Socio-political hot takes

Nobody asked for this, yet here we go. A few of the socio-political stories of the week, and my hot take. Disclaimer! I'm not your tutor. I make reference below to a few facts and to data, like that 80% of our behavior is genetically determined, or what the impact of women's suffrage are. These are not well-known facts that people accept casually. But they are true nonetheless. And no, it's not my responsibility to help you find out where that data is (although geez; I have links right there to the side, fer cryin' out loud. The Those Who Can See blog alone answers most of these, and is well supplemented by Jayman and Audacious Epigone's columns at the Unz Review.) Do your own homework. It's my experience that you won't value and accept the information unless you put in at least a little work of your own to acquire it anyway.

1) Disney is one of the most evil, worst companies on the face of the earth, populated by some of the most evil, vile people known to man. The leaked audio, coming on the heels of Disney's full-throated attempt to meddle in the politics of Florida and stop a bill that would protect children from being groomed and molested at school should say everything that needs to be said about this terrible, terrible company. Going broke is too good for them. Most of these people, quite honestly, need to meet the DotR, and I predict—I don't endorse, but I predict—that they will indeed do so in the fullness of the wrath of the American people at the abuses hurled upon us constantly by our so-called elites and their foreign mercenary foot-soldiers. When that happens, it will be unfortunate for all involved, but I seriously doubt that I'll be able to spare much sympathy. These people quite literally asked for it. As an aside, this speaks condemnation to the two Bobs. Iger set this up. He allowed this environment to grow and fester, and in fact encouraged it. Chapek is simply unable to cope with it or deal with it. He's the scapegoat trying to clean up Iger's mess, but of course he's in way over his head and is not equipped with the chops to meaningfully handle the catastrophe. Iger is the snake, the toxic, poisonous one. Chapek is the hapless, helpless one who is fundamentally trying to do the right thing but is too weak, cowardly or stupid to figure out how to.

2) Speaking of, Chris Rock also literally asked for it. I don't endorse Will Smith's actions, but seriously; in civilized society, you don't make fun of a woman's appearance, especially if its caused by an involuntary condition, and not expect to be taken to task by her husband. I know, I know—Will Smith is a joke, and his marriage is a joke. There's enough terrible people to go around in this story. But I feel no sympathy for Chris Rock. That kind of stuff that he pulled is super toxic. People should shun him and his shows if that's how he's going to act. This isn't a question of free speech. He's totally free to say those things without the government censoring him. He's not guaranteed an audience who wants to hear it, though, and he's not guaranteed social acceptance for what he says either. That's the biggest misunderstanding by entitled, spoiled little princesses on what free speech actually means.

2a) Corollary to number two; 2019: "Oscars so white; we need more diversity!" 2020: "Oscars so white; we need more diversity!" 2021 "Oscars so white, we need more diversity!" 2022: "Just right?" There's a reason that snarky comments all over the place are now calling this "just another case of black on black violence" and "you can take Will Smith out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of Will Smith." It's actually older and broader than that; the ghettos are just Little Africas in America. You can take the black man out of Africa, but you can't take Africa out of the black man. After how many centuries and how many generations now, there's still a fundamental disconnect between the behavior of European descended Americans and African descended "Americans". They truly aren't the same nation. The fundamental disconnect isn't due to any social anything either; it's due to biology. 80%+ of our behavior is driven by our genetics. I know, I know; that makes nice white people sad to have to come face to face with the idea that different people are actually different and not just multicolored interchangeable widgets. But frankly, that should make you sad if you believe that. What an evil, dehumanizing thing to believe in the first place!

I sometimes read the comments at Breitbart to get a read on where the conservative zeitgeist is. The comments section is a better barometer than the actual articles, but still. Usually I'm disappointed in how cucky most people still are. But they're awake on this issue. The reality of black criminality and society level disfunctionalism comes up non-stop under most articles related to this. That's where I read the comments referred to above, for what it's worth. The racism boondoggle is almost over. People are really starting to get it en masse that the whole thing is a hoax.

2b) The most controversial aspect of his multifaceted hot take; I said earlier that Chris Rock was asking for it, but in civilized society, men don't leap up and punch comedians during their show, either. He should have publicly walked out with his wife, turning his back on Rock's performance. It's a bit of performance art of his own, but it signals that that's not acceptable and that he doesn't need to suffer it. Then they resolve their differences privately. The watchwords in Christendom on how to resolve these differences is that Christ counsels us to be peacemakers, to turn the other cheek, to forgive another his offenses seventy times seven times. I suppose that I'm not entirely opposed to the idea that if after many, many attempts differences simply can't be resolved in a civilized manner, that they can be resolved in a private field with your seconds from thirty paces. But of course, that's been illegal in America for decades. How they cannot be resolved is by passive-aggressively going to the hall monitor and trying to tattle on the guy who you provoked. Not that Chris Rock is doing this, somewhat to his credit, but I hear all kinds of pundits, stupid talking heads and internet commentators saying that pressing charges for assault is the answer. This is absurd. Chris Rock wasn't hurt. He wasn't injured. And he asked for it. Assault? Criminal charges? That's the ultimate toxic beta response. Anyone who proposes that should be ashamed. Why in the world have we got to the point in our society where we feel like running to the teacher and tattling is the appropriate response to a predictable action that we provoked in the first place? Pretty simple, really: women's suffrage. I was once offended by the notion that giving women too much say in the ordering of society is a slow suicidal action, but in retrospect and after much thought and review of a lot of data, I have to admit that it's true.

