orimence

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Deep thanks to everyone who's donated and continues to donate! As always there continues to be more need for support. Abdul's let me know that they've used the previous funds to get a new space to live. Problem is, the shelters run down and full of leaks and just generally not very safe.

Right now they need funds for:

fixing leaks (there's a lot of rain lately)

putting up a fence

adding a toilet

adding a bathroom in general

general labour costs

food and medical expenses

everyone needs to hear about the situation in india right now. the youth of this nation are going through hell and back to protect the foundations that our country was built on in the first place, while the adults who are supposed to actually be in charge try to silence our voices.

NEET, which is an exam taken by millions of students per year and is the ONLY gateway for medical admissions across the country, had its papers leaked. so many took their lives because this exam meant everything for their future. and NTA, the agency who conducts this exam, was not held accountable.

there was national backlash. cockroach janta party (initially a satirical political party formed by abhijeet dipke in retaliation to the remarks of the chief justice of india calling the youth "cockroaches" and "parasites of society") started protests at jantar mantar, demanding the resignation of the union education minister, dharmendra pradhan. the movement also asked for ten million inr (~100,000 usd) in compensation for the families of students who died by suicide and wanted NTA be held accountable.

sonam wangchuk, a climate activist and education reformer, also went on a hunger strike at jantar mantar to protest against this corruption in india's higher education system. his fast began on june 28, demanding the resignation of the union education minister. his fast lasted for 20 days until delhi police FORCIBLY removed him and admitted him to safdarjung hospital on july 18.

because of this, cockroach janta party announced "chalo sansad," a march to the parliament beginning on june 20th, 9:00 am ist. but the police seems to be responding with water cannons, mobile jammers, and baton charge. all of this, because of a peaceful protest led by people no older than 30.

Let's take sinners for example. There is a white guy with like 2 lines exclusively about hating minorities in this movie. His name is not Ray, it's Bert (I had to look that up on imdb), he is the kkk-vampire and not a single person on earth is writing self-insert fic about this guy. They are writing self-insert fic about the central antagonist, who is also a vampire. Girls like villains, what else is new.

And sure, maybe I am being to literal here, but yelling at people that they are liking a thing in the wrong way is just the fastest way to kill a fandom. The underlying things this post is pointing at are real and they do exist. Societal beauty standards center white people, a lot of (white) people have are harder time sympathising with people of color. But those things are not fandom problems. They are just general problems of living in white supremacist society and they show up in all facets of or society including fandom. But you are not gonna fix them by telling people they are somehow bad for liking the sexy vampire.

Am I “making up a guy to be mad at” if by your own admission you are a fan of a character that fits the hypothetical scenario that I described in the original post? That you brought up, because I didn’t bring up Sinners (2025).

You admit that societal beauty standards favor white people (an odd thing to bring up), and in turn white people have a harder time sympathizing with people of color (a poor excuse for racism), and yet you think this doesn’t factor into fandom? You think white ppl, from the society that you acknowledge has racist biases, will somehow leave those same prejudices when engaging in fandom? You think that the “real world” is a completely separate vacuum from the art that leads to fandom?

“Girls like villains” a very strange, pointedly projective, and dismissive of the main point of the post: racism. You think women of color like racist villains? Or is it just white women? Because that’s what we’re talking about here: racist characters, specifically. With this line of thinking, you put forth that either the women in a fandom, Sinners (2025) by your example, a predominantly Black led piece of media which centers Black women as they’re integral to the story, should categorically like the “sexy vampire” despite the fact that he’s terrorizing Black people throughout the movie just because he’s the villain. Or you put forth that there are no women of color in the Sinners fandom, which would be an odd thing to think given the previous points.

I started to get an inkling of this when he had the Yeti run away rather than finishing the first encounter. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he have it fight to the death? My suspicion is that it’s because the players were all rolling badly, and this was only a preliminary fight to get them in the mood for the session, so Pix was not interested in wasting time, energy, HP, and spell slots on an encounter that was ultimately just supposed to be set dressing. So he had the Yeti run away forever, even though it was anticlimactic, because he was already thinking ahead to the battle on the ice lake.

Speaking of which: let’s talk about whatever the opposite of rules-lawyering is. During the battle on the ice lake, we get a callback to the first significant example of Pix bending the rules for fun, when he allowed Mr. Wizard to turn Max into a light source—even though you’re not supposed to be able to use that spell on a living being—by handwaving it with the excuse that the spell was affecting Max’s clothes. We also get several new examples of this attitude: first, giving Ruby advantage against the Displacer Beast when she maybe shouldn’t have had it—because SOMEONE had to hit that thing—and second and most importantly to me, allowing Bro Dude to wield Max’s Spiritual Weapon with Commander Strike, even though that is definitely not how that works.

