It’s a jam-packed Melendy Avenue Review today, folks! There’s a podcast! There’s a video! There’s two reviews! There’s the return of Ed’s Corner where he proves he was right all along about fantasy gaming franchise cross-promotion and even the money knows it, dammit! And, hell, while we’re at it, let’s open a reading election to the public! Don’t say we don’t ever do anything for you! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Podcast Content
A People’s History of Violence: Asanuma and the “Lost” Assassin
Video Content
2022 Birthday Lecture: Notes Towards an Intellectual History of Generation X
Election
Vote for my next literary fiction reads!
Reviews
Lahiri, The Namesake
Carter, The Politics of Rage
Lagniappe
Ed’s Corner: No Win Condition Blue Chip & Character Malignment
PODCAST CONTENT
It’s been a while since I promoted the podcast I’m on! A People’s History of Violence is an antidote to fecklessly apolitical true crime, where my friend Isaac and I delve into the intersection between crime and politics with an emphasis on following evidence and considering the historical contexts involved. I’m quite proud of this one we did on the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, a Japanese socialist leader and very capable leader who was cut down by a fascist twerp… said fascist twerp and his cult-guru leader then becoming an icon for similar figures on the contemporary far right, like Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes. Have a listen!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/75116286
VIDEO CONTENT
Some of you have indicated a preference for video, over text, versions of my Birthday Lectures, so here’s my latest one as video. Like I’ve said, I get that this is long, and still incomplete, given the broadness of the topic- the intellectual history of Generation X. That said, I do think I ask some decent questions and point to some possibly useful avenues.
ELECTION
Normally, only people who pay for Citizenship get to vote on my reading! But, today, I open it to all readers! This election is for my next set of important literary fiction reads. I will read them in order of votes received! Any ties will be broken by Roomie Ed, and voting will end 24 hours after this newsletter goes out (about 11:30 AM EST on Saturday the 3rd).
THE CANDIDATES
James Farrell, Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1935) - Not quite “socialist realism” but close! Lefty thirties scribbler Farrell “tells it like it is” supposedly about working class Irish life in Chicago.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920) - Just how innocent is the age? Let’s find out from one of the major lights of early twentieth century American literature!
Emile Zola, A Love Story (1878) - They didn’t make a movie of this one so I went with this unrelated poster, lay off! This is the next in Zola’s vast Rougon-Macquart series, tracing life on Second Empire France.
If you like voting, consider becoming a Citizen! Five dollars a month or fifty a year helps keep your friendly neighborhood critic afloat!
REVIEWS
Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Namesake” (2003) (read aloud by Sarita Choudhury) - I cheated a little; usually, for my contemporary literary fiction audiobooks, I only go back as far as 20008-2010 or so. I let this one in on the idea that Jhumpa Lahiri and her stories of upper-middle-class immigrant angst do play an important role in our contemporary literary landscape.
This is the story of the Gangulis, a Bengali Indian-American family. Ashoke and Ashima leave Calcutta for Cambridge when Ashoke goes to MIT for grad school in the late sixties, then moves to the Massachusetts burbs when he gets a job as an engineering professor. They have a son. They tried to follow a Bengali naming tradition where an elder relative names the child, but due to slow mail speed between the US and India and some health crises, they do not get a name from the intended grandma. Pressed by the bureaucratic imperatives of American life, they have to improvise a name, and the little shaver winds up with the handle Gogol Ganguli. The Russian satirist is Ashoke’s favorite writer and he was reading him during a traumatic moment in his life, so.
A fair amount of young Gogol’s first-generation-cum-Gen X angst gets channeled towards annoyance with his weird name. He’s a brown kid in a white town. He’s far from poor and has a stable and loving family, but has to deal with a certain amount of racism and also back and forth between his parents insistence on preserving at least a little of his Bengali cultural heritage and fully embracing Americanism, and the fact that even if he commits to either option, he doesn’t quite fit in with either culture. He does ok, though, becomes an architect and all, and finds something resembling balance towards the end, but has to go through some difficulties to get there.
