Dungeons & Dragons Content Creators Summit and Being a Corporate “Shill”
I was invited to attend the Dungeon & Dragons (D&D) Creator Summit in early April, and I happily accepted. I initially wasn’t going to publicly say anything about attending because I didn’t see any need. However, in the last week, numerous conversations on various internet platforms have both tacitly and overtly accused anyone in attendance of being a Wizards of the Coast (WotC) “shill” or “clout chaser” who will agree with anything WotC says because they:
Paid for attendees’ travel.
Included a per diem to cover meals and incidentals while traveling.
Have given past promotional materials to many of the people in attendance.
May offer us further financial opportunities in exchange for refusing to challenge currently proposed ideas and materials.
This is not only reductive, but further divides a community still reeling in the wake of the recent uproar over the leaked, proposed Open Gaming License (OGL) revisions which resulted in targeted harassment of individual studio employees and content creators, especially those of marginalized identities, despite the fact that most of those who were harassed had no authority over the business decisions which caused the initial uproar.
What is a Summit?
Summits are opportunities to have open dialogues and share opinions towards a common goal. They’re common in academia and politics. Good summits are about synthesizing new ideas and challenging old ones. They’re often heavily structured and moderated with specific strategic goals, and the good ones deliberately invite people with vastly different perspectives on a topic.
To put it mildly, summits aren’t something to organize if you want people to pat you on the head and tell you that you’re doing just great! They’re often extremely heated because people passionately and vehemently advocate for their perspectives and priorities which may be in direct opposition to others’.
What’s different about this summit is that it ostensibly possesses a level of transparency which I haven’t experienced before. Summits are often closed-door conversations, so that the people in attendance can speak candidly about topics or strategies currently in the planning stages.
My invitation email specifically stated that the goals of the D&D Content Creator Summit are:
To gather feedback on how the D&D team can improve the experience of making D&D content.
To gather feedback on upcoming products such as the D&D Rules Update and D&D VTT.
For content creators to have more opportunities to interact with D&D staff in-person.
The email invitation specifically stated that this summit is based on consistent feedback WotC has gathered since PAX Unplugged 2022, and that this is a “first step.” Additionally, no one in attendance will be expected to create any content regarding the summit, WotC will not be taking any footage, photos, or recordings of the summit for any purpose, and any information shared with attendees may be shared with the community. That last part is notable, because it means that people in attendance – all of whom have platforms of varying sizes – can frankly offer feedback now and in the future on what is discussed, as well as how D&D incorporates the feedback.
Who is Going? Why Were They Invited?
I don’t fully know who is going. I also don’t know why certain people were invited and others weren’t. No one I know of – outside the organizers and those who helped them – does, and anyone else is likely acting on various degrees of speculation. I strongly suspect questions about inclusion and exclusion criteria will be some of the first things asked at the summit. I’m especially curious about this criteria, given that content creation isn’t my primary job – consultation and education on mental health are, though that role sometimes extends to matters of content creation.
Some creators announced their attendance publicly out of excitement at being included or with the intent of gathering questions from their communities. Some creators kept their attendance privately known only among industry members and friends. Of those I know who have kept their attendance private, the fear of being the target of harassment is a commonly cited reason, but an even more common reason was a desire to attend and push for change.
Many of the people I know who plan on attending are staunch advocates for various topics such as inclusion, accessibility, and representation of marginalized individuals in D&D and other tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). Some of them have directly consulted with WotC before and offered frank feedback as part of their consultant role. Other attendees built their platforms on advocacy and haven’t been shy about calling out perceived missteps. In short, they’re not people who are afraid to voice their opinions.
It’s worth noting that – of the attendees I know – nearly every single one is marginalized in one or multiple ways, whether it’s ethnicity, gender identity, orientation, neurotype, medical/disability status, or a variety of other identities. Nevertheless, who is and who isn’t in attendance is absolutely worth noting, once we have all the facts. Who has a seat at the table is always poignant and important feedback.
