From that point, I created an inviolable social situation for a lot of people, who chanced to read my material but did not feel they could learn from it. At the same time, while affected and often insulted by what I said (your players are not "heroes") they found themselves unable to express their disagreement or anger in actual arguments. This led to a kind of disgruntled respect, most commonly voiced as, "I don't agree with everything he says, but..." — which I've always translated as, "I really fucking hate that guy, but he's better at explaining himself than I am."
That may not be fair. Still, I'm of the opinion that if someone proves me wrong, I'm ready to change my mind... without the need for official papers to justify the change, since if it turns out that the shift in my thinking wasn't warranted in the long run, I'm open-minded and I'll just change my mind again when I have more evidence. On the other hand, these others are of the opinion, "If it seems like someone who has proven me wrong, that's absolutely no reason for me to do anything." Which is how we define "close-minded."
At no time did I ever pretend to be a neutral observer or a "fellow traveller" with respect to D&D. I'm not one of the crowd that gushes when a new splat book arrives or one of those willing to try a new edition just because one happens to get published. I'm not a nostalgia hack crying for the good old days, I won't pretend that the artwork back then wasn't shit, or that the artwork now isn't slop, or even that I give a fuck about the artwork associated with D&D, because artwork isn't a game rule. I'm not one of the community, on purpose. I don't measure my social value against it. I don't wear a badge that says I play D&D at the local club on Wednesdays. I don't like any published edition of this game. I don't respect the designers, I don't respect their efforts, any more than I would respect a writer who turned out a book that was "mostly okay." I have this funny thing about any mechanical product, within which I include games: they have to work exactly as they're designed to work. If they only sort-a do so, then I see it with the same amount of respect I'd have for a chainsaw that won't work in bad weather.
Therefore, I have exactly zero reason to soften my criticism. People who do that wish to preserve their sense of "belonging" to the community, out of fear that they'll be "cancelled." But I'm not part of the community and I don't accept their judgment as regards the value I write. This makes me free to say what I believe, not what I think the reader can handle.
This is why my work feels confrontational to those people who are inherently caught in their need to manage the social costs of possibly saying something they might be judged for. It's also the reason why a lot of writers who were previously concerned with those social costs grow to be so much better when they finally come to a point of, "Fuck it, I want to say what I think." When the reader isn't in the same room as the writer, the writer is free to step out from the gulag the reader unconsciously imposes.
15 years ago, Android made a device that was vastly better than the Apple product of the time — but it was unduly complicated. We bought one for my partner Tamara who had the wherewithal to suss it out, patiently, in all the ways that a modern like product would resist producing... and utterly loved the process of doing so. As did so many others that Android began kicking Apple's butt, forcing Apple to change it's product in order to compete. Success does not come from making things easier and less complicated. It comes from creating something so ingenious and difficult that it will arrest the attentions of a significant part of the population. This is a lesson that business steadfastly refuses to learn.
When we don't have to please strangers off the street at a marketing strategy event, when we don't have to live up to the standards of "ordinary people" who must invent opinions on the fly because they're paid to do so off the cuff, then the boundaries on what we can make and what we can think don't apply. But yes, true enough, if we step outside the "boundaries" and speak our minds without being paid to do so (suggesting, you know, that we've had time to think about it, not like people who have only just witnessed a product for the first time just minutes before), then we come off hostile. It's the default reaction to hearing anything outside the norm being said.
When a reader encounters an argument that clearly reflects a lot of knowledge and reflection, it creates an implicit heirarchy between the writer/speaker and the reader, who understands inherently that they have not given themselves the time to think about it. It exposes a sense of self-erasure, emerging from a belief that everyone's opinion ought have the same value — a delusion that evaporates when someone is able to make multiple considered arguments with one sentence after another, giving the reader no time to disagree with the first or the second when being pummeled with the twenty-third. This discontinuity with what most people think of as "opinion," that being something off the cuff, reads as an attack, a declaration that the reader must be stupid, because intrinsically this is what the reader feels when they're met with an argument they themselves have taken no time at all in their minds to address. This feeling is then ascribed to the "attacker," not the self; the "attacker" is using words "unfairly" to outline "wrong ideas" that are in fact only wrong because they're new and unfamiliar. It all goes to show that the sense of everyone's opinion being the same is really only evidence of how the concept has been widened to include every half-baked thought that people have created in their heads without taking the time to fully cook one.
