D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting

[Voadam]

But this is already the case. If you look at her entry

Beat me to it as I was typing up my post.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The desire for power and control are as much fundamental human needs as the need for romance/

The desire for power and control is negative, destructive, and pretty much sums up what is wrong with humanity.

And an appallingly sexist stereotype when applied to men.

As are needs to be appreciated, to create art,

Has Ravenloft done House of Wax or Theatre of Blood yet?

And again, having a desire for romance is fine. Having that as your only purpose is boring and stereotypically sexist when it applies to women./

Calling it "romance" is to belittle it. The desire to have a family is constructive, and essential to the survival of the human race, just as the desire for power and control is inimical to the survival of the human race.

And it is just as sexist when denied to men.

Which as I said elsewhere, is not an excuse.

It's not an excuse, it's a problem.

If it is to become less sexist, Ravenloft needs to stop trying to be 19th Century Gothic.

Or perhaps it would have been better just to let the setting die.

Which is why I said I wanted new female Darklords with motivations other than just romance.

I'm sure there will be. But I think too much emphasis is put on these darklords. We need to kill off a bunch of power hungry men. But I don't think replacing them with power hungry women would be an improvement.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm sure there will be. But I think too much emphasis is put on these darklords. We need to kill off a bunch of power hungry men. But I don't think replacing them with power hungry women would be an improvement.

I don't think either is a problem in itself. The purpose of lords to give the domains character and to be frightening. While seeking power isn't a good thing, characters who are power hungry can be terrifying (you don't want every lord to be seeking power, but many are: including some of the women: Ivana Boritsi could be described as power hungry, as could Jacqueline Renier). I am not interested in dark lords serving to embody ideals or beliefs I myself hold. In some ways I want them to challenge my beliefs. Some of the best horror works because it makes you uneasy, uncomfortable, by establishing a world or populate it with characters with beliefs/morals that you don't have. If you believe 'blessed are the meek', contending with villains who seem to embody, even make appealing, right makes right, can lend itself to horror.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

While seeking power isn't a good thing, characters who are power hungry can be terrifying

They are also every boring Generic Fantasy villain ever.

 

[Bedrockgames]

They are also every boring Generic Fantasy villain ever.

Well I think you need more than just power hungry. Like I said I think having familial connections and love in there, things like that, can make it more interesting. And in Ravenloft here is a problem inherent to the setting for power hungry characters: it is really hard to have someone be like Sauron for example. But on a smaller scale it works (like with Renier for instance).

Also I want to be careful here because you do need to mix things up (this is why I was saying having more female domain lords is good, and if we do, you'd expect more varied motivations). If every NPC in ravenloft is brooding and in love, it can get old. Having the occasional pure ferocious vampire or werewolf is useful in terms of horror.

 

[Faolyn]

I have addressed this is elsewhere in the thread, I really don't have an easy time with the quote interface. I find it a lot easier to break up each comment and deal with it individually (both in terms of formatting but also in terms of thinking about what the person said and reacting to it)

You can apparently respond to just part of what I wrote at a time, which means you are either quoting individual sections or you are deleting everything other than that one issue. In either case, it means you are capable of breaking up text into smaller chunks.

Please try harder. Hint: If you quote a section, then it vanishes from your quote clipboard and you can quote a later section with ease.

I was saying characters who desire love were popular at the time, one of the big ones that was seeing greater popularity again because of the broadway play was Phantom of the Opera. Her curse was reminiscent of that.

You said her background and curse remind you of male villains. Why male villiains? If it was simply because of Phantom, then you would just say villains, or of a particular villain, not-plural. Instead, you specify gender. What about her or her background seems masculine to you?

I would say Strahd is very much defined by his love for Tatyana. He has other things going on, but as I pointed out, so does Gabrielle Aderre and Ivana Boritsi.

Which are all related to their love lives. Both of them love screwing over and killing people who have found happiness. Gabrielle hates the Vistani because she blames her Vistani mother for denying her love. Ivana throws massive parties to distract from the fact she can't touch anyone without killing them.

What else do they do?

Again, we don't know why they put these themes with the female characters,

Sigh. Yes, we do. Those are tropes associated with female villains throughout the history of media. Good women have husbands and children. Evil women forsake such things for power, revenge, personal gain, etc. It's rare, even today, to find a (male) writer who dares to give a woman both.

I can only assume willful blindness is your reason for not seeing this.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You said her background and curse remind you of male villains. Why male villiains? If it was simply because of Phantom, then you would just say villains, or of a particular villain, not-plural. Instead, you specify gender. What about her or her background seems masculine to you?

I didn't say it was masculine. I was just saying it was the kind of tragic curse/situation I remember seeing a lot of male villains at that time have. Specifically the bit about her turning into a wererat in the presence of someone she loves. My point was that I didn't see this as a uniquely or mostly female trope.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Which are all related to their love lives. Both of them love screwing over and killing people who have found happiness. Gabrielle hates the Vistani because she blames her Vistani mother for denying her love. Ivana throws massive parties to distract from the fact she can't touch anyone without killing them.

What else do they do?

No you are not understanding the Aderre character, she hates the vistani because they don't accept her as one of them. She was rejected by the people of Ravenloft and by the Vistani, thus she is an outcast. A lot of it is complicated and bound up together, but read the entry. It is clear this isn't just about her not being able to have a baby and it isn't just because she is blaming the vistani for her mother 'denying her love'. It is the whole package of her background.

Ivana Boritsi isn't well sketched out in the black box. Don't believe she had an actual entry there. But we know she owns most of Borca, she is effectively the temporal ruler, and that she a person of excess. It is hard to compare her with lords who get a full description. Clearly she is powerful and has a brain, and she seems more competent in general than her cousin Ivan (who is one of my favorite lords). But again I would say it is definitely an interesting entry, and I did like how they expanded her and the emordenung as the line went on.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sigh. Yes, we do. Those are tropes associated with female villains throughout the history of media. Good women have husbands and children. Evil women forsake such things for power, revenge, personal gain, etc. It's rare, even today, to find a (male) writer who dares to give a woman both.

I can only assume willful blindness is your reason for not seeing this.

I don't know why you are assuming this. We really can look at the same piece of media and come away with different conclusions, and we can take different lenses to that media. I don't accept the idea that what you lay out in your post is the only or the most likely explanation. And I especially reject the notion that content equals message. Just because you have an evil character who does X, and is female, doesn't mean you are saying evil women do X. And I just am not seeing the message in these characters that 'good women have husbands and children'. Clearly having a family is something many people desire, and denying that to some of these characters helps give them believable motivation. But I think we have a fundamentally different view of how media impacts people, what kinds of messages media carries, and what these tropes even mean. Especially with horror, I don't think you can take them at face value. And I do think you need to consider what the imagery and themes meant to the writers.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I can only assume willful blindness is your reason for not seeing this.

I am not assuming bad faith on your part. I don't see why you would assume it on mine. I have a different worldview and different view on art, media and design than you. And I am very much coming at this from a point of view where contextualizing the content is the focus (and that includes understanding it in its time, as an expression of the thoughts of the individual designers, etc). I think there is a big danger of taking vital tropes away from people, when we just assume they are bad or wrong in all cases (like I said, someone whose mother lost a child in birth, might use that imagery in their art to work through things----it doesn't mean they are making a commentary on whether women should have babies or not).