OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.
This is, for what it's worth, the line that I think I most often see from pro-life organisations and activists. This might be just a factor of mostly encountering it in Catholic contexts, but the line is usually not that we just need to change this law, but rather that abortion is a symptom of a wider 'culture of death'. This sort of idea. However, evangelicals also make a similar argument (see parts three and five), emphasising the importance of shifting the moral vision of the country and building a culture that values life as such.
This would also be the argument against meduka's claims about eugenics - that is, even if we were inclined to believe the claim that abortion is eugenic, life is life, and we don't believe in killing people over a few points of IQ or a skin colour or a genetic disease. Human life qua human life is sacred, and the fact that there are people who would see to quantify and judge the worthiness of any particular life on criteria like these is just evidence of how far we are from a true culture of life. The rot runs deep.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.
Full credit for noting this - I think it's an important observation. For all that abortion is presented as a women's issue, and much of the rhetoric around it seems to presume a gender gap (men shouldn't tell women what to do, if men could get pregnant abortion would be legal instantly, etc.), historically trends have been pretty much the same. It's generally around half-and-half irrespective of gender. There's recently been a spike in the female pro-choice rate specifically, likely attributable to Dobbs and its immediate aftermath, but I'd bet that this isn't a permanent realignment and it will even out again given time.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
The term certainly appears starting from the 60s, though, it must be said, not incredibly prominently. I don't think this by itself proves very much, though. "Cultural Marxism" in the sense of 2010s-and-20s culture wars just doesn't seem like something that has much to do with a handful of 1960s academics.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
There is some diversity - a few months ago they wanted to raise human rights abuses in China. However, they do remain strongly opposed to the US alliance in a way that I think rounds out to giving China what they want - it feels like they think it's the Cold War still. And just today we've seen Greens MPs attend and encourage that rally against the arms expo in Melbourne. (Sorry for the poor quality article, but others don't seem to be up yet.) I remember interviews like this as well - I think the Greens at this point are functionally isolationists.
Suffice to say I think that isolationism in the face of Chinese hegemony in Asia is not a wise move for Australia.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I think I preferenced the Greens once in the mid-2000s, in one of the first elections I voted in, but I went on from that to be a pretty consistent Labor voter, and only over the last few years I am drifting towards the Coalition. The thing is, in the 2000s the Greens genuinely seemed credible - anti-war looked great when Iraq was still going on, environmentalism is a concept that it's easy to have warm and fuzzy feelings around, and their stance on social issues at the time was basically secularism and gay marriage. Of course, I may also have been fooled or just an idiot back then.
Now, though, I feel more aware that they're just, well, kind of nuts. They're currently all-in on Gaza, they're demanding rent and price controls, they're the loudest supporters of the Voice and treaty, they oppose the US alliance, and they suck up to China as well. Pieces like this are pretty eye-opening for me.
I just don't want to let those people anywhere near the levers of power.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Yes, I'm venturing this not as a definite claim about the world, but rather as a tentative theory or an impression that definitely needs to be explored further. Still, I think it aligns with the much-repeated observation that men are more thing-oriented and women more people-oriented. I'm also probably influenced by the bit with Mars and Venus in Perelandra, where the protagonist perceives Mars, the masculine figure, as like a sentinel standing atop a wall, gaze reaching out towards the horizon, in whose shadow we shelter; and Venus, the feminine figure, like a mother looking downwards and inwards, encircling and nurturing those she cares for. The male looks outwards and the feminine looks inwards. Likewise when people like Chesterton criticise Buddhism for being effeminate, they put that in terms of its interiority, its looking-inwards at the expense of engagement with the world. (I do not think this is a fair criticism of Buddhism, though, and I actually regard the Buddha as quite a masculine figure.)
But outwards/inwards is just a metaphor - it's not quite what I'm trying to express. It's something like a direction, a mental mode. Possibly gender isn't the right language to describe it at all, since as I said, I think all people use both the masculine and feminine modes, and it's merely that the genders traditionally tend more in one direction. However, I struggle to find language that quite captures the distinction I'm drawing. That could indicate that I'm just conceptually confused and that this is nonsense; or that the distinction I perceive is genuinely difficult to pin down.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I can't disagree with that. The Greens have always been fruit loops, but they've gotten significantly crazier lately. The chance of them controlling the balance of power is terrifying.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Yes, compulsory preferential voting means that elections are decided by fighting over the middle, which means that both major parties have strong structural incentives to moderate and focus on the swing voter.