I will say… as someone who grew up in Massachusetts in the late twentieth century, and had South Asian classmates whose first names did strike us white kids as odd and amusing, we wouldn’t get or care that “Gogol” was any different from any other “weird-sounding” name. I guess the Gogol thing maybe more gets something else across. If the MIT career path didn’t let you know, these are smart, cultured people. America is impressive to them for its material wealth (though they’re a little miffed by how uncommon domestic help is, compared to West Bengal where they never had to sweep their own floors!), not for its cultural accomplishment. It’s not just sentimental attachments that lead the Ganguli parents to cling to Bengali ways- American ways seem cheap, rootless, no weight of past or custom behind them. It’s not just supposedly timeliness customs, either- it’s also things like the expectation that educated people will develop degrees of culture that even rich, educated Americans mostly don’t bother with. I’ve run into this with similarly-situated immigrants or first-generation Americans in my life, not just from South Asia but from all over.
So, there’s stuff to say and to think about, here. “The Namesake” says some of it, in inoffensive prose. The book isn’t great but it’s not terrible. It’s a little boring, but, I try to project myself to what a thirty year old in 2003, when it was written, might think. Depending on where this literate Gen Xer lived and what they did, they might, or might not, already be used to families like the Gangulis, to the existence of third-culture kids, to the idea that immigrating to the US isn’t always a picnic even if it isn’t always a nightmare compelled by desperation, either. But any educated American twenty years later is already profoundly accustomed to these elements of twenty-first century life, through knowing neighbors, classmates, coworkers, through numerous Netflix shows and comedy specials, just the general back and forth of life… or else, they don’t want to be used to it, likely out of bigotry (that’s not to say a Hari Kondabalu fan can’t also be bigoted, but you get what I mean). That’s not to say that the lives of professionally comfortable but existentially somewhat fraught immigrants and their kids isn’t worth examining. And there’s surely worse examinations- among other things, you can now find numerous YA-type novels to instruct you on the realities of people not dissimilar to the Gangulis, the appropriate subject positions that their mostly-white readerships can take towards people like their characters and authors, on and on. It’s just not a revelation, now, to me anyway.
I will say that reading this did seem to give me a better idea of what is going on in contemporary literary fiction. To the best of my knowledge, Lahiri isn’t a big target of critical-social-media bile. But reading this helped me get the idea that, in the background of what a lot of contemporary literary people are trying to rebel against, stands the sort of big, bourgeois novel of diversity, ala Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and whoever else that became such a big thing in the 2000s. I’ve had some peeks at Gen Z literary culture — if a middle-aged nerd like me knows much about it, it can’t be that cutting edge, but I see a little — and as far as I can tell, their big models are the closest you’d have to an alternative from this same period (or maybe a little later- five years is a long time, for non-historians). They seem to idolize “alt-lit,” spare, divorced (supposedly) from politics (especially cursed “identity politics”) and moralizing, notionally avant garde but also, you know, easy to read, and easier to posture around. Bret Easton Ellis’s idea of literature, as opposed to Lahiri’s. They see a few things — long novels, moralizing, progressive politics, sentimentality, cuteness — as tics of the millennial literati they despise (despite the fact that alt-lit was a millennial thing, too, really- historical facticity isn’t their strong suit… anybody's strong suit, seemingly).
Presumably, people on both sides of this half-unconscious generational literary squabble would be confused, if they bothered to listen to a clout-less middle aged man like me, when I denounce glazed-over “alt” “lit” types such as Ellis and Tao Lin in the same breath as moralizing bourgeois chonk-writers like Franzen or whatever is left of the new-sincerity McSweeney's types, because an opposition between these camps seems to structure their idea of what literature is… Lahiri’s work doesn’t quite fit, but, it’s earnest, literally about multicultural life as practiced, and over three hundred pages long, so, would presumably be in that millennial camp. Man! Imagine if you thought those were the options! Then consider that that’s how some of the people who are supposed to be the voices of an upcoming generation see the matter! ***
Dan Carter, “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics” (1995) - Split the difference: I still think Lynyrd Skynyrd is a good band, but I change the channel for “Sweet Home Alabama.” For one, it’s massively overplayed, for another, Watergate wouldn’t bother my conscience, not because I voted for their fucking fascist governor but because I’m the son of McGovern voters, McGovern activists, thank you very much.
