KitKat

IF YOU OWN THE STORYTELLERS, YOU OWN THE STORY: The worst thing to happen to D&D wasn't the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. It was the attempt to turn a game for everyone into a vehicle for cultural marxism. D&D has always offered room for different people, different worlds, and different stories. The problem was never about gatekeeping, to the contrary D&D was notorious for harboring the freaks and outcasts. The unloved and unlovable. The sort of people who would crave a fantasy where they could be someone else for just a moment. Which is why when the the petulant Left showed up the community and the hobby at large was wholly unprepared. Because while the the traditional D&D community might've had rules lawyers and nerdragers and every assortment of man and woman who grew hair in the unlikeliest of places what they weren't was exclusionary. They got together to have fun, break things and kill stuff. But the Leftists they just sat down at the table didn't want that. They wanted an exclusionary game that THEY controlled, that they dominated. One where they got to gatekeep who got sit down at the table and who didn't. Where they set the tone, define the stories, and they always made sure to make sure everyone knew exactly who was in power. Trojan Orcs indeed. And this is a constant in culture, these people never merely want a seat at the table. They preach inclusion because it's an easy justification for exclusion. If you don't support my inclusive political positions, no matter how extreme or bizarre, those self same values give me the right to exclude you from the culture you created. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be a means to power. Politics is downstream from culture, always has been. What people encounter in stories helps shape what they consider admirable, shameful, normal, or unthinkable. Control the institutions that produce those stories and you gain influence over the assumptions people bring into political arguments before they even start. If you own the storytellers, you own the story. You can see the same impulse outside D&D whenever an audience is an obstacle to establishing the politically approved message. Whether it's a film franchise, comic books, star trek, star wars, whatever.. doesn't matter. The purpose isn't love of the story, community, hobby or thing. The purpose is to use that thing as a skinsuit to draw people in, a vehicle to evangelize for the Left. To act as cultural touchstone "It's always been this way." And God help you if you disagree with the "new direction" and "subverted expectations. Suddenly the discussion isn't about whether or not the writing works, if it's lore consistent, if it even makes sense.. it's about whether you're the sort of person who should be allowed to be there at all. Of course corporations with sympathetic Community Managers that always seem to side with the radical Leftists making the accusations, the demands for exclusion, just cements it in as Word of God. Custodes have always been female and there is no war in Ba Sing Se. Whatever. Point being the issue isn't stories with or without politics, stories have always contained arguments about power, duty, freedom, and justice and so forth. The issue is that in all cases the storyteller must come to the politically approved conclusion, and if it doesn't then there's a problem. Your problem. And you don't want to be a problem, do you? What are you? Some kinda phobophobe? We don't like those kinds of people around here. Something something Popper's Paradox something something. Do that and you don't need to dictate every script. People learn right quick what gets commissioned, editors learn what gets promoted, and everyone notices what gets punished. Whether it's at the gaming table, or in the publishing house. Cultural influence becomes political power becomes law. And nobody has to do much of anything. You'll just start seeing it across all forms of media, and then it seeps into and outwards until it finds its way back in education and the cycle begins anew. Eventually you don't have a bad opinion you posted on X, you have a criminally sanctioned action and someone's going to come knocking on your door. People like to tell themselves they're free, and conveniently all their stories agree, but those pesky so and sos keep starting trouble, amiright? Eventually it becomes so endemic that you realize you're some dude named Russell Brand and you're facing life in prison, but the court generously only gives you ten and a half. Because they're merciful. Or something. Anyway, what I've been trying to tell you since the very beginning is that the words "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" were never actually said in the animated series, you just always believed they were because of some goofy meme and the fact that if you own the storytellers you own the story. And thus, on a cultural scale, they can hide things from you by never putting them there to begin with. Turn something you love into something you barely even recognize and then tell you it's always been that way.