3) It's been interesting to watch the media quietly stop their "Russia made such a huge miscalculation; derpy Putin, what an idiot, Russia is losing so badly, derpy-derp derp" propaganda in the wake of the obvious: Russia is actually completely and totally winning, they're doing exactly what they said that they were going to do, and they're doing it on schedule, and there's very little credibility to any suggestion that they won't end up with literally everything that they demanded before this whole thing started, and even then some. The big miscalculation was made by the "Americans": the sanctions, which it looks like will probably finally break the back of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Very lean times ahead in America as a result of that, I predict. Which in turn will reduce the already very frayed patience that Americans have with the government taking our money and giving it to entitled, demanding, uninvited and insulting foreigners and Fake Americans who call us racist non-stop just for not giving them our money fast enough. Not just lean times, but rough, violent times ahead for America, I predict.

4) In spite of the screeching harpies of the media and their ridiculous stories about the Hunter Biden laptop, everyone knew that Hunter Biden's laptop was real two years ago, except for those deeply in psychotic denial and all of the fake and dead people that voted to put this senile, corrupt old man in office. The laptop was (and still is) completely catastrophic for any expectations that Biden would be anything but a complete disaster, but now the veil of denial has been ripped away and everyone with any integrity has to admit it. Biden always was just the dumb tag-along who's now over-the-hill of an openly hostile to America crime syndicate, not a legitimate President. Biden the Pretender will be his eventual sobriquet. I do wonder why the story has come back now though, and what that means. Did some other faction of the crime syndicate that rules America decide that with the Russian and inflation debacles on Biden's "career" that it was time to put the pressure on him to get out of the way? Time will tell. Reading the actions of the "cloud people" is a bit like reading tea leaves. They don't actually make any sense to normal people, but they surely mean something to them. 

UPDATE: Adding one more.

5) I'm less up in arms about the stupid man winning at women's sports story. Frankly, women's sports have never really been very interesting to anyone other than the participants' parents anyway. With very few exceptions women's sports are merely a slow, boring parody of men's sports anyway. Not quite sure why anyone ever championed them in the first place, and Title IX was nothing but a tax on men and men's sports to force schools to create alternative to popular past times that nobody actually cares about or wants to see. I say get rid of Title IX completely, and then everyone can go back to acknowledging the reality that nobody cares about women's sports anyway, and men won't be tempted to pretend that they're sexually and psychologically confused so that they can complete against girls and act like it's amazing that they won. 

Cross-posting; Star Wars, Ad Astra, Space Opera X and D&D

I don't often like to cross-post on more than one blog, but I'll do it this time, because this kind of straddles the topics of the legacy Dark Heritage blog (this one) and my more focused Dark Fantasy X blog. Anyhoo, on to the content. Arguably, it fits better here, but for various reasons which are probably apparent, I did it there and I think it needs to be there too:

This is going to be a little bit roundabout, but let me set some context for an idea I've had that would alter a major guiding principle of Space Opera X and change a lot about how I see the setting, and therefore how it gets presented. Before I get to the punchline, though, I'll need to spend some time winding the thing up. Also, here's a video of Tim Kask, the first employee of TSR back in the 70s, talking about life at TSR and in D&D in the first few years of its existence. Not only is this an interesting little video in its own right, but it'll become relevant down below. Watch it, and log away what Tim says.

It's no secret that George Lucas was a big fan of Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, and that in his earliest drafts, the Jedi order resembled the samurai of movies like Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Seven Samurai much more than they eventually later did. Although echoes of this samurai past still stick with them. Originally Jedi weren't superheroes at all, and there isn't much—if any—hint of mystical super powers that they had, at least in the earliest versions of the scripts. They were just honor-bound warrior clans or organizations, and the Jedi and Sith were rivals here. The original Sith warrior was actually not Darth Vader in these early drafts, but Valorum, a Sith Knight who is demoted for some failure and eventually joins the rebels. Valorum is later renamed Dodona, and Espaa Valorum is later the head of the Empire, or at least the Sith clan. In the Star Wars graphic novel by Dark Horse based on these early versions of the script, Valorum is certainly a villain, but he's a relatively honorable one, who's more interested in dueling honorably with Starkiller (the early version of Luke Skywalker) then he is on advancing what he sees as grasping and puerile goals of the Imperial bureaucracy.