Isn’t Your Objectivity Compromised by Receiving Compensation for Attendance? Coercive Rewards and Role Clarity
Some of the online discourse supposes that those of us in attendance will kowtow to WotC’s efforts because they paid for travel, offered a per diem, and many of us have received promotional materials in the past on which we’ve built content. Is that true? Is our objectivity compromised? Probably not, and here’s why.
In the psychology field, there are two concepts we talk about frequently: coercive rewards and role clarity. Coercive rewards are often discussed in terms of psychology research. Participants in research are generally compensated in some way for their participation, but the compensation cannot be so great as to compel or coerce them into saying yes when they might otherwise refuse.
To give some perspective on the level of compensation, I live in the same geographical region as WotC headquarters, so travel costs aren’t covered for me. I am still receiving a per diem for food and incidentals during the summit. However, I’m taking two days away from both my day job and my private practice. While I can reschedule some of my clients, I won’t be able to reschedule all of them, so I’m going to end up losing money by attending, and I’ll have to make up other work at my day job. To put it bluntly, per diem and travel costs (if I were traveling), and occasional promotional material are not enough to coerce an endorsement from me, especially if I think something is actively harmful and the goal of the summit is to offer critical feedback.
Instead, my attendance is driven by my love of the D&D community, what it’s meant to me, and my desire to help improve that community and help it thrive by bringing as many people to the table as possible. Most of the people I know planning to attend are in similar situations and of similar mindsets – taking time off from work and essentially losing money because the goals of this summit are important to them. The travel compensation and per diem simply help to minimize losses for some people.
One summit attendee I spoke with noted that there is also an equity issue at play. Without offering compensation for travel and a per diem, it limits attendance to those of a certain socioeconomic level. That negates the possibility of wider community feedback. Also, how many memes and Twitter threads exist about creators being “paid” in exposure? Offering compensation hints to me that WotC takes this feedback seriously and is willing to treat everyone in attendance like a professional.
Beyond pure dollars and cents, many of the summit attendees are either immunocompromised or have family members who are. They are literally taking health risks to attend because they believe in the purpose of this summit and improving the D&D community as a whole. If that’s not a sign of how dedicated some of the attendees are to improving the community, then I don’t know what is.
Now let’s talk about role clarity. There are a lot of different jobs in psychology, just like there are in games and content creation. In psychology, a person might be a therapist, evaluator, expert witness, consultant, teacher, researcher, or any number of other roles. To perform any of these roles effectively, they must be crystal clear on what that role entails and what is outside its scope. It’s the same thing here with the summit. Based on the invitation email, it seems that the role is similar to one of a consultant – to critically evaluate what is presented and offer feedback based on one’s experience and expertise. Thankfully, this is a role in which many of the attendees I know have a wealth of experience.
Some readers might retort with, “But you might get other jobs by being there!”
Yes. Yes, we might. This is a professional invitation with an expected, professional role, and if we perform that role well, we might get future professional opportunities. That’s what should happen when one performs their job well, and it should be true regardless of the industry and context. However, the reality is that those jobs are both hypothetical and not likely to happen overnight. It’s more likely that these jobs would be one-off consultations, collaborations, or the like.
While jobs like that are appreciated and welcome, they are not steady employment. Summits are not generally real-life versions of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory whereby the one attendee who is most skilled and virtuous will be given control of WotC. Anyone who plans on attending with the fantasy that they will be instantly rewarded with their dream job is probably going to be disappointed.
Is This Summit Solely to Do Public Relations Damage Control?
Ignoring the fact that a lot of the people attending this summit are generous with their opinions, for good or ill, some in the community have asserted that the D&D Content Creator Summit is simply WotC’s attempt to repair damage to the D&D brand in the wake of the bad business decisions during the recent OGL controversy. Events like this summit take a long time to organize, so I actually believe the email I received when they said that this is based on feedback they’ve received from as far back as late November/early December 2022.
