Shoshana – Page 7 – Shoshana Kessock

Not All Men, But Enough To Make Me Furious

May 30, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Sexual Harassment, Speaking Out

Warning: This post is about the Isla Vista shooting in California. It will have discussions about sexual violence, murder, misogyny, feminism, and more. It will also have personal content. And it’s long. Reader discretion advised.

For the third night in a row, I woke up in the early morning before dawn, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I sat up in my room and tried to calm down. The last two days, I didn’t remember my dreams. Today, I absolutely do. I got up, washed my face, and now I’m sitting here typing this.

I haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep since the Isla Vista shooting.

In the grand scheme of things, I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. I just graduated grad school. I was just on the west coast for an unbelievable WyrdCon. I’ve got a fantastic book project I’m working on. I’m facing some crazy health issues. There’s a lot on my mind. Yet since I heard about the shooting in California while I was in LA, I haven’t been able to sleep well. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, every night. I’ve been keyed up, stressed, losing my temper. And it’s getting worse. Because so has the coverage of the event and the subsequent response in social media to the discussion of misogyny and violence against women.

The events of the Isla Vista shooting and the discovery of the manifesto by Elliot Rodger has sparked a debate around the world that has been bubbling up just under the surface for ages. (Do yourself a favor: don’t read it or watch the YouTube video of that monster if you want to sleep again). The news is tackling questions of the objectification of women, of feminist thought, and masculine entitlement and even the toxic fallacies of masculine culture. Most of all, the fantastic hashtag #YesAllWomen erupted with stories of women’s experiences around the globe, sharing the horrors and the cautionary tales, desperately trying to get the world to hear them. This hashtag, over one million tweets strong, has been instrumental in casting a light into the dark corners of accepted misogyny, casual mistreatment and brutal violence against women that has been a part of our so-called liberated, modern culture. Here, I thought, here is a chance to see this issue tackled in a meaningful way once and for all.

And then. And then came the other responses. The trolls, who have made it their business to harass women (and men) who commented on #YesAllWomen, who go out of their way to verbally harangue, threaten, and terrorize those who’ve spoken up to share their stories. The MRA, with their truly heinous beliefs about women. The media outlets that chose to spend their time focusing on what could have gone wrong with a wealthy (read: entitled) young man like Rodger, demonizing his mental illness as opposed to focusing on the narrative of his pathology.

But what really bothers me is the Not All Men issue and conversation hijacking.

In the days since the shooting, I have heard more misdirection away from the story of women than ever before. The whole ‘Not All Men’ issue has been a problem for ages. A woman will speak up about misogyny, about mistreatment, and the conversation will inevitably be utterly hijacked by some (usually well-meaning) guy who is desperate to distance himself from misogyny culture. “Not all Men!” is the rallying cry, but what that guy is trying to say is, “I’m not like that! I don’t do that! Look at me, I’m with you! So don’t lump me in with that bullshit!”

Yes. We know. We know that you don’t want to be lumped in with monsters who objectify, oppress, harass, stalk, beat, rape, torture and murder women. What good person wants to be? But in the rush to justify yourself away from that culture, those screaming Not All Men are exercising their self-righteous fury at the women’s voices who are trying to just get themselves heard. They’re shouting over the conversation to make it about THEM, to make THEMSELVES feel better. It’s self-centered and lacks empathy. And it makes me as a woman so inordinately angry that I can’t think straight after a while.

Isn’t it enough that talking about this issue is difficult? That women across the internet and the world have laid themselves bare with stories of unspeakable traumas just so this issue can be pushed forward into the light? Isn’t it enough that women have gone out on a limb to say “Here, see the pain I’ve been in, the things that have happened to me?” Do they also then have to sit and listen to bruised egos trying to justify themselves in the face of evidence of systematic privilege? The whole Not All Men conversation is a compounded insult to injury that brings bile up in my throat every time I hear it. I started out gently correcting people, recognizing their attempts to distance from the horrors of rape culture. I politely pointed out that yes, though individual men might not enact mistreatment of women, they are part of a larger group that does and need to recognize their place in that system. I started out polite. But after the insert huge number here time I said “I know YOU don’t do that BUT” I finally ran out of patience.

Guys. We know. But this part of the story isn’t about you. You get to have your own conversations about masculine culture and how much it blows. You get to have your own conversations about violence against men in our culture. You get to have conversations about the other issues that plague men, like classism, or racism, or homophobia. You get to have ALL the other issue conversations you would like. And we as women will be right there to empathize, to listen, to help as we can. But this story is ours. And we as women need to get it out there without being reminded that ‘we are all alike in our misery’ or ‘your misery is not as bad as our misery.’

Folks, this isn’t the Misery Olympics. Nobody is trying to take away the individual struggle that you have had by talking about their own trials and tribulations. Nobody is saying that just because they have faced systematic oppression that you have not individually had issues due to your own position in society. Nobody is taking away your right to your own pain. But if your first knee-jerk position when you hear someone talking about systematic abuse of power by a group that you belong to is to defend yourself, is to steal the narrative away to shout loudly ‘But I didn’t do it so I am not culpable’ then you are part of the problem. You show by that very action that you believe your story is more important than that of the women around you, who are desperately trying to be heard. You show your lack of empathy, your self-involvement, and your disregard for the other person’s pain.

“But my life has been hard too! I’ve had _____ happen to me because I’m a man! I don’t get extra cool things in life because I’ve suffered too.”

Yes. We KNOW. And it sucks. It all sucks. Every terrible thing that’s happened to a person sucks. It’s all awful, horrible, and terrible.

But it’s not the same story.

As half the population of the human race, women share a special narrative. It goes around the world and can be shared by women almost everywhere. Only the most lucky can say they can opt out of this shared story. You can sit down as a woman at a table in Peoria or Paris, Stockholm or Santa Barbara, and if you bring up the mistreatment faced by women, the stories will come out. The heads around the table will nod. Or those who are afraid to speak up, ashamed, will simply look you in the eye and you’ll know. They get it. They understand. Even if they protest that ‘it’s not that bad’ or ‘you should just get over it’. Even if they say ‘you just need to focus on the positive’ and ‘we need to move forward and be strong.’ Women will look at one another with that shared experience of walking home alone with their keys in their fists, hoping that the guy walking thirty yards back isn’t after them. With stories about trusting the wrong person and ending up with a glass full of roofies. Of the violation of their personal space by men touching their asses, their chests, grabbing on them, pushing up against them. They’ll share the stories of harmful words, terrifying encounters, and violence.

And some people are trying to push this shared narrative down once again. They call it beating a dead horse. They say ‘We ALL have issues, together! United! So we need to stand together and forget what divides us!’

I saw a post on Facebook calling all this discussion ‘hysteria’ and I nearly vomited. I wanted to climb through the internet, grab the person who posted it, and scream. I wanted to say, “Don’t you get it? These things happen! They happen to so many of us I can’t keep count!”

They happened to me.

I don’t share my own narrative with sexual assault often. I have my own issues with processing just what happened to me. I don’t talk about it, refuse to break down about it, demand a degree of control over my emotions from myself. Yet some days, I go to bed and remember things I wish had never happened or that I could forget.

I remember going to my first sorority party and getting drunk for the first time. I remember getting a ride home and the guy in the backseat with me deciding that we were going to hook up right there, in front of his friends, even though I said no.

I remember my first serious boyfriend forcing me into sexual acts in the front seat of his car only mere feet from my front door. When I asked him why he did it instead of waiting until I was ready, he said, “I needed it, and it’s not fair. I gave you a ride.” I remember that I was so naive that I didn’t know what to call these events. I remember being told “You shouldn’t have gotten so drunk” or “He is your boyfriend, what did you expect?” or “What’s your problem anyway? It’s not that big a deal.” That wasn’t the last time he did it either, because I believed those people. I believed I was just being hysterical.

I remember walking home late at night after work to have a guy follow me from the train station. He would make vulgar, violent threats and each day, he got closer, walked a little further, until he followed me right to my apartment building. I turned on him and screamed that I’d wake up the neighborhood, then raced inside. The next day, I didn’t see him again, only to find out that was because he’d assaulted a woman in the vestibule of her building. It hadn’t been me, but it had been her.

