Profiles in Positive Masculinity: Neil deGrasse Tyson

I thought it would be interesting to use, as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s manly picture, an image that he brought up while being interviewed by Joe Rogan (as well as in other instances) from his time as a heavyweight college wrestler:

…in part because I don’t necessarily think of Tyson as…swole. But there you have it. He was an undefeated wrestler and team captain in high school, and went on to wrestle as an undergraduate at Harvard. On the list of astrophysicists you wouldn’t want to fight, Tyson is probably at the top. He may also be the only name on that list.

But it’s been a while since he last wrestled. Obviously, I need to look at Tyson as a scientist, educator and public figure, and for the purposes of this profile, I’ll be looking at the second two.

He founded the Department of Astrophysics at the Museum of Natural History in NYC in 1997, and has had his position as director of the Hayden Planetarium since 1996. He visited the Planetarium as a kid, and that visit was a big part of what got him initially interested in astronomy and astrophysics. Neil deGrasse Tyson is gifted with an amazing voice and eloquent mind, and he was an excellent choice to take over as the personality behind the remake of Cosmos, following in Carl Sagan’s footsteps. He is an effective communicator and educator, with that combination of presence and his enthusiasm for what he has to teach that makes a person compelling.

Tyson has become a public figure primarily through debates over science and religion over the course of the past decade or so. I’ve watched him in debates a number of times, and one thing that stands out to me is that he doesn’t take crap from anyone. He isn’t acerbic or self-absorbed or unnecessarily harsh; he is direct and clear and uncompromising. He is able to acknowledge and speak about what some might call the spirituality of science without leaving room for anything he feels lacks sufficient evidence to justify belief. That is, he can talk about the numinous without having to refer to the divine, nor even leave grey area where others might want to reference god or the supernatural. For Tyson, the natural is more than enough.

For being uncompromising while remaining gracious, for serving as an example of more than one kind of strength, and for being someone who has become a public figure because of his intelligence, eloquence, and integrity, Neil deGrasse Tyson is today’s Profile in Positive Masculinity.

Positive Masculinity in a Genre Film

Here’s an example of positive masculinity from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them:

Changeling 20th Anniversary Edition (C20) Review

Overall

Changeling the Dreaming has always been a beautiful, broken game. The 20th Anniversary edition is less different from the 2nd edition than I’d expected. It is somewhat less broken, and still beautiful in its way. Lackluster kithain art detracts from it, and I would have preferred a bigger focus on new art in a game that is so driven by imagery (and so flush with new cash from the Kickstarter).

The metaplot is reiterated and updated, but it holds less interest for me than it did 18 years or so ago, when I first started playing the 2nd edition with my friends in college. It remains very US-centric, which is unfortunate, and the rise of David Ardry still comes across as someone’s first brush with fantasy worldbuilding.

All that being said, this remains a game I would run or play, and enjoy. There are solid updates to the rules to help with this, though it remains broken and in need of some house-ruling. If you love Changeling the Dreaming 2nd edition, you’ll love C20. If you already have the various splatbooks, though, I actually think you could skip buying the Anniversary edition. Many of the rules changes can easily be part of house rules, and the stunning new art that I was hoping for in a 20th Anniversary edition just isn’t there.

This is just after a single read-through. I haven’t had a chance to play C20, and I’m sure I’ll find more on subsequent read-throughs. I’ve focused on the main kiths, Arts and some setting updates. I’d like to give more attention to the Hsien updates and other details as well in the future. Still, here is what I found.

Art and Design

A lot of classic Changeling the Dreaming art is carried over, and there are some new pieces. I thought that the new art for the clans in V20 was lacking, and I think that the new art for Changeling often falls flat, especially for the kithain. (For a tutorial in how to do new art for a OWoD line, I recommend M20).

The book is well laid-out and easy to read, and the table of contents has a few, but not enough, links in the PDF version. I prefer M20’s PDF, where all of the page numbers in the table of contents are links – in C20, only the chapter titles are links, which makes navigation a bit more cumbersome than it needs to be.