It's also worth noting that there was a lot less difference between the Jedi, the Sith and everyone else. There's concept art by MacQuarrie showing stormtroopers with lightsabers (and shields!), as well as the original concept painting for Darth Vader which shows him sporting a blaster pistol on his leg; as much like a black hat gunfighter from a Western movie as like a samurai or mystic warrior.

By the time we get to the novelization and the movie as presented in theaters, both the Jedi and the Sith had undergone a major change. The lightsaber becomes their signature weapon, that nobody else uses. Belief in the Force is an "ancient religion" that most people are skeptical of, even when they know what Darth Vader can do, for instance. Obiwan becomes, by necessity of George Lucas' idea to modify his plot to conform to his interpretation of Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey*" plot arc, a wizardly mentor figure, so he has to have some magical powers. It's worth noting that in the first movie especially, but in the original trilogy overall, these magical powers are much more subtle and modest then they later end up being.

But this was a major change to the setting, to the nature of both the Jedi and the Sith, and to the idea that it faithfully represents the samurai ethos at all anymore. The Jedi and Sith as rival samurai clans idea never really recovers, they neither really resemble samurai all that much anymore. For that matter, the plot doesn't resemble the samurai movies much anymore either. When people tell you that Star Wars is basically a remake of The Hidden Fortress, that's now a reliable tell that they're midwits (at best) parroting something that they've heard in an attempt to sound smart and name-drop, but that they don't actually understand what they're claiming at all. Star Wars has very little resemblance to The Hidden Fortress; it's more like after a lengthy introduction, a remake of Where Eagles Dare spliced to a remake of 633 Squadron. But that's stretching it. It's not a remake of anything, just because it borrows some sequences and plot points.

While we're treated to an escalation of Force superpowers in the next two movies, that's in an attempt to raise the stakes. Darth Vader throwing things at Luke with the Force while swordfighting is supposed to be impressive because we didn't imagine that that could be done. Same with Yoda pulling up an X-wing out of the pond. Later, when the Emperor shows remarkable precognitive powers (although fallible ones, obviously) as well as shooting lightning out of his hands, that's supposed to shock us (no pun intended) because, again, we had no idea that something like that could be done. The Force superpowers remain relatively modest throughout the original trilogy, and those we see using the force in these remarkable ways are (other than Luke himself) presented as true prodigies of force power anyway; much greater than the run-of-the-mill Jedi or Sith would have been. Although that presentation is a bit implicit rather than explicit.

Unfortunately, then George Lucas made another major change to Jedi between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel trilogy, and turned them overtly into superheroes. It's not just the Force, but the lightsabers are escalated immediately. Right off the bat, we're told that lightsabers can now cut through thick blast doors. Funny; I don't remember Darth Vader thinking of doing that when Luke and Co. were escaping the Death Star and he was cut off from them by a blast door. Dooku throws around lightning like its throwing a football in the backyard, Yoda doesn't just strain, struggle and pull an X-wing out of the swamp, he rather casually catches a falling cavern ceiling and throws it aside to save Obiwan and Anakin's life. Even within the prequels we see this escalation; when Obiwan and Qui-Gonn are stopped by destroyer droids in the first sequence of Phantom Menace, we later see Jedi and even clone troopers treating destroyers as if—in the immortal words of Ryan George's Pitch Meetings—they're super easy; barely an inconvenience. If the prequels weren't bad enough—and they were—then other media from this same era is even worse. The Starkiller character from the Force Unleashed video games raises his hands, uses the force, and pulls a freakin' Star Destroyer out of space and crashes it to the surface of the planet he's on. 

Somewhere around here, it occurred to me that Star Wars had become an overtly superhero story, even though people like Dave Filoni and others in featurettes and interviews explicitly denied it. The Jedi and the Sith were like the X-men or the Avengers; completely disconnected from normal people altogether. They also developed a bit of the Superman problem, i.e., the only kinds of stories you can tell about Superman are ones where his dedication to his ideals are tested, because those ideals conflict with him using his deus ex machina powers to easily and handily solve literally every problem that ever comes his way. Watching some of the episodes of The Clone Wars which was the follow-up media to the prequel movies themselves, it occurred to me that most of them were really boring, because the Jedi never even struggled to overcome all of the challenges thrown at them. There were no real stakes anymore; they were just going through the motions of making action sequences. Using your lightsaber to fight off enemies is supposed to be cool, but they had all of the excitement of the Jedi using a lightbroom to clean up their rooms. 

When I created my own Star Wars Revisited stuff for homebrew RPG use, which later lost the Star Wars IP connotation specifically and became Ad Astra and then Space Opera X, my analogs to the Jedi and Sith were always supposed to be more like the original trilogy version, and I actually made that explicitly clearly stated. The rest of the characters were equally competent swashbuckling heroes; if the Jedi had modest magical powers, the others were still Batman and Captain America or whatever and could stand toe to toe with them even without magical powers. I wanted to seriously de-escalate the power creep of the Jedi. Which wasn't really so much of a creep as it was an abrupt shift during the prequel era.