At the same time, WotC would be foolish to avoid using this as a step towards what they pledged they would do at the tail-end of the OGL controversy: obtain and incorporate direct, community feedback. After all, the ability to follow through on proposed behavior changes is what we want when we have problems with people and companies, right? If the goal is to simply do damage control after a public relations nightmare, inviting a bunch of opinionated people with platforms to give feedback isn’t great if one doesn’t intend to actually listen.
No one attending has forgotten the OGL situation, regardless of where they stood on it. If WotC is doing things well, they’ll learn that from the feedback. If WotC is going in a direction that irks folks at the summit, they’re going to learn that too, and if it’s the latter, that’s not going to help WotC, because the folks in attendance have platforms and haven’t signed any non-disclosure agreements.
Final Thoughts
All in all, what is the D&D Content Creator Summit going to be, and what is going to come out of it? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.
Much like in D&D, we can’t know the outcome of things before the action. That said, there are going to be a lot of talented, caring, observant, insightful content creators present asking hard questions and offering critical feedback. Content creators, especially advocates like those I know are going, work damn hard to produce what they do, and it cheapens their hard work, especially the advocacy work, to call them corporate shills and assume that they’re going to agree with anything presented. Agreement isn’t the assignment. Neither is the assignment for us to listen to WotC. The assignment is for WotC to listen to us.
If we want to see change from people and companies, we have to be willing to note when they take steps to change, even if it’s just the first step. That’s not to say we can’t be critical at the same time. We should be critical, in fact, but critical isn’t the same as unyielding vitriol, universal condemnation, and us-versus-them. Critical means noting both mistakes and successes and pushing for constant improvement. No person or company is going to go from badly messing up to doing everything perfectly.
As far as I know, WotC is trying something new with this summit, and it represents a shift in how they produce their products. I don’t know if it’s going to lead to sustained changes, but I’m willing to see if it does. I hope it does. More than that, I hope it’s exactly what they said it is: the “first step” in a new strategy of involving the community. My biggest fear is that if they see overwhelming, unflinching condemnation of anything they attempt, especially when it’s violence and threats from the community they’re trying to get input from, then they may stop trying to engage at all, and then we’re left with only anger and unfulfilled hopes.
Fan theories before Infinity War: Haha I wonder if they’ll make a mustache joke or Sherlock joke! Maybe we’ll see Hawkeye do a cool thing and have a side quest :)
Fan theories after Infinity War: IF THEY DONT BRING EVERYONE BACK TO LIFE AND DECAPITATE THANOS WHILE PUTTING MY HEART BACK IN MY CHEST I WILL FUCKING DIE.
The skeleton lit the candle and gazed, with it’s unearthly eyes, at the flame. “I do not know if I am strong enough to do this,” it whispered quietly, the voice echoing in it’s skull.
“You must try,” said the dying necromancer, pausing for a pain wracked breath, “I believe in you.”
The skeleton turned its gaze to face him and laid a cold, fleshless claw on hands that once held worlds in them.
I feel that anyone who believes Romeo & Juliet is about some kind of Great and Timeless Love TM* needs to see this.
WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS TODAY IN MY SHAKESPEARE CLASS.
If you go and actually read what Romeo says to Benvolio in the first scene, you will realize that he is only upset because HE WANTED ROSALINE’S BODY AND SHE SAID NO AND SO ROMEO WAS MOPING AND PITCHING A FIT ABOUT IT. Then, the second he lays eyes on Juliet, he’s basically saying
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During the balcony scene, Romeo talks about how he scaled the wall of the garden to see Juliet. That is not romantic. That is disrespectful to her. This is a private area of the Capulet home, and Capulet built the wall around it to protect his daughter. This was a time when a woman’s virtue was the most important thing she owned. If Juliet was found with a man in this very private part of her home, everyone would think she was no longer a virgin, her reputation would be ruined, and it would be much harder, if not impossible, for her father to make a good marriage.