Possibly something like that is what they're up to now - Labor pick a fight with the CFMEU, who are traditionally their allies, on the logic that this will sway centre-right voters, and lefties who flee to the Greens are going to preference Labor above the Coalition anyway, so maybe it will all work out? But given their dismal primary vote, I really doubt Labor can afford a strategy like that for long, especially after the last few years have been disastrous for them both in terms of big symbolic actions (the Voice) and in terms of kitchen table issues (they just don't seem able to beat cost-of-living). I really would not like to be in the Labor party room right now.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Notably this was how Anthony Albanese won the 2022 election in Australia - the small target strategy, banking on Scott Morrison's unpopularity after a series of scandals to shift votes over to him.
We live in an age of negative partisanship - "I'm not the other guy" is the dominant strategy on most sides of politics right now.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
This isn't really about CWR as such, or an attempt to answer the question, but I'm fascinated enough by something to write about it anyway.
Specifically, what's the idea of masculinity here?
Where can actual men engage in unrestricted intellectual discussion in a truly properly masculine fashion without effeminate finger-wagging jannies from California all too frequently interfering to whine about "antagonism" (the very essence of the competition of ideas, and therefore impossible to ban from it) or whatever as they do here (again, not as bad as in the past, but still too much)?
Pardon me if this is uncharitable, but I think this mistakes aggression for masculinity, or perhaps more importantly, for manliness. We define the term 'man' not only in distinction from 'woman', but also in distinction from 'child'. "I have become a man" suggests maturity and growing up. It also suggests some idea of virtue - indeed, the etymology of virtue, the Latin virtus, quite literally means 'manliness' (from vir, 'man' in the sense of adult male human).
What is discussion in a 'truly masculine fashion'?
I don't think it can be identical with mere aggression. If I think about unrestrained aggression, I typically picture children. I think of a kid throwing a tantrum. Shouting swear words and angrily jumping up and down might be behaviour we indulge in a child, but it's generally seen as shameful for an adult to do that. On the contrary, if I think about virtuous manly behaviour, I often think of tightly restrained behaviour - I think of self-discipline and control. To give a pop culture example, a few years back there was that popular Critical Drinker video talking about adult behaviour in Star Trek, and that is to say, often, manly behaviour. Spock and Kirk are engaging in a more masculine fashion when they're controlled and professional. Wild, violent outbursts like those of the reboot series make them look less manly, and more like children.
Rather, my sense of masculine virtue in discursive norms involves things like courage, honesty, resilience, patience, self-control, responsibility, and so on. This may lead to contentious arguments - it doesn't conceal or hide disagreement - but neither does it lead to petty screaming or tantrums. On the contrary, it keeps emotional responses under control, and is not driven by petty egotism either.
Sidenote: I have a theory that one day I'll write out in greater length that there's something in male psychology that tends to be more other-regarding, focused on the exterior to the self, even self-forgetful at times, whereas there's something in female psychology that's often more self-regarding, more aware of and focused on self-presentation, and the connections between self and other. This strikes me as a trend rather than an absolute, but on the intuitive, gut level, something feels basically 'male' to me in an outwards-looking posture towards the world, getting fascinated by things and even endowing them with spiritual value, whereas something feels more 'female' to me in focusing on one's representation of the self, in who-one-is-to-others, and so on. I venture this only as a half-baked thought I need to work on more, but if so, it would be consistent with a picture of virtuous masculine discourse that's about firmly and with a sense of practical discipline working out a shared problem, whereas virtuous feminine discourse would represent a different mode, perhaps more about shifting or aligning perceptions in an interconnected social web. That said, I say that conscious that actually-existing human beings shift between masculine and feminine modes at times as needed, and even that I myself use the feminine mode more often than most men.
Anyway, I bring it all up because having visited CWR (though never commented there), the impression I had was that it wasn't particularly manly at all. It tended more towards what I guess I'd call the childish mode, which is all about giving voice to immediate emotional reactions and visceral responses. It was more aggressive, and, if you're not used to it, it can be easy to confuse the masculine mode with mere aggression, but that does not ultimately equate to masculinity. That's boyishness, not manliness.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Signalling incentives exist on the right as well as the left - being the edgiest and most daring in your online bubble is more immediately appealing than going for any kind of mass appeal. Better to be captain of a small boat than a junior technician in a flotilla.