But now comes the time to think about what Tim Kask said about Gary Gygax and what he thought. Remember that from the little video up above? Star Wars as a high concept world-buildling episode could be seen as a three-legged stool. One leg was space opera, one leg was superhero stories, and the other leg was high fantasy. The setting superficially resembled space opera and takes place in space, but once you get rid of the superficial trappings, it's a combination of Old West American frontier and Medievalism, the plots are very high fantasy, and the characters have superpowers like the Justice League or the Avengers. Well, maybe Justice League is a bit much, but like the X-men at least.

But what if Space Opera X were more like a three-legged stool of space opera, the Old West, and sword & sorcery of the kind that Gary Gygax claimed he was modeling D&D on? Specifically the Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber kind, who are the two most iconic authors in the genre? And like with Gary Gygax, who failed to really understand why anyone would want to play a wizard or an elf when you could play a more down-to-earth heroic figure, what if the Jedi and Sith were treated much more like the sorcerers of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber than like actual protagonists? In Howard, they're almost always villainous. Leiber has friendlier sorcerers; the Gray Mouser actually apprentices under one briefly and has a few modest magical tricks up his sleeve from time to time, and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes tend to be sponsors and patrons of the two main characters. Although they're weird. They're inhuman, and bizarre, and inscrutable. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never really trust them, because they can never understand them. 

I don't know that that changes the way the game would work, at all. In fact, I don't see any reason why it should. But it is a major change to the worldbuilding side, if my Knights and Warlocks are much more rare, and much more inscrutable, and are usually played more like plot devices than like characters. Heck, there may well be something about them that specifically makes them go insane over time, or at least become trans-human creeps. While Star Wars has gradually become the story of Jedi and Sith, with everyone else kind of falling into the background (even The Mandalorian and its sad Boba Fett spin-off are not immune from this, although they should be from a structural standpoint. I think the writers just can't help making it all about the Jedi and Sith) Space Opera X, on the other hand, would specifically be about swashbuckling "normal" people, with the magic-users being relegated to more of a plot-devicey role most of the time. 

* I'm not really very impressed with Campbell's "The Hero's Journey" and I see the name-dropping of it as a red flag that I'm dealing with a midwit who greatly overestimates his own intelligence. The plot arc and the archetypal characters are not actually nearly as ubiquitous as its adherents claim, and they often struggle to name anything other than Star Wars itself that really fits it very well. They're certainly common, but that's a far cry from universal, and they often appear without the rest of the "Hero's Journey" package, which defeats the purpose of the the model. I also think that the plot outline of "The Hero's Journey" is so reduced to banality that it says very little to point out obvious similarities that it posits. Mostly, Joseph Campbell is a tool for the self-important to flatter themselves that they are intelligent and academic without them actually having to be intelligent or academic, or even to know very much about what they're talking about. If you want to work in this same space but actually read someone who's said something more interesting, then check out the work of Georges Dumezil. It's still a just-so story, but it's fundamentally a much more serious and interesting just-so story than the one Campbell has pushed on us.

It's also interesting that those very interested in showing how academic they are by referring to Campbell and the monomyth are completely unaware that the monomyth is very much out of favor and has been for decades in the field of academic comparative mythology.

2006 Northrup, Leslie: Mainstream scholarship of comparative mythology since Campbell has moved away from "highly general and universal" categories in general. 

1998 Constantino: "It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a (Joseph) Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor." [ed. Pun intended, I presume.]

1999 Ellwood, Robert: "A tendency to think in generic terms of people, races... is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking."

1990 Crespi: "... unsatisfying from a social science perspective. Campbell's analytic level is so abstract and devoid of ethnographic context that myth loses the very meanings supposed to be embedded in the 'hero.'"

1984 Dundes, Alan: "Like most universalists, he is content to merely assert universality rather than bother to document it. […] If Campbell's generalizations about myth are not substantiated, why should students consider his work?"

No Legend of Vox Machina for me

I suspected that it might be very strange, and I was actually anxious to not watch it while I was surrounded by any of my family, but my daughter was out last night and my wife went out with a friend for "girls night out" and I fired up The Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon Prime. I quit ten minutes in and walked away.

The gory deaths were animated; I didn't really mind them so much, but they seemed incredibly gratuitous. The f-bombs being every other word was bizarre; it really took me out of the show and its the only thing that I could notice. Then we had weird animated sex scenes, another gory fight, and then a character who looked kinda sorta like a woman except really big and burly, with the sides of her head shaved and a pink beard. And... that's when I decided there was absolutely no way.

The video I'm linking isn't about that, but it's the same thing, right? Like Geeky Sparkles says, this is about "I licked D&D and now you can't have it anymore." Critical Role is exactly the problem with D&D, and they've led in to the problems that D&D now has.

On Virtue and Villains

I'm not sure how to categorize this, other than I believe it's central to my philosophy on both writing and gaming and entertainment overall, which is a reflection of reality. Here, I'm utilizing some elements from a blog post by Alexander Macris to discuss the philosophy, because I like the categorizations that he makes.