The Good

Birthrights and Frailties for each Kith are updated, and I like almost all of the updates. No big changes have been made, but they have been cleaned up overall. There are now no Chimerical-only attribute bonuses, which is something that I actually thought made sense for the Sidhe and Trolls, though I might be in the minority there. You can still create a troll with a Strength of 8 (max out Strength on a Grump Troll, add Strength of Atlas merit), but it is all mundane, meaning your Troll is far stronger than the strongest human ever to live. Similar with a side with an Appearance of 7 – so I guess people just collapse screaming in ecstasy in the street wherever you go? I preferred Chimercal attributes that you could manifest by Calling on the Wyrd in 2nd – the sudden reveal was made all the more significant. In actually running Changeling, I would keep those attribute bonuses Chimerical I think.

Arts have also been cleaned up. There was talk, when the rules discussion started on the Onyx Path forums, of eliminating Realms, which I would have preferred; in C20 Realms remain, but it is possible to spend a point of Glamour to cheat and use a Realm you don’t actually have, which is a big bonus to the way the system works. Realms are an element that adds constraints that sometimes drive creativity, but can also easily drive players crazy as they find out their character can’t do what they assumed she could do with her Arts. It’s an annoying element that isn’t present in any of the other supernaturals’ abilities. But the fix of being able to just spend Glamour to affect an Art you don’t have is a step in the right direction.

There is a much better crafting system, which makes up for Infusion being removed from the game. It now makes more sense, how one would create Chimerical objects in-game, something that was profoundly missing in 2nd. Now any Changelings can create Chimerical objects, Nockers are just a bit better at it.

And many things are now under one roof. Gathered up are all the added noble houses, and there are a few new ‘standard’ kith added to the lineup (Clurichauns, Piskies and Selkies) from splatbooks, and they streamlined the Hsien and added them as well. Elements of various metaplots have been brought into C20 together, and I’m not sure they all fit together, but that isn’t a big concern for me.

I like that they kept Naming, though I miss Dreamcraft. The new Contracts Art feels like it was borrowed from Changeling the Lost, but with good effect. It lets you do things that fae are supposed to be able to do, in my view. I think it could have used another pass in development, but, again, house rules.

There are also four new seasonal Arts, clearly drawn from Changeling the Lost, and I like the addition. Autumn, Spring, Summer and Winter each bring different things to Changeling. (As an aside, I personally think the sweet spot for Changeling is somewhere between Dreaming and Lost, but that’s me) Each seasonal Art expands on the idea for that season well, though again, I think they could have used another once-over in development.

The Not-So-Good

Already mentioned, the setting remains US-centric. Understandable, but not good. I mean, it isn’t America of Darkness. Also already mentioned, I don’t like that the Chimerical attribute bonuses are now just attribute bonuses. I get why they did it, but I could see that easily causing problems. I mentioned the poor art for many of the kithain.  The general rule that Changeling abilities are more costly, and have fewer dice, and are less powerful than the abilities of other supernaturals remains true.

Infusion and Dreamcraft both get the boot, among the Arts. Dragon’s Ire is now an Art, and it looks like it would not be a great choice since other arts help you in combat. I prefer the Dragon’s Ire as an ability, since I liked that different kiths got a reduced difficulty to call upon the Ire in different situations. I thought this was a great thematic element – suddenly the boggan is frightening because she is defending her home. Most of the Arts got a once-over at least, and are a bit better balanced with one another, and also stick to their themes more closely (no more using Pyretics to find lost things, that’s Soothsay now).

Unleashing, which is an awesome idea I think, is just not designed well enough. More examples would have been helpful, as there is a lot of hand-waving involved in figuring out what exactly happens. I like the idea of Unleashing – to ‘kick the door open’ to the Dreaming – but the execution isn’t well thought out enough. It’s like a tiny taste of an indie game, where you roll dice to see who narrates the result, and it just doesn’t work as a part of Changeling. Definitely another place where house rules would be required.

