Greenwood's fetishism had to be toned down by TSR in order for the setting to comply to the ethics policy and greatly improved the setting. If anything, TSR didn't go far enough. The removal of the ethics policy was the beginning of the end of D&D. However, back in the day the girdle and Edwina were usually seen as nothing but jokes much like a drag queen was just a circus clown and trannies were just identified as nothing but homosexual prostitutes. (Transvestitism is just a homosexual fetish). Though it's possible that one of the pornography addicts at Bioware purposely added it in as part of their degenerate fetishism.
I have been a lurker for a long long time, and I also appreciate that, I'm just kind of in a D&D mindset lately, playing through 1 right now with SCS and just installed ToEE, with a bit of Pillars and Kingmaker sprinkled in.
Thanks for an in depth reply, I'm still going to hold off for a few years, and the alphabet stuff is a shame as I can do without it in general, it being front loaded definitely leaves a bad first impression, but I will trust that it phases out.
It makes sense that gay people would feel that way in the real world but it's clear that there are completely different social and sexual norms historically and culturally in Larian (and Greenwood's) vision of the realms, and it would be weird and out of place if gay people experienced the same feelings in a world where most people appear to be openly bisexual or at least find it entirely unremarkable. It may not be true to real life experiences but to me it flows logically from the world that the characters inhabit.
It's the dicks in the ass that make them spiritually gay.
One positive result of Baldur's Gate 3 is the realization that I've been too harsh on generic pseudo-medieval/Renaissance fantasy settings during all these decades that I've lumped the Forgotten Realms into that category. Really, the FR is just contemporary Canada/America in RenFaire drag, without even the modicum of internal consistency that a reader/player would expect from a generic setting. Thus, there are enormous cities with populations vastly in excess of what could be supported by that level of technology, even making allowances for the presence of magic, and these urban areas are surrounded by hinterlands that quickly taper into near-wilderness, reflecting geographical population distributions in present-day Canada and America. The depiction of those cities versus rural areas similarly aligns with the perspective of contemporary urbanites. BG3's presentation of the Forgotten Realms is fundamentally consistent with Ed Greenwood's vision, just updated for Current Year demography and sexual fetishes.
Forgotten Realms only became commonplace because it was made the official setting for D&D after TSR bought rights to it as to replace the Greyhawk setting after parting with Gygax. The official modules then being pumped out by them and WotC and new players starting to associated D&D with FR (especially after the big name video games) is how it happened. Considering the setting of Arda and the struggle between good and evil that is throughout it's existence, Dragonlance is a much closer setting to that of LOTR. FR is more like the Marvel comic universe than it is Arda, just a gaggle of whatever Greenwood shoved in that he stole from other fantasy works and then all the stuff WotC started to shove in because FR is just anything that sells more supplements/modules.
Lmao, thinking this will discount down to 20 within 2 years.
jaheira.docx
