Important Things To Be Said

There’s a couple of things I wanted to clear up just so we’re all on the same page here. I think it’s important to be open about how I’m going about this blog and writing in general. This is something I must say.

I said yesterday over twitter that I would be erasing a bunch of posts on this blog. As of right now I’ve deleted 180 of them. The vast overwhelming majority of these posts had nothing in them just so you know – they were old, bad metaposts, link spam, traffic bait, and other worthlessness that I had been intending to excise for the longest time. But! There were actual content posts I deleted. Here’s why: they were awful. The posts I deleted either contained casual misogyny, were full of worthless profanity or bigoted language or were cheap call-outs of some kind that served no use. And I only deleted the ones that were up and down impossible to turn around. Now I’m going to go back and edit other articles to remove similar cruft out of them. This is not something I’m doing on a whim now, it’s something I would eventually do. This is necessary.

Now, I’ve heard some incredible internet geniuses telling me that I am “embellishing the past” by doing this. That my bad articles weren’t bad they were awesome and I’m being a PC coward or, wow, a “fag.” I know from what place these comments arise, and I think they are completely off base. What is being done here is trying to make this blog much more pleasing to a wider variety of people. I have learned a lot about myself and others in the past two years. The things that I wrote don’t reflect my views anymore. They were stupid, hurtful and wrong, when they did not have to be.

A lot of gamers like to operate under some kind of culture, and within that cloak they are unassailable. They can and do say that misogyny, and profanity and perhaps even racism have just been A Thing in RPGs since the First Rulebooks were penned by the Ancients. So they can say those things too, and they can depict them! It’s all part of the culture, and being true to it and operating under its conceits, why should they censor themselves? I don’t want to do that.

I don’t like that culture. I want to create my own gaming culture on this blog, for me and whoever reads. By no means is it perfect nor will it ever be, but I try. When I started writing Adel, at first I thought about changing D&D religion and doing something different. That’s how it began. That experiment has led me to think about how this culture can be different in other ways. It is a fantasy culture, it doesn’t need to follow medieval traditions. It doesn’t need to follow current human traditions. It can have its own. And I use this space to try to show that you can make a setting where everyone can adventure together, and they are all just as important and they all contribute. You don’t have to sacrifice excitement, adventures, danger, culture and drama to be egalitarian. That is part of why World of Adel is the way it is now. Yeah it has fishpeople and humans with fox ears, because it’s my game setting inspired by a mishmash of things I find fun. But it can also serve a good purpose, I feel.

There are parallel questions I get to this effect, such as “you seem to write things/have a lot of ideas where the protagonist isn’t a DUDEMAN, but you’re a DUDEMAN, why don’t you write more DUDEMEN?” I’m trying to do something different, because I want to see different characters and different situations, I want to explore things that for much of my life, I have been childishly fearful of, or dangerously ignorant about, or even willfully denying. I can’t write certain characters as well as people who are those characters in real life. But I want to try, because they’re characters I find really interesting.

I don’t intend to blog about problems in gaming culture at length. Nor am I going to go point out people or blogs or whatever that don’t agree with the way I’m doing things here. That is just not my arena and I couldn’t do it very well. There are a lot of people who are doing that already, people I’ve met and respect, and they are doing an admirable job educating people and just being generally great gamers and friends. Now what I will do, and what I will absolutely not tolerate criticism of, is look at my own flaws, and if I don’t like what I’m doing, I have a right to decide how to change it. And changing it does not destroy its artistic value or its “edge” or whatever, it improves it. Everything I’ve done? Improvement. I have had upheavals in my mental and emotional self, and I believe I’ve come out of them for the better. I’m a bisexual puertorican man. For a long time, I kept trying to deny myself to “fit in” but I don’t have to “fit in” with friends or with my idea of what gaming culture was and even with society at large, not if fitting in means to perpetuate all these awful things, and to obscure who I am.