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Power Fantasies (Part 2) - Extra Fantasy

Addendum

Feb 23, 2023

As promised, coming back to part 2 or Power Fantasies to talk about two subtypes of the necropolitical fantasy that did not make into the main article. You may not get much from this without reading that one first.

Queer Necropolitics: Killing You Softly With Gay Tieflings

Necropolitics of the Radiant Citadel cannot be divorced from the queering of necropolitics. As the societies of murder contract as result of their relentless apocalyptic omnicide, some nonfellows have to be made fellows

. We cannot have a lull in the killing, can we? It may pass as peace.

The solution? Queer necropolitics for the queer adventurer

However, that is not an easy process and needs to balance some quite tricky contradiction. The mythology that creates aggro cannot be done away overnight: the Other cannot just be embraced. For the Other to become part of queer necropolitics of the fellowship, the Other must go through a normative process before it can be accepted as part of the Imperial consensus

. In its merciful nature, the hegemon does not require complete change; they ask the Other to shed away most of what they are that is challenging to the empire, except one thing, one piece of flair — allowed to keep a single bit of deviant identity that makes them special.

The most important part part of queering necropolitics is that you do not challenge Imperial taste and comfort. You can be exotic, a welcomed novelty to the stagnation of their identities — but not an inch more.

We saw that in the most recent presentations of the orc; first, it must be accepted as a “half-orc”, as the racialized mongrel and all the bile that implies — still a camp-form in the Imperial core. Slowly, it was accepted to be an orc, but one divorced from the community of nonfellows — reject the Orc culture and be a true child of the Citadel. Mirroing the post-colonial adoption of “untainted” Others as a source of labor and identity renewal

The queer Imperial subject is through necropolitics made its most eager soldier, — allegedly able to earn acceptance through adventuring. The reason why they are so eager, is, that unlike their “normal” “peers” in the community of the fellowships of the Empire, who just believe their identities are in danger, the queer necropolitical dark messiah has their identity endangered by legitimate real threats

. They were attacked before and will be attacked again.

This mirrors the aggro and necropolitics of our reality under the liberal consensus; a lot of awfulness in this artform and its industry is accepted against real people as necessary. Because “I’m playing gay elves kissing”, I don’t care how many people are exploited for labor, art is stolen, designfluencer scams happen, monopolies consolidate vertical integration and expand their enclosure of the human general intellect. But that is the thing, isn’t it? For the Imperial, I’m not a person.

I’m less real than Vox Machina and their soft lesbians kissing ^O^

This aggro is a fractal of the same miserable mindset that sees my life and the lives of billions inherently less valuable than from the normative Imperial queerness accepted in the Imperial community of fellows

. How it pits normative transness and queerness against racialized minorities or how it defends genocidal industrias token embrace of queerness to openly state that “an Imperial queer life is worth a thousand of the swarty Other”

Among roleplaying games, the fractal mirrors of the Citadel are neverthless, are quite keen on their shards. The Keep is usually less preocupied with pretenses, and a lot of honesty has come from there. Bluntly, soldiers of the Keep have declared “I’m an Imperial trans/queer and I have the right to do a genocide in my fantasies”; the best verbalization of the tensions inherent to the queer necropolitical power fantasy: am I not an Imperial? Am I not, all for this one misfortune, not part of the community of fellows? Am I not a real person, unlike all those Other assorted piles of gay meats? Am I not too allowed to protect my identityfrom those non-Imperial assorted meats in their camp-forms?

I am owned my birthright to gay something from their deaths as part of the apocalyptic accord of necropower — my unique circumstances only mean I lose more from not using the populations condemned to death to my benefit.

Nothing exemplies this transformation, this queering of the necropolitical/ transnormativization as well as the “queer tiefling”.

Tieflings, mortals marked by a lineage from the “lower planes” or similar Death-Worlds of Hell, are marked as the Other; however they are often an Other that emerges from camp-forms within the Imperial core, as a result of “daliances” for power and so — or the stereotype goes. Sometimes they even get their cool empire too. In that way, they exemplify one of the most cruel and messed up elementgs of necropolitics that we did not cover in the original article: the necropolitical impulse to burden the victims of the camp-form and aggro with the guilt of their oppresors

. The Tiefling is already both Orc and Adventurer by its own fictional positioning.

So, the tieflings are queered as the “Other from within”. Reframing them so they can become part of the necropolitical power fantasy — “making them playable” — takes a price: the normative process. Sure, they can diverge from Imperial norms, but only a little, as a treat; as mentioned before, it cannot be so much it threatens Imperial tastes. Just enough that they can be an exotic, deviant person — harmless, unthreatening identarian beings

. The days are gone for the “monstrous” tieflings, those whose identity and presentation mark them as part of whatever is the current Other.