The Bad

Bunks that do not take an action are now impossible, which I definitely don’t like. Even the simplest bunks require that a character split their dice-pool for the Art activation roll, Given that Arts are now difficulty 8 base, and that dice-pools will be tiny because of Realms, splitting seems like a non-starter. I see no reason why basic -1 bunks would require one to split their action, and this means that every Changeling fight will be as follows:

Round One: everyone does something silly and waits.

Round Two: the fight actually starts, as everyone’s Art goes off.

Changelings using magical powers would easily be overcome by, say, jock

Combining the fact that Arts require Realms with the fact that no Art can be used spontaneously just feels like a bad relic of the past combined with a nerf. Splitting your first action hardly seems like a viable option, considering how tiny Art dice-pools are to start with – that’s a lot of work to end up rolling 2 or 3 dice at a difficulty of 8 for your magic power.

There are also always issues with the Satyr’s Gift of Pan, and those issues remain. Under their effect, if one fails a difficulty 8 roll (easy to do with low starting Willpower, and Willpower costing twice as much as it does for any other denizens of the World of Darkness), they cannot resit giving in to their secret desires. They just seem to be unable to get away from consent issues with Satyrs, and I can think of plenty of players who would make this until an un-fun evening.

Overall

If you loved Changeling the Dreaming 2nd edition, you’ll also love C20. If you actually played 2nd, you will have plenty of house rules to make the game work, and house rules will still be required for C20, though perhaps fewer of them. You’ll need to figure out what to do with Unleashing, and what it means to have a Strength of 8 or an Appearance of 7 in the mundane world – or house rule those things.

In the end, I love Changeling the Dreaming, and C20 doesn’t change that. I would still play it. Reading through the book still gives me ideas for stories. C20 brings things that were scattered across a couple dozen splatbooks into one tome, and updates some of the metaplot to 2015 or so. On the other hand, I think that someone who already has those splatbooks, and already has some house rules, and could maybe add Unleashing into their game…I’m not sure that person needs to buy C20 at all.

Profiles in Positive Masculinity: Aziz Ansari

It seems appropriate, having just binge-watched Master of None Season 2 (which I cannot recommend enough), that I should present the second requested Profile in Positive Masculinity: Aziz Ansari. First, a manly picture of Aziz:

Complete with pocket squerr.

I first found out who Aziz Ansari was while falling in love with Parks and Recreation, a show that featured another masculine phronemos, Nick Offerman. (And yeah, there’s a decent chance Chris Pratt will show up in one of these too someday) Like the other main characters in Parks and Rec, Ansari plays an exaggerated version of himself: a perennially stylish hype-man who works incredibly hard at goofy projects throughout the series. Somewhat like his character Tom Haverford, Ansari wears many hats: author, stand-up comedian, actor, director and producer. He even does occasional charity work…

When I think of Aziz Ansari, I think of style. He is a very fashion-conscious person, which despite being a fat slob myself, I respect. He puts a lot of thought into how he comes across, and always seems deliberate in what he says and does. He’s also highly creative and hardworking – amidst his work on television and in film, he has remained active in stand-up for the past decade and a half, releasing multiple comedy specials and headlining more than one tour. But what stays with me is his intentionality.

Master of None is one of the few shows I’ve ever seen that doesn’t address masculinity by vapidly playing to stereotypes. His character, Dev, is not plagued by insecurities about his masculinity. Humorously, he’s the sort of person who would be uninterested in the conversation I’m trying to have through these blog posts. He never questions himself in that way, nor does he do anything to make himself more masculine. He’s a small-statured guy with an enormous best friend Arnold, and the two of them are more interested in brunch than working out. They have this great un-self-conscious friendship. Neither one of them seems to have any trouble meeting or talking to women – rather, then issues that come up for them are in maintaining relationships, understanding themselves, and understanding others. Regular human stuff.

