I’m not the biggest fan of Dungeons and Dragons.

That’s not to say I dislike it. Not by any measure. But… I have my issues with it.

The game itself is a perfectly serviceable table-top RPG and the gateway drug for many to find other, what some might call better games. I’ve recently started playing a campaign with some friends and it has been immensely enjoyable. As with most campaigns, a lot of the entertainment factor comes down to the group and the person leading it. Everyone present is a friend of mine and the dungeon master is an experienced veteran who puts an admirable amount of legwork into crafting a story that, so far, has expertly thread the fine-line between pushing us in a certain direction, but leaving it open-ended enough so that we still feel that we, as players, have agency and can make choices that really matter. And, they do - ask my friend who paid the DM twenty bucks to reroll a charisma check so he could marry an NPC, which… you know what? Not now.

I vaguely remember seeing reruns of the cartoon when I was a child on Boomerang or some such network that we had through my father’s premium cable package, which came with five quintillion channels of which .0006% were worth watching.

I thought it was cool. I was also seven, so my standards weren’t too high.

I actually thought the movie was surprisingly entertaining, creative, and really captured the chaotic essence of what it feels like to play an actual campaign with a bunch of barely-functional morons.

It’s a shame that it didn’t make the necessary billion dollars at the box office necessary that all movies without Marvel somewhere in the opening credits need to get a sequel greenlit these days.

Where the gloss begins to wear off for me is the setting. I know that there are a dozen different codified, canonical settings that are state-sanctioned by the anointed ones at Wizards of the Coast, but it only ever seems that anyone wants to play games set in the Forgotten Realms setting. It’s this big, sprawling world, but for as many names and places as there are, it all feels half-baked and poorly fleshed out; a large but tasteless serving of bland, lukewarm high fantasy mush. Everything always comes back to a handful of cities and everywhere that isn’t Baldur’s Gate, Waterdeep, and Neverwinter are tertiary afterthoughts. In a world with a whole lot of beasties running around it, most of them seem to be variations of the same few critters. How many variations of carnivorous slimes can there be? And I’m not saying it’s a bad setting, per say, but just… y’know.

I understand that Forgotten Realms is the gold standard of Dungeons and Dragons settings, but I also find it boring, a little confusing, and just not all that interesting. I also understand that one of the reasons it seems uninspired is because it set the stage for so much of what came after it, so everything about it that feels derivative only comes off that way because so many future settings were aping what it did first, but… well, even then, something about it just never hooked me the way that Warcraft’s Azeroth did.

Maybe it’s because I got there first. And you never forget your first.

But my second and biggest issue with Dungeons and Dragons is the corporate overlords that currently own the IP - Wizards of the Coast. Like many once well-respected companies in the world of games, both of a video variety and otherwise, Wizards of the Coast has been on an ugly, grinding, and agonizingly protracted decline ever since being acquired by Hasbro in 1999. Predictably, a hobby company that thrived on creativity, originality, and passion being bought out by a bunch of totalitarian corporate stiffs that have never had an original thought in their lives has been nothing short of disastrous. 2023 was an especially brutal year for the company. Whether it be suspending the Dungeons and Dragons open-game license that had been in place for decades that effectively knee-capped any third-party that was making Dungeons and Dragons content and force them to pay extortionary prices to continue1, or sending goons from the infamous Pinkerton agency to shake down a YouTuber to retrieve Magic the Gathering cards that the company had sent him - and that he paid for - for unknowingly revealing them before their street release, public opinion of the company has soured and metric tons of consumer goodwill has gone up in smoke. Personally, I refuse to buy any product with their name on it. I cannot, in good faith, support a company that acts like a thug and treats their own paying consumers like hapless victims who just happen to be standing on the wrong street corner2. And I’m not the only one.