Speaking of good marriages, Count Paris is seen as the bad guy because he “comes between” Romeo and Juliet. Capulet had arranged for Paris to marry Juliet in 2 years time, when she would be 16, in a time when most women were already married and mothers by the time they were Juliet’s age at (almost but not quite) 14. Most fathers would have already had their daughters married by now, but he wants to wait two more years AND PARIS IS OKAY WITH THAT. Not only that, but Paris is young (her father could have had her married to a 60 year old man), titled (he’s a fucking Count), wealthy (again, he’s a count, which means Juliet will have financial stability), and, from what we see of him, he is a very good guy. Capulet could have done a LOT worse in choosing his son-in-law.
Finally, here’s something to consider: Juliet was 13, Romeo was 17. Their relationship lasted 3 days, defied their parents, and ended in the deaths of 6 people.
If I ever hear you say that Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told, I will bitch slap you.
That is all.
And then, in Shakespeare’s next play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he basically went out of his way to make fun of the people who thought that Romeo and Juliet was so deep and romantic in writing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” sequence performed by a bunch of lousy, middle-aged men who saw too deep into it.
Rejected dude on the rebound initiates a murder-suicide, OMG GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD.
Shake-speared!
Bitch I have a degree in this, so you can fucking try to bitchslap me but I will punch you in the face, because you have serious genuine factual errors and reading comprehension FAIL.
Which is to say, without the nasty attitude, this post is actually wrong about a bunch of stuff.
POINT THE FIRST: Let’s start with the stuff about Juliet and Paris. Let’s also start with this “everything you ‘know’ is actually wrong” problem with the idea that sixteen was a normal marriage age.
It wasn’t. The average age of marriage in Shakespeare’s day and culture was MID-TWENTIES. Marriage of kids younger than that was something the aristocracy did, mostly to secure alliances, and was seen as kind of squicky. Even there, a lot of those young people stayed with their parents until their late teens. It was rare - not Unheard of, but rare - for girls younger than that to be encouraged to have children because, bluntly, IT TENDED TO KILL THEM, and that’s a waste of a good alliance.
Further, Italy was the place where you set stories when you wanted to get away with Ridiculous Edge Cases. You know how, like, _The King and I_ is set in “Siam” so these things can be pushed to their ludicrous and most violent edges? Same with setting shit in Italy. English audiences would go LOL THOSE CRAY ITALIANS AMIRITE and not get hung up on feeling insulted/etc. The fact that Juliet’s thirteen and Paris is going “younger than she are happy mothers made” and her dad’s giving in etc is SUPPOSED to be skeezy as fuck. Paris pushing for her marriage RIGHT AFTER Tybalt dies and, again, her dad giving in is SUPPOSED to look like they’re being assholes, because they ARE. Capulet threatening to throw Juliet out on the street when she doesn’t want to marry Paris isn’t supposed to be “normal”, it’s supposed to make him look like the pride-bound domineering asshole he is.
Same with the whole “walled up young woman” thing: that’s another “those fucking Italians, lol” touch.
Which brings us to POINT THE SECOND: Romeo and Juliet’s love affair didn’t kill no-fucking-body.
THE FEUD killed four people (Mercrutio, Tybalt, Romeo and Juliet) and Paris being a fucking gross and uncompassionate selfrighteous dick killed two more.
SO LET’S TALK ABOUT Mercrutio and Tybalt! The morning after the Capulet party, Tybalt wants to kill Romeo. He wants to kill him, not because of his cousin - as neither he nor anyone else has the FAINTEST IDEA that Romeo and Juliet are in love - but because Romeo showed up at the Capulet party the night before PERIOD.
One: Romeo didn’t even want to go to the party. Mercrutio insisted (and insisted, and insisted) that they gate-crash in masks. Two, Capulet, Tybalt’s uncle and the head of his family and THE GUY IN CHARGE basically told Tybalt to chill out, it’s fine. Tybalt’s devotion to The Feud is so intense that he’s ignoring that because of the ~*insult*~ Romeo has done the Capulets. Three, the Prince just said YESTER-FUCKING-DAY that if he caught anyone feuding again he was going to kill them.
