madimpossibledreamer

• Okay, I wasn't planning on making a more in-depth post on this, but this keeps spiraling and getting wilder.
• Cancel your D&D Beyond subscriptions if you still are upset by the greedy dragons and their pet wizards.  Also Magic the Gathering Arena.  I would if I'd ever used either service.
• Racists, etc are a problem in the publishing space, but WotC and Hasbro could already go after them, and they're making it out to be a bigger problem than it is.  They're still trying to make sure they can cancel anyone for anything, and I'm fine with it being a longer process in which they have to issue a DMCA or something, meaning that someone else can check that they're not just using it as an excuse to get rid of competitors they don't like.
• I don't tend to play D&D.  I think I've done so once.  But I still see a majority of them as important and valid.  I didn't think my joking "Hero System" idle thought post the other week would be so relevant, but yeah--I really like Hero System, but also Call of Cthulhu is amazing and Mutants & Masterminds is another interesting take on the superhero genre.  (What can I say, City of Heroes was big for me.)  These adventurers deserve to have a space that is fun, an escape from the anxiety of our usual reality because let's be honest it's been an anxiety-inducing few years more now than ever and I don't see that changing anytime soon, so that's more important now than ever, and terrifying publishers, DMs, etc is not the way you go about this.  Putting a ton of small third party publishers out of business, killing jobs and competition is not the way you go about this.
• From what I understand there is no way for a "morality clause" (and all of you worried about oh no, being moral is so terrible have the wrong priorities, it's more the possibility of witch hunts and wielding it incorrectly to go after people you simply don't like than treating people like actual human beings that you should be concerned about and the fact that you're not makes me concerned) to even work in the ORC license, since no publisher would own it and therefore not be able to exercise those rights.
• Going after the whole license might have been on purpose, or maybe not.  I'm not sure they have a clue how many people have used it since.  I didn't have a clue about KOTOR or Chaosium, for instance.  But going after VTTs is heinous.  Yes, they want a monopoly.  "If you're going to play a TTRPG, it will be ours.  If you play online, it will be ours.  Play D&D or else."  That's my decision.  Not yours.  And anti-competitive behavior drives me up the wall.  I get why companies do it, but all it says to me is that they're not confident enough in their product that they think customers would freely choose it if they had a choice.
• Yes, non-disparagement clauses exist and yeah, you could totally get sued if you say something you're not supposed to on Twitter.
• I never thought my Ludlum phase would wind up being useful like this, but here goes: anonymous sources are anonymous for a reason.  It does not make them less credible.  Particularly if multiple people have vetted them.  They remain anonymous because, well.  In spy fiction they would get killed if their identity as a leaker was discovered.  In this case I don't think Hasbro is hiring assassins to take them out, but they probably would get fired, which is equally bad.  Even trained journalists will not out a source because a) why would you speak to a person if you knew they were just going to get you fired; that will just ensure no one ever trusts you to keep confidentiality ever again and b) that removes your ability to hear from the inside.  You do yourself and them a disservice.
• Further: planted leaks to discredit people are common.  Misunderstandings are common.  Witnesses notoriously don't see the same things.  It's possible, for instance, that someone was appalled by the fact that each survey didn't get read individually, not knowing that it's not common practice.  Things could have changed.  They could be lying for their own reasons.  They could be lying on behalf of management.  We don't know.  Even if the details may have been wrong, this doesn't change the impression that several other people got without even having heard this: that even if they do plan on reading surveys, we may be at an impasse.  "You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."  The terms the community specifically wants changed may (and probably are) the very terms that WotC and Hasbro are unwilling to change.
• It's up to you whether you forgive.  I wouldn't.  But definitely don't forget, because knowledge from the past better prepares you for the future.
• Don't threaten people.  Except with taking your wallet elsewhere if you can't support the company.  Threaten you'll vote with your wallet.
• Anyway, that's my considerably more than 2 cents.

this story is brought to you by a slightly more sane NRA, aka everyone needs guns but you should definitely train with them and keep them locked up away from the kiddos (sadly, not even kidding, it's one of the letters "The Spider" answered in the back of the magazine...)
(It comes off as especially bad when compared to the Twilight Zone/Shadow episode I'll talk about soon on first look and also...maybe not so good an inspiration for Spider-Man which apparently according to the (unfortunately late) Stan Lee he was somehow??)

honestly though?

