En Train de Revisiter

So I thought a few things I'd commented on before bore further examination.

• Here's my main one. It seems the City Elf origin story in Dragon Age isn't as nonsensical as I'd thought. It had been presented to me as if the nobles' treatment of elf women is routine in that setting. And that made me insane, because it sounded like a people who probably aren't even absolutist routinely did something even the totalitarians didn't—that is, I'd heard the setting's nobles were significantly worse than Hitler. Which would be utter garbage, from a cultural setting standpoint.
  
  It turns out, no, it's more just that one noble being an a-hole, and the inequality making it difficult to achieve redress, which is much better—apparently it's even a fairly mature, sensitive treatment of the subject, which is surprising. But it's still a deal-breakingly bad choice, for three reasons. Most basically, it's just the usual "eighth grader trying to seem grownup by filling his story with horrors" thing—there's a reason rape's considered a common Mary Sue backstory. Second off, the "societal elite taking advantage of the women of an ethnic underclass" thing is the same quasi-Marxist race-baiting narrative that gave us the Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse hoaxes. But that brings me to my last problem with it, the only case where I'd cut Ubisoft a lot more slack than BioWare: if you are an Anglo firm, you have no business doing a story like that. Germans don't get to drop casual references to genocide, and Anglos don't get to make casual reference to the abuse of other nations' women. You should be careful discussing anything your nation has inflicted, but never suffered. But apparently the history of Ireland is a secret now?
  
  Also, I'm sorry, but the elves in that setting are much too much Noble Savage/television Indian cliches...and the character designs are ugly.


• Andrew Klavan repeated the same specific charge against rock that Diana West made, that (unlike Sinatra!), rock is about lust instead of love. Yeah, again, how 'bout Spend My Life or You Are The One or Made For Lovin' You or half of Whitesnake's output or the Bon Jovi corpus entire? Ignorance is unsightly, Klavan. He also said rock lyrics are never as intricate as those of...whatever the hell Sinatra is. His example? "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah..."
  
  Dude, the Beatles were a children's band, let's all admit it—no, seriously, if you set a Raffi song to some 60s style background music and had a really good tribute band sing it, do you doubt you could pass it off as a previously lost Beatles cut? But I'll put the lyrics of Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne, or even David Coverdale at his best, up against the best of Sinatra any day of the week.


• Turns out, some of the wizard names are still in the 3rd edition spell listings; Tasha's still there. But they took out the "uncontrollable"—I remembered they'd changed something, but forgot what—and "Tasha's hideous laughter" isn't nearly as cool a name. Plus, they got rid of "Leomund's lamentable belaborment", and that was an awesome spell.


• There's a guy at First Things, R. R. Reno, who insists that Analytic philosophy is the heir to scholasticism. Except Analytic philosophy is the heir to the so-called "Rationalists" like Descartes and Hume, who denied Reason's dominion over huge swaths of thought; they have about as much claim to be the heirs of the Angelic Doctor as Svetlana Stalin does to be Autocrat of All the Russias.


• Third Edition D&D actually comes damn close to being a game with a single mechanic, that "roll higher than the Difficulty Class" thing. It's impressive how initiative, saving throws, ability and skill checks, and attack rolls are all that one thing. Of course it's basically the Alternity mechanic turned upside down, minus the modifier dice. Still, switching Armor Class from low to high worked out really well, and those attack bonus/penalties are a lot more intuitive than THAC0. Let's not even get into how First Edition had to do such things.


• Know why Kyôran Kazoku Nikki is the best thing ever? This.

  Tsundere, kuudere, yandere. They're all ancient relics now. The ultimate and the invincible genre, that is kandere! It's not like I'm being omnipotent and omniscient for you.

  'Scuse me while I try and figure out a manly way to squee.


• You know it's weird, I actually have much less hostility toward Firefly now. It's probably just that my unholy geek wrath is currently directed at Avatar, with occasional pauses to squeeze off a few rounds at bad fantasy (that's most of it, especially fantasy that incorporates the canards about the Middle Ages), but I actually kinda like certain aspects of the show. Maybe playing ODST warmed me up to those guys a little, though Dutch is a hell of a lot better use of Adam Baldwin than Jayne was. And while nothing could make me pretend Firefly wasn't canceled because it wasn't very good, I do in fact feel for the Browncoats, losing their show.
  
  I just wish whenever we lose something we didn't immediately have to canonize it—just because Kennedy was assassinated doesn't change the fact he was a fair-to-middlin' president.


• So I had worried that my book is too long, but it turns out it'd be about the same size as some Warhammer and 40K tie-in novels. In the Grim Darkness of space, apparently, there is not only war, but lots and lots of paper to spare.