Remember the previous day? When Romeo didn’t know Juliet from Eve nor she from Adam, but we opened the play with servants fantasizing about killing the other sides male servants and raping their female ones? Because of The Feud? Just checking.
Tybalt gives no fucks. Tybalt is going to avenge ~*his family’s honour*~ by at the very least beating the shit out of if not killing Romeo.
And you know what Romeo does *because of his love for and romance with Juliet?*
He refuses to engage. He says no, Tybalt, I know you hate me but I don’t hate you and I’m not going to pay attention to the insults you’re slinging at me, I apologize for wrongs I’ve done, let’s call it all fair. No, I’m still not gonna fight you even if you keep insulting me.
For love of Juliet, Romeo tries like crazy NOT TO FIGHT.
Mercrutio, on the other hand, either can’t stand to see Romeo insulted or thinks because he’s the Prince’s nephew he’s special and the no-brawling rule doesn’t apply to him, pulls out his sword and starts to fight. It’s IRONIC that in trying to stop Tybalt and Mercrutio, Romeo gets in the way of Mercrutio’s parry and gets stabbed, but it’s also Mercrutio’s own damn fault. His “a plague o’both your houses” speech may be very quotable and thunderous, but it’s also hypocritical as hell, considering how DELIGHTED he was to participate in their Feud for his own amusement right up till he got stabbed.
(Watch out for Shakespeare: he likes to do things like that.)
This, really, is the point of the entire prince’s bloodline in this play: they every damn one of them think they can just sort of ignore or deal lightly with the Feud, and the Feud gets them.
So that’s two for the Feud.
Then Juliet fakes her own death. Well, actually, after being told by her father she has no choice but to marry Paris whether she wants to or not, and RIGHT NOW, or he’ll physically throw her out on the streets to starve to death or whore herself, she shows up in Friar Lawrence’s cell saying “fix this or I will fucking kill myself.”
And Friar Lawrence is a coward and fails her. Because here’s the thing: she and Romeo are married. End of story. All Lawrence has to do to FORCE the Prince to get involved and give them protection (or for that matter the local bishops and even the pope) is walk out there and say “they’re married, I witnessed it, we’re done.”
The thing is, this is entirely likely to get the FRIAR into a metric shittonne of trouble. So instead he concocts this huge complicated bullshit plan, and to the appearance of everyone except Lawrence and Juliet, she dies. Then Romeo thinks she’s dead so he kills himself, then she finds him dead and kills HERSELF and wait why was this all a problem in the first place?
OH RIGHT, because of the Feud. (Otherwise frankly the Romeo/Juliet match is fucking AMAZING and would give both families the economic power to dominate Italy. Seriously they’re idiots.)
Now, on his way in to kill himself Romeo also kills Paris and Paris’ servant, in both cases in self-defense. They’re there because despite Juliet rejecting him Paris basically feels a proprietary ownership of her DEAD BODY because her father promised him her living one. Basically.
Just think about that for a while. Think of how GROSS that is. Because it’s really gross.
Those are the only two deaths you can sooooort of blame on the actual romance. I feel they’re more appropriately blamed on patriarchy, but whatever makes you happy.
But. The point is: THIS PLAY IS ABOUT HOW THE FEUD KILLS PEOPLE. Like it literally tells us this in the prologue. “Two households, both alike in dignity/in fair Verona where we lay our scene/from ancient grudge break to new mutiny/where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Aka “so these two idiot families start brawling and killing each other over an old grudge.” The relevance of the children is not that they were in love: it’s that they were BECAUSE of their parents DOOMED. That’s what “star-crossed” means. It means “you are fucked”. It means “fate says you can’t have this.” Their “misadventured, piteous overthrows” - aka their fucked up, incredibly sad efforts - “doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.”
