It was so hard for me to grasp at some point over a decade earlier that in the past, in the middle ages and earlier for example, that people would publish all these educational books.....and none of the info was copyrighted; literally anyone could find some book published by some random Greek or Arab person and just take all the knowledge, and release their own stuff that just freely builds on the knowledge contained within, or that inventions could be copied by anyone and no one was like 'pay me for my brilliance'.
God, back when I was a kid my father used to be against me playing video games so I'd have to find some free way to game and I just lived on abandonware games. I downloaded games that were either kind of old and came out around the mid-90's or even earlier, or had just been abandoned; that and a ton of gaming on emulators.
So many fun old games, sooooo many fun old games. Also lots and lots of ASCII rpg games, lots and lots of ASCII rpg games.
Stick these people in a warzone; it's literally the only way they'll rediscover their humanity.
I didn't realize French libs were this demented.
Reminds me of when Tucker Carlson referred to a young black kid (two years younger than Rittenhouse) who was shot by cops as a young man (had to correct himself too by the way), but referred to Rittenhouse as a kid.
I look at stuff like this and wonder why the global South ever tries to engage in dialogue with us when we even call young male victims of drone attacks 'military aged males'
https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/1718198085858320437
Has it aged well? I've been curious to give it a shot, and I'm somewhat patient with old animes, but I think the oldest I ever went was the 80's
Like so many other people on the internet you seem to have very little information about what you're talking about, but that doesn't stops you from expressing your opinion.
The guy in your link like so many people on the internet seems to have very little information about what they're talking about, but that hasn't stopped them from expressing their opinion. Here's someone who does actually have a lot of information on what they're talking about who has a response to their video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXF5C2c0UYs
See this and let me know if you still feel the same way
Honestly just replace 'tankie' with 'person who doesn't help advance Western interests, primarily America,' and that'll cover all their bases.
Edit: actually I think race essentialism and stereotyping are fine setting and plot elements if they’re actually examined - it is absolutely great fuel for interesting stories and conflicts if the setting doesn’t treat it as universal truth, rather than the products of systems within the setting
I made a few posts just now discussing this very thing; the idea that a universe's genetic system where you have beings born evil and then as per that afterlife's system design is that they also go to an eternity of suffering is inherently evil in and of itself and players should be aware of this issue and actually trying to tackle it, as this very system is more evil than anything they could possibly encounter in the setting. Alternatively a setting could emphasize that there are people (orcs and goblins for example) suffering because the medieval societies around them basically are playing 'cowboys and Indians' with their lives and the lives of their families, and the players could basically get sucked in (very easily) by being hired by people to kill off orcs only to realize they're murdering a local population and that the very medieval societies that hire them are actually quite vicious and barbaric.
The truth is that neither of the two ideas I've had aren't offensive on one level or another, but I feel a lot of players don't seem to realize that the old systems and views on race and inherent racial alignment most likely themselves came from people who saw the horrific history in a place like America and only saw basically 'cowboys and Indians', or John Wayne movies (never watched any; I'm assuming his movies were probably mostly about him killing tons of native actual American people), divorcing the humanity of the people whose lands were being taken and them being genocided down to even the youngest life.
I actually did have a story element I'd intended on dropping on my players' hands (had my campaign lasted that long); the idea was that in the heavenly realm, divine beings were split in a debate in regards to whether creatures like orcs and goblins were innately evil or whether it was learned, so to create a controlled environment to test their views, they would have goblin babies be raised away from civilization with little influence on them up to the point where they could raise and take care of their own children and then immediately left to their own devices. It would be the players' duty to watch over this tribe without influencing it and to ensure that no outside influence affects the village; the village does ultimately encounter outside influences, negative ones, but the idea was that regardless of the negative encounters, it doesn't make the goblins lean towards evil or violence, instead they persevere and maintain a neutral society, perhaps more hostile to strangers, but not 'evil'. I wanted to make the players think about the nature of evil in traditional fantasy settings and about the innate absurdity of 'born evil' races.
Unfortunately as I continued to write, I got sleepy and missed a few points I'd actually intended on including in my post; One of my additional issues that I took with orcs and goblins was.....where do they go when they die? It makes no sense for them to go to the abyss or hell because that's where evil beings go and like....orcs and goblins didn't choose to be evil, so what are they being punished for? If you have a setting where beings can be born evil without the choice to become evil, and they go to hell because 'they deserve to because they're evil', then it kind of means that any actual hero would be trying to tackle this system because there are beings being punished for choices that were never in their hands to begin with.
You'd end up with a situation where you literally have evil babies, and if as a heroic character you literally see nothing wrong with the world operating like this, then your own character is either evil or insane.
