Why #NotAtMyTable is Not About Bullying

The instigators of #NotAtMyTable are claim that they're all about stopping 'bullies' and 'abusers' in the RPG hobby. Of course, we all know that's a lie. All they give a fuck about is their little group manipulating people's sense of fundamental discipline to be able to get power over the hobby, in order to enact censorship and blacklisting.  We know this because they've done it dozens of times before now; it's so endemic that I can link you to an earlier blog post of mine about a totally different "outrage" in the hobby and you'll see how it applies in exactly the same way; once again, Totalitarians are trying to use emotional appeals to the mushy middle's sense of decency against them, to take control.

One of the things they claim is that they want RPGs to be 'safe' from sexually suggestive or 'triggering' games. Now let's assess how this is absolute bullshit and what they really want is to use claims of sexism (or racism, or homophobia) to go after games they don't like.

I mean, it should be as simple as asking: "which of the sides in the controversy are have significant numbers in favor of censorship"? That should be enough. But let's say you want some more proof that they're not just totalitarians, but HYPOCRITICAL totalitarians....

The proof is in the Maid RPG.

Maid is a game where you can literally play a preteen slave/maid dressed in a completely transparent uniform, who is sexually pursued by her master and is identified as a 'lolita'.  And this isn't 'can' as in theoretically in some weird stretch the way you could theoretically do something like that in, say, Call of Cthulhu (weird as that would be).  This is 'can' as in "It is explicitly used in the book"!

If the game had been written by, say, James Desborough, they'd be calling for his arrest. Feminists all across the hobby would be demanding that he and anyone ever remotely associated with him be banned for life from producing RPGs ever again. There'd be demands that we censor the entire RPG hobby. There'd be people going to the UN. There'd be fainting-couch outrage like you've never seen before.

Of course, James Desborough, who has been painted as the great 'smut-peddler' villain of the RPG world by the Regressive Left RPG Division, has never, ever, written anything even remotely as extreme as Maid.

But because Maid was NOT written by Desborough, and was instead translated and published by a beloved leader-figure of the Forge/Storygames movement, the game is 'stunning and brave' instead of sick disgusting misogyny proof-of-rape-culture whatever etc. etc.

It proves what a gang of hypocrites the Regressive Leftists are. Content doesn't matter, all that matters is which team you're on.  Desborough writes games that are regular RPGs, and he's a militant rationalist-atheist type who has dared question the appeals to emotion used by the Outrage Brigade and their constant and singular proposed solution of handing control and censorship powers to a small group of self-determined elites, so he is a sick pervert who must be stopped.  But the sick fucks over at Storygames can feel free to write and/or promote RPGs featuring sexual acts Desborough would never touch, and they are just being Sophisticated Artists, because they're part of the special club of self-determined elites who want a Central Planning Committee to rule the hobby and punish the old-school gamers for their sins against inclusion.  They're on the right team, the team that wants the Outrage Brigade in power; and Desborough is not.

And mind you, for my example, I picked someone that you could legitimately point out makes very slightly racy RPGs (again, nothing anywhere remotely close to the likes the 'child slave in a see-through uniform being violated with a broomstick' example from Maid, just more like a Benny-Hill Sexy-Party type of smut). But the Outrage Brigade just uses him as low-hanging fruit; they don't actually need anything like that to try to drive out their ideological opponents. It's convenient for them when there is that, but if there isn't, they'll just lie.   Remember kiddies: I wrote an RPG about culturally-accurate Indian Mythic History, and put the first ever transgender heroic character on the cover of an RPG, and they STILL spent months claiming I was a racist and a transphobe.

It's all a fucking shell game of empty hypocrisy. And the good news is, the enormous backlash on Twitter against the stupid fucking hashtag is a sign that the Mushy Middle finally isn't falling for it. They've figured out the trick, and they know that these claims that it's just about making people be nice are really a shallow power grab, and the accusations (often repeated over the recent history of the #NotAtMyTable hashtag by increasingly desperate Regressive Leftists) that if you dare question their campaign it must mean you are a pro-bullying racist sexist bigot yourself has finally been seen through as a pathetic scare tactic.

It's 2016, bitches, and the hobby isn't falling for your crap anymore. Time to run and hide, your scam is up.  Tell your comrades that the Pundit is coming and his Proxy Army is back in town.


RPGPundit

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