So many other story-lines are driven by male anxieties – anxieties around (ahem) size, strength, sexuality, how others perceive them, daddy issues and so on. These stereotypical anxieties drive a lot of character actions and relationships, and a common crutch for humor; a cheap shortcut to get the attention of viewers, and star-writer-director Ansari has none of it. One can only assume that, since Master of None originates primarily in his mind, it reflects a lot of what Aziz Ansari is about. And perhaps for this lack of masculine anxiety, more than anything else, Aziz Ansari is today’s Profile in Positive Masculinity.

Alienating Atonement and the Theater of Hell

Sinner, This Is Your Life

This is an image I have heard innumerable times: You have died. You are greeted by an angel, and told that you will be shown your life. You are seated in a movie theater, and are shown your entire life, from birth – every good and bad thing you ever did. Every secret thing, including every secret thought. Maybe the other people in your life are there too, in the movie theater, watching.

The idea is that you will be horrified, and humiliated, and embarrassed. You will feel intense shame and guilt for all you have ever done. You will understand how awful you truly are, in that moment – how unworthy and utterly in need of salvation you are, miserable worm.

Then you are judged based on what the movie showed. If you died without Jesus in your life, you are sentenced to Hell, and in this imaginary situation, it is well-deserved. You nod your head, tearful, understanding God’s transcendent justice in sentencing you to an eternity of torment.

Theologian, Here Is My Finger

The above is a horrifying view of the atonement. It is an expression of one of the worst threads of Christian theology – the idea that shaming and guilt-tripping, teaching people how awful and irredeemable they are, is the best way to bring them to God. As an inheritor of the Reformation, on the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, I realize that this criticism is squarely pointed at my own tradition, such as it is. Luther and Calvin and many who came after went to great lengths to describe what miserable worms we all are.

The basic message is that the at-one-ment with God is achieved because God pinches His Divine Nose and grudgingly accepts your miserable soul, solely because he was first able to contrive a situation where his own self could be tortured to death on a cross as compensation for the whole affair.

What if God Isn’t a Vindictive Jerk?

When I think about being in the audience in this humiliating theater, watching someone singled out and shamed by a bullying God, I feel deep sympathy. What a horrible situation to be in. Anyone who has ever been mocked, or bullied, or singled out for abuse, or humiliated can surely empathize with this situation.

I was recently listening to a sermon that described just this scene, the one referenced in the pages from a Chick tract above. I felt not only sympathy for the person afflicted by this view of God, but anger at the God who would do this. This would be despicable behavior from a human being – from God it is categorically irredemptive.

Imagine, rather than the terror of being truly known by God and others that haunts some of us (maybe many of us?), there was a similar scene. You are lovingly invited to a theater where your life is shown on the screen – in all of its mess and beauty, loss and triumph. It is the great story told by your time in the world, with all the laughs and cheers and tears and even regret. And through it all, there is the loving presence of those who love you, of a God who loves you, who see you for who you are and love all of you. What you went through life fearing, and protecting yourself from, happens, and it is a time of joy and radical acceptance. You are where you are meant to be, and you are who you were meant to be all along.

One might even go so far as to call that atonement.

Daredevil and Punisher; Sensitivity and Strength

I recently responded to the disappointment of Iron Fist by watching Daredevil season 1 again. And, having finished season 1, Netflix helpfully offered up season 2 as my next choice, and choose I did. Watching these two seasons of Daredevil, featuring the Punisher in the second season, got me thinking about superheroes, the supernatural, and game design, and a whole lot of things. Here’s a start.

Sensitivity Versus Strength

Normally, in the United States, sensitivity and strength are seen as oppositional aspects of a person. If someone is overly sensitive, we are concerned that they are vulnerable to the harshness of the world, and would expect them to be weak, to be a “snowflake”, to require trigger warnings on a regular basis. Right now, in fact, I would say that a sensitive person is subject to more ridicule than I’ve seen in a long time. Our society has no idea what to do with sensitive people, in fact – it’s either bitter mockery or ironclad defensiveness, it seems.