I don't really have a strong take on Darryl Cooper, whom I'd never heard of prior to this post, but certainly I think Tucker Carlson makes more sense if you interpret him as basically uninterested in winning elections or in getting public policy done. Being king of his own small mountain is more lucrative, and probably more emotionally satisfying as well.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Hm, I think you point at something correct, but I'd like to precisify it a bit more? It seems to me that there are at least three rough factions in this general area, which I'm going to name the Free Lovers, the Paedophiles, and the Family Abolitionists. There's overlap between all three camps, to a degree that should probably concern every non-paedophile here, but it makes sense to distinguish between them, to me.
The Free Lovers are straightforward enough - more sex, fewer rules, inhibition and repression are the enemies, marriage and monogamy are at best not for everyone and at worst inherently oppressive, patriarchal institutions. I don't think they're as large a force today as they were historically, but we can see their descendants around parts of the LGBT movement. Any time people start talking about sexual freedom or relational authenticity, they're likely drawing from this well. The core idea is that one's innate sexual desires are good and should be liberated, and ideologies that impose limits or controls on one's sexual behaviour are inherently oppressive. Normally the Free Lovers still accept some minimal limits around consent or harm, but when they don't, you get...
The Paedophiles, whose primary goal is, well, something I'm a little too delicate to discuss openly. Uncharitably they're just people with twisted fetishes who want to use children for their own satisfaction. Charitably, they have a high view of the agency and responsibility of children and think that children can meaningfully make sexual choices, and frequently other choices as well. For the most part this group are pariahs today, but again they had more influence historically (cf. that French petition in the 70s), and I think you can sometimes see some of their ideas transposed into non-sexual realms - think of e.g. David Runciman advocating lowering the voting age to six years old. (Disclaimer: I have no reason to think that Runciman himself has any inclination towards paedophilia or child abuse. He is merely an example of a 'serious' thinker with a high view of children's agency and moral responsibility.)
The Family Abolitionists believe that the family is an inherently damaging, controlling institution and want to abolish it in favour of some sort of shared or communal approach to child-rearing. The overlap with the Free Lovers' criticism of marriage is clear enough, as is a strategic alliance with the Paedophiles, for whom removing children for parents' protection, or sharing access to children, is desirable. Sophie Lewis is a good example. I don't think I'd agree that this is anything like 'the default position' now, but it's trendy and it sounds progressive, so nobody argues against it, but it's so obviously revolting or enraging to normal people that it has zero chance of happening outside the odd hippie commune. It's ideally placed to be an intellectual fad - it sounds radical, embracing it shows how edgy you are, but it will never happen and thus you will never be on the hook for anything.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I enjoyed it! Thank you for the window into that short period of history where sincere, self-confident Marxism-Leninism seemed to be on the ascendant, and proudly evangelised itself as such.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Yes, it's demonstrably the case that even saying it's all the perfidious Jews is allowed, so I struggle to think of any group you couldn't safely name.
In this case I don't think he means the Jews, if only because I don't particularly associate them with the promiscuous free-love element of the left? Sexual liberation is definitely an element of many of these left-wing movements, and at times that has gone in grossly repulsive directions (I think particularly of the French petition half a century later), and I'm not surprised that it was around in Russia during the revolution, no more than I'm surprised that it's still around today, but I struggle to point to a single demographic that's clearly responsible.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I think emphasising the emotional tone of the imagery is an important point. I don't think tankies would exist if the yellow hammer-and-sickle on the red flag wasn't such a striking image, or if Katyusha wasn't such a banger, or if there weren't those giant statues of Lenin, or if socialist realism wasn't a recipe for such great posters. No one wants to drape themselves in the imagery of a pathetic loser - they want to drape themselves in the imagery of strength and purpose. The same aesthetic ingredients that make Red Alert such a fun game also make Soviet or communist ideology appealing.
