Thebetterjellyfish - Untitled

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

i've seen so many antisemitic posts and tweets where the person is careful to say "jewish people" instead of "jews" as though all you need to do is switch out your language. i guess this is the legacy of the 2015-era obsession with correct language as social justice, now people think they just need to avoid certain words and not actually unlearn bigotry. anyway it's way more insulting when people do this

M's sorry, how's about I says it another way, ifs you care about your "relevancy" mores than the ppls in palestine, please dni.

M's just gonna unfollow ya'll I can't with this. The strike ends on the 30th of March.

If you haven't seen the announcement then here's your reminder: Palestine has asked for an online and irl strike lasting from the 24th to the 30th of March, please don't buy things from stores unless you really have to, don't feed into the American or Israeli economies, please spread awareness no matter how big your audience is, make art to support Palestine, donate to Palestine - related causes, and do your daily clicks!!!

Hold off posting requests, hold off on events, you can all wait four days to keep posting normally. Don't treat this as some sort of trend!

If ya'll don't give a damn about me or my opinions on this then unfollow, block, do whatever you have to I don't care. This will not end until Palestine is free.

Massive fuck you to everyone who is talking about Palestinians as if we’re already all dead and sharing more solidarity with our corpses than us living. “We will never forget the beautiful Palestinian people-“ how about you stop “making peace” with Palestinian extermination. My people are not going to be forgotten because we are going to live. Palestinians have already survived one genocide and have been surviving one ever since.

Do not ever let the idea that all Palestinians are going to die exist in your mind. Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.

Support for Palestine should be unconditional by the way. Stop looking for the ways they're just like you (ex: gay, trans, neurodivergent, etc) and support them for the sole reason that theyre literally facing a genocide right now. This is what solidarity is.