This is a tragedy about how THEIR PARENTS STRIFE killed them. They’re doomed from the start. And you know what Romeo and Juliet’s romance - their “death-marked love”, which is to say “the love that will get THEM killed” - ACTUALLY FUCKING DOES?
It saves Verona.
“The fearful passage of their death-marked love/and the continuance of their parents’ rage/WHICH BUT THEIR CHILDREN’S END, NAUGHT COULD REMOVE/is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage.”
Again, translating for those who need it: this really sad and fear-inducing story of their totally fucking doomed romance, and how NOTHING BUT THEM DYING would make their parents stop fighting, is what we’re going to show you in the next two hours.”
People were already dying from the feud. They were being injured. Property was being damaged. Brawls were spreading out and killing innocent bystanders. *The Montagues and Capulets were effectively having a gang war.* What Romeo and Juliet did was *make it stop*. Except that everyone involved, the Prince included, had their heads so far up their asses that nothing but their children killing THEMSELVES because of THE PARENTS’ ACTIONS (or in the Prince’s case two of his relatives getting killed along the way) could make them realize oh shit, this is not good, and make peace.
The Prince reiterates this in his closing remarks, in case anyone missed it, even blaming himself: “and I, for winking at your discords, too have lost a brace of kinsmen.”
Modern readers should actually hone in on this pretty well, because we’re still doing this shit. The publicized suicides of queer kids, of girls who were raped, of trans kids - notice how there are all these things a lot of society was fucking ignoring until those happened?
(And actually killing yourself explicitly to bring attention to the wrongs and abuses being done to you that you cannot escape was a cultural norm even then, and can be found behind a ton of ghost stories and revenge stories. Shakespeare knew what he was doing.)
POINT THE THIRD: let’s talk about Romeo and Rosalind vs Romeo and Juliet.
Some context: Shakespeare is not a boy band. Shakespeare is Fall Out Boy. NEVER take anything he’s saying at surface level. His most famous cycle of sonnets is actually a super bleak charting of the failure of love between an older and younger man that sort of devolves into this sordid triangle between Narrator, Golden Youth and Dark Lady, and that whole “my mistress’ eyes” sonnet is nowhere near as complimentary or appearance-positive as people seem to think it is. (The Narrator - who is a character in his own right - is tearing down other women, not elevating his mistress.)
So there was this guy named Petrarch, who popularized the sonnet to HIS format (in Italian) by writing a whole bunch of poems to Laura, who was unobtainable, not interested in him, and eventually dead. THIS BECAME THE FASHION: devoted love and adoration to this woman you couldn’t have, who didn’t want you, and perferrably died chaste so you could idealize her without fear she’d do something human. And Romeo is ABSOLUTELY being a Pining Petrarchan Lover with Rosalind. He’s also writing cliche drivel so cliche it’s MEANT to sound like cliche drivel, to a woman we never even see on-stage.
Then there’s Juliet. And you know what the BIG difference is with Juliet?
Juliet is right there. She’s *PARTICIPANT*. She is matching him passion for passion and lust for lust and, in poetic form, EVEN LINE FOR LINE. Their speech together COMBINES into sonnets - SHAKESPEAREAN sonnets, aka the form Shakespeare made up for himself because he thought Petrarch’s wasn’t as cool. And suddenly cliches are being thrown out. The cliche was the mistress being the moon: fuck it, Romeo says, Juliet is the SUN; the cliche was to swear by the moon, the stars, and Juliet says no don’t do that, swear by YOU. They even get into blasphemy. Juliet is the OPPOSITE of a Petrarchan mistress: she is right there, she is SO right into Romeo right back, she’s alive, and the more he encounters her and the more she’s human and wanting and silly and joking the more he adores her. He loves her MORE after they’ve fucked, after Juliet is manifestly no longer the chaste unachievable idol.
Is it true love? Who knows. They’re both babies, and it’s a play: conventions of the theatre DO allow for people to fall in love at first sight. But whether it’s love or just infatuation, the point is they’re both right there, they’re both feeling it equally and as partners, and Juliet gets to be a living participant with her own desires.