But first, I'm quoting a section of the first chapter of On Virtue, a 1981 book by Alasdair McIntyre and his rather disquieting observation about society of the time. While it seemed disquieting at the time, it's much more obviously true now, thirty years after he first wrote it. Macris also referred specifically to this passage.

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because they're torn and charred. 

Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory and phlogiston theory, although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each. Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. 

In such a culture men would use expressions such as ‘neutrino’, ‘mass’, ‘specific gravity’, ‘atomic weight’ in systematic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been so largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear very surprising to us. What would appear to be rival and competing premises for which no further argument could be given would abound. Subjectivist theories of science would appear and would be criticized by those who held that the notion of truth embodied in what they took to be science was incompatible with subjectivism. 

This imaginary possible world is very like one that some science fiction writers have constructed. We may describe it as a world in which the language of natural science, or parts of it at least, continues to be used but is in a grave state of disorder. We may notice that if in this imaginary world analytical philosophy were to flourish, it would never reveal the fact of this disorder. For the techniques of analytical philosophy are essentially descriptive and descriptive of the language of the present at that. The analytical philosopher would be able to elucidate the conceptual structures of what was taken to be scientific thinking and discourse in the imaginary world in precisely the way that he elucidates the conceptual structures of natural science as it is. 

Nor again would phenomenology or existentialism be able to discern anything wrong. All the structures of intentionality would be what they are now. The task of supplying an epistemological basis for these false simulacra of natural science would not differ in phenomenological terms from the task as it is presently envisaged. A Husserl or a Merleau-Ponty would be as deceived as a Strawson or a Quine. 

What is the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by fictitious pseudo-scientists and real, genuine philosophy? The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have — very largely, if not entirely — lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality. 

But how could this be so? The impulse to reject the whole suggestion out of hand will certainly be very strong. Our capacity to use moral language, to be guided by moral reasoning, to define our transactions with others in moral terms is so central to our view of ourselves that even to envisage the possibility of our radical incapacity in these respects is to ask for a shift in our view of what we are and do which is going to be difficult to achieve. 

McIntyre is both right and yet not right. We have lost that comprehension as a society. But the knowledge isn't lost and fragmented and otherwise unable to be recovered, it's just not utilized. The culprit is the abandonment of Christianity by our people (even many of those who still call themselves Christians... but that's a topic for another day) and the embrace of situational, worldly ethics designed to make us feel good about ourselves regardless of what we choose to do and believe; regardless of its rightness or wrongness. But the knowledge isn't lost, just abandoned by the majority. It's still there, and can be readily pieced together if people were willing to humble themselves sufficiently to acknowledge the Hand of God and look at it again. Like the brazen serpent Moses held aloft to cure the children of Israel from the bites of the fiery serpents, it's relatively easy to repair our understanding of morality. But many will outright refuse to look and will perish in their pride.

For some independent confirmation, Paul described to Timothy the same conditions, and prophesied that they would reign in the last days: "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." And Isaiah was even more blunt and succinct: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! [...] Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!"

Because of this loss of understanding of actual morality, Macris argues, we have four general categories of villains in our works of entertainment, and the older types conform to a society that understands morality. The newer types, or at least the newest type, does not. It's not that such a villain isn't actually a villain or that such characterizations don't exist in real life, because they do. Although as you will no doubt have seen over and over again in modern entertainment, the sympathy that we're supposed to have for the villain, who becomes philosophically converged to the anti-hero or even in many cases the so-called hero, is his defining trait as a character. The merging of heroism and villainy into a kind of sorta nobody is really either is the defining trait of works of entertainment that over-utilize this type of villain.

The categories and some of the examples used to illustrate them are, therefore, from Macris (I believe; he doesn't attribute them to anyone else, anyhow) but the discussion around them is my own.

Ancient Villain (The Destroyer): This can perhaps be best described as pre-Christian pagan villains. Villains here are synonymous with chaos, and they are typified with wanting to destroy order. The iconic example, although most ancient societies have analogs, are the struggles of the Olympians known as the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy. Typhon and Echidna are the most iconic examples, because they just raged against order and wanted to tear it down because they hated it. They didn't want to rule. They didn't want to build something else. They just wanted to watch the world burn, and had no plans to replace it with anything else.

Although the category name is "ancient" and ancient works of literature often depict this kind of villain, it's hardly something that has left us. If the Medieval villain template is Satan himself, then the ancient villain template is also an aspect of him. In works that expand on the narrative of Genesis chapter 3, we learn that Satan, when called out by God in the Garden of Eden, is angered and declares that if the children of Adam and Eve will not consent to be ruled by him, then he will destroy them out of spite. God promises that he indeed will have some such power; he will be able to bruise the heel, but through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, ultimately Satan will fail, and have his head crushed. 

