Angel on my shoulder: we're extremely fortunate. You shot him in the side of the head and you're wearing gloves. Place the gun in his hand and set the house ablaze. Officer Goger's tragic suicide will be the perfect cover story
Devil on my shoulder: Goger was always eating stuffing and spelt wheat and steel cut oats. Bet he'd taste reeeeal good on a spit with an apple in his mouth. Come on, i've seen the way you've looked at him..
My tulpa, a 6'9" DD smokeshow hottie PS1 graphics anthro leopard girl in a lab coat: you must put a baby in me Your Highness, quickly!
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Reading is in the trenches because why did my 9 yr old nephew look at the word "jealous" and said "jewish"? And when asked why he mistaken it as such he said they both started with a "J". It's like his brain is doing autofill. No matter how many time I try to tell him slow down and sound out the words he just won't.
--
TRAP CARD ACTIVATED
No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.
This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".
This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.
Intervene now, anon, or he's never going to read well.
I remember one of my grade school teachers discussing with my mother the differences between me and my sister at learning to read, and he described me as a "sight reader from the start"... which is to say, an acknowledgement that most people do not do that and it's not reasonable to expect that of the majority of kids, who really do need the phonics and the "sound things out."
Generally speaking if a kid has arrived at school not knowing how to read already, they're not going to do well with sight reading and need phonics. The few kids who develop The Reading in the way the whole language people think they should do it before they hit school.
So true. I know a retired teacher who bawwws and tries to contradict me when I rant about whole language at our knitting meetup. She's all "different kids need different approaches!" and "I saw it work!"...
But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.
As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.
I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.
It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.
It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.
But I could not learn to read.
I was a couple years younger than this nephew, but not that much younger. It's not too late. Now is the perfect time for some tutoring. If you can afford it, get a pro. If you can't, do your best. But you've got to do something.
The four cueing systems if whole language reading education are a band-aid method used by severely dyslexic people. When people's dyslexia is so bad that they simply cannot learn to read effectively, tricks like cueing allow them to function well enough in society to get by. They do NOT teach proper literacy.
This system was popularised by a guy who is obviously dyslexic, refuses to acknowledge that when asked, and essentially decided that everyone else must be like him and therefore the system that helped him get by was a substitute for real literacy since it was so much faster and more achievable for him to learn to "read" this way than phonically. It's kind of like if somebody without hands was learning to sew, found it incredibly frustrating to do without hands, so they started putting their creations together entirely with fabric glue which they found easier to apply... and told everyone how much easier it was so all the schools got rid of needles and thread and sewing machines and everyone was taught to "sew" using fabric glue only and then wondered why their clothing kept falling apart on their bodies.
A restaurant named You're Not Supposed To Be Here, where the whole point is that the vibes are unnerving. The lighting is weird, the whole place has a faint scent that's not a bad smell, but it's certainly not food smell and you can't quite identify what the hell it is. The music is weirdly janky and you can't quite tell what's wrong with it, the vocals aren't exactly garbled but sung in a language you swear you've never heard anywhere and couldn't name if you tried. Only hiring staff who have anxiety and they're 100% permitted to show how much your presence here stresses them out.
There's a restaurant here in town that's set up in a refurbished office building, but, like, they didn't revise the existing floor plan when they moved in, so when you go there to eat you have to ride an elevator up to an aggressively beige reception area that looks and smells like the Ghost of Dot-Coms Past, where after a while a waiter will come wandering down one of the grey-carpeted hallways and lead you to an unmarked office door, and inside that door is a fully furnished dining room. I've been there twice and I still have no idea where the kitchen is located. The food's actually not bad, but "unnerving" is one way to describe the dining experience!
I apologise if you've already answered this, but I tried searching your blog and I'm unsure if you haven't or if it's another example of Tumblr's amazing search system.
I was talking with a friend recently about how much of a culture clash the Monk Class is compared to the rest of Dungeons & Dragons and was wondering if there is a coherent reason for their original inclusion. I'm aware that they're largely influenced by Shaolin monks as depicted in Hong Kong cinema in the 70's/80's as compared to the Sword and Sorcery stuff most of the rest of D&D takes influence from.