The result of this is rapidly becoming a form of constraint and censorship: not because the topics or the content is offensive, but because it's being perceived that the "abuse" created by the writer above is not the reader's perspective, but an active failure of responsibility on the part of the writer. Thus, the writer is not expected to mollycoddle the reader. If it feels that the main character of the piece is getting too put upon, it is the writer's responsibility to insert a helper or some form of outside force to intermediate for the character's well-being. It is the writer's responsibility to assure that the world being built doesn't come off as overly unjust, excessively dystopian without a clear sign of an out of some kind, then the writer must hold the hand of the reader lest it become too cold and dark and apparently hopeless. A book that's too uncomfortable, that suggests the character can't remain the same person going out of the novel that they came in as, asks the reader to accept a prospect they're not mentally prepared to consider: that event might force them to change their mind about something or someone. We can't have that as a part of writing fiction in this day and age. It upsets too many readers and affects the perceived bottom line of the publishing concern. They might, gawd forbid, find themselves cancelled.
As a result, we don't dare depict the real world. The real world has consequences. People are irrationally executed or murdered on the streets of ordinary towns for no justified reason at all. We can't have things like that happening in actual writing. Writing is where we go to escape all that, to assure ourselves that everything is all right. That's where the responsibility of a writer lies. Not in giving opinion, but in providing care, and assuring the community being written to that everything is going to be all right, so stop worrying.
This is not something I'm saying that I hope won't happen. This is doctrine being enforced right now.
By all present-day arguments, this post should have begun with a number of trigger warnings. I might have, in the name of responsibility started this post with,
"Warning: this post includes content that implies an intellectual hierarchy and usese sustained argumentation without relief pauses; it further criticises community norms and identity-based belonging, rejection of reader-as-peer framing, depictions of irreversible consequence and moral discomfort, skepticism toward therapeutic models of fiction, critique of publishing economics and cancellation anxiety, dismissal of off-the-cuff opinion as equivalent to considered thought, refusal to provide reassurance or narrative escape and the suggestion that readers may be asked to change their minds."
If I had written this at the top of the post, it would have shown that I care about the reader's safety, and that I do not wish to impose my aggression and lack of concern for the reader's fragility and overall fear regarding subject materials with which they have no previous experience. Because I did not do this, it demonstrates that I am a monster who does not care for your safety, and I wish to take advantage of your fragility and that I wish to increase your fear. This makes me a very irresponsible person and as such, I should not be given a public platform, this blog for example, upon which to express my views.
It is worse than this. Because I am a 61 y.o. white male, who apparently feels zero sympathy for my fellow human, because I'm willing to unrestrainably abuse my reader in this horrid fashion, I am plainly a number of other things besides, all of which draw upon perceived motivations for writing this post that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content herein. Content in the post is irrelevant where these accusations are concerned. I do not need to write the actual words for it to be assumed that I am saying something that does not occur in the text. My age, my gender and my race make those conclusions more than self-evident, by definition.
Importantly, the pre-emptive moral inference that is based on my identity is not condemned; rather, the reader in this culture is congratulated for seeing through my text to a hidden meaning that is, of course, there, which overall makes the words themselves completely meaningless. This might as well have been a post about the lubrication of farm tractors for all the value the words are to the audience unable to wrest themselves from the belief that the purpose of writing is to "make the reader feel good" when it is done. But obviously, not in a "Hallmark white-person way," but in a "concern for my sufferings and personal difficulties" kind of way, which make the reader feel justifiably angry for all the unfairnesses that have been heaped upon them.
And because I chose to be a writer some 50 years ago, this is by default the societal role I'm expected to fulfill. That role is now to reassure the reader that the world is unkind, that the reader's pain is real, legible and morally centred, and that anger is completely understandable because it preserves the reader's identity while avoiding the risk of reconsideration. Any writing that nowadays does not participate in this performative economy is now suspect. By definition.
The novel, Sense and Sensibility, Marianne's "sensibility" is treated as evidence of virtue; it is socially legible, rewarded and defended as authenticity. Elinor's restraint, on the other hand, is read as cold, without feeling and even as a moral deficiency. The novel is more than 200 years old and it describes precisely the same belief that "feeling deeply" confers legitimacy, while actually thinking is a sign of failure to conform properly to the expectations of the masses.
This is what comes of the internet turning the whole world into a drawing room.
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