any time you try to tell grognards that yes, the creators of D&D were conservative Christians, they *lose their shit*

like, even if I *hadn't* worked directly with plenty of people who were at TSR back in the day, most of this is very, very publicly available info
like I don't know how much more obvious the Mormon elements in Dragonlance, coming from very Mormon author Tracy Hickman, could be
I don't know how much more obviously Christian-centric the idea that paladins (you know, the historical Christian knights tasked with protecting European purity against Teh Evil Muslims?) are automatically good could be
I don't know how much more obviously Christian the alignment system (which treats "law" as a counter-force to "good") in D&D could possibly be
Like, Gary Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness. Tracy Hickman is a devout Mormon. Dave Arneson was described by everyone who knew him as a "devout Christian" (a term almost never used for liberal Christians).

It's Christians alllllll the way down.
And the idea that the "Satanic Panic" around D&D somehow proves its founders WEREN'T Christian is...

well, let me introduce you to <checks notes> all of Christian history? in which any time Christians disagreed with other Christians on anything they accused them of Satanism?

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More from @Delafina777

4 Feb
So I'm writing a thing on the trio of parables that ends with the prodigal son and like MAN OH MAN do Christian commentators insist that Jews hated shepherds.
Like, I can't even count the number of commentaries that insist that shepherds were "despised figures" for first-century Jews and the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin were designed to insult the Pharisees by comparing them first to a shepherd and then to a woman.
So, as is my wont whenever Christian commentators make a claim about what was normal for first-century Judaism, I decided to try to hunt down their source on this.
Read 37 tweets
4 Feb
are we really surprised that the guy who wrote <checks notes> "pretty as a swastika" abused his Jewish girlfriend?
like people kept dismissing this crap in Marilyn Manson's songs as "he's just doing it for shock value"

and maybe he was

but if we've learned anything from GG/the alt-right/Trump/etc. it's that a LOT of people move from doing it for shock value, or the lulz, to believing it
and more importantly, you don't get to use marginalized people as fodder for your "shock value"

like, I'm literally not sure how dehumanizing a marginalized group for shock value is different from dehumanizing them for an ideology
Read 7 tweets
3 Feb
Welp, I needed to get some writing done and I can't go to a coffee shop, so I found a nice table with a fireplace outside and got a tea and sat down to write.

And, dear reader, I regret to inform you that my curse of having people have terrible conversations near me is unabated.
I'm listening to two dudes go off on how Jeff Bezos's girlfriend is a gold-digger with "secondhand plastic surgery" (what does that even MEAN?) and how he could have any woman in the world so why is he dating her?
It's just astonishing to me that these men seem to hold, unexamined, both the belief that 1) every woman can be bought for enough money and 2) a bazillionaire should not be dating this particular woman because she can be bought.
Read 12 tweets
2 Feb
There's a line in an essay I otherwise really agree with about how the writer doesn't agree with blanket "we need more women in politics" statements because those get us more Marjorie Taylor-Greenes and Lauren Boeberts and I think that's still putting it on women to save us.
We do need more women in politics, full stop. Not because women are going to be better than men, not because women are going to save the country, but because *women are half the country.*
I mean, maybe an individual female politician is someone who will advocate for what we'd hope she'd advocate for, or maybe she's just as bad as the white male politicians around her.
Read 7 tweets
2 Feb
Other than the massive federal logistics failure that created this situation, pretty much everything I've heard and read about this middle-of-the-night vaccination spree involves human beings being pretty great.
The health care workers administering the vaccine were worried that when they called for people 65+ plus to come to the front of the line, they were worried that other people in line would get angry.

Instead, people cheered for them.
People waiting in line in hope of getting one of the about-to-expire vaccines sang Happy Birthday to a stranger waiting in line.

washingtonpost.com/health/2021/01…
Read 14 tweets
2 Feb
oh hey someone beat me to the article I was going to pitch @hey_alma

heyalma.com/dungeons-drago…
I mean my version was going to talk about how the people who created it were conservative Christians and how Christianity is woven throughout the game's understanding of everything from morality to the planes
and how the whole Satanic Panic thing over it was actually an intracommunity Christian conflict, not some sort of Cool Counterculture being persecuted by stodgy religious authorities
Read 5 tweets

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