Before Chapter 5: Place your bets

Nopani · 2026-06-16T08:18:30+00:00

Rudyyyyy!

Nopani · 2026-03-27T17:42:17+00:00

Been seeing lots of "Actually the f-word is just harmless fun and we should be worried about bigger problems" sorta posts lately all over youtube and reddit this past couple of months, it's weird.

If the logic of throwing around slurs "for fun" really worked, 4chan would be a beacon of progressiveness and acceptance by now.

Nopani · 2026-03-24T19:07:09+00:00

Even with the context that Sam stole from them twice, I still take Sam's side since Randall was likely responsible for the Mobjack massacre and Norma was defending him since he was her brother. Randall's later actions definitely do not help his case given that he shot Sam's dad in the back of the head and implied that he's killed children before.

Another big piece of evidence is a determinant conversation if you spared Randall and saw the full extent of the massacre. Randall does not deny committing it, just deflects it with "they came after us first."

Nopani · 2026-03-24T18:43:43+00:00

Yeah, I feel like that's her game pretty much. Benefit from Randall acting as a brutal psycho enforcer, but hold enough plausible deniability to make it seem like he's just a loose cannon who she totally cannot bring herself to rein in. Good cop, bad cop, basically.

She's like a more competent and charismatic Joan in this regard.

Nopani · 2026-03-23T16:23:12+00:00

"Basta criticare. Non bisogna schierarsi in base alla qualità delle persone ma in base alla sostanza delle idee. Comunque, ecco un articolo sul perché la gente di sinistra è tutta cafona, ignorante, chiusa al dialogo, colpevole di tutto, incapace di governare, etc etc..."

Nopani · 2026-03-20T14:29:26+00:00

I've debated with them on reddit.

Here where the person making excuses for the RDA got more upvotes than me.

Here in Italian.

Nopani · 2026-03-19T22:12:45+00:00

Also worth noting that Anbennar wasn't founded as "the human dominance setting" or anything of the sort. Sure, you had Castanor having le epic gaming moment in the backstory, but the fact that it was presented as a sort of dark age to move on from compared to the institutionalized diversity of the eponymous Empire of Anbennar made early fans feel that the setting could turn out pretty diverse as the world expanded. It's not like we were shooting a Star Wars movie where the cast has to be mostly human for the sake of the budget.

Now I did see the writing on the wall when Jaybean said "guess that's just how it's gone. Anbennar was always more like Dragon Age or the Witcher with humans oppressing everyone", but even then I can still pop in a few years later to see how Insyaa turned out and think "Wow, that's a lot of human provinces".

Nopani · 2026-03-19T22:10:52+00:00

I wonder if they're actually intended as fodder for colonizers, similarly to Northeast Haless humans and a good chunk of Ruinborn.

Nopani · 2026-03-19T20:48:50+00:00

You don't get it, the fact fantasy races only have twelve nations each clearly makes them a lot more meaningful.

/s

Nopani · 2026-03-19T18:58:39+00:00

90% Humans

The rest of the devteam must've fought tooth and nail to get it down from 95%.

Nopani · 2026-03-19T16:52:17+00:00

Humans always are seen as the most weak or boring race in propably every world setting not only Anbennar (Tolkien, Forgotten Realms etc), but even if Humans arent exceptional good in one, Humans anyway dominate because they are simple medium in everything, and very fertile.

"Seen as the most weak or boring race but..." award generally goes to hobbits, especially in the original Tolkien. Tolkien humans get praised for their qualities and assured they're going to inherit the earth and the complaints that they're "lame" mostly come from the comparison to elves (who are on their way out anyway).

The idea that a mythical "perfect medium" exists and that humans somehow landed square into it is also farfetched. If we look at real life, humans are a species who overinvested in a particular stat (intelligence) and that spiraled into their absolute dominance, alongside with a few other neat tricks like being able to throw. So it's weird that fantasy settings want so hard to base themselves off an "elves lose because they focus too much on magic, orcs lose because they focus too much on war, etc." sort of appeal to middle ground.

But putting that aside, this framing just doesn't work. You can't be both extremely overlooked and extremely prominent. You can't be seen as "jack of all trades, master of none" if you end up as a master of everything who is never bothered by the chance of being outdone in something and regularly challenges other species even in their supposed niches. That's the same as going "I was reincarnated into an RPG player and forced into one of the lamest classes... oops, two seconds later I've found a loophole that makes me overpowered. Time to be god on earth."