I remember going to a bathroom to change clothes at a convention. It was a single room bathroom and the lock had problems. No sooner was I down to my underwear but a guy pushed open the door. From his instant leering, he knew I’d been there. He blocked the doorway, grabbed at his crotch, and complimented my chest. When I told him to leave, loudly, he called me a filthy slut who wanted it. He only left when a woman outside shouted at him and asked if I was all right.

I remember waiting out in Gothenburg for my bus to Knutpunkt and being approached by a man. He asked me was I there alone, and if I had a boyfriend with me. When I politely tried to end the conversation, he shook my hand and then used that opportunity to hold me in place while he came in to give me a sloppy kiss and lick on the cheek and grope my chest. I was so stunned I didn’t have a chance to say something. I just sat there, feeling the need for a shower.

And then I remember the little things. The casual comments calling women sluts. The jokes about rape that my guy friends thought were hilarious. My mother’s warning that I can’t go out in that skirt because ‘men have only one thing on their minds’ and then being proven right when a guy slipped his hand under my skirt on the bus. Waking up on a subway car to a guy groping himself next to me while he stared down my shirt.

Okay, so some of those aren’t little.

The list goes on. This is part of my narrative, of the stories I live with and can share with #YesAllWomen because I’m part of that long storytelling tradition now of trauma that lives under your skin, in every interaction with a new man, in the dreams that won’t let you sleep. This is part of my story and I will be damned if I will sit back and listen as people try to hijack that worldwide narrative at a time when it’s finally coming out of the shadows of shame and fear and into the light.

So say ‘Not All Men’ in front of me and see what happens now. Not All Men? But enough men. Enough men to fill a million tweets and how many more stories never told. I remember mine, though. And today I’m putting them out here in the hopes that this post will let me sleep a little.

Slut Hulk: David Goyer and Craig Mazin Set A New Low For Discussing Comics

May 21, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Film, Geek Culture, Speaking Out

When I woke up this morning, I didn’t think I’d be writing a post on my blog defending She-Hulk. Or the right for comic book characters to not be called sluts and sex objects by Hollywood screenwriters. But hey, it’s a Wednesday, the sun is shining, and The Mary Sue put out an article about David Goyer and his comments on a podcast called Scriptnotes. And that changed what I did with my afternoon.

The short version is that David Goyer, a writer for DC Comics who is going to be working on the upcoming Superman / Batman movie, went on a podcast called Scriptnotes hosted by a John August and Craig Mazin. He and other panelists talked about other characters in comics that would be translated into film and how, and things went straight to pretty awful sexism the moment Goyer was asked to talk about She-Hulk. Here’s the transcript (thanks to The Mary Sue):

Craig Mazin: The real name for She-Hulk was Slut-Hulk. That was the whole point. Let’s just make this green chick with enormous boobs. And she’s Hulk strong but not Hulk massive, right? … She’s real lean, stringy…

David S. Goyer: She’s still pretty chunky. She was like Chyna from the WWE.

Mazin: The whole point of She-Hulk was just to appeal sexistly to ten-year-old boys. Worked on me.

Goyer: I have a theory about She-Hulk. Which was created by a man, right? And at the time in particular I think 95% of comic book readers were men and certainly almost all of the comic book writers were men. So the Hulk was this classic male power fantasy. It’s like, most of the people reading comic books were these people like me who were just these little kids getting the shit kicked out of them every day… And so then they created She-Huk, right? Who was still smart… I think She-Hulk is the chick that you could fuck if you were Hulk, you know what I’m saying? … She-Hulk was the extension of the male power fantasy. So it’s like if I’m going to be this geek who becomes the Hulk then let’s create a giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck.

I really have no idea where to start.

First off. David Goyer. I could go into explaining how She-Hulk was created as cousin to the Hulk in the comics. So them sleeping together would only work if this was Marvel’s Game of Thrones. But I’m going to sidestep that. I’m going to instead look at the logic behind your statement and the disturbing context that you’re applying to women comic book characters. And hang on, Craig Mazin, because you’re not escaping culpability for this sexist bro-fest. We’ll get to you in a second.

2051136-she_hulk — Because having big boobs and being in comics makes She-Hulk a slut, according to Goyer and Mazin.

If David Goyer is to be believed here, then since most comic book writers were men, the characters they were creating were to fulfill a need in male readership. Since, you know, men were the only people reading those comics. (Never the case, since I owned a She-Hulk #1 as a little girl). The writers therefore were trying to build a character that men, who use the Hulk as a power fantasy, could then focus on as a sex fantasy when they emote into the Hulk. They couldn’t possibly be trying to create a full-rich character with her own story that might appeal to men in other ways besides her sexuality. Because, as we know, the only way for a character in comics to be received by comic book fans is through their need for escapist narratives about giant muscles or through sex fantasies about ‘overly sexualized women’.

Heck, Craig Mazin seems to agree with him as he said: “The whole point of She-Hulk was just to appeal sexistly to ten-year-old boys. Worked on me.”

If that’s to be believed, than the comic book industry spends all it’s time aiming their writing not at their audience’s minds and hearts, but at their insecurities and need for escapism or at their testicles. And if you’re a woman, then not at all.

From here, I’ll separate my comments regarding Goyer and Mazin. Because Mazin spent a good deal of today trying to backtrack away from his comments on Twitter, claiming not only that he can’t be sexist because he has a daughter and wife, but that his comments were about the sexist aims of comic book writers at the time. But in his attempt to point out sexist tropes, apparently, he had no problem calling a character in the comics a slut because of her representation in the art as having large breasts. You know, like every other female character in comics ever. So is it then that every woman in comics was written as appealing to the male libido only and therefore that they’re ‘sluts’?

That’s a loaded word, Mr. Mazin. It means sexually promiscuous and is generally aimed to cast a female character in a negative light, generally to create shame about the character’s sexual conquests or activities. That’s why it’s called ‘slut shaming’. It is a derogatory term. There were a million ways you could have said ‘I believe that She Hulk as a character was created in an overly sexualized way.’ Instead, you went straight to calling her a slut. What’s slutty about her character? Her work as a lawyer, or being an Avenger? Maybe it’s the fact that by comparison she actually usually wears more clothing than the Hulk? I’m curious why that was the name you chose, Mr. Mazin, if you did not mean to be derogatory about the character’s sexuality. If slut your go-to word on the subject, that says something about the way you think about the character. And about women being portrayed as sexual in general. Backtrack all you want, but the word choice is telling and repugnant.

Now we can move on to David Goyer. Because on the day when DC unveiled the new title of their Superman/Batman movie, David Goyer decided to go ahead and show just how little he thinks of not only comic book fans but of the female characters in comic books in general. He started with his view of female characters as sexual fantasies, created only to entice male libido, but he also then went on to insult comic book fans in general. Quoted from the Mary Sue article:

Goyer was asked how he would translate the J’onn J’onzz aka Martian Manhunter to film. As Goyer is one of the people in charge of bringing the DC Universe to live action, this was definitely a topic where his ideas carried weight. In response to being asked about the hero, Goyer asked, “How many people in the audience have heard of Martian Manhunter?” After hearing some light applause and cheers, he added, “How many people that raised their hands have ever been laid?”

First, a powerful female character like She Hulk is just there for sexual titilation. Then, Goyer falls back on the stereotype of comic book fans as unable to get laid.

David Goyer, can I ask you a question: why do you work in comics?

By the way you spoke in this interview about not only the material you work with (example: comments on how ‘goofy’ Martian Manhunter is) and then your clear insults at comic book fans, I don’t understand why you’d work in comics. Your clear disdain for the subject material and the fans comes through in the whole interview. On top of that, it’s obvious how incredibly out of touch you are with the industry in general. And with these comments, you’ve made it abundantly clear that one of the people entrusted with bringing the next big DC movie to the world has little regard for female characters in comics or the audience of your film. Is this the person who should be working on the first big screen introduction of Wonder Woman?

Oh yes, and Mr. Goyer? I didn’t miss the bit of body shaming you put out there too. She Hulk in the comics is exceptionally fit and athletic, a muscular match for her cousin the Hulk. (COUSIN, Mr. Goyer. Not someone for the Hulk to sleep with. COUSIN.) But do I hear you referencing Hulk as anything but a male power fantasy? Nope. For She Hulk however you went ahead and called her ‘chunky’.