There’s a story of how George Wallace was a racial liberal before losing an election to someone who just screamed the notable anti-black slur (I’m fine not using it, but I hate using the “letter-word” formation like a child), and then vowed to never be out-slurred again. This is about half-true. He did lose his first election for Governor to a candidate with Klan support. And, more importantly, Wallace’s central drive always was power for its own sake, and, if historian Dan Carter is correct, power for the sake of gaining more power, always moving, always forging ahead, seldom even seeming to enjoy it.
Wallace was born into circumstances that were lower-middle-class by early 20th century Alabama standards and poor by most American ones, in the Alabama black belt. “Child makes the man” is always a risk in these big biographies, but Carter clearly did the legwork and everyone agrees: little George was a dynamo of energy and ambition, and did not have a lot of shame or honesty hedging him in, more or less from the beginning. Another way the old story is half-right: Wallace’s first real political mentor was “Big Jim” Folsom. Folsom was a back-slapping, mildly corrupt progressive in a certain Southern mold: he wasn’t going to seriously shake up the racial order, but he was going to try to materially improve things for the citizenry as a whole, including the black citizenry, and he condemned the more violent aspects of racism as a way of keeping Alabama poor and subject to the whim of landowners and big business interests. He made wry jokes about how there was plenty of integrating going on in Alabama, after dark. He was quite popular.
There’s a lot of back and forth about populism these days. It doesn’t help that some academic and political elites have chosen to make it the go-to term for everything they don’t like, from Corbyn to the alt-right, and it further doesn’t help that their critics have since insisted that whatever they think ur-populism is is never wrong and the elite critics only lump in “the bad kind” to discredit a threat to their regime. More heat than light! Let’s put it this way: Folsom can be seen to represent both the strengths and the limitations of a populist approach, defined broadly and generously as “advocating for the material interests and attempting to uphold and represent the cultural values of the common people in a given constituency.” Folsom did do some good things for the people of Alabama, building roads, schools, hospitals, etc. He also was crushed after the Brown v Board of Education decision came down, and “massive resistance” to school desegregation became the order of the day throughout the South. The last straw was a picture of him having a drink with black congressman Adam Clayton Powell. He was out, and that whole generation of Southern populists, an under-appreciated support for the whole New Deal order (the literature shows a lot of how Southern racist bourbons supported the New Deal, and they did, with conditions, but so too did Southern populists), was out too.
Whether or not he actually breathed the promise not to get “out-(slur)’ed” into the open air, Wallace from then on made his career in opposition to the black freedom struggle, and anything he could memetically link to it. We don’t need to rehearse how things went in Alabama, except to note that whatever has gone down into conventional history, things were likely worse. Birmingham was, for a while, the bombing capital of the world- an industrial town, there were many men there who knew how to handle explosives. Carter uncovers very, very short links between murderous klansmen and Wallace, including at least one meeting Wallace directly took with the National State’s Rights Party, an openly fascist goon squad that sought to prevent even notionally-integrated Alabama schools from opening up by having adult thugs attack the schools directly.
With all this massive resistance stuff, I always wonder… what did they think they were going to accomplish? Integrated schooling is now the law of the land in Alabama just as it is Minnesota, and so is one-man, one-vote without poll taxes and so on. Except… well, you have to figure what at least some of this did was provide delay and cover. On the other side of the coin, Malcolm X used to say people would talk to King because they didn’t want to talk to them. There was a dynamic where figures like Nixon, and eventually Reagan, seemed like more palatable versions of Wallace, better attuned to national audiences, knowing when to say the quiet part quiet… and in war, you can never underestimate the element of time. The period of chaos that came with massive resistance and all that came with it in the South gave southern white supremacists time to adjust, to figure out workarounds to maintain their power, so there was still a deeply unequal society with whites on top in the end. Would it have worked that way if the southern “moderates,” the deal-makers, had been in charge from the beginning, without the terror? I’m not sure it would.
