So, let’s go over everything Wizards of the Coast is trying to do this coming year.
>Erasing everything that made DnD fun
>Sanitizing everything to appease a minority of leftist puritans
>Making anyone who wants to play DnD pay microtransactions
>Making anyone who makes anything based off of DnD pay royalties to Wizards of the Coast
I hope the company fucking crashes and burns, Hasbro failed to claim TSR as their own now we just need it all to crash and burn so TSR can make a big comeback.
Wait, what do you mean Microtransactions? For a tabletop game? HOW?
They’re planning on making all DnD content switch over to digital only eventually, meaning any source material can only be accessed through DnD beyond, and the ones being charged won’t just be the DMs, it’ll be players too as they’ll lock everything behind a pay wall that you need to pay into to play.
They’ll most likely disable any ability to share the content with others, meaning each person wanting to play will need to buy access to the content.
BTW the new DnD CEO was a former Microsoft employee who was instrumental in implementing ever more microtransactions in video games.
They’ve switch the President of the D&D portion of WotC a couple times over the last few years. Mearls was an idiot, but then they replaced him with Ray Winninger, a guy who at least had some background in RPGs and Tabletop hobbies, but was clearly hired because of his background in trying to force tablet and app integration into games (which failed). Things under Winninger apparently didn’t impress the higher-ups. New guy, Dan Rawson, is a nepotistic pick from the current WotC President, Cynthia Williams, who also worked at Microsoft with Rawson. Williams is the one above being quoted about not monetizing their brands enough, Rawson’s entire career has been monetizing and e-commerce.
Individual feats, stat blocks, items, and anything else they can break up. It’s cheaper to just buy the whole thing instead, but this shit shouldn’t even be an option. They’re doing this because they’re trying to see what they can get away with. They will try worse. They will do worse. They will try to stamp out competition.
People will make excuses that they can just keep playing 5e and keep using homebrew, but they need to stop making excuses for why it’s okay to support WotC indirectly and WotC will continue to see what they can get away with because not enough people will have abandoned them to make an impact on their profits.
the thing about code or language switching is that its almost always context-based and purposeful. strip it of its context and it becomes frivolous and meaningless.
the reason “hola mi nombre es juan. oh my god I didn’t realize I was speaking spanish.” is ridiculous is because it’s exceedingly rare anyones going to accidentally switch languages. in everything everywhere all at once, they speak chinglish to each other. they never accidentally speak mandarin to deirdre in the IRS office for example because that would be ridiculous.
eeaao is such a splendid depiction of this. especially due to the varying levels of mastery across their generations. its clear joy understands mandarin but doesn’t speak it (except when jobu is trying to be dramatic). she doesn’t have enough grip of cantonese to tell gong gong that ruby is her girlfriend but she understands enough to know evelyn doesn’t say it. you have to understand that Both of these things can be true for this scene to hit so hard. in particular, i love the back and forth between waymond and evelyn. she fully switches to english when speaking to alpha-waymond. but switches back and forth with her waymond in a way that feels so reflective of speaking languages that represent home in different ways. with an ease you can only grow into with someone having grown up in both environments.
There are also so many more layers to this, especially in how Mandarin vs Cantonese vs English is used
So as a preface: Cantonese and Mandarin are two dialects of Chinese but they are fairly different grammatically, and while many people in Hong Kong and Guangdong (Canton) region speak both, understanding one dialect if you only speak the other is more or less impossible. Native speakers of one often treat the other as a second language.
so in the prime universe, Evelyn speaks Cantonese and only Cantonese with prime!Gong Gong, who is never seen speaking any other languages aside from Cantonese. He barely understands Joy’s broken Mandarin and only offers a berating response to her in Canto. Waymond and Evelyn’s Chinglish is a mix of Mandarin and English together, but they mainly speak English with Joy, and she can barely understand her mother tongue.
between prime!Gong Gong and prime!Waymond, Waymond is only ever talked at. Gong Gong speaks to him in Cantonese (which he presumably understands) but he only replies back in Mandarin once. There is very little direct communication between them without Evelyn.
