Kyorei's Maniacal Mutterings

I mean, a better question might be if anyone cared? Anyone who's likely to actually read this silly thing, knows me outside of Tumblr.

Heh, honestly, I'm surprised this thing is still even alive, at the end of the day.

Well, for all...[checks notes] two? Two mutuals? Or so? Who still look when they get notifications? I spend a lot of my time and creativity, anymore, with a pile of tabletop RPGs.

I also started taking up writing, a bit more than I had, previously. If anyone remembers those posts about "Unmarketable Movies I'd Actually See" and "Unmarketable Fantastic Four"...

I kept going with that for a bit. Star Trek taking a dive into "grimderp and painfully hamfisted and counterproductive soap-boxing" spurred me to write three seasons and three movies of intentionally horrible ideas...that eventually formed a lot of the framework of my trying out Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures...and making me fall in love with Trek all over again. May it last forever.

Star Wars becoming a systemic murder of everything I loved and a guilt-trip for having ever loved it in the first place, I wrote what *I* would have created, instead. After all, if you reach the point of "I'm an IDIOT and I could have a better story concept"...well, get going with that typewriter, and try to make Hamlet, I guess. I had a Chiss girl as the Jedi, and she managed to SAVE her "Kylo Vader", thankyouverymuch.

Then I had an idea of, "I'm sick of everyone cranking it to human misery in Gundam...what if I wrote an Arthurian Hope-Punk Gundam?". Not as fleshed out as my other ideas, but the lingua franca in Space was Esperanto, so that made me chortle.

Summarizing all of this in an FAQ doc, I explained that a huge reason none of the above would ever fly in today's markets, is that the entertainment industry would only appreciate another "Castle of Sister-Fuckers: the Stabbening", until someone figures out how to independently push "Rainbow Hug Warrior" into a "surprise" commercial success.

Naturally, I had to come up with a few episodes of that, where a Power-Ranger Space-Jesus comes down on his rainbow rocket skateboard, and fixes the world through empathy, reason, and cosmic hugs.

It was after writing all that, I finally realized common running threads on my work. A THESIS of sorts started coming together, a message:

"Camelot is still out there, waiting...even if the Knights forgot it, we can still reach for it and make the world better".

So, at the insistence of some new friends on a Discord chat, I decided to try summarizing the stories that had been brewing in my head since middle school. I'm 42. That is a lot of brewing.

I abridged it as much as I could, but still wound up with a novel. No, seriously, I had to publish the damn thing through Barnes and Noble, because it was easier than sending a Google Docs link, anymore.

The basic concept of the webcomic I wanted to do, and Red Sky, just to sum up my main characters for some friends. It wound up some 390 pages in hard-cover.

Per CBS, apparently the younger generations are increasingly opting to have pets, rather than kids...if they can even afford pets, anymore. Old people are starting to see this as a "crisis", and can't grasp how or why it's happening.

See, when you force entire generations into for-profit colleges who rely on loans to pay their exorbitant bills for a diploma that will PROBABLY be worth slightly less than the paper it's printed on in the job market, you end up with a debt crisis spawned by the overwhelmingly wealthy few achieving a parasitic relationship on an entire generation of debtors. This means you have an entire generation who can't get loans for a house, a car, or in some areas, even get a lease agreement for apartments.

So, nobody can get a job in their field, their debts are multigenerationally absurd, and they can't get a home or transportation, to even begin to contemplate the idea of wanting to start a family, as all their wages are garnished and those wages unto themselves are minimum wage.

It turns out, when you force entire generations into economic serfdom, they kinda' don't have the ability to make another generation! If only we had some kind of historical example, or better yet, a real-life, modern example we could all look at to understand "babby only happun wen pay people gud".

Oh.

Right.

We totally have one of those, it's called "Japan".

See, Japan has been going through this same nonsense, as it came to a head sometime around 2000 or so. Japan largely makes it illegal for married mothers to work, in a country where pay has so failed to keep up with inflation that even a meager apartment (by Japanese standards: Americans would call it "a walk-in closet") requires two incomes. To live. Let alone in any kind of comfort. Japanese couples are literally in an economic situation for the past twenty years, of literally being forced to choose between a baby, and a roof over their heads.

Japan's "solution" in the intervening time has largely been tone-deaf: subsidies to make "pure, good Japanese children", that would barely cover a single paycheck. A pile of anime with mandated, pro-reproductive propagandist messaging. A push to remind Japanese girls that it's their nationalist duty to keep Japan alive by making babies. Literally, everything just shy of Shinzo Abe going door to door, begging every woman to make a child...or actually paying people what they're worth...or letting women have jobs after having kids.

And ultimately, that's where I see the United States going, soon. Generations X, Y and Z have all been debted into slavery, kicked to the curb, and left to die by those in power. Full-time workers in a market where full-time work barely exists in the first place can barely afford to live in squalor with a few friends to help them make rent and utilities, but boomers say we're too busy "eating avocado toast" to buy their houses and diamonds. Then we stopped buying cars, because we can barely afford to ride buses and subways. Then we stopped going to poorly-stocked brick-and-mortar stores, when the Internet existed and shipping times weren't bad. Every step of the way, the older generation blamed us for just being "lazy" or "stupid", when their wages went four times as far as ours do.

