Stack of Turtles wrote: ↑
October 3rd, 2024, 15:34I think another major reason why they wrote the illithids that way seems to be out of a San Francisco "upload me into an AI" type obsession with transhumanistically achieving immortality. They've completely altered the lore of mind flayers out of a desire to imagine that the mind flayer can still somehow be "the same person", even though, canonically, that person died of having a parasite eat his brain and split his head open. They want it to be an evolution/metamorphosis instead.
Rand wrote: ↑
October 3rd, 2024, 18:06
The issue with devils, mind flayers, orcs, etc being humanized and having excuses made for their nasty behavior is that the developers have committed to the insane idea that there are no inherently evil species.
Note that they do not seem to take issue with inherently good ones existing.
Now, read into that. Their problem is evil being seen as the evil it is... following along?
No?
They feel concern for how the evil creatures are being correctly perceived as evil and righteously destroyed, especially by the classic paladin (a class they have corrupted for similar reasons).
...
...
Still not getting why?
They relate
everything to themselves that has the slightest emotional resonance to their self-crafted image of their personal identity. Get it now?
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I think there's an element of overanalyzation here, and while I think that there may be individuals that exhibit these behaviors, I think the overall explanation is much simpler;
they're simply narcissists that lack critical components of empathy. Everything they portray stems from them and their own experiences, and they are unable to empathize with or treat others as having valid motivations for their opinions, thoughts, or actions. Varying degrees of narcissism is not an uncommon trait, and it is amplified by social media, and easily cluster in social context, exacerbated by many elements of the modern world (lack of meaningful familial relationships, an absence of eye-to-eye conversations and exchanges, no challenging of personal values or such challenges being treated as personal attacks, feelings of disconnectedness from community as a result of multi-ethnic balkanization, absent or indulgent parental figures, etc).
This isn't at all limited to """Baldur's Gate""" """3""" or gaming, but rather seems endemic within modern writing and even public exchanges, and explains not just why they are having difficulties writing "others" (and subsequently may seek to simplify or remove such otherness in an effort to bring concepts down to a level that they can handle) in terms of opinions or temperament or just alien motivations and thought (animals, illithids, etc.), but also the degeneration of writing over the past few decades, as briefly discussed in the chat yesterday concerning Vampire: The Masquerade, where you'll find characters in older material that just wouldn't be "acceptable" today, but that they seem to be plainly incapable of writing as genuine characters altogether, such as the "
The Confederate", "
The Skinhead", or "
The Small-Town Sheriff"; characters that may be archetypes or tropes, but not misrepresented
caricatures, and while arguably "bad people" are still presented as people; the skinhead, for example, is obviously an asshole, but I think that everyone alive during that era and with any experience of skinheads could point at someone they knew and feel "yeah, that sounds about right", and even if they (obviously) don't think that it's representative of all skinheads
it's a character.
I only bring up these specific examples because it came up in a conversation just yesterday and I still had that up on my screen, but there are many other examples of things you'll just not see today. And you have to remember that these ones from Vampire: The Masquerade (2e and Revised) would have been written by people that by-and-large would have been considered leftards at the time. Yet they were obviously capable of writing believable characters and imagine and model "foreign thinking" separate from their own values or motivations.
So no, I don't think it's really that deep, I think it's really just narcissism as a social contagion, combined with the leveraging of social capital in order to reward incompetence (i.e. narcissistic incompetents invite their narcissistic and incompetent friends, as well as the active censorship of people that buck the trend).