Communism today still has a lot of left-over cachet from the Cold War, where it was perceived as the alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy. If you don't like the current system and want something else... it's there. I don't think it made it to the main blog (frankly I think the ACX readership has very questionable taste in book reviews), but the 2024 ACX reviews included Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, which I thought helped to convey the way that it was the default alternative. If you didn't like capitalism, it was the natural place to go.
In the current moment, memory of Cold-War-era horrors is fading, and surviving communist states from that era are either dismissable or have reformed in less communist ways (most obviously China, of course, but modern Vietnam is probably a more typical example), but there's still a lingering sense that communism is the alternative.
The combination of that status as the most prominent alternative, a really cool or appealing aesthetic, and a simple and intuitive pitch makes it relatively easy to sell.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I wouldn't recommend doing the exact same thing, no. One theme I was surprised to find when I looked up a lot of early anti-communist material was the regular return to the idea of a threat to our women (Marx himself tries to dispute this in The Communist Manifesto - it seems like "they will socialise your wife!" was an accusation with some traction), and I'd guess messaging that invokes a kind of male chivalry is an adaptation to a male-only electorate. If the demographic I'm trying to convince includes women, I would probably take a different tack.
In other words, you're right that it's highly contextual - in general it seems like the strategy for anti-communists is to associate communism with other bad things as much as possible (atheism, envy, rapaciousness, poverty, lack of patriotism, etc.), and for communists is to associate communism with good things (equality, fairness, economic growth, anti-fascism, etc.). The objective merits of communist policies is rather beside the point. The key question is what you can plausibly tie communism to in the minds of the public.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
You could look at early Cold War anti-communist education to get an idea of what worked, I think?
Unfortunately a lot of what worked probably isn't going to strike you as all that rational. "Communism is atheist" is a popular argument that was very influential, even though it's technically fallacious. Something like this sounds a lot like complaints about woke indoctrination today, except it emphasises atheism more.
Likewise they hate our freedom, they're all sketchy conformist drones, they conquered eastern Europe and massacred people, and so on. Images are often more powerful than words - the argument that communism is bad for economic growth and development sounds very dry, but this 1909 poster makes that argument in the form of a hideous ape-monster strangling attractive virginal Britannia, and that's the sort of thing that gets lodged in your head. The spectre of attacks on women is popular.
If you want a substantive argument you'll need more than that, of course, but in general the masses are convinced not so much with reason, but with emotion. You can overdo it, and lurid imagery like some of the above posters can get too absurd to work, but in general what you want to do is clearly link, in people's heads, the idea of communism and the idea of poverty or misery. A modern equivalent of this is probably people talking about Venezuela. "Those communist ideas sound appealing but this is what they lead to" followed by Venezuela is a sensible strategy, even if it might also be getting a bit too cliché to work.
I'd also suggest that the contrast can be effectively heightened the more that capitalism is seen to be working and delivering on promises of prosperity. Anti-communist propaganda in the Cold War went hand-in-hand with a positive message of American prosperity. That's much easier to push if the economy is actually doing well and people feel that their quality of life is improving. So having something positive to point to is a big help too - for every "evil empire" to scare you, a "morning in America" to console and inspire you.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
That's what I think of as the consequentialist argument for capitalism.
My experience has been, arguing with communists, that there are basically two planes on which that the argument can occur.
The first plane is the consequentialist one, which usually comes down to empirical data. Forget concerns about abstract justice - what happens when these systems are actually instituted? Which is best for living standards, or economic growth, or whatever your own preferred measurement is? This approach makes a lot of looking at the USSR in practice, or making case studies of one country or other changing its policies - China's embrace of markets, say, or occasionally people try to argue from the welfare state in the direction of socialism. The point is that you just don't worry too much about theoretical justifications, but only look at outcomes.
The second plane is the opposite - the deontological, or in-principle, side of the argument. Here you argue that there's something intrinsically morally wrong with one system or other, or a sacred moral rule that's transgressed. This might be a Marxist using the labour theory of value to argue that capitalists exploit workers by capturing a portion of the value of their labour, or anarcho-capitalist or Randian arguments about how taxation is theft might also fall into this category. I'd say a typical capitalist argument here might be something like the Wilt Chamberlain argument - here the principle is that voluntary transactions shouldn't be obstructed.