(Though I did notice you mentioned Chyna there in reference. Maybe because she played She Hulk in the porno? Could that be your ONLY point of reference for the character, Mr. Goyer?)

Let’s recap: Body shaming, slut shaming, fan shaming.

This is what commentary on comics and comic book films comes down to these days? Two guys bringing their sexist (‘But I’m not REALLY sexist!’) ideas to the table? We’ve heard these voices for years now, perpetuating the same garbage and framing the view of female characters through the lens of male lasciviousness. Heaven forbid that we could divorce ourselves of the male assumption that everything in comics is for them long enough to consider female characters as entities unto themselves. Goyer and Mazin are just echoes of the same old song and dance, just caught out in the open being blatant about it. Slut Hulk. Just something to bang. It’s all been said before. Now it’s just caught on podcast.

What amazes me is in his comments, there’s indications that Goyer felt like one of those stereotyped nerds growing up. He says ‘those people like me’ who were getting beaten up. So now, as a screenwriter and someone in the driver’s seat of providing creative content to the comic book world, seems Goyer might be suffering from a little self hating nerd syndrome.

DC Comics, do yourself a favor. Hire someone to work on your movies and your comics that doesn’t clearly hate on your own fan base quite so much.

You’re Insecure About Your Work, And That’s Okay

May 14, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

I’ve been reading a lot of words of encouragement lately about how to be a better writer. How to motivate yourself, engage with your readers, what to do and what not to do. A lot of it has centered around the idea that creative folks have a tendency to be extremely self critical about their work. In fact, one of the issues that writers seem to deal with is self-doubt to an amazing degree. I speak from personal experience when I say that my own issue is usually a crippling fear of my work being judged as inferior or lacking, which often can stall me when I’m just about to do a major writing push.

“What if it’s not good enough?”

“What if it’s not received well?”

“What if it’s not engaging enough?”

“What if the material is found offensive and I get yelled at on Twitter?”

(That last one is particularly troubling, but that’s an issue for another blog post).

The thing is, lots of people are insecure about their work. I mean, there are doctors and lawyers out there who worry about the services they provide. Having a crisis of confidence isn’t just an issue for the creative sphere. However, I believe that the inherent issue about creators taking it much worse than in other fields is the fact that the rest of the world invalidates creators on a regular basis.

Being an artist isn’t valued the way it should be in our society. People ask writers to do hours of work for pennies, for nothing, for exposure. They ask artists to ‘just draw me this, it’ll look good in your portfolio.’ And everyone can write, can’t they? So why hire someone who is a professional in the field, when you can cobble something together for cheaper? Thank goodness it’s not this way everywhere but ask anyone who has a child if they’re pleased their kid is a writer, and the response you’ll often hear is that they wish that child had been a ________ (insert higher paying profession here). Being an artist remains, to a large extent, looked at as a dalliance, a pie in the sky, unless you make it big. Otherwise, you’re just messing around. You’re not actually doing anything.

And you wonder why we develop insecurities? Even the best potential writers grow up with this knowledge in their heads – that there are a million of you. That there are others out there probably better. That you won’t make any money. That you won’t get published. That you will never make it. That you will fail.

What a litany to feed your insecurity. What a mess to try and work through.

So when a writer has a complicated relationship with their work, with how they feel about themselves as a writer, it’s one thing to try and bolster them and get them into a better mindset. It’s one thing to try and help them see that there is validity to their work, and help them fight to be in a better headspace to create brilliant art. It’s another to invalidate their insecurity.

All feelings are valid. Whether or not they’re productive, that’s another thing. But I find that often when I’m reading encouraging messages about the writing process, there’s an insidious message behind the bolstering that sounds very much like tone policing to me. Don’t be negative about your work. Being negative is bad. It’s the mindkiller. You can do better than that. Just be positive. Face your fears. That’s what makes you a writer!

No. What makes you a writer is producing the work. What makes you a writer is getting up, putting words on paper, no matter how it happens. If you struggle with it but it happens, then you’ve written today. If you don’t struggle, good! You’ve written today. If you sit and slam your head into the wall and wonder if you’re wasting your life and then can’t write that day because of it, you’re a writer tackling a crucial issue in your writing process. I posit that grappling with your fears is part of the writing process. It’s a nasty, difficult, exhausting process, but it’s part of it. And telling folks that those fears should be tackled and moved past before a writer is ready is in my mind negating the struggle that that creator has been undertaking.

There’s this idea in our society that if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you tackle things head on, if you make the battle happen, then you’ll win. Isn’t that what G.I. Joe taught us? Our cartoons growing up? We learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem and courage in a thirty-minute episode and suddenly Knowing Is Half The Battle. The fact is the other half the battle is tackling the issue. But that tackling, that fight, is not a one day thing. For some, it can be a constant, ongoing struggle until they find the answer they’re looking for. And often the most well-meaning support can sound as though any writer who isn’t making headway into being positive about their work is a fragile writer that needs to toughen up to fly right. So I ask a question:

When did it become a sin to be sensitive about your work?

When did it become a problem to feel badly or have negative feelings?

Don’t get me wrong. I think life would be so much easier if we didn’t have these insecurities as creators. I think it would be amazing if every time I tackled a project, I didn’t have to face down some scary demons inside that tell me I’m a failure nobody will want to read. I wish that I could sit down every day without having to battle fear paralysis. But that’s my cross to bear. And others have their own. But I think that far too often these negative feelings are brushed aside with a forced ‘You Can Do It!’ smile that almost reminds me of those vintage WWII posters. But if you think of it for a second, those posters were propaganda, out to encourage people to forget about the fears they might have about, y’know, war.

I would never compare creation to war (because we don’t dodge bombs, folks, as much as it feels that way sometimes) but the cheerful enthusiasm without consideration for negativity being a part of people’s lives smacks to me of it’s own brand of writer propaganda. In our rush to try to improve ourselves as creators and help our fellows through the darkest places, we may be forgetting that people have a right to their feelings. And telling them How To Be Better might just be a way of telling them that they’re not good enough all over again.

I believe that instead of white-washing away the negative, of telling ourselves and each other that we need to have a stiff upper lip about our bad feelings, we need to acknowledge that they’re there. We need to acknowledge where they come from with sensitivity, honesty and empathy for each other. We need to support in ways that are a little less brute force. And we need to admit that for some, it won’t be a one-day, one-week or even one-year turn around. This might be a black dog battle that a creator fights every day of their lives.

And that’s okay. Because they’re still fighting.

Sure, it would be easier if the fight was over and the issue tackled and everyone had a self-esteem party. But that’s an internal struggle for the writer in question. But as long as they’re still fighting, and tackling, and writing, then that writer is doing the job. A writer, to be a writer, must do what they do: write. If they take deadlines for jobs, if they have responsibilities, they must meet them, even if the black dog of insecurity comes to visit. They have to pick up the fight because that’s what they agreed to do when they signed up to be a writer. But they’re still fighting. And they’re still writing. And they don’t always have to do it with a smile on their face, or in a way that other people feel is ‘best’. It’s their process, their feelings, and they get to have them. Even if it makes other people uncomfortable to see negativity. Even if other people wish they could ‘help make it better.’ Even if the prevailing idea is that feeling bad about yourself is bad.

Insecurity sucks. Feeling bad about your work sucks. But your feelings are your own.

May we all come to a place where we don’t have to feel this way. May we all fight that black dog and win someday. Until that time, I’m here with you, with my own dog to battle, getting the words done. But some days, I’m not doing it with a smile. And that’s okay too.

Dresden Lives: How We Chased A Dream And Made It Real

April 18, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, LARP, Writings

Today, like any other day, I’ve got about a dozen different windows open on my desktop. I’ve got emails for work, school, blog posts, prep for job applications, and tons of little things to do. But on the very top of that pile of work is what I anticipate will be the last round of edits for the project that has had me occupied for some time. And I’m excited to tell you about it.

Let me tell you about Dresden Lives.

