oops! all dndads discourse

To me, realizing “they talk about kids like this?/they let the discord get like this?” was the deal-breaker that made me go “aw damn, loving this was a bad idea, now there’s a big hole in the trust safety net.” The stuff that has happened since with the content warnings and other issues has confirmed this impression. Having that drop out from underneath you hurts a lot, and I don’t want people to get real deep into the show before they realize the hole in the safety net is there. In my book, it’s a pretty bad one, and I always appreciate getting a heads-up on stuff like that when I’m getting into something. I think something about this show creates a “they’re playing very close to the edge and it’s thrilling, but in a safe way because I trust them” listening relationship. If you take away the trust then you realize you weren’t enjoying a thrill ride, you were in actual danger without realizing it - you just didn’t happen to get hurt so far. I got hurt by getting in pretty deep before I realized that they think stuff is hilarious that I really don’t find okay, like incest, or adults being unnecessarily naked in front of kids and making the kids uncomfortable, or kids checking out naked adults, or turning the word “consent” into a joke. But if people look at the actual facts of the situation - the screenshots, etc., not summaries from people who are trying to “put an end to the discourse” - and can go “that’s fine” or “it’s not great, but it’s not their job to fix it” or “that doesn’t bother me,” then I respect that decision. We all have different things that are deal-breakers. Like my header used to say, “If you love the show I am happy for you and I hope it brings you joy, i just have some... management concerns.” I have no beef with fans of the show. Many of my friends still are fans of the show, and I still like and support the great fanartists and writers that are involved in the fandom.  And if you look at the actual facts of the situation and go “yikes, I’m out,” then I hope it was easier to read it here from somebody else who’s going “yeah, I saw it too and it’s not okay” than it was to get slapped across the face with it when you were just trying to listen to a dumbass show about dungeons and dragons.  Edit: Since it comes up regularly, “Dungeons and Daddies is a rowdy, horny, violent podcast for grown-ups” is a disclaimer that got added in mid-October of 2020, presumably in response to this critique as well as other conversations happening in the listenership. The kink test discussion, the Grant and Yeet discussion, and basically everything in the first section of this post is from before that. I don’t know that it hugely matters, but hey, clarity is good.  Edit 2 to answer the recurring question of “why don’t you also criticize NADDpod or Crit Role or TAZ for their problematic content?” Because I don’t listen to those shows. Edit 3: Cleaning up this desktop, have all the many many relevant receipts for the content warnings issue, featuring such hits as ‘40 episodes of content warnings getting done in 48 hours by a handful of untrained volunteers.’ The daughters thing, in all its glory. Short version: June 2020, on Talking Dad, a listener asked whether having only sons on the show was deliberate. Some of the cast's responses struck listeners as sexist, inconsiderate, or confusing. After discussion on multiple platforms, someone posted a thread on Reddit. Four cast members responded. This was the first time that fans had publicly discussed concerns over female representation with the cast, but the same conversation had happened in the Patreon discord repeatedly, for months. Many fans had sore feelings but were willing to give the show another chance. However, the next few episodes were not received with the same tolerance and assumption of good intention that they would have previously been. (Will’s apology for that is still a great example of how to own your shit and not make excuses for yourself... and would really mean a lot if he had ever responded to anything else again, ever. Like this, for instance. The thing about asking marginalized people to ‘hold you accountable’ as a creator is that you have 99.99% of the power in the situation. If you ask for the feedback, but then don’t actually do anything about it, you’re just asking people to throw their emotional labor down a hole so that you can feel like you’re woke and responsive.) Some folks contact Freddie to see if the show is okay for their kids and he handles it with typical grace and tact.  People are uncomfortable with the idea of Glenn and Canary because she seems young, and instead of just saying “oh, sorry if it came off that way, but no, don’t worry - Glenn wouldn’t flirt with a teenager,” Freddie just kinda argues with everybody about whether it’s fair for someone to interpret her as young and then, when that doesn’t get traction, he switches to arguing about whether Glenn was flirting or not. As is pretty typical, a very small and easily-addressed thing gets blown up hugely by the cast’s breathtaking inability to respond appropriately to stuff that they see as criticism. Then later, a Patreon mod (who still mods) made fun of people who thought Canary was young. Good look.  And when a mod told Anthony that people were getting uncomfortable with it, he said “that’s a fredo problem.” Amazing. 

brennan and orion both say things regularly that feel like they’re reading dndads but probably aren’t. 

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

So apropos of a totally separate conversation involving some people who deeply misunderstand the First Amendment, I was reminded of the attempted policing of the tags during the height of this discussion and had some thoughts on that. At the end of the day, you have to step back and look at the setting of the conversation. Is there some kind of defined boundary within which this conversation is happening and somebody who is in charge of what happens inside that boundary and who gets to be there? If so, it makes total sense to expect that there are rules. If the rules aren't being followed, you can reach out to the person in charge. If the person in charge don't get things under control, you can leave that space. All totally fair. That's a system working as intended. Social media in general? Twitter hashtags? Tumblr tags? There is no 'in charge.' There is no defined boundary within which a certain set of conversational rules apply and will be enforced by an outside referee. You have every right to express your preferences about how people conduct themselves, but what you are talking about is not the rules, it's etiquette. There is no lifeguard on duty. I'm not saying "posts that try to keep negativity out of the tag don't belong in the tag," because my whole point is that telling each other what goes in there doesn't work. What I am saying is that when you're in a space that is unregulated by design, trying to regulate that space is the least efficient way to control your experience within it. You're going to wear yourself out trying to terraform the whole planet. Just put your astronaut helmet on instead. If the platform doesn't offer sufficient tools to accomplish that, maybe it's not a good platform for you. This isn't a request for anyone to do anything differently, we're not even in an active discussion at this point anymore. It's just a bit of unsolicited advice being expressed into the void on the off-chance that it might make somebody else's life easier. If you are counting on a boundary that is everybody else's responsibility to maintain, you are going to be putting a lot of energy into making sure everybody else knows what you expect. If that's what you want to do, you can do it, but I think it's likely to get frustrating. Setting up a contained space where you can define the rules, finding a space where somebody maintains a set of rules that meet your needs, and/or using the built-in tools like blocking tags and users, will work better. In other words, I don't have a guaranteed way to keep you from seeing me say things you don't like. That button is on your screen.