From first quarter to fourth, parent company Hasbro saw a net loss of over a billion dollars and regular stock declines of upwards of 20%. For a company as expansive of Hasbro, not all of the blame can be placed on Wizards of the Coast’s under-performance… but even the Bank of America places a large amount of it on their specific mishandling of Magic the Gathering. In the wake of the open game license controversy, market analyst t Edwin Evans-Thirlwell with the Washington Post described the move with the following scathing criticism;

WotC appears to have committed an irreversible act of self-sabotage in trying to replace [The OGL] — squandering the prestige accumulated over 20 years in a matter of weeks.

The end result was a culling of 1,100 employees from Wizards of the Coast by the end of the year - a stunning 20% of their entire workforce.

Despite the heavy-handed corporate bullying and stunning managerial incompetence, the game has and, inexplicably, continues to hold steady thanks to a new generation of players who provided the shot in the arm that Wizards of the Coast needed to stay solvent. The bulk of this new crowd tend to belong to a certain demographic that prove to be socially radioactive in whatever circles they brute force their way into.

Theater kids.

Theater kid is one of the pejorative terms that’s tricky to describe accurately and succinctly, yet everyone seems to have an inherent understanding of exactly the kind of person it applies to3.

If I had to try and pin down an exact definition, I’d say that theater kid describes someone who is often but not exclusively white and upper-middle class. There’s an increasing amount of diversity amongst their ranks, to be sure, but they almost invariably come from well-off families. They’re also most often vocally and outspokenly progressive, and tolerate little political deviation in either direction. They’re gripped by an almost pathological need for attention and are possibly afflicted by some sort of narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder, with a healthy dose of neuroticism so strong it would make Woody Allen blush. Most of them have a strong need to play the victim for sympathy points and their much-desired attention, and will often milk whatever aspect about themselves they can find (i.e. their sexuality, their physical appearance, their mental health issues) to wring as much of both out of anyone who will listen. Some going to far as to exacerbate or outright feign physical or mental disabilities in order to get it4. In my opinion, their most defining and unifying trait is that they are, without exception, aggressively annoying.

Personally, I find the term theater kid itself is somewhat is a misnomer. Not all theater kids participate in the art of live theater. Not all, but the overwhelming majority, who do participate in live theater are theater kids. Given their almost debilitating need for attention, it only makes sense they’d be attracted to the stage. Given that not all theater kids actually do theater, I think the theater aspect of the term more aptly refers to their melodramatic and overly-performative personal conduct. A theater kid is never just content - they’re obnoxiously exuberant. A theater kid is never just sad - when they’re upset, they act as if their lives are coming to an end. They’re prone to lapsing into belligerent hysterics at the most minor inconvenience and never just disagree with someone, but take every minor sleight or polite difference in opinion as a personal attack. More often than not, they are needlessly cruel and nasty. They are called kids largely because they act like children in that way.

It’s been something of an open secret that the Dungeons and Dragons scene, and much of geek culture as a whole, has been thoroughly colonized by theater kids for a while, now. It’s important to note that I am not talking about the entirety of the table-top roleplaying game scene - I’m talking strictly about Dungeons and Dragons. I have never seen a case of theater kids straying away from that particular tabletop ghetto. In fact, the only reason that Wizards of the Coast seemed to weather the open game license storm was because of the support from theater kids. From what I remember, people who actually care about tabletop roleplaying as a hobby were more than willing, if not eager and happy, to abandon the Dungeons and Dragons ship for greener pastures.

Yet, it was the F.N.G.’s of the theater kid bloc that stubbornly refused to abandon Wizards of the Coast with the refrain of, What else will we play?

Make no mistake, the market was not lacking for alternatives to Dungeons and Dragons. There are dozens, if not hundreds. Paizo Publishing, best known for publishing the game Pathfinder - originally a spin-off of Dungeons and Dragons - was willing to give them one when they announced that they would be doing the exact opposite of what Wizards of the Coast was doing.

