It's R'lyeh Riley!

There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year

Venture outside with your ant buddies to forage scraps from an incomprehensible civilization of alien gods (each one several times larger than the city you've spent most of your life inside) for the glory of your GodMomEmpress

Get attacked by a platoon of soldiers from a rival megacity, they're an offshoot of your species except like twice as big (basically orks) and like 10% of them are genetically modified supersoldiers with wings

Luckily, you've been engineered from birth to spit acid so you and your antfriends successfully defeat the rival ants and their winged miniboss

and then this kid, this one kid who is always very eager to answer questions and is always kind to his classmates, raised his hand looking a little bothered. now for context, i emphasize thinking for yourself in my classroom, even if that means disagreeing with something i say and he has echoed some stuff that his parents clearly have told him before. he's not a bad kid or an asshole, he's just an 18 year old with conservative parents who otherwise knows nothing about politics. but he just looks so bothered after i explain this about dirty arguing techniques. big frown on his face. looking unsure. when i nod at him to speak, he says, in a very quiet voice, "didn't -- didn't charlie kirk used to do that?"

and i was like. well yes. yes he was famous for stuff like this.

and then the kid looked down and was just like, "oh. i thought he was just really good at debating. i never watched his videos though, only clips. why would he do that?"

Heavy Topics: Romance in RPGs

Every group is going to have a different preference when it comes to exactly how they like to engage with topics of romance, flirtation, and sex, and if it hasn't been covered already the best idea is to talk about it with the rest of the table. D&D is a shared storytelling game after all, and that sharing comes from a place of shared vulnerability on behalf of the players and DM: Once you know what everyone's comfortable with, you can colour inside the lines as vividly as you'd like.

Likewise there's a sliding scale to how much these elements are focused on in roleplay and in storytelling: A player might have a character who's conceptually a dashing ladykiller but doesn't want to specifically make that part of their roleplay focus or engage in drawnout scenes of seduction. Alternatively, a character might not be conceptually built around flirtation, only to have important story-defining romance emerge as their tale unfolds.

Regardless, it's always about setting boundaries, and from what the asker says they're in exactly the right sort of group.

Now, addressing those "D&D is not your dating sim" people, I have to bring the hammer down a bit harder, especially because I've had people in my inbox before asking me how they can punish players for perusing romantic relationships in the first place. Simply put, if the DM isn't comfortable running romantic or flirtatious scenes, they're responsible for telling the group that upfront. There's no shame in saying no, plenty of people have certain topics that they're not comfortable indulging in, but its just as much their responsibility to let the group know that as it is the rest of the group's job to respect those limits. Flipping that on its head however, you can't get angry at other people, especially people that aren't in your playgroup for enjoying types of stories that you don't. D&D is absolutely a dating sim if everyone at the table is cool with that.

Personally? I make characters that are flirty, that have high or low libido as one of their character traits. I've even given PCs I've played kinks that I don't have because I felt like it would fit them, or specifically made characters with the understanding that a romantic heart would be their primary heroic motivation.

Remember that joke in the Hunter the Parenting lore video about the ANCIENT KINGDOMS OF THE LIZARD KINGS? They were dinosaurs! Dinosaurs had tool-using super intelligent dinosaur people! If you take Exalted as canon or having some influence on it, they might have had GIANT CRYSTAL CLUBS THAT MAKE LIGHTSABER SWORD BEAMS and vegetation technology that works because they talk to it! Talking dinosaur-people and the Mokole shapeshifters are their descendants, and the Mokole apparently helped humans to evolve because they missed having people to talk to and teach just SO MUCH!

They're all dead.

Every single one of them was wiped out and now, there is not even a single shred evidence they ever existed; not a bit of their architecture or technology remains, and they might as well have never existed. In some way, they live within the eternal ancestral memory of the Mokole, but even that is tragic; seeing the lives of long-dead ancestors and watching everything they ever were completely cease to exist drives many Mokole to depression, hopelessness and unspeakable loss to know how much has been lost, and the world does not know, and the world does not care. Humanity rests on the bones of those who came before.

Her first 28 years are fairly tame, until we reach 1987's Canadian Mountie Barbie. Reasonable odds for a cop, even if they're not a USAmerican cop.

in 1991, we get US Air Force Pilot Barbie, US Marine Corps Sergeant Barbie, US Navy Petty Officer Barbie. There's also 1992's US Army Barbie, if those guys were feeling left out. I'm also ignoring the 1989 US Army Barbie because that one is 100% a stolen valour runway look, not a uniform.

Going to run my autism over those four.

US Navy Petty Officer Barbie is wearing quartermaster's rating insignia, so no combat for her.

US Army Barbie is wearing an airborne maroon beret with no rank insignia that I could see, but she's loaded down with medical supplies, so I'm gonna say combat medic, but only as many kills as her other medical endeavours.

US Air Force Pilot Barbie is wearing a jacket that looks like a Top Gun tie-in. The unit patch is just the USAF coat of arms, and the name patch says she's a Captain. VERY confusingly, the plane on the box art is an F-5, which had just recently been retired. But its USAF usage was almost all in the OPFOR Aggressor squadrons, which is... "come play enemy planes for our training exercises".

US Marine Corps Sergeant Barbie is wearing E-5 Sergeant's insignia, and three medals (she's in dress uniform). To my eye, and allowing for badly printed colours, looks like Navy and Marine Achievement Medal, Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, and the South West Asia Service Medal. The first two are fairly obvious "Barbie Is Well Behaved" stuff, but uh. That last one though?

USMC Barbie was in Desert Storm.

"The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.

The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care."