Basically, my question ultimately boils down to, "Is the Monk Class there purely because of an original player wanting to rule of cool their way into playing something wildly out of genre, or is there a stronger link between Sword and Sorcery and Hong Kong cinema that could have organically resulted in the Monk Class joining the rest of the classes?"
A lot of the link between the two was simply a matter of time and place. The kung fu craze hit North America at just about exactly the same time as the sword and sorcery revival that gave us films like Clash of the Titans and Beastmaster and The Sword and the Sorcerer and Dragonslayer and Krull โ not to mention the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan adaptation, which revived popular interest in first-wave sword and sorcery literature โ so there was a lot of it going around. Analysis of early Dungeons & Dragons as a product of its media influences often overlooks that it was largely drawing on what was trendy in American popular media in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Even the tonally incongruous Lord of the Rings references weren't a deep cut; while the books were originally published in the 1950s, they'd experienced a strong resurgence in the 1970s, putting them firmly in the popular consciousness at the time that D&D was being developed. All this being the case, it's not surprising that early D&D was also substantially influenced by Hong Kong action cinema.
That said, the reason the monk character class in particular (i.e., as opposed to kung fu media influences more generally) is there is allegedly because one specific guy in one of the game's early playtest groups really, really wanted to play as Remo Williams from Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's The Destroyer; several of the class's signature abilities are direct references to powers Williams exhibits in the course of the novels. Remarks from folks who worked at TSR at the time have pointed the finger at Brian Blume as the Remo Williams fan in question, though accounts are conflicted whether Blume was actually an uncredited contributor to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor (1975), in which the class makes its first proper appearance, or whether Blume's interest merely prompted its inclusion.
This is the case for the character archetypes in a lot tabletop RPGs of that era; instead of trying to work out what classes "ought" be be present, authors would simply start with the types of characters their playtesters actually wanted to play, often based on specific popular media characters, then work backwards to derive an IC rationale for why those were the setting's standard adventuring professions. Other examples from D&D in particular most obviously include the Ranger (based on Tolkien's Aragon, naturally), but also the Paladin (principally inspired by Holger Carlsen from Poul Anderson's 1961 isekai novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, also the source of D&D's goofy regenerating trolls), the Assassin, back when it was still a separate character class (probably mainly based on the Assassin Caste from John Norman's Gor), and even the Wizard to a large extent (less Gandalf than you'd think: a large portion of D&D's iconic wizard spell list is lifted directly from the 1963 Vincent Price film The Raven).
(I often think that modern indie RPGs could benefit from reviving this approach. Like, fuck textual consistency โ just pick half a dozen of your favourite popular media characters without regard for the compatibility of the source material and work backwards to explain why these six random assholes are your game's playable archetypes!)
While Stoker definitely had some funny hangups related to the construction of masculine identities, Quincey Morris isn't purely a reflection of the fact that he had a thing for cowboys โ the American cowboy popping up as a stock Exotic Foreigner type character was genuinely a recurring trope in Victorian popular fiction.
IIRC it was partly due to Ned Buntline's 'biographies' of famous cowboys and gunslingers getting popular, and so people would just genuinely invite them to come to London and talk about their experiences.
So part of the excuse for stock cowboys is that people kept importing real cowboys.
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I apologise if you've already answered this, but I tried searching your blog and I'm unsure if you haven't or if it's another example of Tumblr's amazing search system.
I was talking with a friend recently about how much of a culture clash the Monk Class is compared to the rest of Dungeons & Dragons and was wondering if there is a coherent reason for their original inclusion. I'm aware that they're largely influenced by Shaolin monks as depicted in Hong Kong cinema in the 70's/80's as compared to the Sword and Sorcery stuff most of the rest of D&D takes influence from.
Basically, my question ultimately boils down to, "Is the Monk Class there purely because of an original player wanting to rule of cool their way into playing something wildly out of genre, or is there a stronger link between Sword and Sorcery and Hong Kong cinema that could have organically resulted in the Monk Class joining the rest of the classes?"