And that reaction there showed that they were strictly interested in Dungeons and Dragons, and not interested in tabletop roleplaying as a hobby. For all they cared, the community, the scene, all the other players and all the other publishers could go pound sand, so long as they got their piping hot shipment of Wizards-approved sloppa. They have made it abundantly clear they will accept no substitute. It’s consoomerism at it’s finest.

And Wizards of the Coast… well, they know who butters their bread. Like most big companies that cater to an audience of social outsiders (i.e. dorks, nerds, etc.), they began to take a hard-tilt to the left side of the political spectrum that really began to materialize in the second-half of the Obama era. This in and of itself is not terribly surprising. Most forget that these spaces were not exactly bastions of conservative values or right-leaning thought. So far as I can tell, most nerds of yore of were most left-leaning, albeit with a more libertarian cant than today’s authoritarian flavor du jour. In a lot of ways, their political persuasions seem to have been more in line with another group of social outsiders from the time in the outlaw country music scene.

They didn’t really care what anyone else said or did, they just wanted to be left alone to smoke their dope and play their music. Similarly, the early pioneers of the tabletop space were perfectly content to live and let live so long as they could do what they wanted unmolested.

But this live and let live, man attitude of the 70’s and 80’s has been thoroughly rooted out by a much more totalitarian neo-liberalism that has little tolerance for those who do not adhere to the party line. This is the camp most theater kids, despite many of their protestations to the otherwise, land. And this is the camp where Wizards of the Coast went to meet them.

In more recent releases under Dungeon and Dragons’ Fifth Edition, some illustrations have been cropping up in the books that have ruffled some feathers. Especially in the updated Player’s Handbook.

The orcs - once a exclusively evil-aligned race with no ambiguity - have been turned into a softer, more palatable, and distinctly less wicked race that are now playable. They’re also very plainly Latino-coded, for some reason.

We’ve got some very obviously homosexual dwarves who wouldn’t be out of place at San Francisco’s infamous Folsom Street Fair, working hard with some female dwarves-of-color.

I can’t find the illustration now to save my life, but I know for the fact the one on the racial page for the elves featured quite possibly the ugliest depiction of elves I’ve ever seen.

Now, people’s problems with these illustrations and the change made to the orcs has nothing to do with the race or sexuality of the characters depicted. It’s fantasy. If you want your dwarf to be a hulking Nubian leather daddy with a taste for Elven twinks, so be it. I don’t give a shit if there’s an orc with a sombrero and a pancho named Luis who’s entire bit is making the best tamales in all the nine realms. If it shows you how progressive I am, I’m the only person out of eight playing a female character in our campaign, because, well… I think that sausage party needed a bit of a feminine touch, as only a man’s man such as myself can bring. So long as the crew you’re playing with is cool with it, you can do whatever the fuck you want with your character and the NPCs, for all I care. Lesbian elves and Asian gnomes is not what most people have a problem with. Personally, I have a problem with a lot of the art because it’s just ugly as sin, but that’s not terribly new to the role-playing space. What has people upset is the fact that Wizards of the Coast is using these illustrations as an extremely transparent and ham-fisted attempt to virtue-signal to theater kids that, Hey! Look at us! Aren’t we progressive? We’re not like those old fuddy-duddies. We have lesbian elves. And they’re ugly! They want their new best friends to know that they’re all sympatico, and they’re willing to revise a whole lot of history and make a whole lot of changes to accomodate them.

To understand how the theater kids managed to get Wizards of the Coast in such a stranglehold, you first have to understand that the tabletop roleplaying scene of 2024 is almost indistinguishable from what it was at the beginning of the 2010’s. The popular perception of Dungeons and Dragons changed both dramatically and quickly over the latter half of the decade.

What happened?

The answer is multi-faceted.