Dresden Lives is the live action role-play adaptation of the Dresden Files RPG by Evil Hat Productions. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Evil Hat to bring this product to you alongside my fantastic writing partner Josh Harrison and our editor, the orbital platform of awesome himself John Adamus. The game is adapted from the Fate Core mechanics to bring that system’s focus on telling awesome, character-driven stories to the LARP sphere. Plus, we worked very hard at adapting the Dresdenverse so that the game would give players a chance to have their own adventures in that rich urban fantasy universe.

But more than tell you about the game itself right now, I want to tell you a little bit about how this project came to be.

It all started four and a half years ago. I was GMing a tabletop session of The Dresden Files RPG, fresh out of the box from it’s Evil Hat release. I had been lucky enough to meet the Evil Hat team at GenCon the year before and been involved in the beta tests of the game, so I was super excited when I had the books in my hands. It was during that first session with the players that the idea dawned on me: The Dresden Files needs to be a LARP.

I’d been a long time LARPer before that, having started in 2005. Like many other LARPers out there, I cut my teeth on White Wolf’s World of Darkness games when I first started out. In fact, most of the games run out of the group known as NYC LARP back then were White Wolf games. They fed into that urban fantasy/supernatural bent that I loved, and I adored first Changeling: The Dreaming, then (my favorite) Mage: the Ascension, and finally Vampire: The Masquerade. It was after playing V:tM however that I started to feel dissatisfied with the themes of the WoD. In most World of Darkness games, you played a monster of some kind constantly at war with themselves in a world that would grind you down and destroy you, if you didn’t destroy yourself and everyone around you first. that was certainly my experience when playing V:tM, and I became pretty bored with the idea of playing a power-hungry creature of the night. I was aching for a game that, at it’s core, had hope for the power of humanity to trump over their worst instincts and be the damn heroes.

Satyrs are only one of the kinds of denizens of the Dresdenverse. (Photo by: Shoshana Kessock)

And there was the world I was looking for, inside of the Dresden Files. In Harry Dresden, I found a very human, relatable character who struggled to maintain his humanity while accruing massive power and in the midst of often horrifying circumstances. It was a story that was unabashedly about the price of being a hero, but it was laiden with hope, friendship, laughs and vulnerability that made it relatable. The Dresdenverse could be dark – oh God, some of the things Harry fights are truly terrifying – but it could also be beautiful, and awe inspiring, and difficult, and wonderful. That balance of the supernatural horror and the heroic was the very kind of LARP world I wanted to see exist. I wanted to see players get the chance to fight the forces of darkness and be heroic. That’s what Dresden meant to me.

The project started out as a fan project, just a bunch of LARPers doing a thing at conventions, but I always had it in my head that I wanted to bring the system to Evil Hat once it was done. It took four years of play testing at the Double Exposure conventions, iterating on the rules with every game and coming up with ways to break the system so we could test it’s limits. We wrote hundreds of pages of text, pre-generating characters for sometimes sixty players a convention. We ran games with faerie queens, dragons and Denarians, just to see what that would do. We had to answer questions like, “What happens if a dragon picks up a Denarian coin?” (The answer was, PLEASE GOD DO NOT LET THAT HAPPEN IN OUR GAME!) We had every kind of Dresden denizen in our games from emissaries of gods to cannibalistic changeling. We even had were-goats (which I’ll never hear the end of for the rest of my life).

1801270_10152216089070115_1404827622_o — Combat in Dresden Lives. Well, not really – then they stopped and pulled out their cards! (Photo by: Kate Eckert)

Along the way, I was lucky enough to team up with Josh Harrison, whose dedication to snappy pop culture references and a hell of an amazing talent as a writer and LARP designer made him the perfect choice for this project. We became the foundations together of Phoenix Outlaw Productions, reborn from just a group of LARPers running things at conventions to an actual company out to produce games to share with the masses. And we were fortunate enough to forge a friendship and writing relationship with John Adamus, whose work on Fate Core as well as on Evil Hat’s Dresden line was integral to us finding our way. Some members of the team came and went, but in the end with the help of fantastic people like Justin Reyes, Kat Schoynheder and Nicolas Hornyak, we’ve seen the convention games grow and flourish. (And for that we also owe a thanks to Avonelle Wing and Vincent Salzillo from Double Exposure for their constant support).

Wizards, police and minor talents - oh my! — Wizards, police apprentices and minor talents – oh my! (Photo by: Shoshana Kessock)

For four years we made this project go on the power of devotion, passion and love because in the end, we adored the project and the game world. And we were devoted to giving our New York/New Jersey players at the Double Exposure conventions the best experience we could. We have since expanded to running games in Massachusetts (InterCon) and Los Angeles (WyrdCon) and saw our player base grow to over one hundred and fifty in the tri-state area alone. Then, once we’d stress tested and iterated and beat our heads against the system for ages, we sat down with Evil Hat Productions. The rest is, well, history now. And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t pinch myself and say ‘this is actually happening.’

Recently, Evil Hat opened up playtest applications and have received an overwhelming groundswell of support for those interested in helping us test things out. They’ll join the over one hundred and fifty players in the NY/NJ area plus those at the other cons that have seen the system already. We’re so excited to see what people say, and to put together this book.

I wanted to share this story with all those out there who are as excited, to talk a little bit about how this project happened. Moreover, I’m sharing this because I want those who are excited about a LARP project, who are really passionate and believe that their project should come about, to consider this: you can do it. It was always such a long shot to me that I could get this done, that we could put this together. But with the help and support of great people and a lot of hard work and smart choices, what used to be called the Unofficial Dresden Files LARP is now Dresden Lives. It can happen. If you chase it. After all, isn’t that kind of what the Dresden Files is about? Chasing what you think is right?

So go on. I believe in you. Make awesome things. And meanwhile, join us in playing awesome characters in one of the best urban fantasy settings around. You totally want an excuse to yell “FUEGO!” at a game. You know you do.

“I Don’t See _____, I See People” Or The Dangers of Denying Diversity

April 17, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Speaking Out, Uncategorized

(Warning: I am delving into a discussion of diversity, politics, anti-semetism, and more. I do so with only the intent of exploring my complicated feelings on the subject, in light of a lot of activities going on lately in the world. Please take this as a meditation on the subject and no manifesto, a thought in progress with no intent to insult, but instead to create consideration. I try to understand how to speak about diversity and acknowledge that I trip and fall in the holes of my own ignorance more often than I succeed. Let’s see if I can get this out without finding a pit hole again).

These days, everyone is talking about diversity: how it’s important, how it needs to be a part of our world, how it should be handled in our work and what’s the best language to use. I myself have talked about it, written about it, sat on panels about it (when it comes to geekdom and gaming) and more. There are battles going on about social justice both in the real world and especially across the internet. From people speaking out about the harassment of women in the comic book world to discussions about Ru-Paul using the transphobic term ‘she-male’ on the popular Ru-Paul’s Drag Race, we have been having more conversations than ever regarding how to bridge the gaps between what is considered ‘normal’ in our cultures and those who have been struggling with bigotry and intolerance for years. While the internet rages over the appropriation of words and how to best handle online harassment of activists, one particular part of the argument has stuck with me over the last few months.

When discussions of diversity and fighting for equality has come up, one of the popular responses I’ve heard from people is: “Well, I’m not part of the problem, I don’t see race/religion/ethnicity/sexuality/gender. I see people.” The implication here is that by seeing past these things to treat everyone as individuals, as people rather than a collection of identifiers, then the entire issue of bigotry has been sidestepped in favor of a utopian melting pot of empathy. In it’s purest form, I love this idea. I love it so much I can’t tell you. The idea that we can look at one another with empathy and respect and see and accept one another for the person we are rather than a pile of identifiers is amazing.

It’s also dangerous.

The dream of the Melting Pot, where cultures will merge into one another and we will all become one big culture, isn’t entirely a dream anymore. People from across the world are coming together, sharing communities, building creative endeavors, working together, falling in love, making babies, and growing old together. Today we share our cultures, our cuisine, our holidays, our music, our futures and our hopes with people whose ancestors and ours might never have interacted. Or worse, whose ancestors and our ancestors might not have exactly been buddies. Things are changing and the face of our world, especially in the US, is rapidly shifting. So then why is it so dangerous, so worrisome, to say that differences no longer exist?

Because fact of the matter is… they do. And to ignore them is to ignore the reality of those who are different from you, and the way that those differences are treated by the rest of the non-melting pot society.