A lot of the link between the two was simply a matter of time and place. The kung fu craze hit North America at just about exactly the same time as the sword and sorcery revival that gave us films like Clash of the Titans and Beastmaster and The Sword and the Sorcerer and Dragonslayer and Krull โ not to mention the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan adaptation, which revived popular interest in first-wave sword and sorcery literature โ so there was a lot of it going around. Analysis of early Dungeons & Dragons as a product of its media influences often overlooks that it was largely drawing on what was trendy in American popular media in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Even the tonally incongruous Lord of the Rings references weren't a deep cut; while the books were originally published in the 1950s, they'd experienced a strong resurgence in the 1970s, putting them firmly in the popular consciousness at the time that D&D was being developed. All this being the case, it's not surprising that early D&D was also substantially influenced by Hong Kong action cinema.
That said, the reason the monk character class in particular (i.e., as opposed to kung fu media influences more generally) is there is allegedly because one specific guy in one of the game's early playtest groups really, really wanted to play as Remo Williams from Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's The Destroyer; several of the class's signature abilities are direct references to powers Williams exhibits in the course of the novels. Remarks from folks who worked at TSR at the time have pointed the finger at Brian Blume as the Remo Williams fan in question, though accounts are conflicted whether Blume was actually an uncredited contributor to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor (1975), in which the class makes its first proper appearance, or whether Blume's interest merely prompted its inclusion.
This is the case for the character archetypes in a lot tabletop RPGs of that era; instead of trying to work out what classes "ought" be be present, authors would simply start with the types of characters their playtesters actually wanted to play, often based on specific popular media characters, then work backwards to derive an IC rationale for why those were the setting's standard adventuring professions. Other examples from D&D in particular most obviously include the Ranger (based on Tolkien's Aragon, naturally), but also the Paladin (principally inspired by Holger Carlsen from Poul Anderson's 1961 isekai novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, also the source of D&D's goofy regenerating trolls), the Assassin, back when it was still a separate character class (probably mainly based on the Assassin Caste from John Norman's Gor), and even the Wizard to a large extent (less Gandalf than you'd think: a large portion of D&D's iconic wizard spell list is lifted directly from the 1963 Vincent Price film The Raven).
(I often think that modern indie RPGs could benefit from reviving this approach. Like, fuck textual consistency โ just pick half a dozen of your favourite popular media characters without regard for the compatibility of the source material and work backwards to explain why these six random assholes are your game's playable archetypes!)
Oh, that's very interesting, thanks for answering!
We definitely discussed the hypothetical conversation that must have happened at Dave Arneson's table when a player suggested playing a Shaolin Monk in an otherwise mostly Euro-centric mediaeval fantasy setting and came to the conclusion it was a, "...fine." response. So from the sounds of things, while it was likely a player's interests that prompted it, it possibly would have ended up in the game naturally anyway due to the cultural interests of America in general at the time.
I'll have to check out The Destroyer, that's not one I was personally aware of.
Oh, it definitely would have come along a bit later โ witness AD&D 2nd Edition, which excluded the monk from the Player's Handbook, ostensibly because it was culturally anachronistic, then turned around and produced an entire sourcebook dedicated to playing as ninjas. Of course, by that time, American popular culture had moved on from badly dubbed Shaw Brothers films and embraced ninja schlock, so the transition wasn't unexpected. The 5E iteration of the monk has basically absorbed the 2E ninja as a subclass, bringing us full circle.
(Amusingly, the 2E ninja handbook hangs a lampshade on the cultural anachronism by suggesting that the ninja classes and subclasses it presents could be re-skinned as operatives of MI6-style superspy organisations for "non-Oriental" campaigns. Never mind that having James Bond swanning around in the German Renaissance would have clanged even louder than shoehorning in a random ninja clan!)
I think one of the virtues of games as an art form is that with most mediums, those endless hobby projects you spend decades of your life tinkering with with no particular finished state in mind are obliged to be private affairs, but with games you can share your work and confuse the hell out of people any time you want.
(Admittedly, you can get a little bit of the same effect with any serialised art form, but serialised media is different because individual instalments can have a definite, identifiable finished state even if the work as a whole does not. In order to really drive people nuts you ideally need a project where it's impossible to tell whether any individual part of it is finished or not!)