For one, the 2010’s saw a sea change in American pop culture. Properties and hobbies that had once been exclusively the domain of social outsiders increasingly began to gain acceptance with broader society. I’ve discussed before how video games broke escape velocity with consoles like the Playstation 2, Xbox, and, more than anything, the Wii, which rehabilitated the image of a gamer from a violent, anti-social lunatic to the average middle class young man. Though they weren’t strictly fantasy themselves, I believe the popularity of Harry Potter and the Twilight series softened hearts on the fantasy genre as a whole. The Star Wars prequels were cultural events, and, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe made superheroes the hottest trend of the decade. It was natural that, as more and more of pop culture became inseparably intertwined with nerd culture that, eventually, the rising tide would eventually reach the tabletop roleplaying ship. Celebrities like the then-beloved Stephen Colbert, Vin Diesel, Jon Favreau, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt would come out of the woodwork and reveal to the public that, actually, they had always loved Dungeons and Dragons. I feel like I remember Colbert and Diesel playing a televised game at some point, but I can find no record of it.

While the ascent was gradual and much less pronounced and public than those of the others, attitudes towards the scene and the players eased. Keep in mind that, just as video games and those that played them were catching flack for the rash of school shootings and youth violence of the 90’s, Dungeons and Dragons was squarely in the crosshairs of the public during the Satanic Panic. Again, like gamers, the view of Dungeons and Dragons players was rehabilitated from anti-social, unhinged devil worshippers to a more palatable group of eccentric but ultimately harmless weirdos who preferred rolling dice and eating pizza than hitting the club.

This, I believe, is only a small part of the equation. Two other major factors played larger roles in bringing Dungeons and Dragons not just out of the basement, but right into the laps of theater kids.

As I’m sure many of you have been anticipating me to mention, nothing did more to bring Dungeons and Dragons back into the public conscious than the release of Netflix’s mega-hit, Stranger Things.

If, by chance, you haven’t seen at least the first season of Stranger Things5, Dungeons and Dragons isn’t just a game the main characters play, but a major plot element. The central monster that starts snapping up hapless townfolks in rural Indiana is literally dubbed the Demogorgon after a demon from the game.

The immense popularity of this show and the affection people felt towards the band of awkward misfits that made up the central cast of Dungeons and Dragons-playing middle schoolers got a lot of people who’d never once considered cracking open a Player’s Handbook interested in running a game with their friends. I’d argue that no other factor made Dungeons and Dragons not just acceptable, but cool, than Stranger Things. Just like a bunch of chodes that had never held a comic book before were rushing out to buy Captain America funko pops and get Iron Man tattooed on their ass-cheeks so they could be in on the in thing during Marvel hype, the same type of pop culture junkies just had to get into Dungeons and Dragons to show how with the times they were.

Given that many theater kids are Netflix addicts that can’t even eat without booting up the Office reruns to play in the background, I’m sure that Stranger Things altered the opinions of a not insubstantial amount of them.

Stranger Things made Dungeons and Dragons cool for this demographic. But it didn’t make it fashionable.

That would be done by Critical Role.

Critical Role is a livestream/podcast hybrid that began in 2015 which broadcasts real-time Dungeons and Dragons campaigns spearheaded by professional and popular voice actor, Matt Mercer, and played by a group of players consisting of his buddies - all of whom are also professional voice actors. The endeavor did not, as I had always suspected, begin as a cynical cash grab. The campaign that would ultimately evolve into Critical Role began two years prior to the first episode of the podcast, and most of the people who participate in the podcast were present during that original campaign. It genuinely began as a group of friends just playing the game as anyone else would. In fact, they weren’t even playing Dungeons and Dragons - they were playing Pathfinder.

And then Felicia Day found out about it.

If you’re unfamiliar with her, she is an actress that found success in an early (and aggressively unfunny) internet video series called The Guild6 and a working relationship with The Avenger’s director, the once-beloved, now-disgraced Joss Whedon. She parlayed this early success into landing gigs in just about every nerd-adjacent media ever since and amassed a considerable fortune in the process. She is the archetype of a theater kid. She is what they want to be - a no-name internet personality who rode a meteoric rise on the back of a bunch of gross icky internet nerds right into Hollywood fame. Wherever she goes, you can bet the herd will not be far behind.