(Like seriously her wedding-night speech before she finds out Tybalt’s dead is pretty damn sexy, guys.)
And whether or not it’s love or infatuation the play and the text very clearly come together to indicate that what’s between Juliet and Romeo is DIFFERENT than that crap with Rosalind.
POINT THE FOURTH: And minor, but still important - R&J and the Dream were almost certainly written more or less at the same time, and it’s of note that the Play Within The Play in this case both STARTS OUT lacking all the other context thats attached to Romeo and Juliet’s story as I laid out above, but that Bottom et al go on to strip it more and more and more of its meaning and context as they go on, rendering it nothing more than silly melodrama. The joke, thus, is rather more complex.
SUMMARY: Romeo and Juliet is a stunningly rich play that is mostly about how feuds fuck people over badly and how if you have to wait until YOUR KIDS OFF THEMSELVES to figure that out you deserve to lose your children. Romeo and Juliet are victims of the feud and its mindless death-lust, not perpetrators of death on others. They’re not supposed to be figures of ridicule OR representatives of True Love: they’re supposed to make the audience go “oh BABIES, no, you’re going to end so badly” and then be sad when they do.
Also common knowledge about social practices of the past is usually wrong. Thank you and good night.
I have been waiting for this rebuttal for ages oh my gods.
Today I saw a post that upset me. It was basically stating that half the fandom is incorrect to see the Decepticons as the ‘real’ good guys, and reiterated all the reasons that they’re terrible and the Autobots are, were, and always will be the only good guys.
I may have growled ‘fuck you’ at the computer, almost reblogged with an angry comment…and then looked at myself with horror, because I make it my policy not to be negative at someone I’ve never met, or their thoughts, on such slim basis. Compassion is more important than anything else; we are all hurting, and it is so easy to do further damage that, especially on a platform such as tumblr, it does well to watch one’s words very, very carefully. Fictional characters are not worth doing real, tangible harm over.
So why the hell was I so upset that I almost broke my own rules?
The election.
I have worn a Decepticon emblem somewhere on my person every day since the election. Earrings. My windbreaker. A t-shirt. But mostly the earrings, since they’re subtle and pass mostly unremarked. I’m even contemplating a tattoo, more seriously than ever before.
I’m in agony. I’m a policy student; I specialize in public health policy. A few weeks ago, my mentor quite literally told me to hold off on entering the workforce for the next four years; he feels that me starting a career under the Trump Administration would be a very bad idea. At the same time, I’m significantly changing the course of my immediate future in light of the election; I’m applying to Teach For America, which has an LGBT initiative to recruit LGBT teachers. It’s intended to make up grade and graduation (and survival) differences between LGBT and straight students. I’m going to actively pursue being placed in a red state, where I can do the most good.
It’s not like I don’t understand this is dangerous. There is a large part of me that wants to flee the country (New Zealand being the favorite refuge, right now). But my family didn’t leave China during the Cultural Revolution, though it killed my great-grandparents and led to the torture and humiliation of many of my other family members. My grandmother had to be almost forcefully sent to the US because the rest of the family knew damn well her opinionated nature and total disregard for her own safety would get her dead. But it wasn’t the first time the family had weathered horrors. I know too well that it won’t be the last. And if my great-grandparents could stay in China then, then no incompetent orange baboon’s arse will chase me from the United States.
I’m bi. I’m multiracial. I’m a woman. I’m an intellectual. This is not a good combination in Trump’s America. But I’m not afraid.
Because I think about Megatron every time I start browsing the New Zealand visa site. Megatron, and my family.
We’ve been weaponizing words for generations. Two thousand years, in fact. Megatron, the young miner working in the dark for a better world, shaping words to change sparks, speaks to me on a deep level. This is what we have done for those two thousand years. And like Megatron, we have paid a price. Very often in blood. We’ve never been good at shutting up.