Fact: People who are different than the ‘norm’ have different life experiences, different needs, different wants. Hell, everyone has different wants and needs in this world, and trying to wash them all into a single group is to deny individuality, the experiences, and the trials and tribulations faced by others. Saying you do not see people by the factors that make them up is denying a part of their heritage and experience in favor of your comfort, in an effort to minimize the issue.

Fact: Bigotry still exists around the world. And just because an individual chooses not to notice differences, doesn’t mean that discrimination isn’t still happening from elsewhere.

It’s this particular part of the problem of white-washing, or ‘normalizing’ all people, that I want to focus on.

I’ll use an example that is close to my heart. Anti-semetism.

Just last week, have saw an instance of a shooting at a Jewish Community Center and then a rest home for the aged in Kansas. (And can I get up on my box for a moment and say A REST HOME?! What in the cowardly HELL?) The 73-year-old shooter was identified as a former leader of the Klu-Klux-Klan in the area, and there were questions for a bit about whether or not the shooting was going to be labeled a hate crime. The shooter was reported to have shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ when he got into the cop car.

Ahem. Moving on.

The flyer circulated in Donetzke Ukraine, telling Jews to register with the gov. — The flyer circulated in Donetzke Ukraine, telling Jews to register with the government or risk deportation and seizure of property.

Today we have reports that in the town of Donetzk in the Ukraine, Jews exited their synagogue on Passover to men in masks handing out flyers saying that Jews will have to report to the government who they are or face deportment and loss of their assets. The flyers were supposedly from the local government, though now there are indications that they may have been faked in an effort to create destabilization and propaganda against the local government. Who the hell knows what’s going on in the Ukraine right now, and who is doing what, but one thing is for certain. Jews in an Eastern European city came out of their synagogue and were handed flyers that told them they were going to need to register themselves with the government. This of course less than a hundred years after the LAST time a government asked Jews to identify themselves publicly – and we remember how well that went.

(And yes – I went there. I referenced the Holocaust. Because you can’t get away with this issue today without that ghost haunting every headline).

These are two extreme realities of anti-semetism in the world today, one in the US and one in the Ukraine. But every day there are incidents of neo-nazi activity, of anti-semetic behavior, of micro-aggressions. A friend of mine was on the subway recently in New York City when a woman got on and started screaming about killing all the Jews. My friend was sitting next to an Orthodox girl, who started shaking in fear, so my friend grabbed the girl’s hand and assured her that she was safe, she was going to be protected. On the Orthodox girl’s far side another pair of women grabbed her other free hand. The woman ranted, raved, and eventually left the train without incident. This story, while awful in pointing out how in the heart of liberal America (New York) we have instances of anti-semetism right out in the open, also highlights how folks are willing to do something to fight this bigotry. People stand against these things. Outrage is lobbed across the internet when we hear about these things. Anti-fascist activists get out in the street, protest, stand up, even get hurt – as in the case of neo-nazis knifing feminist activists in Malmo, Sweden. But mostly, when these things happen, we hear disbelief. “I can’t believe this is happening, in today’s day and age!”

Why? Why are we surprised? People have always scapegoated and mistreated those that are other. Those of us who consider ourselves liberal, or open-minded, or progressive, or whatever you want to call it believe that this can be cured with time, with evolution of mankind. And I hope that we’re right. But in the meanwhile, we have to also understand and accept that not everyone feels this way. To pretend that they do, to pretend that everyone agrees with this view of a unified mankind into one homogeneous population at peace with one another is to deny not only the beautiful diversity that we’re trying to celebrate, but to woefully underestimate the bigotry that still exists and festers in this world. It is the ugly side to recognizing differences. And the more that we try and pretend that these differences don’t exist, that we strip those differences back to indicate a person is just ‘a human being’, the more we underestimate the hatred born of people who aren’t so interested in accepting the melting pot world. We forget that there are those out there who are still dedicated to a hatred so unfathomable to me as to be monstrous.

There’s a saying I like to employ about the people in my life, when people ask me about how I’m friends with someone who has a problem, or a personality issue that gets on their nerves. “But Shoshana,” they ask, “that person is a dick! They do such annoying things!” And my response is always: “I get that. But I try to embrace my friends with their flaws, not despite them.” While I would never consider the differences between people as flaws, the structure of the idea there is still sound. To state that I embrace a friend without acknowledging their flaws would be wrong: you’ll always be treating that person unfairly, as you are picking and choosing what personality traits of theirs you appreciate and which you’ll ignore until they become a problem for you. In cases of diversity, I would change the saying and say: “I embrace my friends for all that they are, not just for the parts I find acceptable.” Because it is the height of disrespect to a person in my eyes to say that you appreciate them as a person without appreciating the parts of themselves that you might find distasteful, but that remain parts of their identity and life experience.

Differences exist. But we honor them. We respect them. We do not make them the lever upon which we grind our ax. We do not use that difference as a way to push our pain off on others. And we certainly don’t try and pretend those differences don’t exist, because to do so is to deny the fundamental freedom of choice and independent thought that we so celebrate as part of the human condition. We have the right to be different. Let’s not pretend for a minute that we aren’t in a race to be more PC.

C’mon, human race. I believe we’re better than this. We have to be.

The Quest For The Creative: or, I’m Still Here

April 14, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in On Writing

Let’s talk about depression. Shall we call these depression updates?

In the grand scheme of the universe, being someone who is bi-polar comes with a lot of funny side effects. If you’re unmedicated, there’s a lot of bouncing around when manic and symptoms that come with it, and the depressive slide that comes with the other end of the spectrum. When you are medicated, however, there are side effects. And the trade off one has becomes a part of your life.

We are approaching eighteen months of me being on medication for my bi-polar disorder. For the most part, things were extremely wonderful on the medication. I had a hump to get over initially that was difficult – going from the frenetic energy, the highs and lows, that you have to manage without medication was strange. But then I ran into the biggest issue: the dampening of the creative drive.

There’s many people who have talked for years about how those with bi-polar disorder struggles with the loss of creativity. I read a great blog post that was exactly as I was feeling, and I’ve read a few books that were about the fact that many of our historically strongest creative folks are thought to have been bi-polar and struggled with this same issue. Fact is, the creative drive that lights me up has dulled since I had to take a pill every day. And the longer I’ve taken the pill, my life has slowed down, that’s for certain. But being creative, finding the right words, has become a struggle. A slog.

The advice I’ve gotten? Write every day. Work your craft. Develop new muscles. Keep going.

And I am. Oh I am. But now, what used to be easy seems to be getting further and further away.

I read a comic book years ago, an old Marvel What If?! comic that was called “What if the Phoenix Had Not Died?” Anyone who knows me knows that Jean Grey is my favorite X-Men character, and the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix Sagas were my favorite stories in the Marvel universe. So when I saw that What If?! had answered one of my favorite questions about Jean, I read it through. And this two-part story broke my dang heart. Why? Because Jean lost her powers instead of dying – at least for a little while. And as Jean learned to deal with not being a mutant anymore there was one page of her life with Scott where she sat on a rainy night, smoking, and dealing with her depression over the whole thing.

There was a single box of text that I read which stuck with me for many years:

As politically incorrect as her reference to being deaf, dumb and blind is, the description of losing her telepathy stuck with me when I later went on medication for my bi-polar disorder. The very first day that I put medication into my system, I started having a serious problem reaching for the creative spirit that once drove me. There were days that it felt, instead of touching that creative spark, I was chasing it down a dark hall through molasses. I’ve still been doing my work, of course. But in the meantime what was once a happy experience instead drives me to near exhaustion. Work that was once a joy has become drudgery. And worse, where once I could find the words easily to describe what I wanted to say, now it’s just… gone.

So take this as a description of what it sounds like inside my head these days. It’s a battle to find the focus and the creative inspiration. I wake up, I write, and I do my work – but a lot of it is much harder than it used to be. And it is easier to burn out. It nearly paralyses my arms and feeds into the saddest, angriest, most frustrated parts of my brain, the little voice that tells me you should just stop.

I don’t. Of course not. And I don’t bother trying to use this as an explanation, because I don’t want it to sound like an excuse. I can’t hear another pep talk of ‘you just have to try harder’ or ‘relearn what you knew before’. I’m doing that. Oh I am. But I’m also trying to remember every day the joy that words used to give me, and some days I feel the music again and I can do the dance.