On the other hand, I think we assume that a strong person is insensitive. They are tough, thick-skinned. They  have a hard exterior. We respect toughness, the ability to take punishment and continue. “Even so, she persisted.” The capacity to grit one’s teeth and persist despite pain and privation and opposition.

It is like there is a sliding scale, with Sensitive on one end and Strong on the other, and everyone is somewhere between the two. More of one is less of the other. And there are plenty of examples we might think of, of sensitive people who do not seem to be very resilient, and strong people who are callous and unfeeling, or at least seem that way.

Daredevil

Daredevil is a really interesting superhero, for me at least, because his strength comes explicitly from his sensitivity. He is formidable because he is sensitive. He is blind, but his other perceptions are so acute that he has superhuman perceptions of the world around him. He can echo-locate, and he’s a lie-detector, and he can perceive what is in the next room without opening the door. He has superhuman agility and balance – all of this because of his sensitivity. He’s like Zatoichi, or a blindfolded Zen archer – yes, a fictional trope, but also an interesting take on strength in a genre where it is normal for bullets to bounce off the hero.

In the Daredevil show on Netflix, they make a lot of his moral sensitivity, especially in contrast to the Punisher. He has his interactions with his priest, Father Lantom – who as an aside is one of the few good portrayals of clergy in media – and these interactions show another side of his sensitivity, and another way in which that sensitivity gives him strength. There his interactions with Claire Temple, who continually nurses him back from death’s door after a particularly bad beating, and more than one episode is spent while he is limping and stitched together, frustrated by the limits of his body and its vulnerability.

Punisher

The Punisher is obviously a superb foil for Daredevil. For him, Daredevil is a “half measure” – a guy who can’t get the job done, who can’t do the ‘necessary’ thing and kill the criminals he opposes. In contrast to Daredevil, if the Punisher has any supernatural ability, it is his ability to take damage. He spends the entire show with his face and body brutalized, but is never slowed very much by his injuries. He is a personification of hardness and strength, an implacable killing machine.

Of course, the core of Frank Castle’s story, what makes him the Punisher, is pain and loss. This is, again, part of the tough guy trope – he is driven to become an unfeeling killing machine because, underneath it all, he feels so deeply. But not in a way that causes him to reflect much on his actions, like Daredevil does, nor in a way that makes him something other than a killing machine.

Interlude: Yes, I Know

Yes, both of these are supremacist power fantasies. Daredevil is the power fantasy that even if I lose something of myself, even if I am hurt, it will only make me stronger. I can turn my hurt, my vulnerability, into yet more strength, and use that strength to punch criminals in the face all night long. Punisher is the power fantasy of empowering victimization. I am hurt deeply once, and that one hurt justifies every hurt I inflict on the world around me. His is the logic of every war, every retaliation, of Trump’s MAGA uprising, and the particular male fantasy that if you pushed me too far, or hurt my family, I’d become a killing machine too. All of that true, but that’s not where I’m going here.

To Be Formidable

What if sensitivity is strength? What if the are the same thing? Not in a Daredevil since, where his senses are so sensitive and acute except when he is pummeling his foes into submission, and not in the Punisher way, where his deep hurt at the loss of his family is what fuels his bottomless murderous rage. But in an everyday way, the way that a child can demonstrate better than a superhero.

It doesn’t require any strength, any resilience, to be insensitive. You’re not tough, you’re just numb. Maybe you numb yourself with substances or other behaviors, or maybe you’re just a little numb by nature. If the world hurts you less, toughing it out is no great feat. Maybe you get used to numbing yourself, or maybe you get used to coasting through trouble. Life just requires less of you.