There were points where it was easy to write Wallace off as an atavism, a figure of the old south risen to scare the country again (1995 would be one of those times, so credit to Carter he doesn’t take that tack). It’s a lot harder, post-Trump, but that was well down the line. The sense that the future was 180 degrees away from everything Wallace represented was a major factor in his ability to succeed, when he left Alabama to run in Democratic primaries for president, and then as an independent candidate in 1968. Wallace found that his message resonated in the north, especially when he broadened it to include attacks on bussing for integration, welfare programs, student protestors, anyone opposed to the Vietnam war. King discovered something similar, in the negative, when he went to Chicago and encountered hate as fervent or more as he did in Selma. This not only shows that Wallace’s politics, the politics of white resentment, had a future, but that its past wasn't so remote as all that, either. Wallace was always a thoroughly modern figure.
Who knows how far Wallace could have gotten — probably not the presidency, but he could perhaps have thrown an election into the House of Representatives and make some kind of grubby 1876-style deal — if not for two things. The first was nominating Curtis LeMay, founder of the Strategic Air Command, as his VP candidate. LeMay talked about using nukes, which scared people, he talked about abortion being ok as population control (he was a population control/ecofascist psycho on top of it all), which offended people, and he was just generally weird and off-putting. This restricted Wallace’s ability to throw the 1968 election. The other was a would-be assassin, the guy Robert DeNiro’s character in “Taxi Driver” was based on, shot and paralyzed him during the 1972 campaign. That dude was an avant-la-lettre incel and had all the ideology of a magic 8-ball, but hey…
Wallace tried to clean up his act and repent some, towards the nineties, apparently. A hustle, or sincere? Who knows, and really, who cares? Carter doesn’t fall in love with his subject like a lot of biographers do. Wallace was an asshole who made his wife run for governor so he could be her puppet master (all she wanted to do was fish) and then abandon her for the presidential trail when she had the cancer that would kill her. He had admirable qualities, but not the redeemable kind- his humor and indefatigable work ethic mostly went towards advancing his own power and aggravating white supremacist violence. All around, a grim story, one that only gets grimmer reading it post-1995. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: No Win Condition Blue Chip & Character Malignment
Up front I want to say that this Ed’s Corner takes a few turns to get where it’s going, and I want to explain how that came about before getting to the topics at hand. A little bit ago Peter was idly quizzing me about the particulars of the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system, and I replied that I didn’t have much to say about it other than I didn’t much care for it, to which he replied maybe I could write about that. I hastily agreed because it seemed to be the sort of article I could bang out in a few hours after work on Thursday night. Even though there really isn’t too much in the way of engaging thought that goes into my basic argument, I thought it’d be fine as a light little diversion. As luck would have it though, as I was sitting down to get the article out, some recent news came forth that sort of put all of my previous musing regarding gaming into an interesting new context, and as luck would have it, proved me right about something I had mentioned in an earlier edition of Ed’s Corner. It’s going to be a real coup for the Ed Heads out there this week.
So let’s cast our mind back to Ed’s Corner Number 4 (new readers, I promise there’s generally not a lot of continuity to this feature, just this week there happens to be news relevant to both that article and this one by a quirk of fate), where I spoke about the increasing integration between the two major brands of Wizards of the Coast: that of the trading card game Magic: the Gathering, and the tabletop roleplaying game system Dungeons & Dragons. In the last year or so there’s been an increasing amount of overlap between the two creative properties in their respective product lines. Magic had one core set of cards set in The Forgotten Realms, the featured campaign setting for the current Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This, despite the fact that including these Realms was a hard departure from the established canon regarding the various planes of the multiverse established within Magic lore. Wizards also released a few side products, aimed at the alternate Magic format known as “Commander,” set within Dungeons & Dragons locales. At the same time, by my count there have been at least three Magic themed source books for the Dungeons & Dragons line, despite assurances that the first such book was just a one off experiment.
