I've been thinking about conflict vs mistake theory lately, especially since the events of October in Israel last year.
I've been particularly trying to understand where support for Palestine (and Hamas, implicitly or not) comes from. Much has already been written about this of course, whether it's the bigotry of small differences or the trap of the "oppressor/oppressed thinking," the hierarchy of oppression, and so on.
What I found striking and want to discuss here though is the strain of thought responding to "how can LGBT+ support Palestine" by declaring, e.g., from Reddit:
It's easier to focus on getting gay rights when you're not being genocided.
Or from a longer piece:
The interviewer asks him, “What’s your response to people who say that you’re not safe in Palestine as a queer person?” Dabbagh responded, “First and foremost, I would go to Palestine in a heartbeat. I have no fear. I love my people and my people love me. And I want to be there and be part of the movement that ends up leading to queer liberation for liberated Palestinian people. If you feel that such violence exists for queer people in the Middle East, what are you doing to change that for that community? The first step is the liberation of Palestine.
I don't claim it's the most common strain of thinking, but to me this largely cashes out as "they are homophobic because of oppression/imperialism/Jews." As an aside, contrast with the way "economic anxiety" plays out in the US.
The part I want to focus on is this kind of blend of mistake and conflict theory -- there's conflict, yes, but it has a cause which can be addressed and then we'll all be on the same side. I'm skeptical of this blend, which seems to essentially just be false consciousness: if not for an external force you would see our interests align.
I think this mode of thinking is becoming increasingly popular however and want to point to the two most recent video games I put serious time into (but didn't finish) as examples: Baldur's Gate 3 and Unicorn Overlord (minorish spoilers ahead)
[Again, minorish spoilers for Unicorn Overlord and Baldur's Gate 3 ahead]
Baldur's Gate 3 was part of a larger "vibe shift" in DnD which I won't get into here except to say I think a lot of it is misguided. Nevertheless, there are two major examples of the above:
The Gith'Yanki are a martial, fascist seeming society who are generally aggressive powerful assholes. A major character arc for one of your team Gith'Yanki team members however, is learning she had been brainwashed and fed lies not just about the leader of the society and her goals, but also the basic functioning of the society. For instance, a much-discussed cure for a serious medical condition turns out to be glorious euthanasia.
The Gith have been impressed with a false consciousness, you see, and your conflict with them is largely based on a misunderstanding of the facts.
More egregious is the character Omeluum, who you meet early in the adventure. Omeluum is a "mind flayer" or "illithid":
Mind flayers are psionic aberrations with a humanoid-like figure and a tentacled head that communicate using telepathy. They feast on the brains of intelligent beings and can enthrall other creatures to their will.
But you see, even these creatures turn out to be the victim of false consciousness--Omeluum is a mind flayer who has escaped the mind control of the "Elder Brain." After fleeing, he happily "joined the good guys." You might think it's an issue that his biology requires he consume conscious brains, but fortunately he only feeds
on the brains of creatures of the Underdark 'that oppose the Society's goals', and wishes to help others of his kind by discovering a brain-free diet.
In the world of DnD (which has consciously been made to increasingly mimic our own world with mixed results), it seems that but for a few bad actors we could all get along in harmony.
Anecdotally, the last time I ran a DnD campaign it eventually devolved into the party trying to "get to the root" of every conflict, whether it was insisting on finding a way to get goblins to stop killing travelers by negotiation a protection deal with the nearby village which served both, or trying to talk every single cultist out of being a cult member. I'm all for creative solutions, but I found it got pretty tedious after a while.
The other game, Unicorn Overlord, is even more striking, albeit a little simpler. Unicorn Overlord is a (very enjoyable) strategy game where you slowly build up an army to overthrow the evil overlord. What you quickly discover, however, is that almost without exception every follower of the evil overlord is literally mind-controlled. The main gameplay cycle involves fighting a lieutenant's army, then using your magical ring to undo the mind control. After, the lieutenant is invariably horrified and joins your righteous cause.