Now we've come to babies. You old bastards want nurses in your retirement homes that speak languages other than Swahili or Spanish?

So, we have this trope, where two people get into an argument, suddenly agree on a point, and end up friends. Doesn't matter if it's your mortal enemy, an alien, some monster from the beyond, or what-have.

What if that's how demonic pacts happen?

"Stassszinsssky iss a geniusss, and I shall NOT hear hiss name befouled in thisss hall!"

"HELL yeah. That man's writings on human nature, sociology and the fabric of the soul are friggin' TIMELESS."

"INDEED, the only acsssseptable critissssissm of Babylon 5 shall be that the (sss)CGI isss a bit dated."

"Damn straight, man, I...shit, did we just become friends?!"

"YEEEEESSSSS!!!! THE PACT ISSS FOOOORGED!!!"

"Son of a BI-"

So, I GM some games. Role-playing games are, of course, a fun and engaging collaborative means of storytelling, each person is a character, a thread in the web of the story's tapestry. Black, white, green, and all the colors in between. Some are thick, some are deft, some are orderly, some are chaotic, the system truly seems to work, when all of them work together and build a brighter future in the setting for everyone.

In a way, adventurers fulfill a role in their society, albeit one not entirely analogous to our common (Western) society...but sometimes they have something close.

Peacekeepers.

Negotiators.

Investigators.

Physicians.

Doctors, soldiers, educators and firefighters without borders.

Now, what about when that system isn't working? What about when all the characters care about is how much XP the random NPC is worth? What about the "goblins aren't people" crowd?

What about murderhobos?

That's something every GM tangles with regularly. When someone abuses their place in the narrative, their measure of immunity to commit heinous acts of murder, mayhem, robbery, treason and thuggery? When someone in the party is exactly the sort of irredeemable monsters that the party is ostensibly supposed to be protecting the world from.

The GM's job is to remove that immunity. Make the murderhobo vulnerable, make him face consequences until he either stops killing, or stops playing. If the other players shelter him, they should be made to face the consequences of their "friend" until the murderhobo reforms, leaves or is ejected.

We accept this as standard for PCs. This is normal of an RPG format. This is part of the basic social contract of roleplay: be a disruptive little shit, get flushed.

I watch the news and wonder why we can't accept this of those in the public, real-world spotlight. The sports players, the actors and actresses, the politicians.

The police.

Nobody, especially those in the highest seats, and their jackboot-clad "friends", nor even the extra-judicial Supermen quoting Monty Python between dungeon crawls, should ever be above the laws they claim to uphold.

So, I know maybe, like, five people will read this and all, but...remember 9/11? Specifically, after 9/11, when America suddenly realized that police, firemen, paramedics, and soldiers were, in fact, human beings. When "Thank You for Your Service" entered into the lexicon, for a good few years.

Now, it's being extended to a new group of people. People we've abused, underpaid, and characterized the very existence of as a failure. A burden. A waste of potential and a loathesom crust not at the bottom of the barrel, but beneath the barrel, entirely.

Nurses.

Delivery drivers.

Sanitation workers.

Construction workers.

Food workers.

Cleaners.

Truckers.

Restauranteurs.

RETAIL CLERKS and SHELF STOCKERS.

Some of the above are paid minimum wage, given no benefits, and are treated, habitually by both their management and society as subhuman beasts of burden, targets for us all to take our frustration out on. They clock in every day, because it's the job they fell into in a bad market, and better jobs haven't made it back since the end of the Clinton Administration, when all our computer jobs got sold to India and Bangladesh. They clock in every day, because the very idea of a cubicle farm is their private Hell. They clock in every day, because it gets them out of the house, and they genuinely like dealing with people to a degree, and they need that level of socialization. They clock in, to slave wages, benefit cuts, mistreatment, demonization and dehumanization, every day.

They clock IN.

...and it has literally taken a traumatic event across the entire planet, the modern plague, the new killer thing unleashed upon us all, that the average member of any of those jobs, who gets told they have to show up during hurricanes and blizzards, plagues and riots, whether they like it or not, lest they lose the only jobs they feel they are allowed...it took a planetary virus scare to realize:

Those are HUMAN BEINGS.

I have literally never seen the media say how much my sector of work is essential before. I have literally, not once, seen customers actively thank me for existing in our society, as I have recently. I have never seen myself, the work I do, or the company I work for, be described as more than "a social parasite" or "a vestigial lump of flesh on our economy"...as "essential"...until now.

It's a heavy damn thing to think upon. That after twenty years of clocking in, that if there weren't millions of me, this country would have long fallen apart, and most of us get paid peanuts and left in the cold to die, because we've been seen as disposable for eons. And suddenly...we're essential. Suddenly we're thanked. Suddenly, we're a "service".

The cynic in me knows that this will be forgotten almost immediately, once it's all over. I know damn well, the moment people try to return their hoards of toilet paper and get denied, a flood of Karens will demand we be fired for it. People will refuse to tip. People will roll their eyes at someone being "just" a nurse. Once this is all over, the other shoe will drop, and it's right back into the social trash heap we'll go. More pay cuts, more lost benefits, more schedule chicanery, and less safe working conditions.

But...part of me hopes? Part of me thinks, maybe the world will finally learn? Maybe we can take this opportunity, this rare moment of societal empathy, and use it to grow and become less horrible to each other on some level.