Heath Ledger's Joker is one such villain. There isn't any reason for his sadism, he just wants to watch the world burn. We're given numerous explanations for how he got to where he is, but we gradually come to realize that every explanation that the Joker gives is just him just yanking our chains and he's making them all up to amuse himself. 

This attitude of villainy is still very much with us today. Radical Marxists, anti-racists, feminists, and more are defined in many ways not by how they've been victims of anything other than their own evil; they have nothing but spite, envy and covetousness for more successful and happy people than themselves. Lacking any way to get what they want that they are willing to pursue (i.e. humility, repentance and acceptance that they're not entitled to whatever they want), they turn to spite and pettiness and just want to burn everything down. It's not hard to see a visceral, inexplicable hatred of Western Civilization in the eyes of most liberal philosophy that has no desire other than to burn it all to the ground, dispossess the children of Western Civilization of their inheritance, their peace, their happiness, for no other reason than to satisfy the nihilistic narcissism of the Ancient Villain for a brief moment. 

In this way, the ancient villain isn't just necessarily a ravening monster who despises order and justice because he exists outside of it. Sometimes the ancient villain understands it and yet rejects it and it turns his attitude into one of pure nihilistic spite.

Medieval Villain (The Rebel): The Medieval villain is a bit more subtle. Satan is again the template, but many Medieval characters fit the archetype quite well. Mordred, for example, the bastard son of King Arthur, is one such. Morgoth (and Sauron too) from the works of Tolkien, who greatly admired the Medievalist tradition, is another. The Medieval villain is one that requires Christianity to evolve out of the idea of the Ancient Villain. Whereas the pagans of Europe and the Middle East could easily conceive of an ancient villain who wanted merely to destroy order, it was Christianity that introduced (or reintroduced) to them the concept of the corrupter. The one who doesn't want to destroy the natural order, but rather wants to rule it and remake it in his own image, with him at the head replacing the heads of the current order. Satan wanted to take the place of God himself, to remake creation in his own image, to set himself up as the ruler. When this was rejected, he rebelled and became both the medieval and ancient villain at the same time, depending on circumstances. Those whom he could corrupt, he did. Those he could not, he sought to destroy. The fatal flaw of the Medieval villain isn't his undying rage or spite, but rather his undying pride and arrogance. He knows that he's rebelling against an order that is good, but he doesn't care. As the Satanic saying goes, as put forward by Milton, "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" or "Non serviam" is the watchword of the Medieval villain.

Modern Villain (The Manager): The modern villain is characterized by the banal, bureaucratic nature of his villainy. Often the modern villain doesn't necessarily believe that he's a villain. He just doesn't care about the morality of his actions in pursuit of his goals. He's the perfect example of the expression that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. If "breaking a few eggs" evolves into "burning down the entire chicken farm" that doesn't make him evolve into an Ancient Villain unless his motivation for doing so evolves as well; it's just a case of what's already there going out of control like a runaway train.

Other times, the modern villain can be sadistic and moustache-twirling, but as merely an agent or bureaucrat of a malign system which he serves. Macris gives the example of Grand Moff Tarkin from the first Star Wars movie here; the Empire is a villainous, malign system, and Tarkin is the agent of it. He has no compunctions against destroying an entire planet to make a statement to the rest of the galaxy. It's just the cost of doing business. But he had no particular malign intent towards the Alderaanians. Destroying them was just a convenient tool to accomplish his designs.

Post-Modern Villain (The Victim): The post-modern villain is the most common in entertainment today. I dislike this villain, because it gives the villain an excuse and tries to remake the villain into a sympathetic, non-villain. That said, there are actual villains in real life that conform to this archetype, so it's one that shouldn't be completely ignored; rather, I dislike its over-use, and specifically the idea, which is based on McIntyre's proposition that today we don't understand good and evil and have come to excuse evil and try and empathize with evil, and ultimately claim that there is no good and evil. The post-modern villain is characterized by having been victimized by an unjust, malign system which led to him becoming the character that he is. Modern or even Medieval motivated villains are remade as post-modern villains in today's entertainment. The Joker is remade as a victim in The Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix, for example. Darth Vader is remade as a post-modern villain in the prequel trilogy. Hannibal Lector is remade as a post-modern villain in the sequel to Silence of the Lambs. Maleficent is remade in the movie titled after her character into maybe even something beyond a post-modern villain; instead of being a Medieval villain as she was in Sleeping Beauty she's now secretly the hero of the movie, and King Stephen is remade as a Medieval or even Ancient villain. (Because he's a white man.)