I cross-posted this to Bluesky and somebody responded with an artsy black and white photo of a man pulling down a woman's underwear accompanied by a free verse monologue about a motorcycle accident and a YouTube link to the music video for "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran, which was not even slightly on topic, but did achieve the "confusing the hell out of people" part very well.
Spends months on end hyping up a forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons clone I'm working on which I claim will fix all of the system's problems, then when it comes out the only substantive difference from core-book 5th Edition is that "Prone" and "Supine" are two separate conditions.
"Prone" refers to the position of lying face down. "Supine" refers to lying face up. "Prone," being a position where it is difficult to move or see, had a connotation of physical vulnerability.
In the early twenty-first century, "prone" has come to (somewhat incorrectly) mean "on the ground and vulnerable" especially due to involuntary causes, such as physical force. In the table top role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, the word prone is used to refer to being knocked to the ground. "Prone" characters in the game are easier to hit with melee weapons (because they cannot easily dodge), but harder to hit with ranged weapons (because their profile is much smaller and closer to the ground). "Prone" characters need to spend time and effort getting back to their feet. Notably, the game does not distinguish between the physical prone and supine position, and simply uses the term for "knocked to the ground".
The above is a humorous and pedantic exploration of that lack of distinction.
Addendum: More broadly, the above alludes to a recurring phenomenon within the tabletop roleplaying hobby whereby a forthcoming game would be promoted as revolutionary in its design, only to prove upon publication to be very similar to some existing game, excepting only superficial changes, typically owing to the author's limited experience with the medium leading them to overestimate the significance of those changes. When based on some version of Dungeons & Dragons, such games were colloquially known within the hobby as "fantasy heartbreakers".
The proposed scenario of a game which is identical to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition apart from changing the definition of the "prone" condition would have been recognisable to readers sufficiently versed in early 21st Century tabletop roleplaying culture as a humorously exaggerated example of the fantasy heartbreaker phenomenon.
You can never tell how far your memes are going to spread, or to whom. I've bumped into at least one person who does not watch YA animation but had heard of Steven Universe by reputation who was under the seemingly genuine impression that one of Pearl's canonical personality traits is being bigoted against the Irish.
Implicit or implicit enumeration of uncountable things (example: taking inventory of the fucks which one gives)
Suggesting the divisibility of things which are not customarily thought of as able to be subdivided (example: "six whole people")
Using words that aren't numbers as numbers (example: "one William dollars")
Technically correct but contextually misleading estimates (example: looking at a group of several thousand things and observing that there are "at least three")
Incongruous qualifiers for apparently simple sums or tallies (example: she was twenty-seven years old, not counting 2014)
I love all of these, plus I would like to propose two additional, both things that I do on the regular:
6. Comparing a stated number to a somewhat larger number in a context where this adds no information. (example: "I found 50 dollars!" "Wow, that's almost 60 dollars!")
7. Improper use and conversion of units. "I'm turning 21 tomorrow!" "Wow, that's 69.8 in Fahrenheit!"
8. Saying โmaybe more!โ when someone very clearly states an exact number, ie, โI have $2.45 on me right now.โ โmaybe more!โ โno, justโฆ just $2.45โ
9. dismissing a legitimate fact because the method used to confirm it is also completely legitimate: โit looks like thereโs 75 copies of this book in here.โ โI mean sure, if you count them.โ
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Speaking from the perspective of someone who's worked in the tech industry for thirty years, the thing about personal data privacy policies for online services is that, nearly without exception, they contain provisos allowing your data to be shared with third parties to the extent that doing so is necessary to provide the service that's being offered โ and, critically, unless they're literally forced to do so by law, who these third parties are and what constitutes "necessary" sharing will not be defined. This vagueness is routinely exploited by entering into sham partnerships with interested parties who, on paper, are providing the data holder with unspecified consulting services, thereby allowing the data in question to be shared with practically anyone while adhering to the letter of any relevant privacy policy.