I’ve already talked at length about how that moment, for me, is the thematic cornerstone of Bro Dude’s character arc. It’s an incredibly powerful moment of friendship symbolically overcoming fear. And it never would have happened if Pix wasn’t willing to bend the rules of the game and allow Impulse to do something creative and unconventional.

Every single person in this campaign (especially Grian) was angling for Bro to have his moment, even though the dice were against him, and the DM is not excluded from that. The way Pix described each killing blow made it sound epic and cinematic—from pinning the Displacer Beast’s true form to the ice, to cleaving the worm creature in two with an uppercut from the Immovable Axe—even though Bro himself was rolling pretty low damage. Pix straight up volunteered the secret of the Displacer Beast the moment Bro made contact with it, not willing to wait for a Perception Check or a Crit to give him the key to victory. And there was even a moment that he broke the cardinal rule of DMing and outright suggested that Scar use one of his portent rolls in Bro’s favor, against the DM, so that Bro would have a shot at killing the worm and finishing off the session with a bang.

(On a funnier note, I also think that think Pix could see that the party was struggling a little bit with the bosses, which is why he held off on the Ice Mephits’ death bursts. Either that or he just forgot until the last one. But I like to think it was an intentional decision to be nice and turn down the difficulty level.)

I don’t know which came first in Impulse’s mind, Bro Dude’s fear of cats or his childhood terror of a feline creature, but the fact that Pix selected the Displacer Beast as a formidable opponent and a callback to that seemingly throwaway joke was inspired. And the way his face lit up when Impulse finally floated the idea of using Tremor Sense tells me so much. I’ve got a theory that the Displacer Beast was also meant to be detected by Tremor Sense; if I’m understanding correctly, the illusion that the creature projects is only a visual one, while Tremor Sense is auditory and would be able to circumvent the illusion and identify the beast’s true location. If that’s the case, Pix was basically on tender-hooks the entire time waiting for Impulse to remember his Dwarven racial features (which he LITERALLY USED earlier in the session but somehow forgets about in combat), so that cheerful “it’s almost as if I designed this encounter with Tremor Sense in mind :-D” has a bit of a connotation of OH THANK GOD I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER REMEMBER IT

But affectionate roasting of my man aside, I do think this reveals something really lovely about Pix’s approach to game design. It’s not a coincidence that the creatures we encountered in Session Seven could all be turned by Max’s divinity and were weak to his Radiant damage. And it’s not a coincidence that the creatures encountered here in Session Eight could have been outwitted with Tremor Sense. Pix is selecting monsters that will give his spotlight characters a chance to show off their unique abilities and strengths. And the beauty is in the execution: despite every solution being premeditated, Pix still gives the players the freedom to discover the answer to his riddles on their own, so that they get the satisfaction of feeling like it was their own idea that saved the day.

As DMs go, I couldn’t ask for better than Pix. This is a brilliantly smart man who loves the game, loves the story, loves these characters, and most of all, loves the players behind them, and it shows in every little game design decision he makes.

We saw in Session Seven that Max Blunder's story is about charting his own path and proving his strength apart from the circus that raised him. I think Impulse intended a similar trajectory for Bro Dude. The debrief at the end of his stream reveals a lot about his plans for this character; plans to have him prove he's not a weakling to the strict family that raised him. But the dice have a mind of their own and tell a different story, and I think the moral of Broghini's tale is actually this:

His strength is in his friends.

Think about it. How was he able to face his fears and defeat the monster that haunted his nightmares ever since he was a child? Not on his own. Not by soloing it in a blaze of glory. Not by cutting it to ribbons with a great axe. He actually missed a lot of his shots and dealt very little damage over the course of the encounter.

He won because he grabbed Max's spiritual weapon and took a swing at the Displacer Beast. He won because Mr. Wizard foretold his success. He won because Ruby kept throwing daggers to "loosen the lid on the jar", and Mr. Wizard pierced the worm creature with a Mind Spike, and Max cast Command and halted it in place.

This doesn't mean that Bro is weak. It means that his strength lies in a different place than his culture expected it to be.

Dwarven culture, as Impulse has established it, values physical strength and hardiness and combat prowess. All of those are good things, but that's not a complete picture of what strength is. It's overlooking strength of the spirit. Of connection. Of community. Of cooperation and togetherness. As a consequence of elevating the individual, it forgets the power of the collective. As a consequence of elevating the physical, it forgets the power of the soul.