Yep, this is going to be a post discussing racism.
One thing that confused me greatly about orcs and goblins is the severe difference in technological levels between them and regular human empires (also something else, but I'll get to that later). Regular humans are depicted as being from the (unrealistic view of the) medieval period, but orcs and goblins are portrayed as being extremely underdeveloped tech-wise. Their cultures don't feel like they belong together in the same geographical locations, and orcs don't seem capable of learning from the people they've warred with for hundreds of years.
Now you may argue that that's because orcs and goblins are intended to be genetically mentally inferior; their intelligence stat is certainly below the average human intelligence (average human intelligence = 10, orcs = 8 (5e orc = 7)). However there's a reason why this doesn't make sense: human barbarian tribes exist in the same regions as more technologically advanced humans and they're not advancing either, despite co-existing or warring with other humans of their region for hundreds of years. Their tribes, unlike their literal neighbors, have been entirely unable to advance and yet remain as a constant warring group against their medieval counterparts without ever getting wiped out. They don't live in neighboring nations, they live within the same nations as their medieval counterparts.
In the real world, you have situations like this arising because nations like Britannia (I've no idea what it was called before the Romans invaded) was literally invaded by a technologically advanced nation, putting them at odds and making neighbors of people who were technologically lesser. Situations like when the native actual American peoples were invaded by Europeans.
I've seen King Arthur portrayed as a knight fighting off 'barbarians' (one of the transformers movies, but also probably other depictions too), which would more accurately translate to a colonialist terrorizing the local population in this scenario, although apparently in the actual myths he was a Briton who fought off foreign invaders instead (not a depiction you see in media as far as I'm aware, especially as king Arthur is portrayed as being clad in plate armor of the medieval period).
Basically a more accurate representation of this situation in your usual TTRPG setting would depict the more technologically advanced nations as colonizers, at constant struggle with the neighboring populations that they're actively trying to suppress, and I say neighboring because had those populations existed within their nation they would have murdered them all. TTRPG settings never depict this relationship, instead asking that you accept this current situation as though it just sprung up into its current state all of a sudden (which it did).
Going back to the cultures of orcs and goblins, they're usually portrayed in a way that also makes them similar to human barbarians, neither of which match the cultures of the medieval peoples, but settler colonialism is never used as an explanation for why that is (settler colonialism being the only/most likely logical reason). No technologically medieval culture still has its barbarian beliefs or even traces of it, meaning they are indeed more akin to foreign invaders, which just makes the settings feel off given that those nations aren't settler colonialist.
Now as regards orcs and goblins and their alignment by birth, I reject the automatic evil alignment they get and I reject it because in principal I repudiate Gygax's views, which you can read here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/
He agrees with Chivington about the 'nits make lice' being an observable fact, a quote Chivington made in regards to actual human beings and not a race of beings who are objectively/genetically evil. Chivington was in the process of ethnically cleansing the region for settler colonialist reasons; Chivington's side is the evil one and yet in a bizarre twist his logic is the one being considered as the rationale for lawful good.
Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they're the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it's portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There's never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what's presented, and that never made any sense.
Given Gygax's son's (Ernie Gygax) comments about native actual Americans, I got the sense that maybe he was raised on an unhealthy diet of 'heroic' cowboys versus 'savage' natives, and if this was the case, then his father probably raised him that way and had similar views (especially given his quoting Chivington as rationale behind the lawful good alignment of paladins).
When you consider Gygax's opinions on the views of a genocidal murderer, suddenly it would make more sense to flip alignments between the medieval society and orcs and goblins (I'm not comparing orcs and goblins to native actual Americans), and suddenly paladins become basically the medieval Wehrmacht.
Unfortunately this line of reasoning brings me to.....the tired old racist view that 'technologically advanced' = objectively good.
(oof this post was long)
Nice, now that's my kind of campaign.
I'm a terrible DM but I also don't do the whole 'evil races' thing either when I do actually DM; the only such beings when it does occur being fiendish beings who come from hell or the abyss, or the undead (except for one 'undead' lich who only became a (plant based) lich because he feared death greatly).
I remember reading a forum post by Gygax (so relatively recent post, as in within the last twenty years) where he justified the killing of the children of evil races saying that a certain general's observation of 'nits make lice' (in reference to the general pushing his troops to kill the women and children of native Americans) was an observable fact.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/
I used to be a giant fan of Drizzt because I got the impression that he didn't just kill his enemies, but instead thought about morality and such; but it was hard to continue feeling that way when you realized actually Drizzt liked killing beings from the 'evil' races.