These days: I’m just forcing myself to do it. I’m going to write more. And you’re going to see a bunch of updates really quickly, articles and takes on media and updates on things I’m doing. Let’s see if this shakes loose the dam and gets the information flowing again. I’m not burnt out, though this might sound similar. No, I’m just chasing the fireflies.

Living Games, Dangers Untold, Bundle of Holding and More!

February 13, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

Every time I feel like I have to say ‘it’s been a while’ when I start a blog post here. Fact is, I fell out of the practice of posting at least once a week because of the amount of work I’ve been doing lately. I don’t mind saying it’s been a lot, so posting on my own blog about what’s up has fallen by the wayside. I want that to change, even if it’s just some basic updates.

So, what have I been working on? Let’s talk about it all. Let’s talk about all of the things.

Living Games Conference

The Living Games Conference is my graduate thesis project at the NYU Game Center. It is a live action role-play academic conference being hosted at the Magnet Center in Brooklyn March 14-16th. We are the very first Tickets are on sale as the event is one month away. We are looking to have talks and workshops by designers from around the world come together in NYC to talk about the future of LARP and innovation in the field. The schedule includes keynotes from Lizzie Stark and Aaron Vanek with our third keynote soon to be announced (hint: it may be on the poster already, but shhhh)! Plus, we’ll be hosting a showcase of games on Saturday night that will let people get a look at the kind of games there are out in the world.

Part of doing this conference has involved getting funding together for various things, including and especially documentation of the panels. For that reason we’ve reached out on IndieGoGo to help with getting equipment and such. If you can, we’d appreciate any donations you might be able to make – every little bit helps. Plus there are some fun perks.

It has been a real pleasure working on this conference. I’ve learned a lot about event organization as well as the things I believe are most vital to the LARP community going forward. You’ll hear more about the conference as we approach the date in the next few weeks, but meanwhile check out the website for more info, buy tickets here, donate or follow us on Twitter @LivingGamesNYC.

Dangers Untold: The Kickstarter

Dangers Untold is a project I am so happy I got to work on, and now it’s live on Kickstarter! The game is a freeform LARP out to give folks a chance to tell the stories of the Heroine’s Journey. Like Labyrinth or Alice in Wonderland? Ever wanted to fall down the rabbit hole and explore adventures as a heroine out with her friends, Dorothy on the road through Oz? This game is for you. The goal was to create a game that could be played with people 12 and up, a game parents could play with their kids and kids could play with their friends. I designed the LARP based on my experiences with alternative, mechanics-light games with the intent on it being accessible to non-LARPers and seasoned vets alike. Mostly, I just kept in mind an experience I had running my LARP with the pre-teen daughter of a friend. I remember watching her eyes light up at the experience and realized not many games are accessible for younger audiences. Plus, how many times in games do you get to play with a girl protagonist squarely in mind? That was the aim of this game.

Produced by Josh Jordan and Ginger Goat Games based on Josh’s fantastic tabletop game Heroine, we’re looking to produce a beautiful book with photos by J.R. Blackwell and layout by Daniel Solis. The Kickstarter is up and running so come by and give us some love and help us make this great game possible.

Bundle of Holding – American Freeform

It has arrived! Bundle of Holding has put together a collection of fantastic freeform games and I am so honored to have my first freeform, SERVICE, available among them! My game is alongside work by fantastic folks like Jason Morningstar, Lizzie Stark, Evan Torner, Meguey Baker, Emily Care Boss and more. These games are amazing introductions to LARP for those who want to give the form a try but were concerned about long, complicated rules or ongoing campaigns that require a lot of gear. Freeform gives you a chance to create experiences that are personal, smaller, and easier to jump right into.

This is the first time that SERVICE is available to the public since it was produced initially earlier this year, and I’m excited to see it played elsewhere. Meanwhile, you’ve got a week to get your hands on this fantastic Bundle of Holding!

Whew, told you I was busy! Between that and some other projects, it’s been a busy winter so far. I’ll also be talking in another post about places you’re going to see me working with others on some fantastic LARPs and panels soon, including IndieCade East which is this weekend! So stay tuned to more about the work going on and check out the IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, and Bundle of Holding above!

Knights of Badassdom: Why We Deserve Better LARP Movies

February 10, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Film, Geek Culture, LARP, Uncategorized

Warning: The following article involves spoilers for Knights of Badassdom.

The minute I heard about Knights of Badassdom, I was excited. Forget for a moment that this was going to be a movie about LARP. This movie had Peter Dinklege in it, in armor, fighting at a LARP! It had Ryan Kwanden of True Blood fame, one of the only reasons I still WATCH that show, as our hero. And Summer Glau, fresh off of being badass in fandoms everywhere, was going to play the female lead. Plus there was going to be LARP! (Okay, now we’re back to that point) This was going to be a movie that not only spoke to my interests but had a great cast! How could things go wrong?

Easily. Oh so very easily.

It’s no secret that Knights of Badassdom, directed by Joe Lynch, went through production hell. The film was shot and then disappeared for a long while. The creator lost control of it to someone else, a producer who supposedly recut the entire thing before it was finally released into the wild through limited engagement showings across the country. The movie cashed in on a new system of ‘sponsored’ movie screenings, hosted locally in communities to drum up attendance. KoB was marketed to LARP communities to come out and support, to make showings available so that this movie could come to their area with it’s awesomeness. I was one of those people who applied to host a showing. As someone who loves seeing LARPers come together at events, I thought this would be a perfect community event – we’d all get together and watch some big stars pretend to do what we do! But before I would do it, I went to see an earlier screening, just to see what I was getting.

I’m so very glad I did. The moment the movie was over, I walked out and emailed Tugg, the service that was hosting the events. I told my liaison at Tugg that, “Frankly, I attended this film this week just to see what I would be hosting, and it is so bad that I don’t think I want my name associated. Kindly cancel my application.”

Knights of Badassdom is everything that bothers me about LARP films.

The Review

Let’s not start with talking about Knights of Badassdom as a LARP film. Instead, how does it rank as a film? Well, in the land of comedies, it ranks just above Sharkanedo in making sense plot-wise. There is no coherence in the flow of the movie after the characters GET to the LARP, when it devolves into a messy pastiche of horror film tropes banged together to create some kind of narrative. Once you’re halfway into the movie, you wonder why the director bothered to get such impressive actors as Dinklage, Jimmi Simpson and Kevin Zahn when they’re going to underuse them or, in Dinklage’s case, murder them off before they can do anything cool. The dialogue is some of the worst I’d ever heard in a movie, and as the film went on, more jokes fell flat than actually landed. By the time the movie went into ‘save the day’ mode, I was scratching my head at he mess of silly horror movie references tossed in, the ridiculously out of place hill-billy cops plot line that was jammed onto the rest of the film, and the plan the heroes supposedly put together to rescue the game from the horrible demon.

And once you get to the ending and the climactic showdown, I was so busy shaking my head at the lack of cohesion of ideas and the obvious plot holes that I’d forgotten I was watching a movie set at a LARP. It seemed more like a badly staged theater production entitled “How Not To Save The Day By Make Ryan Kwanten Pretend To Sing Fake Metal At A Bad CG Demon.” By the time the credits rolled, I was looking for as many synonyms for ‘disappointing’ as I could come up with.

Not Just Disappointing…

I sat after the film and thought about what I’d heard about the film. About how it had been hacked up in editing by the producer that got their hands on the film. Surely that was what made this film so bad? Anyone watching could have seen however that the movie would probably have sucked no matter the editing (there is only so much editing can do to awful dialogue). Still, I realized something about this movie was making me aggravated, and it wasn’t just being poorly done.

And that’s when I finally got it- expectation. This movie had not been what I expected. The movie in its treatment of the characters was saying something about LARP that wasn’t what was advertised. This wasn’t a movie about a LARP where horrible supernatural things happened. This was a movie about a normal guy getting shanghaied to a land of weird folks who bring down something terrible on themselves and pay the price. In this case, they get killed for the transgression of being LARPers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Horror movie villains from the big budget murder spree films always have underlying themes they feed into in society. The movie Scream went through them in great detail: don’t drink, don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, don’t go off on your own and be different. Those things will get you killed in a horror movie faster than you can say ‘I’ll be right back.’ And why? Because they reenforce the stereotypes of society. Teens having sex is bad, and bad things happen to kids who go off and get high and drink and wander outside of the safe zones. That’s Horror Movie 101, the basics of the social messages behind all those massacres in the Freddy or Jason movies. Horror movies are all about the dangers of the unknown, and how it’s safer to be normal.

