so dog-whistling at the alt-right and trivializing the irl persecution and genocide of the lgbtq community in chechnya can mean the end of your company as an independent entity? who knew?
i googled the "chechnya chapter" and hoooooly shit
while it would have been nice if someone had exercised some god damn common sense during the conceptual stages i'm glad they're belatedly realizing what a fuckheaded idea this was and excising it from the book it was supposed to be in
Sadly, no one actually involved in this stupidity learned a goddamn thing. Dissolving White Wolf and getting rid of the Cechnya bullshit was entirely due to Paradox Interactive finally noticing the fuckery WW was getting up to without supervision.
Too bad it took these idiots literally causing an international incident for them to take notice.
skim this tl;dr for more reasons why this situation ended up so fucked, namely who the people that got tapped to run the new WW chose to hire (which was apparently deleted from the original site because the author got the usual psycho death threats)
that callout was sloppily done and weak, hingeing on the idea that they were deliberately marketing to alt righters. the way people treated the op was absolutely disgusting and it brought out a lot of ugliness in fandom, but it also was just not well-done and making "they're courting the alt-right" the centerpiece of the argument discredited the legitimate points. it was clickbaity and it makes it into an insidious conspiracy when it's all a lot simpler: they're fucking stupid.
the start of this wank is pretty intermingled with wank about zak s, who was not a writer on these books but was paid to do a project beforehand where white wolf claimed to have "investigated" allegations of internet harassment by him and decided he was "innocent," which he is not. if you want a wank rabbit hole to go down sometime, dig up the zak s debacle. it was stupid of them to hire him and even stupider of them to try to make themselves arbiters of who was right and wrong in his wankography. this post is also totally right about how bad an idea it was to involve him and to bring back reinhagen, but the people running the new company are all old vampire larpers so of course they wanted to drag in the old man for nostalgia points.
the tl;dr of the white wolf situation is really just that new white wolf is trying to do in 2018 what old white wolf got away with in the 90s, and is surprised when times have changed and it's not acceptable anymore. 90s white wolf made a bunch of money and got attention for being dark and dramatic and claiming to be so much deeper than every other game company because they did things "no one else" would do. the new crowd still think being edgy and showing monsters on "all sides" makes what you are doing profound and artistic instead of dangerous. they keep demonstrating that the new white wolf did not learn a damn thing from the failures of the 90s incarnation and instead enshrined it, which is the biggest problem when longtime fans of a thing are given the power to resurrect it. 90s white wolf was surprisingly liberal for the time but that praise is damn faint and it's been 25 fucking years. we expect better now because we have better now.
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wankgate2018-11-05 06:42 pm
WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-11-30 02:25 pm (UTC)(link)so dog-whistling at the alt-right and trivializing the irl persecution and genocide of the lgbtq community in chechnya can mean the end of your company as an independent entity? who knew?
Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-11-30 02:37 pm (UTC)(link)Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-11-30 04:28 pm (UTC)(link)Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-12-01 02:12 am (UTC)(link)Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-12-01 02:04 am (UTC)(link)while it would have been nice if someone had exercised some god damn common sense during the conceptual stages i'm glad they're belatedly realizing what a fuckheaded idea this was and excising it from the book it was supposed to be in
Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-12-01 10:49 am (UTC)(link)Too bad it took these idiots literally causing an international incident for them to take notice.
Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-12-01 04:21 pm (UTC)(link)skim this tl;dr for more reasons why this situation ended up so fucked, namely who the people that got tapped to run the new WW chose to hire (which was apparently deleted from the original site because the author got the usual psycho death threats)
Re: WORLD OF DARKNESS
(Anonymous) 2018-12-01 07:58 pm (UTC)(link)the start of this wank is pretty intermingled with wank about zak s, who was not a writer on these books but was paid to do a project beforehand where white wolf claimed to have "investigated" allegations of internet harassment by him and decided he was "innocent," which he is not. if you want a wank rabbit hole to go down sometime, dig up the zak s debacle. it was stupid of them to hire him and even stupider of them to try to make themselves arbiters of who was right and wrong in his wankography. this post is also totally right about how bad an idea it was to involve him and to bring back reinhagen, but the people running the new company are all old vampire larpers so of course they wanted to drag in the old man for nostalgia points.
the tl;dr of the white wolf situation is really just that new white wolf is trying to do in 2018 what old white wolf got away with in the 90s, and is surprised when times have changed and it's not acceptable anymore. 90s white wolf made a bunch of money and got attention for being dark and dramatic and claiming to be so much deeper than every other game company because they did things "no one else" would do. the new crowd still think being edgy and showing monsters on "all sides" makes what you are doing profound and artistic instead of dangerous. they keep demonstrating that the new white wolf did not learn a damn thing from the failures of the 90s incarnation and instead enshrined it, which is the biggest problem when longtime fans of a thing are given the power to resurrect it. 90s white wolf was surprisingly liberal for the time but that praise is damn faint and it's been 25 fucking years. we expect better now because we have better now.