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The D&D Multiverse Part 2- The Remix Culture of the Gygaxian Multiverse
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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8394191" data-attributes="member: 177"><p>So, you say, "Because..." which is suggesting that this is the root cause, and I think you've not quite hit it.</p><p></p><p>You seem to be treating D&D as if it was its own, independent thing, but, like all other bits of culture, it happened (an continues to happen) in a cultural context. And that context includes the science fiction and fantasy of the time. And while there were the Leibers and Tolkiens, the sci-fi/fantasy world was... really freaking weird in the 60s and 70s.</p><p></p><p>We tend to lose this when we think of the literature of the day, because what we know today are mostly the novels of the age, which tend to be a little more self-consistent. But in Gygax's day, it would not be terribly far off to say that the day-to-day genre was dominated by short stories, which we almost never reprint today. As TV grew, we slowly replaced printed short stories with TV shows of similar structure.</p><p></p><p>Star Trek went western at the OK Corral back in 1968 (ST:TOS Season 3 Episode 6, "Spectre of the Gun"). They went Alice In wonderland two years earlier in "Shore Leave". They went time traveling in "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "City on the Edge of Forever", and "Assignment: Earth". Played with Greek myth in "Who Mourns for Adonis". They mucked in with 1920s gangsters in "A Piece of the Action", fought in Roman gladiatorial games in "Bread and Circuses", and jumped into an alternate universe in "Mirror, Mirror". And this was all just one show!</p><p></p><p>Those years of sci-fi and fantasy understandably included a lot of experimentation in what was possible, without quite so much consideration as to why one should do it. The result was, I say, embracing the irony, rather Frankenstinian, and not terribly cohesive.</p><p></p><p>D&D was a microcosm of this - a lot of, "Hey, look, we can do this!!!" But, like the rest of teh sci-fi/fantasy world, D&D shifted from just playign with pieces, to trying to build cohesive structures, and the mish-mash of weird shifted into <em>targeted use</em> of weird. Weird stuff in modern genre works is generally there <em>for specific effect</em>, not just for the sake of weird itself.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 8394191, member: 177"] So, you say, "Because..." which is suggesting that this is the root cause, and I think you've not quite hit it. You seem to be treating D&D as if it was its own, independent thing, but, like all other bits of culture, it happened (an continues to happen) in a cultural context. And that context includes the science fiction and fantasy of the time. And while there were the Leibers and Tolkiens, the sci-fi/fantasy world was... really freaking weird in the 60s and 70s. We tend to lose this when we think of the literature of the day, because what we know today are mostly the novels of the age, which tend to be a little more self-consistent. But in Gygax's day, it would not be terribly far off to say that the day-to-day genre was dominated by short stories, which we almost never reprint today. As TV grew, we slowly replaced printed short stories with TV shows of similar structure. Star Trek went western at the OK Corral back in 1968 (ST:TOS Season 3 Episode 6, "Spectre of the Gun"). They went Alice In wonderland two years earlier in "Shore Leave". They went time traveling in "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "City on the Edge of Forever", and "Assignment: Earth". Played with Greek myth in "Who Mourns for Adonis". They mucked in with 1920s gangsters in "A Piece of the Action", fought in Roman gladiatorial games in "Bread and Circuses", and jumped into an alternate universe in "Mirror, Mirror". And this was all just one show! Those years of sci-fi and fantasy understandably included a lot of experimentation in what was possible, without quite so much consideration as to why one should do it. The result was, I say, embracing the irony, rather Frankenstinian, and not terribly cohesive. D&D was a microcosm of this - a lot of, "Hey, look, we can do this!!!" But, like the rest of teh sci-fi/fantasy world, D&D shifted from just playign with pieces, to trying to build cohesive structures, and the mish-mash of weird shifted into [I]targeted use[/I] of weird. Weird stuff in modern genre works is generally there [I]for specific effect[/I], not just for the sake of weird itself. [/QUOTE]
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