Silverquill Flavor discussion

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BeneTleilax
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Post by BeneTleilax » 3 years ago

Stinging Study seems to have touched off a lot of discussion about how the Silverquill faction is portrayed. For my part, the underdeveloped bathos of this set leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Strixhaven is in general very cartoonish and lighthearted compared to the typical tone of the game, yet the game is still about killing your opponent with violence and magic, and the cards reflect that as well. Thus many cards imply that high-fatality magical disasters are the norm, yet everyone just laughs it off. This bathetic nonchalance is generally inoffensive, if imo mildly obnoxious in how it undercuts versimilitude; after all, it's not like anyone's been in a Pigment Storm irl.

Where that glib bathos fails is with Silverquill. Making "institutionalized abuse" part of a faction's gimmick and then having everyone laugh it off comes off unnervingly like the "boys will be boys" mentality pervasive in real life. They also do not portray any consequences of this beyond the immediate, which further reads as justifying apathy. What happens to the student in the Stinging Study or the victim of Humiliate down the road? In a school where such things are apparently normalized, you think you would see a lot of these people, but the cards wholly avoid them.

So my problem is not that Silverquill is too dark, but rather that it is too light. If they want to make a Whiplash/Black Swan faction, they'd have to do so carefully, but I don't think it's off the table. I don't think tabletop games are a fundamentally more infantile medium than film or anything else. It would be interesting worldbuilding to play out how that actually affects the dynamics of a faction and the people caught in it. The problem is WotC made Strixhaven both childishly bright and riddled with disturbing ideologies.

tldr: if you make a "culture of abuse" faction in your game, don't also hide all its victims.

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Post by TheAmericanSpirit » 1 year ago

@3drinks this the silverquill lore (referenced in rcotd) that is seen as problematic.
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Post by 3drinks » 1 year ago

TheAmericanSpirit wrote:
1 year ago
@3drinks this the silverquill lore (referenced in rcotd) that is seen as problematic.
Huh. Idk, maybe I'm not that deep, but this reads like massive overthinking. They're just cards. Leave it to the internet to try and dig for something to be mad online about.

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Post by TheAmericanSpirit » 1 year ago

3drinks wrote:
1 year ago
TheAmericanSpirit wrote:
1 year ago
@3drinks this the silverquill lore (referenced in rcotd) that is seen as problematic.
Huh. Idk, maybe I'm not that deep, but this reads like massive overthinking. They're just cards. Leave it to the internet to try and dig for something to be mad online about.
Yeah, I'm also of the opinion that the world has bigger problems to solve. Just figured you might wanna know.
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Post by Legend » 1 year ago

BeneTleilax wrote:
3 years ago
The problem is WotC made Strixhaven both childishly bright and riddled with disturbing ideologies.
Magic has had disturbing elements ever since it's inception. It's also ultraviolent. Bringing actual (fictional) children into the center of that context was a big mistake, IMO. With whom could that possibly resonate, I wonder?
BeneTleilax wrote:
3 years ago
tldr: if you make a "culture of abuse" faction in your game, don't also hide all its victims.
They aren't hidden. They're in the graveyard. 🙃
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Post by BeneTleilax » 1 year ago

Legend wrote:
1 year ago
With whom could that possibly resonate, I wonder?
I mean, Harry Potter fans with surface level media analysis. I get that you're trying to do this like, just asking questions routine, but it's not that deep, man. Hanlon's razor and all that.

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Post by Legend » 1 year ago

BeneTleilax wrote:
1 year ago
Legend wrote:
1 year ago
With whom could that possibly resonate, I wonder?
I mean, Harry Potter fans with surface level media analysis.
That answers that question. 😅 Thanks. I just find it odd that Hasbro would bank on that. But what do I know? *shrug*

EXIT: By "odd", I mean counterintuitive seeing as how PC they tend to be.
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Post by BeneTleilax » 1 year ago

Legend wrote:
1 year ago
By "odd", I mean counterintuitive seeing as how PC they tend to be.
Eh, they're PC in a don't-rock-the-boat, make-steady-returns sense. Maybe you think it's all theatrical, but as a predictive model, people who are just putting on act do behave different from them that really believe they're gonna save the world. You see the same stuff in a lot of YA fiction, or like, anything Disney, where they'll go through the motions of Social Justice or Progressivism or what have you, but under the gestures there's some real wacked-out moral reasoning in their fiction coming from wholly different directions.

In part that's just because they see it all as signals and not any cohesive whole, and that's what I see went wrong with Strixhaven. Someone went "oh hey Harry Potter is still a Marketable Concept that a lot of people are bailing on for reasons largely independent of the setting itself" and then someone else said "oh hey Dark Academia is trending on Pintrest" so they slapped Dark Academia on their twee Magical School World because they figure those are just symbols, that don't don't correspond to, or originate from, any baseline reality. There's not really any politics to it, in the sense of an active ideology; Strixhaven isn't any more left-wing than a hand puppet is a mammal.

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Post by Legend » 1 year ago

BeneTleilax wrote:
1 year ago
Legend wrote:
1 year ago
By "odd", I mean counterintuitive seeing as how PC they tend to be.
Eh, they're PC in a don't-rock-the-boat, make-steady-returns sense. Maybe you think it's all theatrical, but as a predictive model, people who are just putting on act do behave different from them that really believe they're gonna save the world. You see the same stuff in a lot of YA fiction, or like, anything Disney, where they'll go through the motions of Social Justice or Progressivism or what have you, but under the gestures there's some real wacked-out moral reasoning in their fiction coming from wholly different directions.

In part that's just because they see it all as signals and not any cohesive whole, and that's what I see went wrong with Strixhaven. Someone went "oh hey Harry Potter is still a Marketable Concept that a lot of people are bailing on for reasons largely independent of the setting itself" and then someone else said "oh hey Dark Academia is trending on Pintrest" so they slapped Dark Academia on their twee Magical School World because they figure those are just symbols, that don't don't correspond to, or originate from, any baseline reality. There's not really any politics to it, in the sense of an active ideology; Strixhaven isn't any more left-wing than a hand puppet is a mammal.
I agree with all of that. And yeah, I was using "politically correct" loosely. Not literally regarding "politics" and all that entails nowadays. Maybe something like "culturally sensitive" would've been better. Anyways, well put as usual Bene. Thanks again.
“Comboing in Commander is like dunking on a seven foot hoop.” – Dana Roach

“Making a deck that other people want to play against – that’s Commander.” – Gavin Duggan

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