I should point out that while there is a place for the post-modern villain, care should be taken. An over-use of the post-modern villain tells you more about the author of the piece and his pathology than it does about the human condition. It's also a truism that many of these post-modern villains—especially if its the conversion of a popular, well-known villain of another type into a post-modern villain—doesn't go over well with the audience. They are irked by authors who try to excuse evil and make villains sympathetic or even non-villainous, in spite of their obviously evil actions. The problem with the post-modern villain is that it's subversive. It presupposes as a necessary precondition that the society in which the post-modern villain is raised is corrupt and evil.  While there's plenty of truth to that notion in today's society, the architects of post-modern villains generally get that completely wrong; what they really want to do is insult their audience by suggesting that their society is corrupt, and that they deserve the villains that they get. Of course, in reality the nihilistic society that the authors obviously favor is the corrupt one and that we the audience are the victims of their banal villainy rather than the architects of it. But who wants to admit that? Who wants to write stories in which the authors' people are the villains, and who wants to consume entertainment in which the audience's people are the villains? In my opinion this is the true root cause of the failure of wokeness to capture the minds of the people. Sure, people aren't very interesting in a lecture about how they are evil and how bratty, entitled perpetrators of hoaxes and cons like racism and sexism are heroic for having to suffer their villainy, but ultimately it's the complete lack of awareness of what good and evil even are that is the fatal flaw of those who perpetrate the post-modern villain and its many failures on our entertainment. Those who would use this trope better be really sure that they know what they are doing, and they better be sure that the are not suffering, as McIntyre suggests, from a lack of understanding of the true nature of morality.

All of that said, how has that changed how I perceive my world-building, my gaming, my writing? One obvious and maybe unexpected to my younger self result is that I've decided that Christianity is overtly the moral framework for every society that isn't outright evil. Christian morality is the objectively true morality that operates in my settings, just as it is in the real world. Another is that I'm a little wary of too much "shades of gray" storytelling. I like noir stories, crime stories, spy stories—adapted into fantasy or space opera. But I've deliberately decided that I have to be careful about these and never present evil as if it were good, or at least excusable. Evil is evil. Full stop. Even the post-modern villains are still villains. Regardless of what happened to them in the past, they chose to harden their hearts and turn to evil because of it, and they could have chosen otherwise. Villainy is best shown when contrasted with heroism. The post-modern villain's villainy is more compelling and true when we're also shown someone who suffered the same injustice that the villain uses as his excuse, but who choose otherwise—restraint, forgiveness, letting go of anger and bitterness, etc. Trying the justify and rehabilitate the image of villains by making them not really villains (especially when the same is done in parallel to the heroes) just turns everyone into a stupid gray mush. Like I said earlier, it says more about the author than the author—I think—really wants to reveal, because it isn't flattering.

The best thing I've heard in a long time

Title is self-evident. Tolkien is even way cooler than I imagined. Just because White Anglo-Saxons are mostly all cucks today doesn't mean that that's our natural state.

More SWTOR Characters

Here's some more. Many of these are manipulated screenshots, i.e., they've had work done in Photoshop. I'm also throwing this all in regardless of order. Most of them were submitted to TOR fashion, I believe, by the same person. You'll see a lot of use of the Furious Gladiator greaves, which is super cool. That's a vastly overpriced armor set, but I'm really tempted to figure out a way to get it anyway, because it's so cool.

An Agent and Ensign Temple. For what it's worth, I use that same Temple customization. Much prettier than most of the alternatives.

A fringer looking smuggler type. Nice look.

An alternative outfit for the same agent above, in a more "naturalistic" setting on Alderaan.

A cool backshot of one of the bounty hunter outfits.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of "casual" Jedi who wear normal clothes, not bizarre peasant robes and cloaks, so I'm a fan of this one quite a bit.

A more mechanistic look at a smuggler.

Another more naturalistic shot of him on Balmorra.

Here he is once more.

"Savage" Jedi. Awesome look. I love that set of leg armor, though.

Interesting alternates for Torian Cadera (left) and the bounty hunter character.

Our savage Jedi again.

And once more.

Torian and the bounty hunter, this time in a very different look.

The agent and Raina Temple. You can't actually see them very well here, but what a cool shot anyway. 

The agent addressing her crew in their custom outfits.

Our mechanic on Balmorra again.

A really cool verson of the Sith Warrior. Yes, she's using the same legpiece again.

I believe that this is within a heavily customized stronghold on Tatooine. It looks awesome, though.

Another shot, like the one above, used to show the companion from the back more than anything else.

Back to our Jedi once more time.

The Sith Warrior and a really cool outfit for Lieutenant Pierce, I presume.

The bounty hunter and his customized companions.

Another bounty hunter alternative with Torian wading through the swamps of Hutta.

The Sith Warrior and her awesome companion customization.

A naturalistic shot of our Jedi on Makeb.

Sith Warrior on Dromund Kaas, I believe. Although there are parts of Korriban in the academy that look very much like this.

The third alternate for the bounty hunter, silhouetted against the setting sun.

Bald chick Sith Warrior. Cool outfit, I agree.

Very casual agent outfit. A disguise, even.

Our bounty hunter again, in the third outfit.

A cool look for a trooper. I think this one looks considerably better with body type 3, but I pretty much only use body type 2.