In practice I find people tend to operate on both planes, or shift between them strategically. I often find communists or socialists begin with an inchoate feeling of injustice, and then jump between planes as needed to try to explain it. This can be very base (it is deeply frustrating to talk to people who seem to reason "there are injustices in the present system, therefore communism"), or it can be dressed up a bit (for instance, the first third or so of Robinson's Why You Should Be a Socialist is dedicated to pointing at current problems and feeling disgusted at them), but the starting moral impulse is to look around and say, "Something is wrong here! This isn't how it should be. For some people to be rich like this while others are so desperately poor is wrong."
That starting impulse is one I have a lot of sympathy for, especially as, at its best, it's rooted in real empathy. Where I depart from communists/socialists is at the "therefore communism" stage. The observation "this is bad" may be valid, but it's not enough by itself. That observation needs to be interrogated and clarified, and then solutions critically evaluated to see if they would actually improve things.
I'll need to check the books when I get home, but off the top of my head, orcs themselves have never been Always Chaotic Evil. The language used for monster alignment has changed across the editions, but I believe you're correct that 3e introduced the 'Always [Alignment]' phrasing, and in 3e, orcs were not Always Chaotic Evil. Always Chaotic Evil was reserved for demons and a few other similar characters - monsters that are by definition evil.
Even prior to 3e, though, there was some nuance with orcs - they were presented as usually evil, but not always, and sometimes they were presented with a valid perspective of their own. I remember the origin story for orcs in 2e Forgotten Realms was reasonably sympathetic to them, suggesting that maybe the 'goodly' races really did screw them over, and orc aggression and hostility is a response to an initial divine division of the world that relegated them only to the wastelands, and miserable lives of violence and poverty therein.
More when I have the old sourcebooks to hand, I think, but as far as I'm aware now, ACE orcs is a strawman.
But as I grouched a little while back, I think today, even among D&D players, there's widespread illiteracy as to D&D's past, and a tendency for people to substitute an imagined caricature of mindless hack-and-slash for the game as it actually existed. ACE orcs fit the narrative if you believe that everything prior to 5e was troglodytic monster-murdering with no hint of story.
EDIT:
Okay, here we are.
AD&D1e and AD&D2e both just list orcs' alignment as "Lawful Evil". AD&D doesn't give frequency, but it does say in the introduction to the Monster Manual 1e "ALIGNMENT shows the characteristic bent of a monster to law or chaos, good or evil or towards neutral behavior possibly modified by good or evil intent", and for the Monstrous Manual 2e "ALIGNMENT shows the general behaviour of the average monster of that type". As such I don't regard either manual as indicating that all orcs are necessarily Lawful Evil.
I don't have the 3.0 Monster Manual to hand, but I do have 3.5. 3.5 lists orcs' alignment as "Often chaotic evil", so not only have they swapped from law to chaos, they've also qualified it. The glossary at the back of the book clarifies that "Often" means "The creature tends towards the given alignment, either by nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40-50%) of individuals have the given alignment, but exceptions are common."
The 4e Monster Manual just gives orc alignment as "Chaotic Evil" without further qualification, but the introduction does note explicitly "A monster's alignment is not rigid, and exceptions can exist to the general rule".
The 5e Monster Manual also just gives orc alignment as "chaotic evil", though its introduction also states, "The alignment specified in a monster's stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster's alignment to suit the needs of your campaign. if you want a good-aligned green dragon or an evil storm giant, there's nothing stopping you."
As far as I can tell orcs have never been rigidly boxed into a single alignment. They have always been presented with an evil alignment as the most common default for them, but anybody who says that orcs were ever presented as ontologically evil in all cases no matter what is telling a falsehood.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
If anything, I find The Last Jedi a very strange film to use as a vehicle for that criticism? The female characters in The Last Jedi aren't very good role models, even if all you value is strength!
The major female characters in The Last Jedi are Rey, who achieves very little in the story and whose primary moral struggle is to do with resisting the appeal of sexy Adam Driver; Rose, who is a sidekick whose big heroic moment is saving the life of the man she's in love with; Holdo, who makes a series of bad calls, is overwhelmed by the First Order, and has to sacrifice her ship just to give the other characters a chance to escape; and Leia, who we last see nodding to a young male hero and telling everybody to follow him. If you look at the heroes whose actions actually drive the plot or save the day, it's mainly Finn, Poe, and Luke.