Megatron is both a power fantasy and a cautionary tale for me right now, and right now, what I really need is the power fantasy. I feel incredibly helpless; I am not the only one. Megatron, someone who starts out so utterly helpless, gives me hope that I, too, may yet be powerful one day. That I may be capable of righting the injustices that cause me such pain now.
I do not mean to excuse his atrocities. I am repulsed by them perhaps more than many others, because I understand how easy it might be to slip over the edge to committing them. (Anyone who tells you it is easy not to slip over that edge is a person to be very frightened of; they obviously do not see themselves as capable of horror, and those people are the ones most likely to commit horrors–they do not examine themselves or their motivations, they believe they are utterly in the right, and that is the most dangerous of persons).
In the wake of this election, we all feel helpless. We are suddenly enemies in our own countries. Our neighbors turn on us for our compassion, for our liberal sentiments and our belief that all people are created equal. Does We the People still cover us? We’re not sure. There are so many who would say no. There are so many who believe we’re seeing the rise of another Hitler.
Megatron rebelled against an authoritarian government. The lowest of the low, he shattered the monstrous system that treated him and his fellows as disposable objects. We are facing a future in which we are disposable objects. Is it any wonder we find hope in him? Is it any wonder that, seeing Trump get another pass for a lie, or use a tweet to cover up his nefarious dealings, you are being deceived gains new, immediate meaning? How about rise up?
It’s not Optimus who gives us hope, Optimus who was a cop in IDW, Optimus, the well-meaning supporter of the status quo (that very same status quo that has so failed us!).
It’s Megatron, who may have fallen from grace, but who understands. Who was the miner who toppled an empire.
You may interpret canon as you wish. I would never want to step on someone’s toes for that. But for all you folks wondering why the hell fandom has suddenly decided the Decepticons are more appealing…
…it’s very simple. We’ve just realized we’re in their position.
This is a really important post. Myself, I have a knee-jerk reaction against things that look like they might be glorifying the actions the Decepticons took in fighting back against their oppression, but Mlle hits it out of the park here in explaining why people like me have got to look a little closer and with a little more sympathy to those things. The Decepticons as a group represent a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and while violence and genocide is one of them, they are simultaneously representatives of this basal, gritted-teeth-and-clenched-fists survival against people who would rather you didn’t exist. In fiction, where we have the luxury of knowing that the atrocities detailed in the canon were never real, this is a message that is just as important as the former.
This is incredibly eloquent, and may I add: you are free to take parts of different characters and let them inspire you towards different goals.
Optimus inspires me to be strong by reminding me that I’m never alone, that I matter, and that so long as I don’t give up things are going to be ok. Megatron inspires me to stand up for myself, to endure pain and to never stand by and let something go on that isn’t fair to me or people I care about. Both of those are simplifications of much more complex characters, but if you need help imagining yourself getting through something hard, draw strength from wherever you feel it, not just from the characters that are “supposed to be” inspiring.
As someone who’s gotten hate messages and online smear campaigns for being a Decepticon fan in the nineties (for worshipping robot satan and refusing to accept that the Autobots Can Do No Wrong) this post speaks strongly to me.
Like the OP, I do not want to emulate everything Megatron/the Decepticons did in real life, blindly parroting the actions of fictional characters. In fact, I fully endose applying real world critical thinking skills before you mimic something you saw in fiction.
But like the OP, people find inspiration in different places, and sometimes, it’s in the Decepticons.
I want to say that it’s been years since I’ve last seen someone bullied for being a Decepticon fan, and I’m glad that the fandom as a whole seems to have moved past that place.
I hope in the future we are all living lives where we don’t need an inspiration to survive, to overcome, to Never Surrender.
In the meantime…
As someone who literally changed his middle name to Megatron 10 years ago…
And the National Parks Services said, “lol, no” and went rogue and we were all like, “I was not expecting the park rangers to lead the resistance, none of the dystopian novels I read prepared me for this but cool.”