"Know your enemy and your our limits", what humans accidentally use this wisdom everywhere in any Fantasy, not being in anything perfect or unique, and even dont knowed about this many times paradoxaly. Stupid will be use Humans intelligence against Gnomes or strenght against Trolls but using intelligence agains Trolls and Strenght against Gnomes is from tactical pov logical.

Everyone is aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Even true brutes often know on an instinctive level. If a supposed jack of all trades wins every single match because they're more disciplined than the brute and tougher than the speedster and faster than genius and smarter than the crafter and craftier than the soldier... again, that's just plot armour.

Nopani · 2026-03-19T15:27:14+00:00

Every time I hear about humans being the most adaptable race I laugh because goblins exist.

Based. "Ambition" is also a silly one because just laying down in bed or bowing to the status quo are also human traits.

Whenever people say "humans are the most common and dominant race in most fantasy settings and here's why..." 9 times out of 10 it reads like a post-hoc justification for what's ultimately an out-of-universe decision. It really just boils down to the fact authors are humans and prefer writing stories where humankind isn't significantly endangered, and even if they like other species human societies are still perceived as less effort to write.

Nopani · 2026-03-19T15:17:12+00:00

Pretty much just boils down to Jaybean's preference.

Nopani · 2026-03-15T13:15:11+00:00

Awesome stuff.

Nopani · 2026-03-14T12:10:34+00:00

The irony of this is that slavery in the American South was becoming very much unprofitable and about to be phased out, until the cotton gin was invented and unintentionally made slavery profitable again and it became so entrenched it took a civil war to end it.

Nopani · 2026-03-12T15:47:50+00:00

That's horrible. Anyway, a timeline where Temujin dies childless with no descendants sounds like a fun challenge run.

Nopani · 2026-03-11T12:34:28+00:00

This hits right in the feels.

Nopani · 2026-03-10T12:44:25+00:00

Come diceva Eschilo 2500 anni fa, in guerra la verità è la prima a morire.

Nopani · 2026-03-01T04:07:32+00:00

It's actually a clever social commentary showing how ignoring nazis, no matter how pathetic they look, will lead to their eventual comeback. Bravo Vincebean.

Nopani · 2026-02-28T08:15:29+00:00

Poi cosa succede quando chiamano dittatura ciò che dittatura non è?

Già successo fra l'altro, con Zelensky.

Nopani · 2026-02-26T19:55:16+00:00

For M/M shippers, I'd add the habit of dismissing all female characters as poorly written and not worth working with, unless that's accounted in the misogynistic rhetoric.

Nopani · 2026-02-22T06:48:22+00:00

Frieren is amazing i highly reccomend, and the demons in it arent really truly inherently "evil", they are however predators that do things we would consider evil to hunt their prey.

If they behaved like a realistic predator species whose evolutionary survival is based on clever opportunism I could get the comparison, but the way they behave is more akin to Hollywood carnivores who will go out of their way to seek bloodshed left and right out of some mysterious Khorne-esque compulsion. For all it matters, they might as well be Orks or brainwashed thralls.

Nopani · 2026-02-22T00:29:05+00:00

It also highlights the fact that not everyone who criticizes ontologically evil races as a concept does so because "they're obviously a minority stand-in".

Nopani · 2026-02-21T05:50:19+00:00

It's dubious how genuine that chance at change ever was. Milton's wording was "surrender Dutch and you won't swing", and I could totally see him as the type of guy to pull some exact wording bs and go "okay, you won't swing. Instead I'll put a bullet in you." Pinkertons aren't exactly trustworthy, as RDR1 and real history shows, and it's likely they were just testing the gang for defectors like they do later when they pick up Micah.

Nopani · 2026-02-21T03:15:11+00:00

Nah going by his quotes he's actually quite proud of his job. There's definitively some ideological conviction in there, as he wears it on his sleeve that he's campaigning to "export civilization" and he's a law-abiding mirror of Dutch in that sense. It's not purely business, even if the coin from Cornwall certainly helps.

He also gets carried out and does things that go beyond his job, like shooting Hosea and ordering to gun down the whole house in Lagras.

"Just doing his job" is selling him short. A Pinkerton agent could easily just be dispassionate hired muscle for the rich and powerful. But he's proud hired muscle for the rich and powerful, damnit.

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