It’s great to show the good guys being led by strong, confident women, but it would surely be more progressive if these leaders were not—whisper it—so incompetent. I mean, the First Order senior staff seem pretty incompetent, and exist in a state of constant sniping, upheaval and infighting, but there is, surely, a big difference between a (male) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they’re all so ruthless and personally ambitious, and a (female) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they just don’t have the ability to plan six hours into the future. Add to this that the female officer corps all have really great hairdos, and we are surely encroaching on Egregious Sexism.
I don't know, I just feel like if I were going to pick a mediocre-to-bad film to defend to the hilt on the basis of it having good role models for girls in the form of its strong female characters, maybe I wouldn't pick a film in which the two female leads are motivated in large part by their attraction to more proactive male leads, and where the female supporting characters are demonstrably bad at their jobs.
I might choose a film that actually has compelling, three-dimensional female characters with well-rounded motivations, who overcome various obstacles through their talent, courage, and virtue; or failing that, at least a film with female leads who actually succeed at things.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
That sounds fair, then. Perhaps when I finish it I'll talk about it in the regular fun thread or something. Thank you for the interesting diversion!
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
The impression I have is that Tural is meant to be something like Eorzea, only a generation or two onwards. It's pretty clear there are deep tensions and divisions under the surface, and Tural is not as harmonious as it presents itself as. It's only tenuously unified out of a combination of love for and fear of Gulool Ja Ja, who is the Warrior of Light of his society. Much like Eorzea, it seems like Tural was a group of quarrelling tribes and city-states, and it was brought together out of crisis by a superlatively-capable warrior-adventurer. That sounds like, well, what you the player character did for Eorzea. But now it's fifty years later, Gulool isn't going to last forever, and what he accomplished may well fall apart.
Possibly I'll be disappointed later on, but right now I don't get the feeling that Tural is necessarily all that utopian. Before this FFXIV has generally been good at finding the balance with societies, I think. Even the sympathetic city-states (all six Eorzean states, Doma, Hingashi, Bozja, etc.) have skeletons in their closet and some unsympathetic traits, and likewise even the villainous nations (mostly Garlemald) have been shown to possess virtues, and be home to many likeable characters. I think the closest we get to purely utopian/dystopian societies is in Shadowbringers, with the Crystarium and Eulmore, and even then Eulmore's corruption is mostly due to Vauthry, and once he's removed you can appeal to the people and they start to make rapid improvements. That mostly leaves the Crystarium as the most one-note society in the game, and I'd happily say that the Crystarium is the blandest, least interesting civilisation in the game. I suppose there's the Ancients as well, but I think the Ancient society is pretty clearly depicted as horribly, dangerously flawed, and even perhaps dystopian in its own way, simultaneously naive and immensely, recklessly powerful. (I have run into people reading the world of the Ancients as uncomplicatedly utopian and good, but I question those people's reading comprehension.)
This is actually one of the reasons why I think FFXIV's overall portrayal of the world is pretty conservative-friendly, or even surprisingly anti-progressive - there are no utopias, and social improvement is only possible through slow, incremental work, which seems to always require renouncing simple binaries of good and bad, or oppressor and oppressed. This often requires tools that would be unsatisfying to a progressive mindset - I remember enjoying the way that both Ala Mhigan/Ul'dahn and Garlean/Thavnairian relations, for repairing those states, explicitly had to be built on capitalism and mutual advantage. Watching Nanamo gradually figure out how to make the Syndicate work for the common good, to wield the power of coin, of market and profit, for the good was very satisfying. Plus I think it's relevant that multiple sympathetic states (Gridania, Ishgard, Hingashi) are relatively anti-immigrant and isolationist, and this is not presented as something we need to change or fix. Gridania has every right to limit its borders to what it believes that its natives and the forest can support. The Hingans have a perfect right to not allow foreigners deeper into their country. This isn't a blandly progressive worldview.
