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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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I'm so sick of exceptionalism. Every damn thing seems to center around some shitty thinly veiled oligarch, their kids as some hero, or unhappenable origins and an impossible hero. Everything is geared towards cultural acceptance of some authoritarian neo feudal dystopian future.
Stories can be interesting in other spaces. We all exist within those real spaces. We can fantasize about better places and times within similar realities as our own. I view all this exceptionalism like collective narcissism. I can't tell if it is an universal writing bias or a publishing bias, but I don't like it.
The dresden files are pretty good and everyone in those books are flawed as fuck. Same goes with expeditionary force by Craig Alanson. Joe Bishop and skippy are both royal fuck ups and assholes.
Do you have a good example of a story which doesn't fall into this trope at all? One which perfectly encapsulates not doing this?
The Expanse in the first couple of seasons did a decent job of showing that the characters were flawed and not at the center of the world while struggling against a system that is a more realistic portrayal of what monsters exceptionalism really creates.
This aspect of Star Trek the next generation did a pretty good job of contextualizing the fact that the events on the Enterprise were the stories of one of many such vessels.
EDIT:
That is why I like Dune and Asimov's universe as well.
In Dune there is a ton of exceptionalism, and it is outright shown to be awful for the average person. I would argue that every form of exceptionalism throughout the books is always met with an equally negative outcome and flaw.
In Asimov's stuff there is exceptional altruism in Daneel. The most exceptional characters like The Mule is shown as a tyrant. Hari Seldon is unexceptional in his exceptional idea, but is dead for the exceptional events that followed and his exceptionalism is constantly in question.
The Expanse is the first thing that came to mind for me as a counter-example when I read your first comment so I'm glad to see you mention it! It even plays on the exceptionalism idea in book/season 3 and 4 where Holden seems special because >!Miller is appearing to him!< and because >!he isn't affected by the eye parasites!< only to explain those things away with reasoning stemming from events that already happened in previous books. And any exceptionalism that comes after that is largely due to the reputation or skills characters have built for themselves rather than because they're "chosen ones".
If you haven't read the books, I really recommend them!
Just very quickly: the books are so much better than the show! I had to stop watching the show somewhere I think in season 2 - everything started digressing/simplifying too much from the books (the characters became flat and uninteresting etc.) So yeah, I found the books much more enjoyable.
Lost in Translation comes to mind. A peek into the intersection of two people’s lives for a few days
There was some brouhaha a while ago in some DND spaces where some people were like "can we stop doing stories about kings and 'rightful heirs'? It's all very regressive and not fun anymore" and some people just lost their mind.
"Don't make this all PoLitIcAL , this conversation about political systems".
Anyway. I'm super done with basic fantasy monarchy. My pandemic DND game had
Lots of options.
Honestly, DND was the wrong tool for the game. DND is best for resource management dungeon crawls, like "we have 20 hit points between us and enough juice to cast Sleep once, do we keep going or turn back?" kind of stuff.
It doesn't really have many tools for social conflict, for example. Tooling for hooking into characters is sparse. I really like Fate more, and feel it's more in line with how people intuit RPGs.