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I don't think Beamdog has done much of anything to make Dragonspear less mediocre.
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Jul 3, 2018 03:59
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John Murdoch posted:It's incredibly telling that there are loads and loads of stories of rear end in a top hat DMs giving people cursed belts of sex change or w/e but the moment somebody in that world wants to use that magic intentionally it's the worst thing ever. There actually was already a cursed belt of gender change in either BG or NWN, I think you find it on an ogre Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 04:13
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Linear Zoetrope posted:There actually was already a cursed belt of gender change in either BG or NWN, I think you find it on an ogre Girdles of femininity/masculinity are a joke item and is basically how DMs gently caress with grognards and you are correct that it's probably the first magic item that you find in BG without pixel hunting. John Murdoch is on the money though in that the instant someone chooses to do it with magic then the shitheads come out in force. Terrible Opinions posted:I don't think Beamdog has done much of anything to make Dragonspear less mediocre. Yeah, I'm fine with Beamdog making new versions of the Baldur's Gate series but their writing is pretty weak. I'd like to see what they could do with Temple of Elemental Evil though since the plot is literally just the old TOEE scenario and is pretty basic.
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Jul 3, 2018 05:30
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Doctor Spaceman posted:In Andromeda it was the intersection of token representation and bad writing. Most characters climsily dump their life story on you a few sentences into the conversation but most characters aren't trans. The truly egregious thing about Andromeda’s trans representation wasn’t even the abrupt disclosure, because as you say that’s just the shallow nature of npc interaction across the board and while the conversation didn’t flow well at all, at least openly disclosing trans status or taking pride in being visibly trans are real things that people actually do. No, the really inexcusable thing was the way Hainly deadnames herself for literally no reason while disclosing, which is just a totally unthinkable act for the vast majority of trans folk — it’s really hard to imagine a more effective way to signal that this character wasn’t really aimed at the people she was supposed to be representing so much as an attempt at being inclusive for inclusivity’s sake without really understanding what they were trying to include.
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Jul 3, 2018 05:56
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Sio posted:The truly egregious thing about Andromeda’s trans representation wasn’t even the abrupt disclosure, because as you say that’s just the shallow nature of npc interaction across the board and while the conversation didn’t flow well at all, at least openly disclosing trans status or taking pride in being visibly trans are real things that people actually do. Well, even beyond that it was like "let me tell you about that time I went on an ark to another galaxy to go deep stealth". Like, the things wrong with that are mind-boggling. I guess in the cool ME future trans people are still poo poo on. I guess they're still disowned by their families and denied opportunities and need to stealth. I guess trans tech is so bad that despite gene therapy and all the other huge breakthroughs in medical tech complete with actual magic wound healing gel you can slather on gory combat wounds, our primary method of trans care is still the same lovely HRT we've been using since the early-mid 1900s. Like, say what you will about Shadowrun and Cyberpunk being lovely with transpeople losing their "humanity" because they put all body modification and cybernetics in the same class without thinking like dinguses, but at least they bothered to imagine their future tech being used for it at all unlike Mass Effect: Andromeda where they basically just plucked a token trans narrative from the present day and transported it into a future with amazing medical tech without even considering how it might affect trans care the least bit. Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 06:02
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People are still getting used to the idea of trans in space. Give them time, don't rush it. Everyone will get amazing medical technology just as soon as people stop being scared and threatened by it. We don't want to provoke any violence by allowing access to it too early.
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Jul 3, 2018 06:18
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Oh yeah, the actual justification there for tying her transition to the need to switch galaxies was also completely awful, but I couldn’t even get around to thinking about that when I played through the conversation because of how dumbfounded I was by the deadnaming. It was just so viscerally wrong to hear. Hainly was maybe the most frustrating part of Andromeda for me, if only because unlike the rest of the game she only really needed the barest amount of extra thought and effort to turn out fine and they couldn’t even manage that.
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Jul 3, 2018 06:33
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Sio posted:Oh yeah, the actual justification there for tying her transition to the need to switch galaxies was also completely awful, but I couldn’t even get around to thinking about that when I played through the conversation because of how dumbfounded I was by the deadnaming. It was just so viscerally wrong to hear.
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Jul 3, 2018 07:55
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Testekill posted:Tangentially related but the enhanced edition of Baldurs Gate included an expansion pack that had a trans woman in it. Gamers being gamers, they reacted exactly like you'd expect. I haven't played the expansion yet so I don't know how it was handled but it was pretty recent and there was no conversation about it so I'd assume she was handled just fine and the chuds were just out in force because HOW DARE YOU INSERT LGBTQ poo poo IN MY FANTASY GAMES I'm guessing she isn't a Planeswalker then, as they can naturally shapeshift.
