#erezu

First and only vent I'll send here. It's frustrating to watch Riddle profit off of people he openly shames and makes fun of, both in the discord and in spaces like his blog. To watch people of the demographics he will verbally rip to shreds agree with him because "Yeah the people he's talking about just don't have spines" etc. Why would the leopard eat my face? He took a concept of a mythical creature that has heavy ties to the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa, and has dedicated absolutely none of the game or lore to those cultural origins. He is openly Eurocentric, and he applies that to almost everything he does. And then he'd excuse all of this with "This isn't real life, it's a world that doesn't work like our own", like he does with concepts of gender and sexuality. Except then in his blogs, he tries to essentially shame its readers for having a "modern idea of gender/sexuality" when writing stories & characters, and uses historical context to prove his point. Historical contexts that he can't even get right, for the record, and are largely based in the works of men who were intensely debated within their own fields. Debates that Riddle can't be bothered to acknowledge. That's not even getting into a lot of the more covert ideas he expresses, which bear no use accusing given that I don't have the energy to explore its intricacies in this. (Also, doesn't dedicate anything to the cultural origin of sphinx, yet makes an entire subtype and event based around the French... neat!) And I have the misfortune of understanding largely how Riddle would argue most of this, because I sought to understand him through everything he decides to share with players and with the world. It would be brash, continuously implying that whoever speaks these arguments is simply an idiot because they haven't even bothered to get to know him. God forbid they might even be American, which means they're an even GREATER idiot because they just don't understand things. He shuts people up by being louder, being bigger, and having more active support within his space than "the other" does. He gets angry that he can't express his opinions in a space because people will criticize him for it, and then shares his blog post about how to take criticism once the chat turns back in his favor. (Because obviously, the people criticizing him were doing so only because they were personally offended by his "critique" of a less skilled artist. Not because he did so with absolutely no tact in a public space.)