So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards.

First, in response to my musing on Santa Claus/Batman as the modern good/bad dual gods, pureamericanism pointed me to Nackles: A Christmas Story, which is a 1964 piece specifically about Santa Claus and a dark counterpart as modern gods, it’s always a mixed bag of glee and frustration to see someone’s already taken up your brilliant idea years before you were born.

Second, in response to my Scientology backgrounder, bloodandhedonism pointed me to The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, an alternate history tale of Ayn Rand being inspired by L. Ron Hubbard to found a country in the Congo as Belgian rule collapses. If you don’t know much about Rand or the decolonization of Africa don’t worry, it’s written well enough that you’ll pick up most of what you need, and it was written piece by piece on a message board with inline commentary from the author and readers that’ll fill in the rest, in a manner that reminds me of the old Shadowrun sourcebooks.

Man, the Shadowrun sourcebooks were absolutely great. The system itself was kind of a mess - they used tons of D6s for everything, on I think the business principle that before the rise of gaming-specific stores in the ‘90s obscure dice would be hard for entry-level players to find but books could be gotten from bookstores and D6s from board games or anywhere. This made rolling anything a mess, and also contributed to a system where there was very little range separating a miss and a catastrophic hit. Also between decking, vehicle rigging, and astral plane stuff you too often got into a situation in which only one character could meaningfully participate.

But the sourcebooks! They were written as BBS posts interspersed with comments from a recurring gang of regulars, and the worldbuilding was great. Some of the best books didn’t even add any game mechanics but just explored the dynamics of the world - Corporate Shadowfiles was an incredibly readable introduction to corporate finance, and Dunkelzahn’s Will, which was, well, a will and testament that was basically a long list of adventure hooks, rivals it as my favorite RPG book ever.

I love stuff like that. I think the L5R RPG - also a great world, and with a better system, open-ended D10, skill/attribute::roll/keep, though I don’t know if they ever got dueling to work in a way that made sense - did some good stuff like that too. The Merchant’s Guide to Rokugan, which turned out to be an unnanounced book about the conspiratorial Kolat, for one, though that was in the period after the Clan War when the worldbuilding was sort of stumbling around in the dark tripping over its own feet for a few years.

“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

“Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world”

William Moulton Marston - reputed psychologist, polyamorist, inventor of the polygraph, creator of Wonder Woman. Y'know, wielder of the Magic Rope of Domination +3. (Though in the early stuff she sure does spend a lot of time tied up herself.)

Strong Female Characters, 1940s edition.

Honestly, I love genre fiction for the way that even the really good, well written stuff will be spiced with completely unreflective takes on the author’s kinks.

Like, Kim Stanley Robinson will write these great epic sagas about politics and ecology and postcapitalism and the role of scientists in society, all sorts of settings, and good money says there’s gonna be intergenerational sex in a public bath.

And my, Joss Whedon sure does love stories about psychologically vulnerable teenage girls who beat men up.

(Also pioneer of the “redhead geek girl” thing. Said once it was his explicit goal to make Alyson Hannigan a sex symbol. Plus Christina Hendricks, Felicia Day, Kitty Pryde, Kaylee hired ‘cause she can fix engines on her back with dudes she just met)

And well okay, that’s men. Except that the genre fiction by and for women is like pure kink. Before the internet, grocery and drug stores used to have, just hanging out there, a section full of rape/submission fantasies for women. Now it’s relegated to fanfiction. Or, y'know, the bestseller lists, like Twilight. Or bestselling Twilight fanfiction.