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Jul 3, 2018 09:19
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If I'm remembering correctly Edwin's transformation into a woman wasn't so much an actual curse but the result of him being very bad at translating the scrolls he was working on and just assuming he had stumbled upon some secret super transformation.
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Jul 3, 2018 11:23
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Linear Zoetrope posted:Well, even beyond that it was like "let me tell you about that time I went on an ark to another galaxy to go deep stealth". Like, the things wrong with that are mind-boggling. I guess in the cool ME future trans people are still poo poo on. I guess they're still disowned by their families and denied opportunities and need to stealth. I guess trans tech is so bad that despite gene therapy and all the other huge breakthroughs in medical tech complete with actual magic wound healing gel you can slather on gory combat wounds, our primary method of trans care is still the same lovely HRT we've been using since the early-mid 1900s. The Cyberpunk “humanity loss” isn’t really like that though. The cdpr just didn’t explain it well. The idea is if you replace most of your brain with terminator programs and parts and or go for some full military cyborg upgrade like raiden with sword arms or gun arms. It destroys the empathy parts of your brain and you start slowly going kill crazy. Regular limb replacements and other stuff for the most part doesn’t affect humanity stats. anyway. what sucks about the handling of trans issues in ME is that the DA Inquisition handled it well. then again, it was Bioware's C team. Terrible Opinions posted:The best summary of Andromeda yet. Amen to that. Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 11:33 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 11:27
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Terrible Opinions posted:the result of him being very bad at translating the scrolls he was working on and just assuming he had stumbled upon some secret super transformation. I mean, he wasn’t wrong.
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Jul 3, 2018 13:24
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Linear Zoetrope posted:Like, say what you will about Shadowrun and Cyberpunk being lovely with transpeople losing their "humanity" because they put all body modification and cybernetics in the same class without thinking like dinguses, but at least they bothered to imagine their future tech being used for it at all unlike Mass Effect: Andromeda where they basically just plucked a token trans narrative from the present day and transported it into a future with amazing medical tech without even considering how it might affect trans care the least bit. Actually Shadowrun (since the release of Chrome Flesh) has a sex change cost no essence. The cybernetic part replacements do, but that's because when Shadowrun means "losing humanity" it means "the soul can't recognize the body as its own any more/becomes detached from the body." Which is why all the tech poo poo makes you lose essence faster than the genetic engineering. It's also why when you hit zero essence your soul pretty much peaces out and you either die or go kill crazy (and then die). Gotta remember that Shadowrun's all magical on top of being all technical edit: Yeah, SR4 (and presumably further back) used to have sex changes cost .3 essence (out of the total 6 you get). Peg legs and poo poo also used to cost essence because yeah they included poo poo without a lot of thought beyond the immediate lore. Now only cyberdicks and the like cost essence. TGLT fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 17:11
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:I think Doom 2016 handles this best by having Doomguy be a dude who just wants to rip demons in half and have a good time.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:04
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H. Bomb has a new video about HP Lovecraft, a somewhat obscure 2008 adaptation of The Shadow over Innsmouth, and a journey of personal discovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8u8wZ0WvxI Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 19:05
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MorganKitten did a retrospective on KIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRBBYYYYYYYYYYYYY.
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Jul 3, 2018 19:39
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Cinema Nippon has started a new series to examine the works and life of Hayao Miyazaki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYD8cJO0_XM
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Jul 3, 2018 20:12
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Mr.Radar posted:H. Bomb has a new video about HP Lovecraft, a somewhat obscure 2008 adaptation of The Shadow over Innsmouth, and a journey of personal discovery: that was loving great at always. Lovecraft is reactionary bigoted shithead, yet thats one of the reasons i find him interesting, like why was he like that. i am not defending his shittness at all. i just find it weirdly fascinating. i like to figure out what makes people like him tick and why they believe the poo poo they do. Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 23:47
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Dapper_Swindler posted:that was loving great at always. Lovecraft is reactionary bigoted shithead, yet thats one of the reasons i find him interesting, like why was he like that. i am not defending his shittness at all. i just find it weirdly fascinating. i like to figure out what makes people like him tick and why they believe the poo poo they do. My impression of Lovecraft is that dude had some major anxiety issues in general, so he was just extra afraid of everything, ever, and the racism/xenophobia and homophobia were just expressions of an intensely broken brain. Like, dude was super racist even by the standards of the time. I found the anti-aristocrat reading of Dracula to be interesting, but ultimately flawed, in that the heroes of the novel include several rich dudes, including a nobleman; it's more of a "OH NO THE INVADING BROWN HORDES ARE GOING TO TAKE OVER AND RAPE OUR WOMEN!" narrative, really. Fun story, but absolutely a product of its political environment. Though it also has a pretty kickass heroine, which is nice.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:04
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I found Howard more interesting than Lovecraft.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:06
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Dapper_Swindler posted:that was loving great at always. Lovecraft is reactionary bigoted shithead, yet thats one of the reasons i find him interesting, like why was he like that. i am not defending his shittness at all. i just find it weirdly fascinating. i like to figure out what makes people like him tick and why they believe the poo poo they do. However its great to see also so many fanboys get mad that Gaiman making GBS threads over Lovecraft's prose and style. Puppy Time posted:My impression of Lovecraft is that dude had some major anxiety issues in general, so he was just extra afraid of everything, ever, and the racism/xenophobia and homophobia were just expressions of an intensely broken brain. Like, dude was super racist even by the standards of the time.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:11
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At least one part of Lovecraft's -isms aside from the obvious anxiety and miserable upbringing, was that he was fairly obsessive over "proper english" type poo poo and held the english up as the ultimate cultured, intelligent people. Basically he wasn't so much a plain white supremacist as incredibly scattershot bigoted, he hated the irish and germans as well, but then praised jews and "cultivated" spanish, he was a weird rear end guy on and off scared of everything.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:19
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Lovecraft literally wrote a short story where a guy went insane and lite himself on fire with gasoline because he found out his ancestor was a black woman. How the flying gently caress you don't see that as some sort of terrible commentary written by an extremely racist person I have no idea. I like his works but you can also freely admit that, yeah, Lovecraft was a really terrible person. But I also think that's why his horror is effective - it drew upon his xenophobia. That's why you could make an incredible inspired works or adaptations of his works with the right framing and the right director/writers. There are groups in this country living in constant fear of government or local bodies that can tear them or their families away without any moral or ethical qualms and there wouldn't be a thing they could do about it. You can imagine that instead of drawing upon the fear of people who are different, you draw upon the fear of morally bankrupt authority and the figures that govern them. Punching up. I mean, they wouldn't be too far off of the extremely powerful entities that are indifferent to the suffering of humanity that appear in his stories.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:21
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Jimbot posted:Lovecraft literally wrote a short story where a guy went insane and lite himself on fire with gasoline because he found out his ancestor was a black woman. How the flying gently caress you don't see that as some sort of terrible commentary written by an extremely racist person I have no idea. I like his works but you can also freely admit that, yeah, Lovecraft was a really terrible person. But I also think that's why his horror is effective - it drew upon his xenophobia. Reminds me of this article examining Bloodborne as a commentary (deliberate or not) on Lovecraft's xenophobia and racism: https://thespinoff.co.nz/games/23-05-2018/challenging-the-bigotry-of-an-icon-how-bloodborne-slyly-calls-out-hp-lovecraft/
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Jul 4, 2018 00:35
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Like, sure, his horror explicitly draws parallels between foreignness and the lurking cosmic horrors waiting to destroy civilisation, and sometimes they'll end with the horrifying twist reveal of a future in which Chinese people live in New York, but that doesn't mean he's racist, he's just a product of his time and what are foreigners really but the unknown (for which we have the oldest and strongest kind of fear!)? On the other hand this is a man who literally wrote a poem called On The Creation Of Niggers in which he explicitly writes that black people were created by God to fill the space between Man and beasts. Oh and then on top of that God made them drunkards and gamblers. No racism, only metaphors.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:47
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Is lovecraft being a turbo racist realy news in the year 2018?