This is why we only see the Proper Queer Tiefling. The days are over for the tieflings with transparent skin and skulls, crawling iron blood exoskeletons or shifting barbed skin. If you gonna be a hero doing aggro-busting necro-cop shit, you better be a disappointing faux-goat anthro with an appealing pallet-swap.

And you better be conventionally cute too.

That part is more important than it might otherwise seem. Because if you are too “monstruous”, you are the Other, and so anyone that relates to you is the Other too. This tension makes it okay and hot to fuck the cute tiefling, but not so much taking in some mothman girldick

; then you risk being ostracized from the community of fellows back to the camp-form.

This is where the other side of the queer necropolitical fantasy comes in: a normalization of fetishizing and exotifiying. Something to be possessed. It is acceptable to fuck the cute tiefling, since they are unthreatening they are something you are allowed to possess that way; for the rest, it has to be only assorted meats that you need to possess through dying and killing in order to not too become a Other. The sexual objectification of the living-dead is yet another way through which their death gives meaning: something to be possessed

Warmachines and Killing Fascists

The camp-form is a space of exclusion, a space of exception — all the nominal tokens of fellowship and community are denied to those within, marked as non-people. Everything is permited to them, and it is out of mind if not out of sight. Camp-forms are utopias, no-places for no-people

; this like other states of exclusion are the domain of war, despite the trappings of liberal consensus war crimes courts, where the Enemy justifies everything done to them.

War and the camp-form are inseperable companions, for those within a camp-form do not know peace and are drafted into a state of Eternal War for the preservation of the identities of the real people

War, however, can have a creative power when you inhabit a death-world and are the living dead

. Since there are no other venues to Be - for you are, and will always be, a non-person - meaning is only from your dying. Since you are already in a camp-form, and already at war, waging war and risking your living-death is a way for you to define yourself rather than be definied by the hegemon!

Thus necropolitics are always tied to war machines — those who Be war.

Paradoxically, a society of killing, engaged in a war with the world, locked in an apocalyptic struggle for its own identity and existing in a state of permanent exception cannot mantain a monopoly upon violence. The same applies to the aggro-focused roleplayer of the Keep/Citadel: if you engage with the systems of combat, the Adventurer no longer has the monopoly of violence

. It can be turned against them by the Orc.

Only through violence can the Orc become a person and earn a name; through a TPK they may gain even the right to BE. No longer an un-being, a proper Villain. An antagonistic fellow, but a fellow; no longer a community of separation. A hero able to use aggro on their own terms.

Reaching personhood through violence.

Becoming a war machine can allow you to experience freedom from the death-world of the camp-form, the Orc using the very same violence of the Imperial to end un-life — but on the process, having that same violence used as proof of their rightful state as the Other

Oddly enough, war machines and the corrolary fantasy of fighting against your own necropoliticalization have not been integrated in the general culture; it is not a fantasy found in many roleplaying games. When war machines appear, they tend to be used as proof that by the Orc and as a justification of the righteousness of aggro: how dare they engage with the existance of war and violence, they are supposed to only be targets of it! But even that just becomes a way for game masters to play out their own aggro fantasies

There is another portray of war machines, one that has emerged as a result of the anxieties that emerged from within the American Imperial core related to the events of 2015-2016. “Fascist” became a prime candidate for targetting by suddenly endangered/uncomfortable liberarls. It made sense; they exist in the necropolitical, and have been seeing threats to their identity everywhere; suddently it felt like they had a real threat to themselves from within the house.

Many games have since then declared themselves “anti-fascist”, as a codeword that fascist analogues are acceptable targets within

. The liberal Imperial poor understanding of fascism and an even weaker grasp for necropolitics

has resulted in the blurry of lines. The fantasy of the war machine was displaced into fascists, as they are the Enemy but could not be made the Other; at the same time, fascism is superficially made the Other, so the usual necropolitical fantasy continues to apply, because cannot blame roleplaying games for not doing their part recycling.

You can see that such approach is going to cause issues down the line. It soon screeched into “liberal revenge fantasy”

games like Stigmata and RECLAIMER, players are given the means to do rainbow and ecological fascism by taking the power of the Otherfied fascist enemies. A dark messianic fascism, reducing it to identarian protection: the problem was that it was the wrong people doing fascism; reproducing all the fascist systems and perpetuating it without any place for actual anti-fascism.

All about passing the bundle of sticks. Take the war machine and fascist mindset for a ride and become not its victim but the Imposer of Eternal Only War. But it is okay, you are not fascists, you shoot fascists, so you A Good.

