Commentary 4

Random thoughts.

• Although I cannot find the source, apparently Pauline Kael said that camp is "failed seriousness", which indicates that even she was right twice a day. And yes, she deserves to be compared to a broken clock—a rock-stupid Upper West Side Manhattanite who mixed equal parts paradoxically shallow artistic pretentiousness with turnip-truck cornpone levels of provincial naïveté, "broken clock" is actually quite generous.
  
  Kael, after all, was one of the drool-soaked dimbulbs who called Dirty Harry "fascist". No, I know—Dirty Harry is entirely about how no convention of the state should be allowed to prevent justice being done, i.e. it is the opposite of fascism. But one must remember, to Pauline Kael, not merely the US Constitution but that constitution as interpreted by "progressive" judges, is the very font and source and self of morals.
  
  Savor with me the irony of someone whose views may be summed up as "That which conforms to the ideology is alone good" accusing someone else of being in a totalitarian tradition.


• I return endlessly, in my thoughts and in my writing, to this silly idea that merely humanizing the enemy is sufficient to end wars. Nobody not mentally ill seriously doubted that "Russians loved their children too", or the Japanese, or the Germans, or anyone else one has had wars with.
  
  But then, one eventually had to ask the question, "Granting that the Russians (or Japanese or Germans or whoever) love their children, why do they not seem to appreciate that Hungarians (or Koreans or Frenchmen or whoever) love their children?" Because an appeal to my empathy and ability to recognize others' humanity is not going to make me stop wanting to fight a war, if I also notice along the way that the enemy doesn't have any empathy of his own.
  
  Attempts to end wars by making one of the belligerents realize the other is an asshole are probably doomed to failure. Just putting that out there.


• It is amusing, to me, to be lectured by Black Americans on the legacies of slavery, not least because all of my ancestors but the Czech ones were rather too busy being robbed and murdered by Black Americans' fellow Protestants to do much slave-owning.
  
  The Czech ones, however, and my great-grandfather's nationalist activities (he signed one of the founding documents of Czechoslovakia, after the Great War), provide another amusing response. Namely, "The word 'slave' is the name of my grandmother's race, fool." See, the Holy Roman Empire was constantly being raided by certain pagan tribes on their northeastern borders. They sent out troops—most notably the secularized Templar splinter-group, the Teutonic Knights—to subdue them, and a number of other tribes who were neither pagan nor raiders, and talked the whole affair up as a Crusade, although the Church hadn't actually preached it as one, and was one of the sharpest critics of the Empire's excesses.
  
  So many of those tribesmen were used for forced labor by the Empire that their race's name, "Slav", came to be slang for their status, in much the same way the N-word was in the US South. Admittedly that wasn't the type of pagan slavery practiced by the Americans, but, rather, Byzantine slavery, the same type as practiced in Spain's colonies—Protestants, I regret not the slightest to inform you, are the only Christians who ever had chattel-slavery.


• That's an interesting thought, by the way. Due to the Moors, Spain essentially never had the Middle Ages; in terms of a number of customs, from slavery to treatment of Jews to inheritance laws, they were basically Byzantines who happened to retain union with Rome. Except their dynastic wars were a lot less bloody (seriously, anyone who thinks the medieval West was bad, should read up on Byzantine history sometime—as I've said before, being dominated by warrior-nobles actually made the Latins less savage, not more).


• Speaking of Spain, while it's true the pointed arch probably comes from Moorish architecture, the Moors pretty much only used it decoratively. It was further north, in France and the Holy Roman Empire (primarily the former) that some architect noticed you could build churches higher, using pointed arches, since they drastically reduce structural stress compared to Romanesque ones. Thus spawning Gothic (which ought to be called Frankish, or more accurately, Gaulic).
  
  Come to think of it, everything ought to be called Gaulic. There is essentially nothing about Western civilization that didn't reach its highest form in France, especially High Medieval/Direct Capetian France—anything you can point to as great about your particular branch of the West is something they'd already done. Plainly, the medieval Persians were right, when they called all Westerners, collectively, "the Franks" (Farangi). Except for how the French were, in everything but their political structure, still Gauls (only partly Romanized Gauls, at that—there's nothing Roman about lots of medieval French customs).