Dwarven culture is, in a way, an exaggerated caricature of modern American expectations towards men and boys, especially at the time that Impulse was growing up. Now, I don't wanna psychoanalyze him too much here (she said, lying, because she loves to psychoanalyze him), but there's a non-zero chance in my mind that Impulse—gentle, sensitive, nerdy, and not always fitting perfectly into the stereotypical masculine mold—might be working through a little something here through this character, whether he realizes it or not.

The point of Bro's story is not to become strong in the way that his parents and his brother expected him to. The point of Bro's story is to realize he is already strong. It is to shed the myopic perception of a narrow-minded culture and realize that the value he brings to the world lies not in how much he can lift and the things he can kill, but in the connections he's forged and the good things he can cultivate.

In short, it's not the size of his biceps that counts. It's the strength of his heart.

(Is that cheesy? Yes. But let’s be honest, I’m talking about a character named Bro Dude. It’s been cheesy from the very beginning.)

He'll become physically strong and kill a lot of things along the way, of course. That's the way D&D goes. But it's not lost on me that the weapon he used to deal his first blow to his greatest fear was not one from his ancestral home, and not the one given to him by a fae king, but the one conjured by his friend and battle companion.

Symbolically, it is friendship that gave him strength. It is friendship that gave him clarity. It is friendship that destroyed fear.

We saw in Session Seven that Max Blunder's story is about charting his own path and proving his strength apart from the circus that raised him. I think Impulse intended a similar trajectory for Bro Dude. The debrief at the end of his stream reveals a lot about his plans for this character; plans to have him prove he's not a weakling to the strict family that raised him. But the dice have a mind of their own and tell a different story, and I think the moral of Broghini's tale is actually this:

His strength is in his friends.

Think about it. How was he able to face his fears and defeat the monster that haunted his nightmares ever since he was a child? Not on his own. Not by soloing it in a blaze of glory. Not by cutting it to ribbons with a great axe. He actually missed a lot of his shots and dealt very little damage over the course of the encounter.

He won because he grabbed Max's spiritual weapon and took a swing at the Displacer Beast. He won because Mr. Wizard foretold his success. He won because Ruby kept throwing daggers to "loosen the lid on the jar", and Mr. Wizard pierced the worm creature with a Mind Spike, and Max cast Command and halted it in place.

This doesn't mean that Bro is weak. It means that his strength lies in a different place than his culture expected it to be.

Dwarven culture, as Impulse has established it, values physical strength and hardiness and combat prowess. All of those are good things, but that's not a complete picture of what strength is. It's overlooking strength of the spirit. Of connection. Of community. Of cooperation and togetherness. As a consequence of elevating the individual, it forgets the power of the collective. As a consequence of elevating the physical, it forgets the power of the soul.

Dwarven culture is, in a way, an exaggerated caricature of modern American expectations towards men and boys, especially at the time that Impulse was growing up. Now, I don't wanna psychoanalyze him too much here (she said, lying, because she loves to psychoanalyze him), but there's a non-zero chance in my mind that Impulse—gentle, sensitive, nerdy, and not always fitting perfectly into the stereotypical masculine mold—might be working through a little something here through this character, whether he realizes it or not.

The point of Bro's story is not to become strong in the way that his parents and his brother expected him to. The point of Bro's story is to realize he is already strong. It is to shed the myopic perception of a narrow-minded culture and realize that the value he brings to the world lies not in how much he can lift and the things he can kill, but in the connections he's forged and the good things he can cultivate.

In short, it's not the size of his biceps that counts. It's the strength of his heart.

(Is that cheesy? Yes. But let’s be honest, I’m talking about a character named Bro Dude. It’s been cheesy from the very beginning.)

He'll become physically strong and kill a lot of things along the way, of course. That's the way D&D goes. But it's not lost on me that the weapon he used to deal his first blow to his greatest fear was not one from his ancestral home, and not the one given to him by a fae king, but the one conjured by his friend and battle companion.

Symbolically, it is friendship that gave him strength. It is friendship that gave him clarity. It is friendship that destroyed fear.

Thank you!

I have read the book but it’s been a WHILE, it was one I read in high school. I didn’t find it horrendously offensive, but I think I’d mainly echo what I’ve seen a lot of other Natives say about it, which is that is largely positions Native struggle, oppression, and even existence as a thing of the past in ways I don’t think Brown is even really conscious of. I don’t know that it’d necessarily, like, damage your way of thinking to read the book, but there are definitely other options!

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is by an Ojibwe author, David Treuer, and is written largely as a direct response to Dee Brown’s book. I think it’s one that’s worth reading whether you read Bury Me At Wounded Knee or not, although personally I actually think it would be an interesting academic exercise to read them in sequence and note how the perspectives differ.