Being an apex predator in the nerd culture scene, and knowing exactly how to pander to the Funko Pop collectors and theater kids of the community, Day heard about this private game being played at Matthew Mercer’s house and knew she could find a way to squeeze some cash out of it. Matt Mercer in particular was riding high on a few popular roles he had played at the time and rest of his buddies were all known entities in the nerd culture scene - I see her logic in thinking people would be interested. She approached them with the prospect of streaming their game sessions on the website of her video production company, Geek and Sundry. But only if they cut out the yucky boring stuff like dice rolling and combat that the geeky-but-chic theater kids wouldn’t like. You know - the stuff that makes Dungeons and Dragons… well, Dungeons and Dragons.

Mercer stuck to his guns however and refused to do the show unless they were allowed to play the game as it was. He did, however, concede to change the game from Pathfinder to Dungeons and Dragons, because most of the paypigs laypeople Day was looking to siphon cash from were only familiar with the more popular of the two. Reasoning that some money was better than no money, Day relented, cut Mercer a fat check, and the rest is history.

Since then, Critical Role has bounced around a variety of streaming services, hosts, and production companies, but has maintained considerable success. As of now, the series boasts three seasons, over three-hundred and fifty episodes, hundreds of millions of collective views, and a massive, rabid fanbase that take very unkindly to the name of their favorite podcast being besmirched. Between merchandising and advertising, the show has most likely grossed millions of dollars in profit. The first campaign was even adapted as an animated series for Netflix called The Legend of Vox Machina. A second series adapting the podcast’s second season is already in development.

I do not have strong feelings about Critical Role as a series. I watched the animated series. It was… fine. I have never watched more than a few clips of the actual podcast/stream series itself, though. I can’t say I was overly impressed with what I saw. I’m sure it’s a hoot and a half if you really care about any of the people playing. A lot of the charm of tabletop roleplaying comes from the people you do it with, and, frankly, watching other people I don’t know play it is about as enjoyable to me as watching streamers I don’t know play video games - it isn’t, and it really just makes me wish I was playing the game myself instead of watching someone else have fun.

That’s not to say the cast doesn’t do a serviceable job playing their characters and using them to tell an ever-evolving story. Most of the cast is… tolerable. There are some that are less so than others. One or two I found intolerable and spoiled what was otherwise a solid group dynamic among the players.

But Critical Role wasn’t the first podcast of it’s type. There had been plenty of Dungeons and Dragons-centric podcasts that preceded Critical Role that, for obvious reasons, remained popular among the crowd who, y’know, actually played tabletop roleplaying games. It may surprise you to learn that it also wasn’t even the first theater kid adjacent Dungeons and Dragons podcast.

Two years before Critical Role began, the McElroy brothers - a trio of disparate media personalities and well-loved figures among the theater kid milieu - began their own, called Adventure Zone alongside their father.

Full disclosure - I actually like Adventure Zone. More than Critical Role, at any rate. I even saw the McElroys play a one-off game live. The brothers themselves are all a bit… well, this may be a bit uncharitable, but let’s just say the word soy comes to mind. But, taken together, they’re a pretty humorous bunch with excellent chemistry that are more funny than they are aggravating. But you’re on thin ice, Travis.

Thin ice.

Adventure Zone has been and is successful in its own right. It accrued a sizeable fan base. For years, you couldn’t go to an anime convention without seeing a handful of blue-haired they/thems from Tumblr cosplaying as Justin McElroy’s character, Taako the Mage. When I saw them live, I think me and my then-girlfriend were the only people not in cosplay. And it was a sold-out venue with a capacity of over three hundred. But Adventure Zone never really grew beyond a respectable but not-massive fanbase that was mostly congregated on Tumblr. It never breached escape velocity like Critical Role.

