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It's the Imperium of MAN not the Imperium of THEY. (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/games@hexbear.net
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[–] 32 points 3 years ago* (14 children)

All art, all stories are an expression of one's own thoughts and ideas. All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view. No fascist will ever write about a communist utopia positively. No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire. If you're an "apolitical gamer" you will unquestioningly write about whatever you're finding in the trash can of ideology at the moment. Similarly, everything you write will be tainted by "modern day thought" because everything we have ever experienced has happened in the modern day, including learning about the past. Every fantasy world is merely a reinterpretation of ours and every sapient fantasy race is allegorical to humans in some way, whether you intend it to be or not. We cannot comprehend non-human conflict and thus human conflict is all we can write about.

These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago* (9 children)

    These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?

    yea

    I once had a prolonged and fruitless argument in a video game guild chat with someone that insisted the 1980s GI JOE cartoon was perfect because it "had no politics and no political agenda." galaxy-brain

    He even topped it off after a while with "did anyone ever tell you... the curtains are FUCKING BLUE?" smuglord

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago* (7 children)

    I have no idea what it means to say the curtains are blue anymore.

    At first, I thought it was meant to poke fun at people who over analyze or really reach when discussing literature, but I don't think it means that.

    Can someone explain?

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    At first, I thought it was meant to poke fun at people who over analyze or really reach when discussing literature, but I don't think it means that.

    It still means that, though the extension is generally mocking the over-reaction against the idea of over-analysis by people that dogmatically claim that no message should be allowed to be derived from their treats.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I think it’s funny when people explain it using examples where the author legitimately did have well-documented cultural associations with certain colors. It’d be like in 100 years someone saying “Batman’s suit is dark because he’s supposed to be mysterious and operates in the shadow” and another person responding, “have you ever thought that maybe he just had a dark suit????”

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    So it's used to describe people who over analyze but also people who don't read into media at all (example: the curtains are just blue, and that has no meaning)?

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Advertising, or "capitalist propaganda" as the kids call it, is famously non-political and incites the audience to no action or thought that could possibly influence the structures of power we've surrounded ourselves with.

    Absolutely wild

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view.

    This explains why I'm terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don't really understand other people very well.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I found a lot of success in joint-DM ventures with somebody who is great at telling ground-level stories. I do all the world building, they handle all the people stuff.

    One of my favourite settings I built was a world where magic flows out of nexuses of power built by an ancient civilization that's now lost to ruin. (Spoiler warning for my son if he reads this.) The world is a polar-shifted Earth, post-climate change and post-nuclear war. The power nexuses are the locations of nuclear power plants, and the island chain the story takes place on is a flooded European continent. I did a whole bunch of math and simulations in a GIS thingy, and figured out where the floodplains would be, and what would still be above water if sea level rose by X meters. Then I rotated it, just to make it even less recognizable.

    It's one of the ways I came to grips with the limitations of being Autistic, and how I can lean into the strengths I have instead.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire.

    This is mostly true but I will state that as a communist one of my major stories I'm working on does have heroic monarchs in it.

    To be fair this story is something I've been working on since before I became communist, and I've added revolutionary themes to it since, but the main "heroic monarch" character is one I created after becoming a communist. Like to be clear she's a heroic monarch in a society where feudalism is every country, and I plan for the world the story takes place in to go through historical materialism stages of development over time. She's a proactively progressive character that makes positive developments for the society she rules. She's also one of my favorite characters I've developed.

    But ngl I do kind of like Gambo/CKII dynastic stuff aesthetically and one of my two major works features it heavily. And features characters that are part of dynasties that are better or worse than others. And also feudal countries that are more progressive than other ones in the world.

    I do worry that i'm letting my special interest make me too ideologically incoherent but its the story I wanna write so shrug-outta-hecks

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