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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7510971" data-attributes="member: 57112">One of the things I've always enjoying about talking with you has been your willingness to engage in debate on good faith. So, other than the back-handed compliment, did you have a point to make? The problem with your designation with there being multiple meanings of "political" (which I'll allow) is that they are distinctions without a difference. They are conflated; we wouldn't use the exact same word to describe all of them if they weren't.Let's pare this down to its fundamental level (I have a tendency to go off on tangents and lose my point, after all). My original assertion that started this dialogue was this: 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. As an aside, this is especially true for those of us living in the United States, where, among other things, we once made light bulbs a serious point of political contention.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?</blockquote>

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