\n\n\n\nSo \u201cThe NPC meme\u201d
\n\u201cThe unthinking unity of the masses, atavistically dedicated to their lifeways in the face of reasoned logic\u201d is\u2026 not traditionally a negative from a fascist perspective?
\nWhat I really think it is, and I\u2019ve been thumping on this for a bit, is the chanverse reinventing an ethic of aristocratic conservatism, or at least landed gentry.
\nLike, combine it with memes about the \u201cNEET/wagecuck\u201d binary, and it really does become \u201cpeople who work for a living are unthinking herd animals, while people who live comfortably off family money, and spend their days discussing and debating among themselves, chasing idiosyncratic hobbies, and playing (often war-simulating) games are an enlightened class of natural rulers\u201d
\nThe NPC meme actually reminds me a lot about the 90s when all my friends and I were playing World of Darkness games about supernatural beings secretly controlling the world. While it cut across demographic and class divides, that appealed the most to kids from fairly well-off bougie families, and they carried that stuff with them as they got older. There was an incredible amount of anti-normie snobbery in that scene since it was where the weird kids got together to brainstorm their own weird-kid chauvinism, and I can think of a couple specific cases where people latched onto this in a really similar way to how the \u201cNPC\u201d thing harkens back to a gamer childhood.
\nThe most obvious match to the NPC thing came from Changeling: the Dreaming, which was a game about playing fae who had access to a secret world of wonder and the imagination and were struggling against the bleakness of the world. It was sort of a metaphor for being young and weird and trying to figure out your life without selling out, so it\u2019s directly analogous. Anyhow, Changeling had these super-normie antagonists called Autumn People who were basically just squares who were so lame and boring that they made the world worse for everyone by being there. But you could turn into an Autumn Person if you sold out to the Man and gave up on your dreams and shit! So this was a powerful image for messed-up kids trying to cope with the expectations of growing up, and to this day I have a friend I speak to infrequently who expresses to me his fears of aging into a life of comfortable futility by asking, \u201cam I an Autumn Person?\u201d
\nBut Changeling was very Theatre Kid, and it wasn\u2019t hugely popular. The game that\u2019s more interesting to me is Mage: the Ascension, which was about occult masters who saw the true nature of reality and gained supernatural powers from their insight and wisdom. Before the Matrix, Mage was where you went for pop cultural \u201cgnostic revenge of the nerds\u201d metaphors. Anyway, in Mage, people who didn\u2019t understand the Cosmic True Nature of Reality were called \u201cSleepers\u201d and were unable to use magic. Mage had a reputation for being popular among people who felt they were much smarter than everybody else \u2013 okay, it was hugely popular, so the playerbase was quite varied, but it especially attracted the same kind of people who liked to imagine living in Galt\u2019s Gulch, for the same reasons. Anyway, what\u2019s fascinating to me is that a lot of these people did grow up to be aristocrats, because I\u2019ve seen many references to Bay Area rationalists and other SoCal technocrats using Mage as a metaphor to describe their own place in society. (For what it\u2019s worth, the guy who\u2019s uneasy about being an Autumn Person is also making something like 180k/y in the Bay Area, in between his midlife crisis gap years to find himself.) Nobody has really talked about this much as far as I can tell, and it\u2019s fascinating to me because with the benefit of hindsight, the stereotype of \u201cMage fans\u201d \u2013 who had a distinct reputation even within WoD players \u2013 perfectly prefigured all this subsequent stuff.\u00a0
\nThe 90s were the last time tabletop RPGs were really big. After that, they were displaced by online gaming. So I can totally believe that the next wave will draw on that metaphor instead.
\n
The World of Darkness thing is interesting because after moving to Portland I realized how specifically PNW parts of it (and FASA\u2019s Seattle-centric Shadowrun, and Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast) had been
Like Werewolf: The Apocalypse was specifically themed around \u201890s PNW ecoterrorism and Battle of Seattle-style altermondialism
And Vampire, how different clans were yuppies and artists and uglies and nature lovers and street brawler anarchists fighting for nightlife dominance…
(and everyone was kinda queer)
I remember one sourcebook talking about the Brujah in a way that was transparently about the mainstream understanding of anarchists as viewed from within the Eugene-PDX-Olympia-Seattle axis, something like \u201cwhile the true ones are all into discussing philosophy and alternate ways of living, most recruits are drawn by the leather jacket brass knuckles \u2018no kings no gods no bedtime\u2019 thing\u201d
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