All of those tropes exist within Knights of Badassdom. Except they slapped the label on that ‘it’s just a joke’ that comedy gets away with as an excuse. The fact is, real comedy also uses its power to reflect a message back at the audience. Even Sharkanedo was saying ‘guys, your fear of sharks is so ridiculous because YOU ARE ON LAND MOST OF THE TIME SO CHILL.’ It makes a person look at their own assumptions and fears and laugh because they see a reflection of the absurd in themselves. Real comedy, like horror, tells you a lot about the community and people it’s talking to with the movie.

Who Is The Audience Of This Film?

So who is Knights of Badassdom talking to? It promised to be a movie for LARPers in it’s promotion. But after watching it, my conclusion is that it really isn’t. This movie wasn’t for LARPers, the way that Big Bang Theory isn’t for nerds. Knights of Badassdom is written for folks on the outside of a community looking in to point their finger and laugh.

They made a serious Lightning Bolt reference. Seriously, guys? Really?

You can tell who the audience is aimed at by looking at how the movie is set up. KoB is full of same tired tropes about LARPers trotted out to represent LARP as a strange hobby full of maladjusted people. The main character is the Everyday Joe (that’s literally his name, Joe), an under-employed metal musician with girlfriend problems, who regards what his friends do as weird and usual. He only attends the LARP because he is kidnapped by his roommates, who represent the stereotypes of LARPers: the rich kid with too much time on his hands and a need to escape reality, and the druggy who is otherwise kind of cool but way into the nerdy stuff. (The second being Peter Dinklege’s character, who might have had a chance to shine if he hadn’t been wasted on bad writing). Then let’s not forget about the game master, the horribly overdramatic and snotty guy who abuses his power and treats everyone like something you scrape off your shoe. That is, when he’s not hitting on the hottest girl there to ‘be his assistant storyteller.’

"I don't even want to be here!" — “I don’t even want to be here!”

Ah yes, Summer Glau’s character, Gwen. Gwen is beautiful, sweet, and a good fighter, a character we should be able to root for. When described by other characters, who get descriptions like ‘wily’ and ‘great fighter’, she is described as possessing a “+3 ass of awesome” or some such nonsense. She’s presented as the beautiful object of everyone’s attention (cue the closeup on her fishnet covered legs), including the game organizer, who skeeves on her in her very first scene. But fear not! She’s protected by her hulking cousin, who never breaks character – even in real life! Gwen is designated as her cousin’s babysitter at the LARP because he’s a danger to others due to his inability to separate fantasy from reality (ahem, LARPer trope ahoy!) Ah, now it all becomes clear! The beautiful female lead doesn’t even really want to be there, but she’s got to be there for family. Because why would a beautiful girl want to come to a LARP without an excuse? Heaven forbid she should actually want to participate in the game herself. In the LARP community I came up in, there was a derogatory term for girls who were brought by relatives/significant others who didn’t want to be there but just ‘played along’: a backpack. The movie backpacked Summer Glau and did it without so much as a cringe at their gender stereotyping.

"We kidnapped our friend to a game - yay!" — “We kidnapped our friend to a game – yay!”

But why should it cringe? Because that’s all this movie is – a load of stereotypes dumped on top of some not very funny jokes. LARPers watching might look at the absurdity of the over-the-top performance and say ‘Look, they’re making jokes with us about the silliness of parts of our community.’ But if that was the case, the framing of the film is all wrong. The movie isn’t about a LARPer poking fun at his own community – it’s about a man on the outside coming in, judging everything he sees as absurd, and then saving the day before wandering off to go be cool again away from all the weirdoes.

It was that ending that got me, the epilogue, that convinced me that the film wasn’t really for LARPers at all. The ‘this is what happened to the characters post-massacre’ that is the tried and true show of an amateur filmmaker who doesn’t know how to end their film. Ryan Kwanten’s character Joe and his new main squeeze Gwen ride off into the sunset together to form a metal band. And they never LARP again. Why would they? After all, they survived the night of terror in a place they never wanted to go to in the first place! They were the ‘normal ones’ who would go off to jam on guitars and be cool and happy together. And all those LARPers and hillbillies died in that field, weird and odd and killed off by a demon, paid for the transgression of being different, while the cool lead characters survive because, well, they just weren’t into the weirdness to begin with.

We Need Better LARP Movies

"I signed on to be drugged out and then dead. What is this crap?" — “I signed on to be drugged out and then dead. What is this crap?”

It’s then that I realized why this movie not only was awful, but it was insidious in its offering. It wasn’t presenting the movie as a collection of in-jokes told from a place of fun. It was holding up a mirror as comedy often does and saying, through Ryan Kwanten’s Normal Everyday Joe, “See what your weirdness brings? You and those hillbillies who died are just the same – backwards and weird and disconnected from reality.” He as much as says so in dialogue when they discover Peter Dinklage’s body. At the screening I attended, there was a notable hiss from the audience when Ryan Kwanten’s character goes off on a mini-tirade about how the murders must have been committed by someone who had taken LARP authenticity too far and used a real weapon in game. Because, of course, that is what LARPers are from the outside- people too wrapped up in their fantasy NOT to commit actual homicide. This is an idea carried in the earnest horror film The Wild Hunt too and perpetuates the same tropes – LARPers are escapists with a potentially unhinged connection to reality – that has dogged every media representation of LARP from big screen to small.

It’s that perception of LARP that has been a self-perpetuating cycle for years. The more LARP has been presented to those who don’t participate as an odd and weird hobby, the more the stereotype is called up again for movies like these. That then perpetuates the stereotypes further and the cycle goes on. Where Knights of Badassdom had a chance to break that trend, it doesn’t break so much as take that trend underground in a sly, backhanded, unsaid way. And for that, it seems like just ‘good ol’ fun.’

After seeing the movie, I pulled my support from the showing I was going to host for a number of reasons. One, I just didn’t want to have to sit through that mess one more time, nor was I going to work to bring a piece of bad filmmaking to other folks who would pay their money to see it. More than that however, I have this dream that there might be movies that represent LARPing in a positive light and not in that snide, backhanded, finger-pointing kind of way. Maybe that’s asking for a lot from Hollywood, a place that survives off the stereotyping shortcuts that populate many scripts. But it’s my choice not to support something that I feel represents a hobby I love poorly, especially a hobby that is much maligned already.

I won’t embrace a movie just because it shows SOME representation of LARP, even if it’s bad. I won’t forgive badly done movies about the hobby just because hey look, that looks like something I love on screen! I won’t default support a movie for having LARP in it if it just feeds the stereotype machine. Because folks, we in the LARP community deserve a better class of representation. And this movie just doesn’t do it.

I Have A Mouth, So Why Aren’t I Screaming? (Or Where I’ve Been)

November 24, 2013 by Shoshana, posted in Random Aside, Speaking Out

Been a few weeks, hasn’t it? Don’t worry, I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet. Indeed I’ve instead been all over the place doing lord knows what in graduate school. I’ve been working hard at my thesis (which will have a website face shortly). I’ve been spending time at great game design opportunities like Practice at NYU (which I’ll have a breakdown of too). I’ve been working hard. But one thing I haven’t been doing lately is blogging. And there’s a reason why. So here’s the story I’d like to tell about how criticism can steal your voice.

I wake up in the morning. I have a long schedule ahead of me. I write things down, you see, because if I don’t I forget half the things I need to do. So I have a list. And on that list is things like ‘pay this bill’ or ‘do this homework’. I go ahead and take out the trash, do laundry, all the things one needs to do. I answer emails. I do what is needed. And on that list is inevitably the reminder: blogging. Every day, my eyes would slide past it. Every day, I’d say ‘that can wait.’

And it waited. And waited. For weeks.

