# Heresy Spoken About Games and the Canon Sainted Mentally-Ill tags: #thoughts Yeah, I might as well get this down. If I'm going to be heretical, I'm going to make sure it's seen for all posterity. ---  I think it's worth noting that there's a reason that there's an enormous in-joke about the bard seducing the dragon — and it's not because weird sex was never at the table. It absolutely was *always* at the table. It's because everybody at the table wasn't a precious little snowflake and were capable of actually opening their mouths and speaking up for themselves when they saw something happening like a normal human being, even if they weren't some of us have specialized in freaky shit happening in RPGs for decades, and I don't just mean a decade, I mean decades. It was never a problem. Hell, we didn't have trigger warnings. We had *advertising*. Same text, different intent. **[[Vampire - the Masquerade|Vampire: the Masquerade]]**, 1991. Pretty much entirely about fucking and being raped by monsters, psychological domination, brutality, and being pretty. Largely credited with bringing more women into the RPG tabletop hobby than the Greyhound bus line moves crackheads. That was not a problem, that was *profit on the hoof*. I don't even think I can largely lay it at the feet of political weirdos per se because most of the people who have been involved with RPGs outside of **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** (yes, I'm telling you, play a different RPG for once in your life for the love of God) have been raging lefties for just as long. They were *always* political weirdos. The main difference is that they were at least *adult* political weirdos who knew that they were dealing with other adults and wanted to produce and cultivate adult things that adults could enjoy. That it was the tabletop RPG hobby didn't matter. What matters was that it was good. For the most part, it was the players' lookout to deal with their own personal mental illness and not push it on everyone else and make it *their* problem. Despite the fact that the raging political activists have made much of the hobby unpleasant to associate with, I don't hold them responsible for this current insipidity. It's the hyper-acceptance and canonization of the sainted mentally ill that's the real problem. Mental illness has become a sacrament, one that you must appreciate and kneel before, reflect and genuflect that it represents the touch of God and those so afflicted cannot be questioned. Needless to say, I'm not exactly thrilled by that fact. Saying so pretty much puts the brand of hereticism right on my forehead, but that's okay. I'm a reject from both sides of the political spectrum and much of the indie RPG space anyway. I'll say what I want, and what I want to say is that both sides of the political activist hobby are equally reprehensible, but it's the elevation of mental illness to the sacred that's really done the damage. All that said, one side does it more than the other, and we should aggressively kick them in the ding when they do so. But don't confuse cause and correlation.