so you have a major language barrier between Joy and her grandfather and minor language barrier between Waymond and Gong Gong - they have the means to communicate and could understand eachother, but it takes tremendous effort to do so.
and Evelyn has to navigate all three worlds, between her daughter, her father, and her husband, and be the bridge between them, as the balance and the tether and their touchstone. Which is such a brilliant metaphor for generational disconnect here and how Evelyn really is in the centre of all that chaos —
but it doesn’t stop there.
most crucially, Mandarin and Cantonese are used for the emotional and private dialogues between Evelyn, Waymond and Gong Gong. In all their flashbacks, in the kung fu/movie star universe, and also when Evelyn and Waymond talk about their domestic life in the IRS building - their divorce, their marriage, their daughter - conversations about the matters of the family are in Chinese.
Which leads us to: the Alphaverse!Wangs all speak English with each other and exclusively in English. Alphaverse!Waymond calls Alphaverse!Gong Gong “sir”, Alphaverse!Gong Gong tells prime!Evelyn to kill Joy in English. The only time Evelyn talks to alpha!Gong Gong in Cantonese is when she confronts him about letting her go.
English is depersonalised in the movie — it’s used practically and for exposition and to communicate quickly, while Chinese usage is infinitely personal. (Really, the first clue that we get that Waymond is…different is when he speaks to Evelyn in English with no Chinese at all).
And the most ironic thing about it all: the universe where the Wangs all understand and communicate perfectly is also where the family is most broken - Alphaverse!Waymond thinks that his own daughter is no longer capable of mercy or worthy of saving. Alphaverse!Gong Gong thinks he has to kill Joy in every universe.
Yes, the remaining Alphaverse!Wang family all understand each other, but without Evelyn, without their mother tongue, they might as well not be a family at all.
i’ll be honest the crushing weight of the silmarillion bearing down on lotr really elevates it to exquisite new heights
what i mean is if you read lotr in isolation you do understand the pressure of the vast ages of history and events but it’s vague and undefined. lotr is the main narrative but lotr is a hobbits eye view of arda and the events of the silmarillion are there and their presence is felt but they’re just names and references. you hear the words silmaril, beren , luthien, feanor, earendil, but they don’t mean anything to you. they’re the appendix to lotrs story, the backstory for the ruins that lotr is built on. but then you read the silmarillion and come at it backwards and see the story of the ring as an appendix to the silmarillion and it could easily seem so trite and small in comparison but instead it makes lotr burn all the brighter. the fellowship comes to lothlorien and suddenly you see it from the other side. there’s galadriel and celeborn and with them valinor and feanor and the two trees and the silmarils and then suddenly into the middle of all that walks samwise gamgee and tolkien stands sam beside galadriel and finrod and glorfindel and tuor and he tells you that sam is just as important. probably more important. that all these ancient heroes would look at sam and know that. and sometimes people talk as if the silmarillion was tolkien’s ‘real’ story and the hobbit/lotr was just an afterthought or a more marketable alternative but when you hold them side by side you understand what he really meant which is that after all those hundreds of pages and thousands of years of history. sam is what’s important.
The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit stories take place in a post-post-post (and probably a few more posts in there) apocalyptic world. The ruins peak up from the sod and we often think that those ruins are just dead stone, old trees, and maybe a song or two, but in Tolkien’s world those ruins include people who haven’t learned how to die yet, and there’s power in having that history that can speak for itself, in the same way that there are forests that can fight back and little normal people who get to (for once) decide the fate of all things rather than just another bozo with a superweapon.
For a nature-loving historian/linguist who survived two world wars, it’s wishfulfillment, of a sort, and it really reads through his stories. Neither texts invalidate the other, they add to one another. There is joy in the saga of Middle Earth culminating in triumph rather than bittersweet tragedy, and the Silmarillion coming before only lends weight to that - The Long Defeat ended in ultimate victory for goodness, rather than a pyrrhic victory by a too-late vanguard or unending misery under the feet of darkness’ last gasp.