All of which is to say that 23andMe has absolutely been selling your genetic data this whole time. The only reason they're asking a judge for official permission to do so now is because being in bankruptcy means they actually need to explain what it is that they're doing.
oh noooo you can't fit her into the "tranny shemale futanari dickgirl" sexual archetype OR the "pure, Natural cis woman crafted by god" sexual archetype? you have to respect her as a person rather than as a sex object? fuuuuck that must be really hard for you I'm sorry
it's funny that both trans and cis women alike are reduced to our genitals, but with trans women it's especially extreme. transness is thought of as infinitely worse than cisness in every way, so why would you ever desire a trans woman if not to play with her one unique feature? and if she doesn't, or can't, put out, what's the point of her? what value does she even have? she's just a sex toy, you can just throw her out
RPG which initially appears to take place in a Dark Souls style shitdark setting, all crumbling ruins and brooding skies and asshole skeletons posing cryptic riddles, but then you get past the tutorial and it rapidly becomes apparent that literally only the player character's home region is like that.
To be clear, it's still a King Big Sad Guy, Who Did The Flame Thing scenario; it's just that the Flame Thing only affects the domain of the one who enacts it, and King Big Sad Guy was kind of a small-time warlord, so it only fucked up a region a couple dozen miles across.
(Following the reveal, this incongruity is played for laughs at first, but much later on, figuring out exactly how some random hill-fort-dwelling fuck managed to do the Flame Thing becomes critical to the plot.)
Imagine that a core mechanic revolves around fighting Sad Flame King every time you want to leave, and the amount of damage you manage to deal before he inevitably wipes you out is what determines how far you're allowed to go out of your home territory when you revive. (with some mechanic in place to warn you to spend your souls or whatever so when you inevitably lose them it's not a forced reset)
Naturally certain players will be able to do much more damage to him than others, but it could be a multi-phase fight requiring damage or status effects that the player doesn't have access to until they explore a bit, or even a weapon that the player can't safely use because of their status as a Pathetic Ghost.
But then as you leave Soulsborne Land and explore the surrounding incongruous heroic-fantasy regions, you fight THEIR big problems for them - possibly with some twists like, instead of having so-little-clear-worldbuilding-that-it-makes-you-curious, you fight a boss with a mechanic that treats its excessive Kingdom-Hearts-esque bullshit lore dumps as a hazard somehow - and you start building up a reputation as a Helpful Ghost Who Solves Problems.
Eventually they start trying to communicate with you directly, which leads to the reveal that everybody wants to Un-Flame Your Kingdom, but they physically cannot enter. Figuring out how to let them in safely is the way to access the endgame.
At which point you fight the Sad Flame King again, but your allies boost you past his cheat phase and into real gameplay again, at which point the final boss music changes from, figuratively speaking, Weight of the World from Nier Automata into the FF14 version of the same song.
And then in the ending you take up the Flame Mantle and channel the Power of Friendship through it, thereby bringing ruin to the world properly
What do you mean that Forgotten Realms is a romantic fantasy setting masquerading as high fantasy?
(With reference to this post there.)
Exactly what it says on the tin โ the Forgotten Realms is clearly principally inspired by romantic fantasy, not high fantasy.
In this context, when I say "romantic fantasy", I'm referring to a specific, relatively short-lived genre of fantasy literature that was wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s, but abruptly fell almost entirely off the map after about 1998, due to a variety of economic and cultural factors which are way too complicated to go into in a Tumblr post. This is distinct from the more contemporary usage of "romance novels with fantasy settings", though there's definitely a lot of overlap.
If you're looking for a romantic fantasy reading list, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series โ especially the early stuff โ is probably the easiest to get your hands on these days; it's practically the only example that still has any real name recognition in 2025, for all that Lackey was a latecomer to the genre. Other names worth checking out include Margaret Ball, Carole Nelson Douglas, Tanya Huff, Holly Lisle, Jennifer Roberson, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, off the top of my head, though not all of them worked exclusively within the genre.
(Elizabeth Moon is an interesting edge case, in that her stuff is principally military science fiction, but very much adheres to the forms of romantic fantasy. Her Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, one of her few pure fantasy works, is a fun snapshot of an era because it was written explicitly in response to what Moon perceived as the shortcomings of the fantasy worldbuilding on display in then-contemporary Dungeons & Dragons settings, and hit the shelves at just about exactly the same time as the earliest Forgotten Realms material.)