The products themselves are all right. I have no real complaints as far as the contents of either. Both play fine at the table, but they aren’t really breaking new ground. On both sides of the product line these crossover products feel more like misspent development space that could've been used to bolster other products that the fans of both lines were actually excited about. Now, in game development, it’s totally fine to have products that are merely fun enough. Any number of things can go wrong with a rules set, and sometime things don’t click into place. I’m not saying these products by themselves are a grave misstep that has doomed the line, or even that they’re bad, but I will say that they are bad within the current contexts of both lines.
Wizards of the Coast has set a blistering release schedule for products in both lines, and as such, fans of either franchise are spoiled for options as far as products they could pick up. If one product is kinda “meh,” any consumer can just wait a few months and see if the next thing on the release schedule is more suited to their tastes. Furthermore these crossover products come in the midst of a larger wave of crossovers with other properties. Dungeons & Dragons has a Stranger Things edition that is heavily influenced by the popular Netflix series, some kind of Rick & Morty branded edition, as well as mainline product releases that crossover with media properties like 2000s-era web comic darling Penny Arcade and popular people-playing-D&D podcast Critical Role. Magic, for their part, had a Walking Dead-themed Commander product release, as well as a recent WarHammer 40k-themed limited release, and future releases of Doctor Who- and Transformers-themed products scheduled for 2023. There’s a lot of brand synergy in the works, perhaps too damn much of it, and that’s not just me saying that; folks with actual economic degrees think so, too.
Just this week, Bank of America has reassessed the stock valuation of Hasbro, the board games giant that owns Wizards of the Coast, from a “buy” to an “underperform,” specifically because of these issues of overreliance on brand integration and accelerated release schedule, at least in the case of Magic: the Gathering, which makes the majority of the profits for the company. According to the Bank of America report Hasbro is “killing the golden goose,” by “overproducing Magic cards,” which “has propped up Hasbro’s recent results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand.” By cluttering the release schedule with airy brand synergy tie-ins the main fanbase doesn’t really want, there’s just too much chaff for their central market base to cling on to the main line. These products do engage otherwise untapped market demographics, but the people they get interested in any one particular product don’t tend to remain engaged with either line after the tie-in passes by, while their core customers slowly become more and more disengaged.
There are further problems, like the self-cannibalizing nostalgia trips such as the recently released Magic: 30th Anniversary Edition which everyone in the Magic community was outraged about, as it was, at first, exorbitantly overpriced at $999 per pack of fifteen cards. At the same time, Wizards gutted the secondary market by making a new printing of some of the rarest, and thus highest value, cards from Magic’s history. The Magic community raised such a fuss about it that none of the usual Magic Community social media personalities would agree to do prepromotion of the product on their channels as is common during Magic product roll outs. Ah, but Wizards of the Coast were saved again by going back to the can’t fail strategy of brand integration and synergy by finding a Pokemon Card Game YouTuber unfamiliar with the community controversy to preview the set for them, which I’m sure will reap them much goodwill in the near future.
I can’t really comment on the product availability of Magic: the Gathering, but this cycle of overproduction is not unusual within the history of Dungeons & Dragons as a product. Gary Gygax’s old company TSR folded under the weight of “splatbooks” of dubious quality that didn’t add much to the game experience of those who used the rules printed in them, and 3rd Edition under Wizards of the Coast had its own set of spurious tie-ins such as the graciously forgotten Diablo II series of supplements. With creative works like these there’s this interesting tension between the infinite possibilities presented by the realms of imagination they open up in the player, and a sort of mania to produce more content within this infinite space, which I think Hasbro and thus Wizards of the Coast is suffering from at the moment.