But I’m almost certain that Felicia Day knew about it. And I am certain that that she would have never even thought about bringing Matt Mercer and crew on for Critical Role if she didn’t know that the McElroys didn’t have a successful proof of concept with Adventure Zone.

It’s safe to say that, while the McElroys opened the door to the theater kids with Adventure Zone, Critical Role kicked the fucking door open. Seemingly overnight, podcast hosting platforms, YouTube, and Twitch were awash with every YouTuber, streamer, voice actor, and even some minor celebrities live-streaming Dungeons and Dragons with their friends. Even box office heavy-hitters have gotten in on the trend. The aforementioned Vin Diesel has shored up his street cred by not just guest-starring in a special episode of Critical Role.

Others followed suit with varying levels of success.

This, in turn, created a knock-on effect in which every joe blow with a Player’s Handbook saw these actors, both voice and otherwise, on Critical Role yucking it up, rolling dice, and laughing all the way to the bank, and thought, Y’know, I bet I could do that.

But one of the reasons that Critical Role was so successful is that the people involved were actors. Their job is - ostensibly - be funny and charismatic. One or two exceptions not withstanding, most of them can be when they need to.

The average copycat that tried to ride this wave did not have this going for them. The result was a suffocating glut of Dungeons and Dragons related media trying to ape the success of Critical Role but with none of the personality, charm, or entertainment value that either the Critical Role cast or the McElroy brothers brought to the table.

A lot of the people who tried to cash in on this hype were theater kids. Not only did the theater kids make up a substantial following of the fanbases of the respective actors in Critical Role, but, as histrionic, attention-seeking narcissists, they saw the sudden skyrocket in those voice actor’s stock as a path to their own success that they could follow. Even more theater kids that hadn’t already been bitten by the tabletop roleplaying bug were introduced to the idea by Critical Role when the fandom went nuclear on Tumblr and spread to an entirely new cadre of progressively-aligned fandom-stans on that site.

What I’m saying is that Critical Role and, to a lesser extent, Adventure Zone, brought in a lot of people into the tabletop roleplaying world that had previously been only dimly aware of it. Seeing all these voice actors and podcasters that were popular in geek culture playing it made them want to follow suit. It wasn’t just acceptable to play Dungeons and Dragons, now - it was what all the cool, fashionable, and chic kids (read; actors) in the nerd scene were doing.

So, of course, they were going to follow suit.

Now, I don’t think that the theater kids who took up Dungeons and Dragons are only playing the game for clout. I think they probably enjoy it. And that’s fine. They should be allowed to enjoy it. The issue is that they don’t seem to like it when other people enjoy just about anything they also enjoy in a different way than they do.

Like I said, most of the people who make up the tabletop roleplaying community are and historically have been an easy-going and inclusive bunch. If you want to play with them, they’re happy to have you so long as you respect the rules of the game, and you respect them. That’s been my experience. No matter how much the theater kids want to say to the contrary, the games were never exclusive to anyone. For as long as the hobby has existed, people of all colors and sexualities have been playing the games and making them. That had never been a problem. Perhaps some small, provincial groups of players may have excluded others based on certain ethnic or sexual factors, but the larger community was never making a dedicated attempt to keep any one group of people out.

They were not going to exclude anyone who was genuinely interested in their hobby. In my own experience, when I got into tabletop games, roleplaying or otherwise, I was always enthusiastically welcomed for even showing slight interest in these historically maligned hobbies. The companies producing the games sure as hell weren’t going to bar anyone from entry - the more people who were buying their products, the more money they were making.

But it didn’t take long for the new blood to start making demands of the old blood. As more and more of these outsiders poured into the community, they brought with them that aforementioned progressive ideology. And they were not going to accept the way things were before they got there. They were going to tell everyone how it was going to be.