• So I thought those pure-carnivore elves, in my D&D game, would be cool if their cavalry rode elk. They have a taboo, based on the Hindu cattle-one, on eating anything "that talks, that hunts, or that sheds its horns." The only meat-animal they domesticate much is poultry.
  
  The dwarves, I decided, similarly have a society centered on sheep-herding; they raise pony-sized sheep (so, basically, Navajo sheep) as steeds and for their milk, but have a taboo on eating mutton (as well as on eating people or carnivores). They also have a gift-economy, with elements both of European feudalism and northwest American potlatch.


• Also, after noticing how every single thing the elves in Skyrim make looks like an eagle, I thought, "wouldn't it be cool if my elves had a theme, in their equipment?" Plus I love the demihumans making stuff from odd materials. So now, the elves in my setting wear the equivalents of leather, scale, and banded armor...but they're all actually made of leaves (the leather and banded look nearly identical, but the "leather" is made of thinner, more flexible leaves). The scales are actually tiny leaves.
  
  Similarly, their weapons are all leaves, too—long ones for swords and daggers, with the stems as grips, or short ones with long stems for axes and spears (why don't Elder Scrolls games have spears, anyway?). It occurs to me that, though my setting isn't set in a 100% standard D&D world, inside a crystal shell and attached to the Outer and Inner Planes by the Astral and Ethereal (I'm sorry, I'm a Planescape and Spelljammer guy—that cosmology will be canon to me until you pry it from my cold dead hands), my elves' equipment is very definitely a shout out to the Elven Navy's ships, each of which is basically a giant flower/seed-pod that looks like a butterfly.
  
  I wonder, is it common for old Spelljammer players to list butterflies among badass symbols, along with eagles and tigers and dragons? Because an Elven man-o'-war, or an armada, is 60+ spacial tons of undiluted whoop-ass.


• Don't remember if I mentioned it, but my D&D setting's dwarves make stuff out of a red volcanic glass, like a color-inverted version of the glass from Elder Scrolls (or like the glowing parts of daedric armor).


• I'm reminded of some halfwit, on an RPG forum I was reading, saying how the societies in D&D games would never work, because they're portrayed as having a gold-based economy. Only, bullshit. I don't own the 4th Edition books, but I know 2e and 3e both say only adventurers do much business in gold—basically, they live in a quasi-medieval version of a hip-hop video, doing all their business in Benjamins (generally with fewer hoochie-mammas, though). Everyone else deals in silver (in this analogy, ten-spots).
  
  Similarly, another idiot said D&D games were basically set in an era like Greek myth, where anyone not like you is a "barbarian" you can make war on to your heart's content. Aside from being the usual Orcish Post-Colonialism crap, it's not even true; I don't know what rulebooks this PC little sissy-britches was reading but the "monstrous humanoids" aren't evil because they're ugly, they're evil because they murder, enslave, and eat people and worship darksome gods whose realms are mostly in a certain air-filled void full of floating cubes.
  
  Also, "anyone not like you can be warred upon without limit" is a far more accurate description of many Native American ethical systems than of the classical world even at its worst—actually Romans' singular claim to superiority over any other people was that they acknowledged (in theory, anyway) that morals applied even to foreigners—but don't expect someone who thinks orcs are an oppressed minority to admit that.


• Thought I'd share two experiences, related to the ditziest person I ever played D&D with...who may or may not be my younger sister. (No, not her, she's my older sister. Although she did once kick a can of Dr. Pepper out of her own hand, into her computer. So...)
  
  Ahem. Anyway. The two experiences are, first, when the shall-remain-nameless player's character was wounded, and no cleric or other Healer-type was on hand. Quoth she, "I wish I was a vampire so I could heal fast."
  
  And second, "I know! I'll summon a hedgehog! Then we'll throw it at the dragon's head and it'll lay eggs in its brain!" That was not intended to be wacky, either.