraternity, sci-fi convention committee, or whatever) we often find it a struggle to be empathetic, or apply conscience and thoughtfulness on a consistent basis.

Except in this case, the corporation exhibited more empathy than the individual writer.

 

[Umbran]

Right, because vampires. Curiously, in the plot in the WW supplement, aren't the vampires manipulating the humans in government to conduct the pogrom? Aren't then the humans just as guilty as the real world humans who, instead of vampires as a motivation, use something equally fictional to justify their actions?

Given that WW vampires have the ability to influence human minds? No. Vampires can be seen as removing the agency of the humans in government - those without agency are not generally held responsible for their actions. That's a major part of the problem.

As this claim has nothing to do with Chechnya or White Wolf, but is much broader, either you can defend the above using Lolita or my other examples, or you cannot.

I am not so laden with testosterone that you can bait me with "I double-dog-dare you" tactics.

Lolita is not a RPG product. It really isn't relevant to this site. In addition, I have not read it. I also haven't read Satanic Verses, and my exposure to Catcher in the Rye was decades ago. I can speak to these things only on generalities. I am not so arrogant (or stupid) as to try to defend a work I cannot speak to in detail.

If you cannot, then it appears you have nothing more that 'because reasons' for your claim and don't have a broader basis for your statement.

Er, no. It appears I have better things to do with my time than take arbitrary tests that I don't really expect will be judged fairly.

Dude, really - it is Thanksgiving weekend. I'm hosting a dinner tomorrow. My mother-in-law is visiting. If you think my failure to defend Lolita indicates anything about the quality of my position, you have lost perspective, and it is time to stop discussing.

 

[Umbran]

As this claim has nothing to do with Chechnya or White Wolf, but is much broader, either you can defend the above using Lolita or my other examples, or you cannot. If you cannot, then it appears you have nothing more that 'because reasons' for your claim and don't have a broader basis for your statement.

Heh. Time in the shower is wonderful for thinking. There's an implicit strawman here.

I say that the ethical question to such publications is pretty simple.

You say, "Oh, yeah? Well, defend Lolita simply, then!"

I say, "I only have to defend a work if I am asserting that the publisher is being ethical in its publication."

I have made no such assertions! In fact, I have noted that corporations have a hard time behaving in an ethical manner! So, why, again, should I have to defend the ethical character of a work *you* choose? That makes no sense! Maybe, upon reading the work, I would find its existence unethical!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Word.

This is the only Lolita worth discussing at this particular time:
View attachment 103262

(It’s REALLY good in eggnog.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I would question anyone who criticizes a work on the basis that it humanizes someone when that someone is, in fact, human. I mentioned Downfall earlier. That film humanizes the goddamn Führer. And it would have been a far worse film if it had not. Humanizing evil is not the same thing as excusing evil, but it is the first step in grasping the reality of it.

Humanizing characters in stories isn't about just recognizing that they are literally human, though. Hitler shouldn't be humanized. We all know he was a human being, not an alien or a robot or a vampire. We don't need to have him presented in a sympathetic manner, ie one that elicits empathy for him.

Humanizing a character like Loki in the MCU is one thing. He's both fictional, guilty of crimes that happen in space or involve alien invaders or magic, the whole story is so fantastical that it's easy to forget the humanity of the characters without some narrative and characterization humanization. Villains are more intersting when they're partly sympathetic, because it makes out emotional reaction to the narrative and characters ambiguous and murky, which is enjoyable to explore in a safe environment with fictional characters, similar to why frightening things are enjoyable in a movie or book.

A story that humanizes Polanski would be a story that literally elicits empathy for a real world child rapist. That should quite obviously be completely unacceptable, morally.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think the term most usually used in the context of portraying all sides of an evil human (thereby softening their overall image) these days is “normalizing”.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The rest of the people have their own opinion about where is the limit, and if they are offended because they think you broke that limit, they don't mind what is your opinion. Never mind if you has a clear conscience if they are angry because you have said something.