The Spider is not as fun as The Shadow.  The Spider definitely comes off as a copycat (though I find the limp interesting, that’s like…a single detail).  I have no idea what this man does for a living.  Sure, he’s a vigilante, but what’s his day job?  I don’t get the sense that the writer has an idea of his backstory, only where he is now, and that’s good and all but that’s a single aspect of the character. 

There’s definite similarities in the writing but I like “Grant’s” writing less.  Part of it is the construction—not sure what’s up here, but…eh, part of it might be that hyphens are liberally used rather than further elaboration.  I dunno, I’ll pull out one of my Shadow Magazines tomorrow to do a comparison.  (Looking at it now…The Shadow doesn’t overuse exclamation points.  Yeah, okay, it’s largely a punctuation thing.  The excess of hyphens/dashes and ellipses [problems I’ve got but I work on it] and exclamation points [which I do not have as a problem] make it a much less smooth read, unlike The Shadow where semicolons are often used correctly and unobtrusively.  It’s an issue of flow.  There are a few issues where dialogue also feels less good in flow, but.)

And part of that lack of character understanding leads to a less charismatic character.  One of the best parts of the Shadow is his organization, actually, which is something some of the adaptations miss.  And while there was the occasional Shadow story with racist stuff (largely in the radio adaptations, though again I’ll dig through and find the single story I’d found so far that was over the top—that would be Lingo, which has a Chinatown segment and also Jericho being cool), Jericho’s an important and especially for the time complex portrayal of an African-American character.  He plays a little into the gentle giant stereotype but subverts it in that he has to be just as quick-witted and fast on his feet as his (probably white) fellow Agents. 

(Again, I’ll look more into the stereotype later, but especially in analysis of Detroit: Become Human I’d heard about the stereotype and it seemed different than that.  [Looked into it.  Okay, TV Tropes says that it’s the mere fact that they are scary, but there are subversions you can do with the stereotype and I’d say this is one, particularly when the villains are portrayed as unintelligent for believing the stereotype and underestimating him, particularly his intelligence.  Quite honestly it’s bad that we’ve got more nuance in a story from the 1930s than David Cage can dream of.  Okay, I’ve come up with a good analogy.  It’s like Charlie Chan, which is simultaneously stereotypical, regressive, progressive, and kind of fun, and there’s no problem with liking it [I do!] but you have to be aware and acknowledge and maybe even discuss that you can’t separate one part from all the others.]) 

It’s even sexist with the main villain woman being a cardboard cutout femme fatale.  While Margo was again, just as capable an Agent.  (Not always portrayed that way in movies or the radio program.  Unfortunately.)  The Shadow as portrayed in the magazine series, which almost always has more nuance, like I mentioned, than the movies or radio, is not perfect.  Certainly there are problematic aspects, but it seems less pervasive and one-sided than many of the other work I’ve seen from the time. 

It just seems like while “Maxwell Grant” thinks about layers and layers of stuff that never makes it onto the page (and sometimes contradicts itself making the Shadow ever more so “terribly mysterious” [quoting Blue Raja there]), “Grant Stockbridge” just isn’t.  In other words, don’t just tell a story with things you find cool.  That’s first draft material.  Once you get to second and especially final draft, you have to question why things are there, what the audience will think, why why why.  Creators aren’t creating in a vacuum; what they make is both impacted by and impacting the world they live in, because media shapes public and private opinion.  It could go further (a female Shadow would be really cool, for instance), but I really like where the Shadow was, especially for its time, and I just…don’t like where the Spider is.  Not for today, and especially not for its time.  (Maybe I just read the worst of the Spider stories, kind of like how I’d write off the entirety of Star Trek if the first episode I saw was the TNG episode Code of Honor but…it’s not exactly a good look/start.)