I should note this is far from unusual in this genre, which requires fights but also wants team-ups. It's a lot like Marvel movies which come up with reasons for heroes to fight each other then team up, like a misunderstanding or even mind control. Wargroove was especially bad at this, where you would encounter a new friendly and say something like "Hello, a fine field for cattle, no?" but the wind is strong or something so they hear "Hello, a fine field for battle, no?" and then you fight. Nevertheless, the mind control dynamic in Unicorn Overlord is almost exclusively the only explanation used.
Funnily enough, I think in these an other examples this is seen as "adding nuance," but I find it ultimately as childish as a cartoon-twirling villain. The villain is still needed in fact (Imperialists, the Evil Overlord, The Elder Brain, The Queen of the Gith), but it's easier to explain away one Evil person who controls everything than try to account for it at scale.
Taken altogether, I can't help but think these are all symptoms of the same thing: struggling to explain conflict. The "false consciousness" explanation is powerful, but seems able to explain anything about people's behavior.
My suspicion is that mistakes and genuine conflict can both occur, but this blended approach leaves something to be desired I think. I had an idea a while ago about a potential plot twist for Unicorn Overlord where it's revealed you aren't freeing anyone -- you're simply bringing them under your own control but you don't notice. That feels a bit like the fantasy all of this is getting at I think: I have my views because of Reasons or Ethics or Whatever, and you would agree with me if not for Factor I'm Immune To.
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Notes -
Interesting thoughts and good post. Not to get sucked into bikeshedding, but in the case of the BG3 examples, I think they're partly justified. Omeluum is very much an aberration (chuckle) even among mindflayers. While it's true he was able to break free from his Elder Brain's control, and he turned out to be pretty nice, I don't think this has many implications for how we should understand mindflayer behaviour or ethics. Notably, there is another very prominent mindflayer in the game who ALSO breaks free from Elder Brain control and is a massive asshole (being vague for late-game spoiler reasons). And in both cases, I think the 'escape' from Elder Brain control was more like a body rejecting an organ than a slave escaping from their masters; I don't think we should infer that all mindflayers would be nice chill people if they could break from Elder Brain control. Also note that even though Omeluum is portrayed generally positively, there are hints of a darker side too, for example when he exults in hearing about your experience on the Nautiloid and talks of the wonders of his civilisation.
Regarding the Githyanki, the trope here is not "democratic revolution", but rather a much older one: Orpheus is the True Heir to the Throne, and he was usurped by Vlaakith, and you can restore him to his rightful place. Baezel is still a hardcore militant quasi-fascist even after she realises she's been lied to, and still serves a fundamentally ethnocentric goal, just to a different master, and neither she nor other Githyanki are about to beat their Silver Swords into plowshares even if they can overthrow Vlaakith. I say this as someone who absolutely fucking loved Laezel's character as a real outlier in how most NPCs are written - her moral system is dramatically different from that of most bleeding-heart contemporary players, but she's not strawmanned or shown to be stupid, and on several occasions her instincts are shown to be better than those of the Gales and Wylls of this world. Finally, perhaps worth flagging that the Vlaakith lore is not Larian's doing, but goes back to 3E, so more than 20 years ago.
I don't think there are many wider conclusions to draw from these specific examples, but I'll note one interesting thing, which is that a common trope among the statistically illiterate is acting like isolated exceptions disprove a general stereotype (actual examples of this in practice are mostly left as an exercise to the reader). This is obviously silly, because even very robust correlations between e.g., gender and grip strength will have some outlier cases. In this regard, I think it's potentially good for big media properties to have lessons like, e.g., "mindflayers are gross and evil, but there is the occasional exception", at least insofar as the second clause is shown not to overrule the first.
Bear in mind that this game is fiction and was created by writers. It's possible that the writer is such a statistically illiterate person and is, in fact, trying to say "the stereotype of evil mind flayers is bad". It's also possible that a reader who isn't one could realize what the writer is trying to do and make that a point of criticism.
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To me what was striking was not the counter examples or the rightful heir trope, it was the explicit invoking of varying degrees of mind control to account for the baseline behavior.
Maybe I’m just reading overly into it but it felt conspicuous not that there was a random mindflayer, but that the reason he was good seemed to be he’d broken free of mind control, implying others might be too.
While I agree that there’s some justification in each case, if you couple that with the recent push to for instance remove alignment associations in DnD, it seems to me a pattern starts to emerge.
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