Orcs? Those are actually stand-ins for African Americans and rife with racist stereotypes. Gotta nix that. Goblins? Those were offensive Jewish caricatures. How did you not notice? Say - where is all of the trans representation? We need to get some more of that in here, pronto. And, my God, where are the lesbian elves? We specifically demanded there be lesbian elves. Who’s fucking leg do I have to hump to get some girl-kissing elves in this place? And you make sure that they are ugly as all sin - we cannot, I repeat, can not have sexy elves anymore. It’ll offend the, er - the less genetically blessed of us, okay? Oh - and do get the evil lich Belgorath and make sure that his dungeons are ADA compliant. We have adventurers that are in wheelchairs, and he needs to make sure that they can get through the dungeon so that they can kill him and loot his corpse, okay?

Get it? Got it. Good.

That’s basically how it went. Everything that everyone had been doing before the arrival of the theater kids was wrong, bigoted, racist, transphobic, homophobic, you name, they were being called that. Anyone who said anything about it was pilloried. Anyone in the industry who tried to smooth things over lost their job. It got nasty fast.

And that’s what people have problems with. When the theater kids came into a space that wasn’t theirs, they immediately and aggressively demanded it be changed to fit their sensibilities. Naturally, not wanting any public push back, Wizards of the Coast conceded on all these fronts. Oh, they’ll send the Pinkertons after a fucking guy who’s been a long-time customer and one of their most avid supporters for a mistake they made by sending him the wrong cards, but a bunch of outsiders to the hobby come in and tell them that orcs being exclusively evil is actually some racist sleight against African Americans (which is a sentiment exactly no one had ever expressed, implied, or even thought)?

Say no more, baby - the deed is done.

And here’s the rub; a lot of people who were in the tabletop roleplaying community? They don’t like being bullied. A lot of them have had their fair share of it.

The people who played games like Dungeons and Dragons were famously and universally depicted as losers, basement dwellers, perma-virgins, and social pariahs. They were the butt of the joke and no one who wasn’t already a geek wanted anything to do with them.

In today’s post-Big Bang Theory age, where the Venn Diagram between nerd culture and pop culture is damn near a perfect circle, but being a nerd was not always easy or fashionable.

Being a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, being into video games or manga or sci-fi or fantasy, whatever - not that long ago, that could be effectively putting a target on your back that didn’t just end with social harassment, but at times escalated to physical violence. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time and go to a school where these things weren’t exactly in vogue, but no one was going to beat the shit out of you if you were caught with a manga book or Magic the Gathering cards. I know a lot of people who did not have that luxury.

It’s one thing for someone who doesn’t share your interests to belittle you for having them. It’s entirely something else for someone to come into your hobby, claim that it’s their hobby, and then tell you that you’re an asshole for liking it the way you’ve always enjoyed it.

And this isn’t just exclusive to tabletop roleplaying. This is a crime scene anyone who’s interested in any kind of nerd culture media has seen. Comics. Video games. Anime. Some have born the brunt harder than others - the comics scene was effectively scourged into total irrelevancy - but they’ve all had their fair share of ideologues but into the community and start reorganizing the metaphorical house.

In a lot of ways, this kind of hostile takeover of so many nerd spaces reminds me of Pol Pot’s Year Zero. I know that’s absurdly hyperbolic for obvious reasons, but these new theater kid brahmin are animated a similarly rigid and ideologically intolerant ethos. The old culture must be systematically, methodically, and thoroughly rooted out, destroyed, and replaced. The history must be revised where it can and erased where it can’t. New foundational mythology must be put in place. Then, a new regime can be founded on the blank slate left behind. A more perfect regime. A more kind, equal, and fair regime.

A regime that’s for everybody… except those pesky, problematic oldheads who only put in all the work to build the hobby to begin with.

A week ago as of this writing,

Well - I think it was for them. The new, self-appointed elite of the culture.

The theater kids.

And if you think that this is a problem that’s limited to the world of pop culture, I assure you -

It isn’t.