Just as it requires less of me to live a white-hetero-male-privileged life. I might be hurt by the world, but overall, the world hurts me less than others with less privilege. (Imagine how quickly a Black Daredevil or Punisher would be caught or murdered by police) It certainly is not easy, but it is in a sense on “Easy Mode” as John Scalzi calls it. My baseline life requires less strength.

What requires strength is to live in the world and remain sensitive. It requires so much strength, in fact, that humans flock to addiction and various kinds of anesthesia to avoid doing just that. We want stories of tough, impervious heroes; of victorious, immortal gods. We trade liberty for security, offering it up before we are even asked, and thanking our leaders for the privilege of losing who we might have been. Build the wall! Take my data, please!

The truly formidable person is the one whose strength and sensitivity flow together. She who feels more, sees more, and knows more must also endure more. And the more we feel, the more we see, the more we know and care, the more we must endure. The stronger we must be, and the more formidable we become. But even if that is not the kind of strength that many of us seek out, nor the kind of strength that makes it into our stories very often, it is just that kind of strength that we need right now.

Four Cool Things Iron Fist Failed to Be

A Wu Tang, Kung-Fu Hip-Hop Mashup

I was kind of excited when the show opened with a hip-hop track and the promise of some forthcoming kung-fu. There is a lot of overlap between hip-hop and kung-fun, at least in my own opinion, and nothing represents this to me more clearly than the Wu Tang Clan, but you also have Afro Samurai and the fight scenes in Boondocks among many other examples. I’m not an expert here, but the connection is there, and Iron Fist did precisely nothing with it.

Occasionally Danny Rand would do his awkward faux-Tai-Chi meditation before a fight, and he’d play some cool music, but it had no connection to the rest of the story at all, except that when his plane went down he had an iPod. They could have gone somewhere with this connection, in the story itself. It could have been an interesting mashup in style following on Luke Cage’s heels. But, no.

A Vehicle for a Breakout Asian Star

What was Mike Colter doing before Jessica Jones and Luke Cage? I don’t know either. But we know now, because Luke Cage was awesome. If I saw Mike Colter on the street, I’d half expect to see him in a bullet-hole hoodie. On my Facebook and Twitter feed, black nerds were going wild about Luke Cage. All nerds were going pretty wild, to be honest.

Iron Fist could have been that kind of breakout moment for an Asian actor and martial artist. I mean, he’s a similarly obscure superhero – it isn’t like there is a huge existing fan-base for Iron Fist. They could even have met folks half-way with someone like Lewis Tan, who read for Danny Rand while they were casting.

I can’t believe that Hollywood isn’t bursting at the seams with handsome, charismatic Asian actors who would love to be cast as something other than Triad Thug #6. Come on.

But no.

The Anti-Batman Billionaire Story

We already have Batman Begins, where a white billionaire goes to Asia to learn supernatural, or at least superhuman, martial arts. We have Doctor Strange, the millionaire white guy who goes to Asia to learn magic from a white woman who is the leader of a mystic Asian sect. Danny Rand could have been interesting as a commentary on these stories. He’s part of a trope – OK. That gives you the chance to comment on the trope in an intelligent way. But, no.

A Humorous Meditation On Its Own Failure

More and more as the series progresses, we have the refrain that Danny Rand is a terrible Iron Fist. I think the show could have made more of this. There’s every indication that he went off half-cocked, barely having earned the power of the Iron Fist before he inexplicably flees his calling and responsibility to…I guess get into fist-fights with corporate security guards and whitesplain Asian culture to people.

But it would have been more interesting if they had leaned into this idea that he is not a very good Iron Fist. He earned this cosmic power, just barely, and then ran away. He’s petulant and obtuse and socially awkward. He grew up in a mystical monastery and is totally unequipped to deal with adulthood and the modern world. He tries to solve everything with martial arts, and it never works. This could have been funny, and endearingly awkward. Think of a stereotypical homeschooled kid with supernatural kung-fu powers. One does not have to be very smart to make that funny.

But, again, no.

Just…no.