Is it in the text?

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I remain consistently amazed by people who read "A Song of Ice and Fire" and clearly misunderstand the text. How can you, for example, read the saga and come away with the idea that Tywin is a role-model in how to govern or rule a family? The proofs for the opposite conclusion are right there in the text, and I could quote you a host of scenes in which is made entirely clear, from Tywin's stinking corpse to hill clans dying for "The Ned's" daughter. But PoorQuentyn is doing such a consistently good job with this that I'll let him earn the laurels for it. 

Instead, I want to make a jump in a different direction, one that October's guest host Jim McGeehin likely would approve of, and take a look at the products of the publishing house of White Wolf. They present a world that's not so unsimilar in spirit to ASOIAF, at least on the surface, but I'd argue that in their case, the critique is missing from the text - with disastrous consequences for the whole product.

White Wolf is a roleplaying publisher, most famous for its sprawling universe of the "World of Darkness", which is a mirror-universe to our own, in which vampires, werewolfes, mages and other supernatural predators roam the nights. I've played it extensively for well over a decade, and since then, I've come to view it with decidedly mixed feelings. In the following, I'm going to talk about "Vampire: The Masquerade", which is the system I'm most familiar with. 

In V:TM, players controlled a vampire (shocking, I know) in a gothic-horror version of the 1990s (attempts to update this as time went on have been unsuccesful mostly). These vampires belonged to one of three factions and were members of a multitude of different clans, which you could view as your fantasy races. 

The faction clearly intended as the standard setting was the Camarilla. It was essentially a feudal society, in which the oldest and most powerful vampires were controlling everything and members struggled for power and with the loss of their humanity. It was influences mostly by Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire", and if you thought Brad Pitt was insufferable in that one, you've seen nothing yet when engaging angsty teenagers reenacting that shit with the knowledge that it elevates them into the upper echelons of learned society (Narrator's Voice: It doesn't). 

Appropriately for a "World of Darkness", ultimately your quest was futile. Power was vanity, and the inner beast would win the eternal conflict. Very tragic, very gothic. But in actual play, at least for the groups I was part of, the power struggle was the real meat of it all, unsurprisingly. Being a chubby nerd, the idea of a host of other chubby nerds doing you homage is kind of appealing, and that the hobby attracted some not so chubby goths added to the appeal. 

And that power struggle was defined by very rigid rules. Age, status, rank, clan, fief, all of it mattered a great deal, and how it all functioned was laid down in sourcebooks that got bogged down by way too much lore as time went on, as these things are prone to do. But unlike ASOIAF, all that stuff was presented straight. Those power struggles, they were just how the world worked. And if you ever asked about the merits of living in 2005 and still adhering to the social system of 1505, punishment and social ostracism would come swiftly. It fits the tragic aspect of it all, of course, but that's not what was in the text. People seriously committed to this stuff and ate up the idea that this was a higher and better way of doing things than, let's say, equality and democracy.

So why do I even think of this now? I read a book about the history of the Holy Roman Empire recently, and it concluded (among many notions) with the idea that its institutions were believed in by the people, so much so that they regarded them as safeguards against the threatening equality and progress of the Industrial Revolution. I was thinking "man, how stupid these people were", thinking of the improvements in living standards and freedoms since then. 

And then I remembered Vampire, and how people ate up the ideology there. Of courese, it was only a game, and the setting demanded that vampires buy in this ideology. But it was never in the text that it was exactly that: ideology. What was missing was the inner Howard Zinn of those writers, letting you know that, actually, it's pretty tragic to be an immortal demigod and to bow and scrape to idiots unable to dial a phone call because they're locked in stasis. And I experienced many and more players breathing these ideas, not being aware that they were perpetuating a moronic system. They believed the ideology, and progressed it further ad infinitum. 

Maybe White Wolf did just a bad job conveying this; that's a possibility. The ton of useless lore they churned out, concentrating on ever more powerful secret societies and stuff to be able to publish and make money certainly didn't help. One example: during my time playing, I never realized the "World of Darkness" was actually intended to be a world apart from ours, a fantasy version of our world, more akin to Tim Burton's "Batman" than "our world, but with vampires". Neither did any of my fellow players ever realize this.

White Wolf definitely did a bad job there, and it fucked things up. Reading the text like this, without clear literary clues of how to really view the situation (as Martin in contrast provides) leads you down to all kinds of bad analogies. In the "World of Darkness", the powers behind the scenes are behind EVERYTHING. World War 2? Conflict between two vampiric clans. Punic Wars? Ditto. Eclipse for the Mayas? Some magic shit. And so on. 

This leads to the really bad idea that only sinister forces are responsible for bad things, and it fosters conspiracy theory thought. The whole system also fosters authoritarianism and an abdication of responsibility. In short, the experience of playing V:TM was actually pretty toxic, but I'm only learning this with hindsight. 

And I didn't even get started on the other major faction, the Sabbat - if you wanted to mix muslim jihadism with Nazi ideology and Crusader zeal, put them all into a pot, add teenager insecurities and the misreadings above, that's what you get. But that's a story for another time...