Many times in the past I have complained about some anticlerical stereotypes in the modern speculative fiction, worse when I read in the news the persecution against Christianity has more mortal victims than racism or homophobia. That is my stuck horn with White Wolf, Fading Suns, Warhammer 40.000, 7th Sea and other franchises where the believers are zealots who had forgotten rationalism and to respect the human dignity, and there is a great temptation to try diverting the subject. Sorry.

We have to take care when speculative fiction talk about real people who is suffering because this may trivialize these matters. Let's imagine somebody writing about real murders against in Ciudad Juarez being caused by supernatural factions (Sabath or Dark Spiral Dances, for example). Do you notice how would feel families' victims? We need a piece of good sense for this. We can't write: "Pentex are selling poisoned "halal" (= allowed for Muslims) food causing taharrush ( = massive sexual assault) by young Muslims with intoxicated minds. Or "vampires are controlled ONU to create opened frontiers because it is a trap, the illegal immigrants are easiest to be disappeared, not only for blood, but also for women and organs traffic, or ot be recruited as fresh meat for the street gangs", "Vampires are financing reseach ecto-genesis, the gestation of living beings, also humans, in an artificial matrix to can "harvest" secretly" without police investigating missing reports". You can imagine the controversy if somebody publish something like theses.

We can use speculative fiction for a softer way to talk about crude reality, for example the big bad wolf of the Gingerbread witch to explain children about potential menaces by unknown people.

* Off-topic. About Lolita. For American Law is abuse all relations with underage teens, but in another countries may allowed, for example in Spain was allowed since 13y (if it was consensual, of course) but now the limit is 16y. There was a controversy in France about a new law because there may be a open door for relations with underage teens. Centuries ago a 16y girl marrying wasn't too rare. In the pre-Christian classical Greek-Roman civilization relations with underage wasn't so forbidden. Our biology tells us teen girls are in the best time to procreate, but we can't, we shouldn't, because they aren't ready yet for serious relations. True men want complete women with enough psychological maturity and emotional intelligence. Young girls are beautiful as an art picture, we can watch them but not touching them. They deserve to know the true love, innocent and pure, and not to be used like a toy or hunt trophy by a perverted. A teenage girl who only wants to have fun but not to grow as person is really sad.

Speculative fiction should be really careful about sexual predators who like underage relations. It is dangerous if people start to see it as something relatively normal and then some pervert stupy finds a new challenge about breaking rules. Don't give ideas to the bad guys.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Humanizing characters in stories isn't about just recognizing that they are literally human, though. Hitler shouldn't be humanized. We all know he was a human being, not an alien or a robot or a vampire. We don't need to have him presented in a sympathetic manner, ie one that elicits empathy for him.

Humanizing a character like Loki in the MCU is one thing. He's both fictional, guilty of crimes that happen in space or involve alien invaders or magic, the whole story is so fantastical that it's easy to forget the humanity of the characters without some narrative and characterization humanization. Villains are more intersting when they're partly sympathetic, because it makes out emotional reaction to the narrative and characters ambiguous and murky, which is enjoyable to explore in a safe environment with fictional characters, similar to why frightening things are enjoyable in a movie or book.

A story that humanizes Polanski would be a story that literally elicits empathy for a real world child rapist. That should quite obviously be completely unacceptable, morally.

I'm sorry, you're saying that an exercise of empathy is immoral? Normally it's the withholding and discouragement of empathy that is quite obviously completely unacceptable morally. You have to go pretty far to find a theory of moral philosophy that says, "Yes, it is okay to be selective about with whom you empathize; you should only empathize with certain types of people."

I think part of the confusion may like in your conflating empathy with sympathy. They are not the same thing. To empathize with someone is to understand their thoughts and feelings. To sympathize is to share them. They are so different as to sometimes work at cross purposes. Triumph of the Will is made to evoke sympathy for Hitler, and does so by dehumanizing him, building up his image as an over-man, beyond good and evil, above the weaknesses and follies that the rest of us share. Downfall demolishes that image, and any temptation one might feel to follow his ideology, precisely by exposing his all-too-human pride and rage and despair for our examination.

(Something's ringing a bell... oh, yes, Nietzsche! There's one place you can find an anti-empathetic moral theory. What a coincidence that I should be reminded of that here.)