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Jul 4, 2018 01:08
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Arcsquad12 posted:I found Howard more interesting than Lovecraft. Howard is way better because he's hilariously the actual example of the whole 'the dude is sheltered and doesn't know anything' who actually realized 'oh wait this is kinda lovely how I'm depicting people' when he started going to cons and meeting fans and all. Like, he never really got PROGRESSIVE but he at least was actually a case of ignorance over hate causing him to not view 'savage not-african cannibals' as anything but pulp novel tropes to draw on.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:12
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Ghostlight posted:Like, sure, his horror explicitly draws parallels between foreignness and the lurking cosmic horrors waiting to destroy civilisation, and sometimes they'll end with the horrifying twist reveal of a future in which Chinese people live in New York, but that doesn't mean he's racist, he's just a product of his time and what are foreigners really but the unknown (for which we have the oldest and strongest kind of fear!)? oh yeah, of course he is giant racist prick. you should read his account of going down a new york street. its um "enlightening". I just find him to be an interesting piece of poo poo who was good ideas man, even if those ideas were birthed from awful poo poo. the only bigoted authors is sorta defend is Robert E Howard(to an extent) and twain. achillesforever6 posted:There is a good free doc on Lovecraft on youtube even though its weird seeing Neil Gaiman go "I think people put too much thought in how things are described can be used to show Lovecraft's deep seated mega racism" and Del Toro going "Well you know there was a lot of racism in MARK TWAIN" gaimen is right though. his prose and style are poo poo.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:12
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OmanyteJackson posted:Is lovecraft being a turbo racist realy news in the year 2018? Honestly, it's good not to forget these things sure, but "HEH DIDJA KNOW LOVECRAFT WAS REAL RACIST???" has kind of become one of those run down factoids that literally everyone has heard by this point.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:14
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lol @ Gaiman pretending to not understand that descriptive prose is shaped by the writer, as if every loving paragraph of description he's written hasn't been thoroughly shoved through the lens of 'twee Scientologist/Jewish English goth'
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Jul 4, 2018 01:18
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OmanyteJackson posted:Is lovecraft being a turbo racist realy news in the year 2018?
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Jul 4, 2018 01:32
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Ghostlight posted:Like, sure, his horror explicitly draws parallels between foreignness and the lurking cosmic horrors waiting to destroy civilisation, and sometimes they'll end with the horrifying twist reveal of a future in which Chinese people live in New York, but that doesn't mean he's racist, he's just a product of his time and what are foreigners really but the unknown (for which we have the oldest and strongest kind of fear!)? I mean, that is literally a common attitude of the time, so it's not really going against the "product of his time" argument.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:50
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Baka-nin posted:Speaking of Lindsey's comment section being awful, Was Starscream only a mincing, cowardly usurper in the 80s? I guess that’s the only transformers era I know anything about. He and Cobra Commander should be way bigger camp idol figures for pride stuff these days. They’d be better than the Babadook for sure.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:56
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Puppy Time posted:I mean, that is literally a common attitude of the time, so it's not really going against the "product of his time" argument. no, it wasn't. General 'the blacks just aren't as enlightened'? Sure, but no literal 'they're fuckin ape people not actual humans like us' was really super out of vogue.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:56
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Considering the people we still have now, "out of vogue" was likely just "Not saying it as up front right now" really.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:02
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Starscream and Cobra Commander are the same person  But yeah, from what I've seen his more recent appearances all focus more on his opportunistic backstabbing rather than him serving primarily as a comedic foil to Megatron/whoever's above him.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:06
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Waspinator is the best henchman constantly getting abused Decepticon/Predacon
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Jul 4, 2018 02:12
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business hammocks posted:Was Starscream only a mincing, cowardly usurper in the 80s? I guess that’s the only transformers era I know anything about. He and Cobra Commander should be way bigger camp idol figures for pride stuff these days. They’d be better than the Babadook for sure.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:15
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sexpig by night posted:Howard is way better because he's hilariously the actual example of the whole 'the dude is sheltered and doesn't know anything' who actually realized 'oh wait this is kinda lovely how I'm depicting people' when he started going to cons and meeting fans and all. Like, he never really got PROGRESSIVE but he at least was actually a case of ignorance over hate causing him to not view 'savage not-african cannibals' as anything but pulp novel tropes to draw on. Mind you, some of this is because his particular, bizarre version of racial theory was very accommodating to certain minorities being One Of The Good Ones. Some of this was because he held race to be highly temporary (basically, he thought evolution happened much, much faster than it actually does), and some of it was because unlike Lovecraft, he wasn’t a big fan of ‘civilisation’, which he saw as breeding corruption and weakness, just as ‘savagery’ made people crude and bestial. Instead, he liked the golden mean of strong, vital ‘barbarism’, frontier nations that did not forsake culture, but kept themselves strong through hardship and conflict. So if, say, he met a black person he liked, then he could consider them a barbarian who showed that there was still hope for black people to rise above their present savagery. If he’d lived longer, he would probably have had very strong opinions on Israel.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:18
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business hammocks posted:Was Starscream only a mincing, cowardly usurper in the 80s? I guess that’s the only transformers era I know anything about. He and Cobra Commander should be way bigger camp idol figures for pride stuff these days. They’d be better than the Babadook for sure. Prime Starscream in particular is even campier, but much more dangerous, and even has the occasional small flash of courage.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:19
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