Well, the trick is that genres are creative conversations, not checklists of tropes, so the real answer to that question is "it's the type of fantasy that was being written by this specific group of popular fantasy authors, most of whom personally knew and frequently collaborated with each other, during this specific period of time".
That said, there are a few recurring features that can be identified. Not all of these will be present in every example of the genre, of course, and whether they add up to a distinct strand of fantasy or a subgenre of high fantasy or what-have-you is a debate I'd prefer to leave to those who have more time on their hands, but to hit some high points:
Romantic fantasy typically features a strong focus on political worldbuilding โ not in the lists-of-kings sense, but in terms of the nitty-gritty details of hierarchies and power relations. What explicit hierarchies are in play? What unspoken hierarchies are in play, and how do they undermine the explicit hierarchies? Who's really in charge, and how does that differ from who's officially in charge? Often there's an emphasis on interrogating gendered divisions within the political sphere. What kinds of political power are typically wielded by men? What kinds of political power are typically wielded by women? How do these spheres interact?
As an extension of the preceding point, romantic fantasy often features lengthy sequences of the protagonist and their allies engaging in complex political discussion and manoeuvres, with the same sort of narrative weight and focus that scenes of battle are given in more conventional fantasy. This isn't to say that romantic fantasy doesn't also feature scenes of battle โ it usually does โ but they tend to be addressed in a just-the-high-points fashion, rather than the meticulous, blow-by-blow fashion of the politicking leading up to them. (Folks who aren't fans of the genre often report finding this difference in focus dreadfully dull!)
There's often a secret or semi-secret do-gooder organisation โ a sort of conspiracy of heroes โ which the protagonist either joins early on, or is already part of when the story begins. (This is most common in ongoing serials, and may be absent in stand-alone works.) Valdemar's Herald-Mages and the Forgotten Realms' Harpers are two examples of the type. Contra the expectations of grittier fantasy, the righteousness of this organisation usually is not questioned; stories may concern rooting out corruption or error in individual branches, and members may temporarily fall from grace, but overall they're on the side of the angels.
While specific applications of magic may be secret knowledge, magic in general is something anyone can do. This may be carried to the point of every (adult) person in the setting sporting a unique magical talent, or of people being sortable by their affinities for particular spheres of magic. The protagonist discovering, exploring, and/or mastering their magical affinity is often central to their arc. The lack of such an affinity will usually be framed as a kind of disability, with all the awkwardness and unfortunateness you'd expect of 1980s popular media.
Magical companions aren't necessarily common in the setting overall, but they're common for protagonists, to the extent that being bonded with such a companion is often positioned as a diegetic marker of heroism. Snarky talking cats and wise telepathic horses are both popular choices, though there have been many variations on the basic idea โ I recall one example where the protagonist wears a sapient enchanted bracelet which later turns out to be a dragon who's transformed himself into an inanimate object for initially mysterious reasons.
The settings tended to be explicitly egalitarian and gay-friendly, with sexist and homophobic attitudes functioning as cultural markers of the obligatory Evil Empire Over There. This is kind of a nothing distinction in 2025, but in the 1980s it was noteworthy. It wasn't without its problems, of course; homosexuality was usually treated as a kind of gender variance, with gay men being framed as in some sense "womanly" in their fundamental essence, and lesbians as in some sense "manly". Oddly, this idea of homosexuality-as-gender-variance almost never extended to any sort of trans representation. Having a special made-up word for gay people โ always printed in italics โ was so common in the genre that it became the subject of frequent parody.
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The really funny part is "I Can Eat Glass" this isn't even the only popular 1990s Internet meme that involved collecting translations of a specific, slightly incongruous phrase. "Oh my God! There's an axe in my head." is another prominent example, just off the top of my head.
"Wow, this kink is so weird and extreme" and then you look inside and it's literally just "what if I never had to Be Responsible or Make Good Life Decisions ever again, and somehow this was a sex thing?"
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