After a little while, I wondered just what was going on. I, like anyone else, can be avoidant of things I didn’t want to do. But the real question is: why didn’t I want to blog? I had so many things I wanted to talk about! Yet something was stopping me, something that was making me balk at the notion of putting my ideas down on the internet for all to see. So as I am want to do, I posed the question to my friends online, almost rhetorically: why was I suddenly nervous about posting up blog posts?

A friend and brilliant young woman came back at me with an answer in the form of a question: did this problem start after you started receiving those threats about the content of your talks and posts?

Ahem. I believe the word I’m looking for is duh.

I’ve been pretty vocal about things on my blog, on other blogs, for the last few years. I believe that standing up and speaking out is an imperative if you see something that needs discussing. “If you see something, say something” is used by the cops, but it isn’t just a slogan for the NYPD. It’s an idea that the world is only improved when people use their powers of communication to make changes to situations they encounter. Yet a lot of people who have spoken out recently have received backlash of the most toxic variety. I got only a little bit of it. But what I did get startled me. And frankly, it shocked me more than I originally understood.

I’ll share a little secret here: I’m a fairly squishy-centered person. Down deep beneath the ‘raaar!’ that often comes out of my mouth beats the heart of someone who honestly wants us all to have what we need in life, with people who care about us, so we can make awesome things that we can share and that make us happy. Idealistic? Sure, and why not? There’s nothing wrong with idealism except that perhaps these days it’s considered naive and nay-sayed by those who are bitter and cynical. But when that ‘can’t we work towards a better tomorrow?’ me is met with rampant douchebaggery (yes, that’s a technical term), it tends to wall up for protection. And it gets tired.

I got tired of getting yelled at for a little while.

I got tired of people asking me why it’s necessary to talk about women in the gaming community. I got tired of having to explain that just because you speak out about women’s rights doesn’t mean you’re blaming all men for the inequality in the world, or that you’re demonizing the men who are trying to help too. I got tired of being accused of being a fence-sitting feminist for not embracing more radical ideas. I got tired of being told ‘I’m tired of hearing about this’ from people who, for them, the issues we’re talking about seem so large and so all-encompassing that they don’t know what to do with them. Or else they’re tired of hearing about it because, to them, it isn’t an ongoing reality that needs to be addressed over and over.

I got tired of speaking up when I would get comments like ‘fat pig’ sent my way.

A person only has so much bandwidth and for a while a little bit of it behind the scenes was negative. Most of it was overwhelmingly positive. But that little toxic bit got to that little squishy center and, well, I got tired. A part of me wants to apologize for that, but I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to say this: turtle-time is over. I’m back.

We don’t create things in a void. Getting used to the voices out there that will fling awful at your feet is part of creating things. It seems like a skill needed more and more every day. I’m cultivating it. But in the meantime, I can’t let myself be afraid of putting words to paper (or blog) for fear of what might fly my way. The awful, insulting crap being slung around the internet is NOT okay. Trolling is not okay. But if I’m going to exist as a creator then I will need to remember just what it means to have the courage of my convictions and stand by what I say.

I’m also going to be trying a radical new approach: I’m planning on creating a lot more than commenting these days. I realize a lot of my time had focused on commentary about other work out there – be it comic books, television, movies, ect. And that’s great, commenting and criticism is awesome – having opinions is what we do, provided we put it out in the world in a respectful fashion. But I’m a writer and a designer. I want to be making things of my own to be the creation I want to see in the world. And if I’m so busy commenting, I don’t have as much time to do what I want. So there’s going to be a little less of my usual ranting criticism goodness for a bit. Why?

I have projects. And they’re good ones. And that’s what you’re going to hear about for a while.

So that’s where I’ve been. That’s where I’m going. Let’s keep in touch more, shall we?

The Wandering Designer’s Convention Update!

October 28, 2013 by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Game Design, Geek Culture

It’s been a while since I was able to give an update here about what I’ve been working on. That’s probably because I’ve been busy working and traveling! Here are some of the highlights:

I was a guest down at Escapist Expo in Durham, North Carolina, and had the pleasure of being on the ‘You Game Like A Girl’ panel there with my compatriots in feminist discourse, Anja Keister, Iris Explosion and Stella Chuu. (The panel video is up online here to check out!) Along with the fantastic ZP Keister, they did their amazing D20 Burlesque show for the Escapist crowd, and I got the opportunity to hang with the gentlemen of Evil Hat Productions, Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks, as well as Daniel Solis. We played games, we had fun, and it was an honest to goodness blast. I really recommend Escapist if you are a fan of their site, if you’re a fan of a nicely sized convention with great people, and if you’re a fan of a friendly city for a visit.
I attended New York Comic Con and did some reporting on it for Tor.com – you can see my coverage of the Marvel Television panel, the Dracula Screening and the Cosplay over at Tor. I also got a chance to see the Defiance panel and ask the cast my question, plus got a great chance to see the Welcome to Night Vale panel. Had a fantastic blast, with much thanks to my friend Justin Reyes for helping me with my camera gear. I also was a convert to the Pokemon nation that weekend – Pokemon X for me! It’s my new relaxation helper. Highlights were getting a chance to shake hands with Kelly Sue DeConnick, the Marvel writer of Captain Marvel and the Avengers. I’m a huge fan of her work and her constant contribution to the discourse about women in the geek world.
Not long after I was on the road again to head to GeekGirlCon out in Seattle. It was an absolute pleasure to meet up with folks out there. I had the pleasure of being on panels about creating safe spaces at conventions with brilliant folks like Jennifer Stuller, burlesque performer and organizer Jo Jo Stilletto, fiction writer and safe space advocate K.T. Bradford, pop culture scholar Rob Salkowitz. The second panel was about Female Characters in Video Game Design and was sat by some fantastic folks like Kimberly Voll, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry and Anita Sarkeesian. It was my honest pleasure to be a part of both, as they gave me a chance to talk about my two favorite things – how to create convention space for all and how women are represented in video games. Later I got the chance to do a panel/workshop on LARP 101 and then presented the Nordic game LIMBO to a crew of players. (I’ll have a full write-up of that shortly). It seemed the game really touched everyone very deeply. I was floored by how well people did with the material and how deeply they threw themselves into the roleplay. Overall it was an incredible weekend – I found the entire community to be welcoming and fantastic, and I was loathe to miss the whole Sunday program to fly home. But family vacation in Orlando called!
Shortly thereafter I was out at Dystopia Rising‘s big season ender for New Jersey known as DeathCon! Every October we throw a big four-day zombie apocalypse adventure and this year all the stops were pulled out, folks. My shift with fellow storyteller Liam Neery created a cacophony of in-game screams as we unleashed terrifying raiders on the fictional town of Hayven, and madness and fun was had by all. As a player I enjoyed myself a great deal, but it was my pleasure getting a chance to once again rain storyteller heck down on the player base. Special shout out to the Unholy Sideshow and D20 Burlesque for performing at the game- it was overall a hell of a weekend.

So now I’m back in the workflow of things, my traveling having been completed for the season. Well, almost. Because next week is… Metatopia! I’m very excited to say that I’ll not only be attending Metatopia but I’ll be sitting on a couple of panels, as well as running a few playtests. I’m planning on doing a playtest for my RPG Wanderlust plus doing a run of my freeform game Service as well. It did well being tested on my NYU Game Center friends, now let’s see how it holds up against other gamers. This Metatopia has so much on the schedule that I’m excited to just get a chance to sit in on panels and talk to people. It’s going to be pretty packed. So check me out at the following:

Friday 11AM – Translating Tabletop to LARP
Friday 2PM – How to Manage Adult Content
Friday 3PM-5PM WANDERLUST RPG Discussion
Saturday 4PM – Inclusivity: Inviting Women to the Table

And after that… well, it’s just work time. The con season will officially be over until February, when Dreamation 2014 has me plotting LARP fun. Until then, I’ve got some projects to do – including all the stuff to prepare for my thesis at the Game Center. There’s going to be a full article on here about that very shortly, so stay tuned!

So the travel season is over, and I’m glad to be home. In truth, traveling is fantastic but it does take away from work time. I have lots of projects coming up in the near future and I’m excited to buckle down and get to work. Meanwhile, my bleary-eyed self is getting to bed so I can get up for class tomorrow. And so it continues!