One can see this tension in the conflict between the vast realm of fantastical possibility, and the contrary impulse to inscribe it within some manner of order and taxonomy. From the very beginning of Dungeons & Dragons we have a prime example of this in the character alignment chart. For those unfamiliar, it’s a series of nine boxes that describes a character’s alignment, or moral outlook in terms of two axes, Good and Evil, and Lawful and Chaotic, with a realm of Neutral in the middle of both spectrums. If you’re having trouble picturing it, just draw a tic-tac-toe grid over one of those political alignment charts you see online from time to time, and it’s basically the same thing.
What exactly is meant by Good and Evil in terms of alignment is kind of just whatever the person either writing about it in the supplement or running it at the table says it is. There’s some general description of what the Good and Evil alignments are in the players manual or game rules, but generally they are meant to be derived from other sources such as the alignments assigned to various creatures in the Monster Manuals (one of the core books in any edition of D and D, Monster Manuals list game statistics for a wide variety of creatures, from mundane animals to dragons to humans). For example, Orcs, Drow, and Kobolds are always evil, and characters don’t suffer any alignment penalties for killing them. But there are even more interesting inferences to be drawn from these bestiary entries, such as the fact that in the “Number Appearing” section of any given entry, for dwarves, say, or gnolls, are statistics for the number of tribe members who are noncombatants or juveniles. The Manual is suspiciously silent as to whether it’s a penalty to your alignment score to kill these noncombatants- does killing juveniles from an “evil”-aligned race turn “Good” characters “Evil”? There’s no confusion about other races. The game rules will forcibly adjust your alignment — turning characters Evil — for killing members of human warbands, willing adult combatants, who surrender or are otherwise helpless.
Law and Chaos are a bit harder to pin down, but generally the line is drawn as there being a tension between civilizing forces and the encroaching entropy of the natural world. Lawful forces build up great civilizations, and Chaotic forces tear them down and render them into the dungeons and ruins that future generations of adventurers will set about exploring. You might think this translates into there being a bit of a environmentalist message to the concepts of Law and Chaos, the extractions of civilization must be kept in balance with the replenishing power of nature, but it doesn’t really work like that in practice. In Dungeons & Dragon’s cosmology, the forces of nature are supposed to replenish the resources used in the building of civilizations, but the exact method of it all doesn’t really fit in line with any environmentalist program I could think of.
While Dungeons and Dragons does draw on the sort of primal chaotic calls to the natural world one sees in the work of fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, there’s also a (stronger) connection to the works of Moorcock’s contemporary Jack Vance, specifically with regards to Dungeons & Dragons spellcasting system. The paradigm that Vance set up in his writings is that the forces of magic are a resource that can get used up, to be gradually replenished by the natural forces within the Earth, or over time through various mental efforts.
There’s this fascinating undercurrent of population migration in the Greyhawk campaign setting, the original setting that Gary Gygax set most of his adventures in and which draws heavily from Vance’s work. Essentially the paradigm was to find an area that is rich in magic, develop, (or some might say over-develop) rapidly, create wondrous magical artifacts and grand works of architecture by strip mining all the valuable resources in the area, and then move on to some other place where the resources had been replenished by the natural, Chaotic, forces of the world. Lawful creatures would find and exploit resources, and then when those resources had been used up the forces of Law would move on down the road, force the Chaotic races off of the newly-resourced land and into the barren wastes they’d just created and littered with the ruins of their previous civilizations. This pattern is repeated in the mechanics of play, where the players are encouraged to essentially strip mine any given dungeon for resources and spend any resources they had to hand the instant they got them. Saving your gold was expressly discouraged by the systems of the game which had a lot of ways to bleed the characters for gold if they didn’t spend it once they had it.