If nothing else, the Ancients' major sin is hubris - they act like gods, fail to reckon with their own moral flaws or capacity for evil, and assume that they have an unlimited right to remake the world to suit their needs. The one good Ancient, Venat, is also the one who's a monotheist - the one who, in her key character moment, confesses to you that she perceives the presence of some kind of divinity beyond her. That seems a lot like a Judeo-Christian Fall narrative, up to the point where the Ancients' Babel collapses, and many nations - or parallel worlds - are spread out from the ruins. Venat's appearance as a kind of guardian angel with a flaming sword, guarding the way back to the Tree of Life, only fits that further. And it seems relevant that Endwalker's finale, the conclusion to the grand story they'd been building for years, echoes the conclusion to 1.0, in that the universe is saved by the power of prayer.
Certainly there are lots of fan readings out there that disagree with me, but I think there's a lot of room for reading FFXIV's story, at least from ARR through to Endwalker, as being quite conservative.
Much of that tracks with how I feel so far. I don't mind it being a lower-stakes expansion, and indeed I think that's a good thing. For comparison, the last few Elder Scrolls Online expansion stories - Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom - went from a demon lord seeking to destroy the world to a fun vacation and peace conference on a resort island to a demon lord who might accidentally destroy the world, and the most fun expansion was the low-stakes one at the resort. FFXIV in particular seems badly in need of lowering the stakes somewhat and just exploring an interesting corner of Hydaelyn.
My negative feeling on Dawntrail at the moment is mainly just that it's, well, boring. Tural and Tuliyollal are noticeably bland and uninspiring places compared to the last places we've been, the villains are tight-lipped and boring, and the heroic characters we meet are likewise very paint-by-numbers. I don't hate Wuk Lamat, but I'd tend to agree that she is badly over-exposed, particularly because there's just not a lot there, in terms of personality? She'd be fine as a supporting character, I think, but she's being asked to hold up the entire plot, and that's too much for her.
Part of me wonders if it's just that I've played too much FFXIV and I'm tired of it. After all, Norvrandt was also pretty uninspiring for most of the setting (Eulmore excepted; it was delightfully macabre). We're coming off several expansions with Zenos playing a major role, and Zenos was awful. However, I can't help but think that something is wrong, because I am really struggling to find the motivation to play Dawntrail. I just don't care about this place or about any of these people. Where I cared about Ishgard's fate, or about Ala Mhigo's struggle for freedom, here I just do not care who becomes Dawnservant.
Anyway, I asked because I wondered if there was a 'culture war' angle? If Dawntrail is just a mediocre and boring expansion, then that's fine - I've played a lot of MMORPGs and they all spin their wheels sometimes. But is there anything else inflaming fan feeling? You mention a 'Trans Superstar' perception, for instance. I vaguely heard something negative about Wuk Lamat's voice actor, but I can't immediately find any evidence of anything controversial connected to Sena Bryer (edit, googled, apparently Bryer is trans, but... meh, you can't tell that from anything in-game), and the acting itself, in-game, is... fine? Not amazing, but fine. (Plus, well, remember ARR? FFXIV has had some very bad voice acting in the past, and Wuk Lamat's nowhere near ARR-Minfilia.) I also ran into criticisms of Dawntrail's story for being a very generic "yay for multiculturalism!" story, but then, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker all had major subplots or even central story arcs about uniting disparate communities or convincing old enemies to understand each other and make peace or some variant on it, so again I feel like the issue there isn't the premise, but rather the execution. It's not that understanding and seeking harmony between diverse local factions is bad, because we've been doing that in-game for a decade - it seems, at least to me, just that Tural is boring.
I admit I find the culture war angle with FFXIV a bit odd, because otherwise I would have thought that FFXIV is the most, for lack of a better term, 'conservative' of the major MMOs currently on the market.
I'm inclined to agree - there's a kind of reservation of certain issues to the female realm, whether for better or for worse, which is almost bipartisan. I don't think it's as simple as saying that choices that exclusively or disproportionately affect female bodies are reserved to women, since that in itself involves a questionable judgement about male involvement in sex and reproduction, and a decision to minimise that involvement, but certainly those choices, around sex, birth, child-rearing, etc., have been moved into that realm. So even though there are just as many pro-life men as women, the pro-life movement has made the probably correct tactical decision to make women its most visible leaders.
Although... the problem they sometimes run into is that the pro-life movement is heavily Catholic, and the leadership class of the Catholic Church is predominantly male. They can't just set aside Evangelium Vitae or something, which is unavoidably by a male pope, so they have to face this accusation. I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
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