(Kindred of the East) Dharma Book: Devil Tigers

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Violence

It was probably only a matter of time before Kindred of the East got its first completely typical White Wolf book. "Exoticism" as a theme couldn't last forever. Sooner or later you get to know these guy well enough that you start to empathize with them, and dare I say, roleplay as them. And you can't roleplay being exotic, at least not honestly, because no one is exotic to themselves.

So Dharma Book: Devil Tigers (Geoffry C. Grabowski) is the first book in the series where it really doesn't feel like it's being driven by racism. The titular Devil Tigers are weird, even by the standards of their surrounding cultures, and thus you're never meant to parse them as anything but purely fictional. 

I'm not going to absolve it of Orientalism or anything, and I'm sure that a sensitivity reader with an appropriate background would find plenty to object to, but for me, with my cursory knowledge of Asia and deep knowledge of White Wolf, this book feels like a return to form. It feels less like an "Asia doesn't quite fit into the World of Darkness" book and more like a regular White Wolf book, for an alternate action-horror setting.

Which means it's offensive for an entirely different set of reasons. If you read the content warning at the beginning of the post, you can probably guess where I'm going with this, but the opening comic repeats one of the company's most toxic patterns. It conveys that a  character is evil by showing him doing evil things, and it doesn't apologize for him, exactly, but it does center his viewpoint without critiquing it. Which would be fine, if they remembered they were making genre schlock for goofballs, but they think they're making Extremely Serious Games for Mature Roleplayers, so the evil deeds they use to illustrate a (PC stand-in) character's villainy are the icky, repellent kind of evil and not the "allow the theater kid with the heavy eyeliner to absolutely devour the scenery with a self-pitying villain protagonist monologue" kind of evil.

And I recognize that part of this is on me. White Wolf never promised me that their games would be fun. In fact, they commonly warn me of the opposite. In a section labeled "Boundaries," which sort of broad-strokes lays out a precursor to modern safety tools, Mr Grabowski says, "You should come to a horror game understanding that you may not find the experience entirely amusing." 

There is some justice to that. I'm not built for horror, so I will be the first to admit that I am slow to see the virtues of even well-executed horror. But with that caveat in mind, and with the understanding that this is directed as much to White Wolf's whole stable of developers, writers, and artists as it is to Mr Grabowski in particular:

YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH AT YOUR JOB TO BE TAKING YOURSELF THIS SERIOUSLY.

And if that comes across as an insult, good. I meant to be insulting just now. However, you should interpret it as a very mild insult. Because I'm not sure that anyone is that good. Stephen King on his best day, maybe. So look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, honestly, "have I ever created anything as sublime as The Jaunt?" If the answer is "no" (and let's be frank, as much as I love Exalted, it probably is) then you have not earned the right to say, "If you're not willing to experience some potentially unpleasant stuff, you're probably not in the right place" or "You shouldn't be dreading the next session of a game, but it is a Storytelling game of personal horror."

Although I might be coming down a little too hard on that whole section. The general tenor of the three paragraphs is that you shouldn't intentionally set out to upset people, even if it is perhaps more sympathetic to the person giving offense than the person taking offense. I guess I'm just a little salty seeing something like that so soon after the intro comic has its viewpoint character say, of the innocent woman he seduced, "The night we eloped, I had two bakemono violate and excruciate her, and I oversaw the agonies."

And it's a fucking stepping stone on his path to enlightenment. Later, he realizes his mistake, "I had learned something, a lesson about the banal character of evil . . . I had been motivated in my action by nothing more than childish curiosity, mixed with childish cruelty."

Oh, good, you've experienced personal growth from your rape and torture. The denoument is kind of too fantastical to take seriously, but it is important thematically, so I'll just keep going - he traps the spirit of the woman he betrayed inside a magical crystal and the final words of the story are, "I keep her with me always, to remind me of this lesson. If you listen closely, you can hear her heart break, again and again."

And look, I'm not going to deny picking up on the horror vibe. In the right context, it may even be effective horror. If I'm hearing this guy's narration as part of a series of audio logs as I wend my way through the catacombs, I'm going to be both highly scared and highly motivated to face off against him in the boss chamber. But there's something going on here with the framing and it's subtle and difficult to describe. It would be much easier if you could see the art, so I think I'm just going to post it.

WARNING: NSFW image (also, it's pretty offensive on a moral level).

The horror of this scene is driven by sexual assault, but if I wanted to shift gears and talk about how sexual assault in media is sometimes used as a vehicle for objectification and the male gaze, this image is so on the nose it's practically a fucking pun. You see, a woman has been reduced to a literal object and a male is literally gazing at said object.

But it's also something that's going on in a literary sense. The woman's role in the story is to be a motivating factor in a male character's journey (and specifically, and most offensively, in her rapist's journey) and look, there's no delicate way to put this so I'm going to just be briefly crude - underneath her artistically beautiful tears, it's full tits and full bush. How much of this was a creative choice and how much was just the misogynist id of the 90s gaming scene, it's impossible to say, but it sure as hell doesn't read like intentional self-parody.

