I mean, that's all fair.....
....Proceeds to educate me on Tiamat lore I was missing like I expected might be the case....
....Edit: Further...it's not like I'm being demeaning here. I literally pointed out how this actually demonstrates that Dragonlance, for all the crap people fling at it, has permanently changed the lore of D&D as a whole. That recognizing the deep (but not totally all-encompassing) connection between Tiamat and Takhisis is, in a very meaningful sense, showing how Dragonlance has asserted its own canon over what came before. So it's frustrating to be simultaneously told not to give flippant responses that ignore important context in a way that is kind of flippant and ignores important context.
Firstly, thank you for giving me that tidbit of info on Tiamat. I suspected something like that might be the case, and I appreciate you for letting me know. 'm unaware if that 4E example was a new thing, or whether there were similar stories going back much further. If that was inspired by Takhisis and entertained a bunch of people, that is wonderful. If it wasn't, and was an off and on again thing all along, that's great too. I'm not being flippant, I genuinely think both would be Good Things (TM) and appreciate you letting me know.
Also, I believe you that you didn't
intend to be demeaning. However, pointing out Takhisis was influential while mocking people for not liking the characters being the same aren't contradictory and don't negate each other. They are two seperate points. What you did was kind of like the noble savage stereotype. I'm struggling to explain, so I apologize for any difficulties in comprehending my fumbling attempts to get the idea across. It's vaguely condescending in a "even you lowlies have things that us superior peoples could learn from" way. In this much more minor case, you mock the viewpoint and people who hold it but compliment how wonderfully useful the "wrong" thing has been to the "right" thing. I get that is not your intention, but it's still definitely going on there. I hope that you are able to intuit what I'm actually trying to explain there, because I am not at all confident I put it in a way a total stranger could reliably understand. The main takeaway is that the example you gave as evidence of not being demeaning, doesn't actually touch on the part that was
unintentionally demeaning. If how that works doesn't seem to make sense maybe someone else can explain it better, and I apologize for any frustration my failure there has caused.
@darjr but also kind of @ everyone getting all tribalistic about this. Eh, in isolation maybe.
But I've seen a lot of shitting on dragonlance and it's fans, even on enworld which is a pretty polite place. I actually agree with you about the fans who are being things I am not allowed to accurately describe using common language due to forum rules. But any treating the fandom as a monolith discussion aside, a lot of those misunderstandings don't actually matter. At the end of the day inspired by does not mean is. There is no
real answer, because these aren't
real things. Like with comics, it all falls apart as soon as you think about it for five seconds. And then a subset of fans start arguing about how it
really works, what the One True Canon(TM) is, as though that's a concept that even makes sense. As though they weren't a hodgepodge of independent but interlinked things riddled with inconsistencies due to the natural limitations of human ability and the intrinsic limitations of what a story is. Dragonlance and its fandom gets an unfair amount of condescension and scorn in the same vein as people going on about real literature. I'm extremely tempted to go on a rant about people who hate kender because of other people who flanderized Tasslehoff Burrfoot, but I'm luckily lazy enough to rein in my rant.
My personal take on the whole thing, for anyone bored enough to care is this. Connected universes are the current flavor for large corporations. Large corporations view everything as a resource to be converted into money. Large corporations and the system they exist in heavily encourages short term gain. Restricting choice is a very effective means of manipulating supply and demand in corporations favor. Niches have hard limits on their profitability, which makes wider niches better investments for large corporations (at least in their thinking). Many valuable experiences, stories, products, etc., aren't one size fits all. All of these together means that corporations do their best to make a single product that as many people as possible purchase without even considering alternatives, and tend to rot the communities from within because community+longevity and profit+hierarchies are mostly inimical and those niche not one size fits all stories are the very things that made the communities and the product a thing to begin with. This is just one tiny piece of both WOTC and multi-industry trends. It is that trend that I personally take issue with. Look at how WOTC is handling race vs Level Up with Heritage and Culture. It's the mindset behind those approaches in a different venue. WOTC is Sauron with the One Ring, Level Up is someone working symbiotically with
the food web. And I personally take issue with Sauron, and Wormtongue, and the totally not Sauron Necromancer, and Saruman even when they come bearing gifts and compliments. Because a look under the hood shows exactly what is going on, and it's not good for the the hobbits, the elves, the dwarves, et all, OR the wonderfully chaotic and diverse fellowship. One size fits all ism from corporation is reason enough all by itself for someone to take issue with something.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
www.enworld.org