This vague agglomeration of moral values works its way into the broader cosmology of the system at large, such as in “The Great Wheel” conceptions of the various planes of existence within the Dungeons & Dragons setting. Various planes are assigned the values of either Good, Neutral, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic, etc, such that all the Evil stuff is in one part of the multiverse, and all the Good stuff is at some other point, and all the Chaotic and Lawful stuff are similarly striated. While extending these concepts to locations rather than individual people, (or more problematically, entire races), does help to clarify where the differences lay, it only really does so by working its way back from Evil. There’s not really much to do in the Good or purely Lawful planes, everything is already pretty much taken care of there, and some of the Good aligned planes even have large swathes of magically enforced pacifism, you couldn’t even cause drama if you wanted to. A lot of the different planes of existence outside of the baseline terrestrial experience for players have the problem of having not much for players to do. Either they’re realms of perfect law and order that don’t allow for disruptions to their amaranthine tranquility, or realms of utter chaos where there are so many moving parts it wouldn’t really create any lasting effect on the multiverse as a whole. Even the elemental planes are not particularly player friendly. Most of them would kill any players who entered them instantly, either drowning them in infinite depths of water, teleporting them into a solid wall of earth, burning them in an endless sea of flame, or leaving them falling forever in an infinite chasm of nothing but open air.
The one place where the cosmology really clicks is in the Evil planes, specifically the Infinite Abyss and the Nine Hells of Baator, the Chaotic Evil and Lawful Evil planes respectively. These two planes better exemplify the cosmological difference between Law and Chaos than most other attempts to explain it throughout the rest of the Dungeons & Dragons canon. The Abyss spawns the Chaotic Evil demons. They’re creatures of pure destruction. Anywhere creatures from this plane end up, they just wantonly destroy anything they happen to set their talons upon in a fit of mindless violence. The Nine Hells, on the other hand, contains the Lawful Evil devils. These creatures, while working to similarly evil ends as the Demons of the Abyss, go about it in a very different way, using expert planning, intelligence, and industry to achieve their evil ends. Both factions hate each other and fight each other in an eternal war that’s constantly spilling out into the rest of the cosmos, and the forces of Good and also Neutrality are constantly trying to keep that war in a state of constant stalemate so they don’t have to worry about either of the two forces bothering them in their respective planes. Pretty much every plotline in the outer planes traces back to somebody working some angle in the eternal blood war between demons and devils, and it just renders most extraplanar stuff outside the hellish end of the cosmology pointless.
This boring and redundant cosmology is necessitated by the game designers’ attempt to fit everything in the game into the alignment axis. It’s not clear why there was any need to adjudicate morality within the realm of the game space. The designers could’ve left the particulars of morality open to the players. Just have the players state what values they had if it was necessary for them to be a member of a particular religious order or something! By trying to get out ahead of players and make their personal values something that had to fit within certain mechanical values, the designers often created more problems than it was worth. A lawful Good Paladin might be called upon to uphold a strict set of religious observances and virtues, but why even bother with the designator Lawful Good at that point? Can’t you just make the thing that makes a paladin a paladin in Dungeons & Dragons be the code of religious vows, and assign game mechanics to these ritualistic observations? Why does the fact that the engine of compulsive destruction embodied by demons in the cosmology need the addition of the alignment type Chaotic Evil, when you could just mechanically represent the destructive compulsions? It’s an unnecessary added step between the player and the actual thing they want to engage with.
Ultimately the alignment system serves to be arbitrarily restrictive, while also not providing any means of curating the play experience. By taking up a Lawful Good alignment, your character could get stuck with a not terribly fun to simulate obligation to attend religious services or some other stricture that doesn’t enhance your experience with the mechanics. Alignment is just a systematic set of brackets to remind you that the system covers everything in the abstract. It’s kind of like the tie-ins for both systems: the imaginative worlds of Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are large enough to contain everything, including The Walking Dead and Rick and Morty, but there’s no real promise that those things it includes are actually fun to interact with within its systems. Everything is possible- including an unsatisfactory experience.
Damn! Even Mithra is thrown by the scale of this newsletter!
Excellent stuff!
Wow, I just watched the film version of The Namesake last night. Unusually, it was directed by a woman, Mira Nair. I have to say, Nair's direction propels the story into a completely different emotional realm, focused entirely on visually and audibly portraying the sense of distance and cultural transposition, and how joy and pain conveyed and communicated over long distances. Possibly the best film I've seen this year, and I just watched Kurosawa last week. I saw it was based on a book and was vaguely guessing that it was McSweeney's bourgeoise lit as you said.