EPISODE 811: AM I CHAOTIC EVIL OR JUST UNHAPPY WITH THE CHURCH?

Also, why loving John Wick makes me nervous.

Apr 03, 2023

Seriously thinking about going to church tomorrow.

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hi, and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the only newsletter where you can find the pope and Dungeons & Dragons in pretty close to the same breath. I aim to please.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

THE WOWND UP

This weekend John Wick IV, aka the Wickening, aka the Whackening, aka Headshot Bingo, aka And This One’s For My Goldfish lost its top spot at the box office to Dungeons & Dragons, a property most popularly known for making parents in the 80s panic and giving their awkward, smart or queer kids some place to hide while bullies roamed the streets on weekends. Even admitting that D&D has been popular again for quite some time now, it’s still hard for Nerd Me to get my head around the idea that something that was so deeply an object of ridicule and shame could have become a popular movie starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and the guy from Bridgerton with the cool name.

Also Pope Francis became for a moment history’s coolest pope, after he was caught on film wearing a very fancy white Balenciaga white puffer coat, because Italy gets super cold in late March, I guess? Or so we all thought until we learned that actually some guy thought it would be fun to use AI to make the Pope look like that. In an interview with Buzzfeed after the fact the artist Pablo Xavier admitted he was high on shrooms when he got the idea, and he seemed like maybe he was still coming down a little when they interviewed him, because he expressed anxiety bordering on fear about the reaction he got. It’s all good, Pablo Xavier. You made the Pope look amazing.

And in other news, some new crazy thing is happening on Twitter, but it’s about who gets a blue check mark and whether they have to pay, which has always been a ridiculous and elitist concept anyway, so you know, have at it, Elon. Meanwhile I still can’t edit a freaking tweet.

TOP FIVE THINGS I REMEMBER FROM DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

A couple years ago I dipped a toe back into role playing games after many years away. As a middle-school kid I had played Dungeons & Dragons a little bit, but it never really worked for me. It seemed to take so much work just to build a character, like, literally hours. And then, I don’t know, it seemed like the mechanics of the game were so separate from what made it attractive. Like after these wonderfully described scenes by the Dungeon Master, they would turn to us and we would be stuck staying dumb things like “I take my +3 bastard sword and I smash the door.” Ugh, so cringey. D&D was basically the equivalent of a video game where instead of getting to fight you hit like, the “strike” button and then watch the sword swing awkwardly and wait to see if the game says you hit anything.

Today a lot of role playing games like this don’t actually have a game master that everything has to go through and we end up building the story together. Which is actually kind of thrilling—when a story like that comes together, it’s just a really special experience.

It’s also true that the guy who ran the D&D game I started going to as a kid was a middle aged game store owner who as I recall at one point randomly took his shirt off while we were gaming, which set off lots of stranger danger alarms. And just like that the act of gaming suddenly felt kind of dangerous, and I was out.

But I do remember some things from those days.

5. The Lich

The first module (aka story) I ever played – or maybe read? — was called Tomb of Horrors, and I remember it being this ridiculously impossible journey through a series of traps in maybe a castle? And at the end of it there was this badass monster called a lich, who in my mind was basically an undead wizard king with jewels for eyes.

4. +5

One of the classic notations in D&D was +/- additions to a weapon. A super special magic weapon might be +5 or +10; something that had been cursed might be -3. In the abstract these were pretty ridiculous, and sometimes you’d get really silly variations, like this just happens to be a +3 flower pot. But it was all part of the broader game mechanic, in which everything from success/failure to amount of damage was regulated via a roll of dice. Speaking of which…

3. Dice

Every gamer had a little felt bag filled with at least one set of a 4 sided, six sided, 8 sides, 10 sided, 12 sides and 20-sided dice, and I bet still does somewhere in an attic, because there was always something genuinely beautiful about them. In a weird way—and I realize this is going to sound weird—they were Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, objects that could be totally functionally but were crafted with a real interest in aesthetics and design.

2. Alignment

For me the most enduring and useful element of the D&D universe is its nine psychology-like profiles of different character types, based on a three by three grid of lawful-neutral-chaotic and good-neutral-evil. The first set of categories defined one’s relationship to order and society and the other to one’s personal morality or ethics. And I find that double evaluation immensely useful. You can be a good person and question authority, or be a fierce law and order person who actually doesn’t care about anyone but yourself.

A surprise to no one, I think I’m probably chaotic good. But sometimes after I read church news I do wonder…

1. Vorpal Sword

D&D was really built on the backs of cool weapons. Everywhere you went you looked around hoping to get some kind of fun new item. And even though I almost never played fighter-type people, there really was no cooler item than a vorpal sword.

I can’t even tell you what it did. It just sounded awesome.

I WENT TO SEE JOHN WICK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS UNCOMFORTABLE DESIRE TO SEE MORE HEAD SHOTS

It sounds like the John Wick series has maybe ended. Maybe. (Don’t worry, there’s a TV series about the hotel and a spinoff film apparently coming.) And while I haven’t seen the latest yet, I must admit I have generally very much enjoyed this series.

And yet if I ask myself why, honestly, it’s because it’s so decisively violent. Truly, it’s like a ballet of headshots. Which is such a strange thing to enjoy, isn’t it? Especially in an era (and week) in which kids are getting shot in schools, on the streets, at home, what are we doing making these kinds of movies, let alone enjoying them so so much?

It’s not like John himself enjoys what he’s doing, I guess. And they did start it all by killing his dog. So I guess that’s how they keep us from feeling too uncomfortable. It’s okay to feel uncomfortable with John headshot-murdering a thousand people in an underground stadium in front of us, we’re told via his grimace. John feels uncomfortable too.

Still, it is a strange and pretty radical disconnect.

THIS IS YOUR DAILY REMINDER THAT THIS IS A VERY BAD TIME TO BE TRANS OR QUEER

I don’t really even know what to say about this. It’s really scary out there. If you don’t know someone who is affected—well, honestly, you probably do and just don’t know it. But this is definitely a moment to consider contributing to the Trevor Project, which supports queer young people, the National Center for Transgender Equality, which fights for the rights of transgender people, or, if you’re Catholic, New Ways Ministry, which has worked for 50 years to try and support queer Catholics.

THREE TWEETS ABOUT THE PUFFER POPE

You would think I would have a lot to say about this, and in fact I do! It’s awaiting print. For now here’s some of my favorite comments about this.