Although, the most important part of the visual language of the scene, the thing that might elude notice if you're not familiar with White Wolf's oeuvre, is the sluttly little fishnet top being worn by the male character. That, even more than the 1st-person narration, is a clear signal - this person is meant to be a player character. 

I threw a lot of heat at Grabowski earlier, but the bulk of the blame here should probably go to the artist, Melissa Uran and the art director, Rich Thomas, although the fact that it takes a team effort to be this bad at your job is why I generally prefer to treat the nebulous "White Wolf" as the primary actor in these situations. There's a culture at work here, and the fact that it keeps happening is probably due to the economic necessity of maintaining the White Wolf brand. So really, in a sense, the fans are equally to blame.

(And that's not just me being glib. I believe I've mentioned a couple of times that c. 2001, two years after the publication of this book, I wrote a fan supplement for the NWO, and it . . . had some similarly gross stuff going on. I won't go into details, because I'm embarrassed to relive them and am content to allow you to assume the worst, but I want to bring it up now to emphasize that there was a culture, I was an enthusiastic part of it, and if I seem angry at "White Wolf," you should know that I'm using an expansive enough definition to include myself in there as well. If 1999 Grabowski was no Stephen King, then you better believe that 2001 John Frazer was no Geoffry Grabowski.)

Okay, so that's approximately 2% of the book out of the way. The question is, does the other 98% redeem it?

No, it doesn't. If anything, the rest of the book makes the opening comic even worse. Because we learn more about the Devil Tigers, and the "enlightenment" the comic narrator was searching for, and not only was a woman's rape used as motivation for a man's character growth, but the character that man was growing into was so fucking . . . ridiculous that a rape is just a shocking degree of overkill as motivation.

See, the Devil Tigers have a creed - they escaped hell, to be reborn as wicked spirits, and if they are to be damned souls, haunting the earth, then they are going to be the best (i.e. "worst") damned souls anyone's ever seen and haunt the fuck out of the earth. 

I don't hate that. In fact, I think it could be kind of fun, especially since they see their role as harrowing the most sinful humans, arming up for (and incidentally hastening) the apocalypse, and ending the coming age of darkness by slaying the Demon Emperor and all his minions ("we will make sure nothing survives, not even ourselves").

That's some potentially awesome pulp bullshit, so why is your "Boundaries" section telling me to treat it like personal horror? No part of this feels personal. Some of it's a bit gross, like pranking a necrophiliac by swapping out the corpse he was planning to abuse with a vampire playing dead, and some of it is pretty horrifying, like the performance artist who was damned to hell after she committed suicide by locking herself in a basement with a bunch of hungry dogs (and recorded the whole grisly affair, to release as her final work "without weighing concerns other than artistic"), but I can't believe for a second that we were ever meant to take any of it seriously. And if we're not meant to take it seriously, then why should any of us tolerate being made uncomfortable, even for a second? Why should we accept that "rapist creep" is a necessary step along the road to being the sexy fishnets S&M demon guy? What game are you trying to make? How did you imagine this playing out at the table?

That's sort of the paradox of White Wolf. They were really good at making bad games and really bad at making good games, so their games were good to the extent that they were allowed to be bad and at their worst when they were trying hardest to be good. . .

Okay, maybe I'm over-generalizing. Certainly, I'm being less than entirely coherent. White Wolf's main strength as a company is this impeccable genre fluency, but with only a few exceptions, it's the fluency of a native, not the fluency of a scholar. This is undoubtedly the source of much of their notorious offensiveness. Not Grabowski, nor Kindred of the East, nor White Wolf generally invented "the sexy brooding rapist" as a character archetype, but rather it would be parsed, in context, as a genre idiom. It also the reason so much of their metagame advice can seem so cringe. They know what words to use, when, but they are groping in the dark for a "why."

Dharma Book: Devil Tigers represents an inflection point, I think, where there's a handoff between genres - The gothic horror tradition of Vampire: the Masquerade, which demanded that Chinese vampires be portrayed with an offensive yellowface accent gives way to some sort of 90s anime fan-dub subculture, where the yellowface accent is performed with such aggressive enthusiasm that it almost has a disarming sincerity.  The "personal horror" in Kindred of the East is almost entirely vestigial, but I suspect that it will take several more books for the developers and authors to notice.

Ukss Contribution: I was genuinely offended by the opening comic, but I figure the disproportionate amount of time I spent complaining about it is punishment enough. 

My choice this time is a little convoluted. It's a whole. . . social dynamic. Basically:

Revered ancestors can stick around as ghosts.

Kuei-jin can eat ghosts.

When the Devil Tigers go to war, they eat their enemies' ancestors.

It's so fucking petty, I love it. I'm not sure where in the setting it will go, or who will do it, but, like, tactical necrophagy will definitely be a thing.