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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TrippyHippy" data-source="post: 7765929" data-attributes="member: 27252">The context of what I said was in relation to what was said previously - that what the Chechnyan government thinks about this, and the nature of their complaints against White Wolf didn't matter. It does matter, which was the point being made. It's at the heart of the matter. I'll try to explain why.  Now I knew about the Chechnyan stuation from Amnesty International, as a member, although very few people I knew in my everyday work and socialising were aware of the situation. Indeed, a number of my gay friends have no idea about anything happening to LGBT people in Eastern Europe and Russia, and I know one that actually said she liked Putin as 'he gets bad press but he gets things done' (believe me, I have had this conversation). The wider awareness about what is happening in Chechnya is so limited that I could do a survey in many local populations, and I'd wager that more than half of them wouldn't even know of the existance of Chechnya. The lack of awareness in the gaming community reflects this also.I feel, as somebody who does care about these issues, that there is a lack of discussion on the matter, and that referencing these things in any medium is a good way of raising awareness. This particular medium was a game depicting a fantasy reflection of our own world, where vampires supposedly exist in conspiracies that mirror human society and control it. Some people argue that a game like this shouldn't reference things like this at all, but I disagree. It's a valid a medium as any other. Is it just an issue of the manner in which they present it? Should supernatural elements ever excuse real life atrocities? There is validity in this statement but it is a nuanced one. I feel the outrage over this particular nuance has been overstated - because the real point is that the issue has been raised at all, metaphorically or otherwise. Using metaphors to raise awareness isn't a new thing - when UB40 sang about mass starvation in Africa in 1979s Food for Thought or Black Sabbath sang about the Vietnam War in War Pigs, they did so using metaphors. When George Orwell wrote Animal Farm as an allegory about the impact of the Russian Revolution he used animals as a metaphor. There really is no difference here, except vampires are used as a metaphor in this case. Now, you could say that they should have changed names or created some sort of fantasy version of Chechnya to make the metaphors less obvious, but again this is a nuance. Presenting the leadership of Chechnya in vampiric form is as much part of the satire as a Saturday Night Show comedian doing a comedy impersonation of a political figure would be. In folklorish terms, it's like presenting Lady Bathory as a vampire or, indeed, Vlad Tepes. These were cruel, tyrannical, murderous individuals - well represented by the metaphor of being vampires. Considering the regime Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov has presided over, I don't see the metaphor as being unapt here either. I don't think this trivialises what is happening - I think it accentuates it, in a poetic way. Now you could disagree with all this, and that's fine. But this is my point: this article has raised awareness to the extent that the Chechnyan leadership took notice - it made an impact on them, it angered them that the issue had been raised and they had been presented in a negative way. This is a good thing, because they are being forced to address the criticism in a public way. I'm not claiming here that people like yourself don't care about the situation over there, but rather that the anger against White Wolf could have been channelled more directly against the Chechnyan leadership within the momentum of having got their awareness. The fact that they felt compelled to respond in anger, should have been built on to widen the publicity. People ought to have championed Western freedom of expression to highlight this issue even louder. But they didn't - the whole thing was meekly withdrawn, White Wolf was condemned and dissolved for a nuanced aspect of their presentation of the situation, and the Chechnyan leadership claimed a victory. The likelihood of any creative medium making statements like these is diminished under threat of misplaced opprobrium as much as anything else. It is the worst possible outcome of this situation - for the LGBT people in Chechnya - some of whom have actually said as much in correspondance to the White Wolf forums. We all care about the people in Chechnya, including the writers from White Wolf, but their situation has not been made any better by the demise of White Wolf and the censoring of the book. It's been made worse.</blockquote>

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