SWTOR Characters

Every once in a while I'll go trawl through the user-submitted images on TOR Fashion looking for ideas on how to build cool looking characters. Here's a few of my latest finds. These are available on that site, of course, but I saved them and I'm going to post them so I can delete them from my desktop, where they're taking up space and cluttering things up.

I actually have three characters with a somewhat similar look (without the cyborg eye-patch) as this character, Vant Galaide (he has a Van Dyke beard, though), Wulf Hengest (a bit darker and with yellow eyes) and Haul Romund (lighter hair, but with pretty dark five o'clock shadow.) The outfit is based mostly on the Expert Outlaw, which I've had for some time and I like to use elements of it. Vant Galaide already has an outfit based on it too, actually.

This is based on a world drop jacket, butit looks like a color swap of the Madilon Onslaught jacket, which I have the schematic to make. I've, in fact, got a similar outfit on one character, although it's a lighter brown and the highlights are a dark red; the bounty hunter dye module, actually. I also love those boots. 

In two color variations; a reddish brown with teal shirt and saffron-colored scarf, or a variation where the shirt is gray and the jacket is teal. In reality, this is readily available in all kinds of colors; it drops pretty regularly as part of any Republic character, and there are schematics (which I have) and even a couple of Cartel Market jackets that all have this look. Most of them look different on an Imperial character, but not all of them. I also have those boots, that jacket, and I think even those guns. I could make this same outfit, pretty much, almost exactly as is. I don't have those exact pants, but I do have in my collections one that looks just like them except the cargo pockets are in the secondary color, which is admittedly a little weird. 

Although I've used a more neutral colored shirt that gives it more of a 50s greaser appearance, I have a couple of different color variations on this same outfit here below too, and I actually really like it (my default Anstal Tane look, for instance, if you remember my Sith Scoundrel videos or screenshots.) Not sure why I'm showing someone else doing something that I've already done other than to validate it to myself, maybe, and take note of the coloring.

I've discovered that one of the keys to making this oufit successful is the bracers. You'll either want something that covers this weird jacket cuff up entirely because its so big, or something small and unobtrusive that can disappear.

I used this exact same jacket, and hence a very similar look, on my own OG gunslinger when he went to Ilum and I decided I wanted him to dress for the icy weather. It just goes to show you; some of the cheap and craftable items really look good.

This last set of images for this character uses some elements that I don't have. I've discovered that for the most part, it's the jacket and helmet more than anything else that make an outfit, though—the other pieces can usually accept substitutions without making it look very different. I do like the alligator skin pants, though. Almost bought that outfit durin the Christmas sale. Wish now that I had.

The next one below is extremely similar to my own Mirialan Operative. I like the outfit well enough, especially with either a secondary black dye module (I think it's secondary) or even better the black and dark brown (again, can't remember if I used Honorable General or the Underworld Boss dye module) on it. This is unusual, because the jacket/chestpiece itself doesn't require it. But if you don't do it, you get a weird bright orange secondary color on everything else that you use if it's color-matched. Blegh. In a pinch, I suppose you could use a mostly black outfit or outfits to build all of your other pieces and don't unify the colors. The example here uses the expensive black/black dye module. That's overkill.

Again; what am I doing here? Looking for validation on choices that I've already made with characters I already have? I'm not sure. I may yet make my upcoming new agent character that will, unlike my Mirialan, not skip around missing tons of recording (plus he'll be human) use a similar variation on this theme again, although I'll probably give him more than one outfit to go between, like I did Vant Galaide, my Mercenary.

The two images below, however, will almost certainly be my default look for that character. I've got access to that chestpiece and helmet, and I've even got a black/black dye module that I picked up cheap when I saw someone selling it cheap (honestly; I wonder if they forgot to add a zero to the end of their asking price) and I've been saving it for a rainy day.

Finally, a really awesome "rugged" or maybe even "ragged" variation on the Mandalorian theme. I'd do it slightly different, but I still think this character is just freakin' awesome looking as depicted here.

Here, the chest piece is one that I'm not 100% sure of; I think it's actually a world drop piece with several variations, which means that it might not really be available to early characters. The rest of the pieces are cartel market items, but they come from three new and very expensive sets. The helmet and big chunky bracers are from the ersatz "Mandalorian" armor, called Infamous Bounty Hunter. I actually have an alternative Mandalorian style helmet that I like better because it's not quite so iconic, which means it feels a little bit more unique. The boots and belt can be subbed if necessary, although I like the look of them here; they come from the Cybernetic Pauldron set, which is an attractive set in its own right.

The piece that really makes it, though, is the makeshift kilt over trousers look, which comes from the Furious Gladiator. That set it unfortunate in the sense that it would be MASSIVELY awesome if the faceplate were always down. It looks great when its down. But unless you're in combat or otherwise have your weapon drawn, it goes up and you look like a dumb version of the mummy underneath. What an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Finally, this last bounty hunter is mostly Roland Dyre's armor with a dye module and some variations that I could build something very close to right now.

You'll notice that it uses the same boots as the one before.