Less extreme and confused, there have also been the accidental

attempts to humanize fascism and the machinery of fascism. In those games, you engage with fascist-coded war machines, but they end up being seen as people in a camp-form pushed into fascism

...

…a grace that is not extended to their victims. The fascist may have moments of personhood as the violence of war collides, but the victim is forever a living-dead in the death-world of camp-form

But even those are accidental. I am beret of examples of war machines being a subject clearly identified, much less tackled on their own term. Much less the necropolitical victim fantasy of war machine as a way to escape death-worlds. Two games are the only ones I could think of that get this. One of them being included here is a surprise to me and to literally nobody else.

Dungeon Bitches and Flying Circus may have little in common and be in opposite ends of many a spectrum, but both engage with the necropolitical power fantasy, against the patriarchy and fascism, from the Othered in the camp-form point-of-view, by becoming war machines and carving an identity and personhood through war and interaction with violence imposed upon them. Literally central to frameworks, engines; all systems and mechanics feed into that.

It is not without hiccups, as they are still games with a lot of Anglophile Imperial eye to them. Flying Circus, in particular, stumbles into fabricating circumstances where fascists can be humanized; it avoids the liberal trap, however, of spending more time with the fascists than everyone else and/or centering their motivations and suffering over their victims

. You may have to face fascists in your struggle for personhood, but they never get to incorporated in the Other alongside you — they remain in a “community of fellows” with the dead Imperials of their dead worlds; they have chosen them as persons over loved ones, community, or literally anyone. To be a fascist in both of those games is to be forever aside from the personhood-creation of the living-dead protagonists (and everyone else).

Everyone in Flying Circus and Dungeon Bitches comes from a camp-form or another — to the eyes of the dead empires, in the case of the former. Playing the game is about reclaiming personhood. As a member of a war machine camp-form in the air

or underground, you get to inhabit the violence of the apocalypse nation-states and Be.

Because even in a world where nothing is ever gone, living-death that lasts forever cannot compete with the most fleeting moment of wondrous life.

Ditts, A. (2014). Punishment and inclusion: race, membership and the limits of American liberalism.

Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.

Haritaworn, H. Kuntsman, A. Posocco, S. (2014). Queer Necropolitics.

Posocco, S. (2014). On the queer necropolitics of transnational adoption in Guatemala.

Posocco, S. (2022). Harvesting life, mining death: adoption, surrogacy and forensics across borders.

Cawayu, A. (2021). “From our rotting bodies, politics shall grow“: necropolitics, social death and transnational adoption

Let’s ignore that those attacks and unlikely to come from Others. Rather, the main danger to the identity of the queer Imperial subject comes from their “community” of “fellows” and any tolerance is conditional. Conditional in them redirecting anxieties about their identity to the acceptable targets for violence.

Bassichis, M. Spade, D. (2014). Queer politics and anti-blackness.

Kiesling, E. (2017). The Missing Colors of the Rainbow: Black Queer Resistance.

Chaer, N. and Mirzazadeh, Z. (2022). Doing Queer Politics Between Islamophobia and Political Islam.

And let’s not even go into how in this imagination, none of those brown masses sent to the shredder so some Imperial queer can pay a mortage is imagined as being queer. Queer people among those subjected to the camp-form only exist when they are to be used as an excuse for further violence and enmity.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics.

Aizura, AZ. (2014). Trans feminine value, racialized others and the limits of necropolitics

Ribeiro, CJ et al. (2021). Necropolitics and Diffuse Violence: Critical Reflections on Social Discourses About the LGBT Body.

Mars, R. et al. (2022). Moth//Man.

Stoler, AL. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things.

Le Guin, U. (1973). The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

Bauman, Z. (2001). Wars of the Globalization Era.

When you have draw aggro, when through necropower you have already been made an acceptable target for dying.

Mbembe, A. (2019).

The Keep players in once again brutally honest: engaging with the systems of a game/rolling dice is commonly accepted as a “fail state”. Proper necropolitics are when your application of violence upon acceptable targets remains monopolized!

Thomson, J. (1997). Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns.

Narozhna, T. (2022). The Lived Body, Everyday and Generative Powers of War: Toward an Embodied Ontology of War as Experience.

Or just as empty marketing.

For this purpose, the essentialization of fascism as something individuals “are”, a way of “being”, that leaves them unable to recognize fascism and fascistic behavior and systems right in their face, making it an identarian question — right there to slide into that necropolitics shaped hole.

Phillips, A. (2018). Shooting to Kill: Headshots, Twitch Reflexes, and the Mechropolitics of Video Games.

I like to believe they were accidental.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol 2.

Martin-Baron, MR. (2014). (Hyper/in)visibility and the military corps(e).

Žižek, Slavoj. (2009). First as tragedy, then as farce.

Or half-track.