(Shadowrun 3e) Dragons of the Sixth World

Metaplot is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be alienating and hard to keep up with it. They're constantly releasing books and every one of these books has something happening in it and in order to understand what is happening, you have to know what has been happening and if you skip a book, or just read them in the wrong order, you'll be forced to infer the contents of an earlier book (to pick an example totally at random: Survival of the Fittest) based on vague allusions and hints that were present in a later book (non-random example: Dragons of the Sixth World).

(Forgive my saltiness here. Wikipedia's chronological list of Shadowrun books only narrows it down to the year, so sometimes I have to guess about the optimal reading order).

On the other hand, elaborate metaplot is the only form of rpg writing that is capable of getting me completely invested in hot gossip.  So I guess I just have to adapt myself to it.

I do wonder, however, why I am so much more invested in the dragon-on-dragon rivalry between Lung and Ryumo than I am in the similar human drama between Damien Knight and Lucien Cross. I guess it's because they're dragons . . .

Although, less trivially, I think dragon gossip is juicier than corporate gossip not just because they are dragons but also because they've got the perfect gossip formula: they're an elite clique, they have history with each other that goes waaayyy back, and they're sexy as hell. It's a set of advantages that the human NPCs largely lack, which is a shame. Maybe if Richard Villiers was canonically hot, I'd be more interested in the shadowy events surrounding his rise to power. 

The best and worst part of this book is when the dragons themselves, using their known aliases, pop up in the shadowland comments to drop cryptic hints of things happening behind the scenes or that happened in the distant past. These exchanges are universally both great and awful. Ooh, there is definitely an intimation of something interesting going on. . . but they're not actually going to tell me what it is.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those sort of antediluvian intrigues - immortals who have outlived their original context and are kind of stuck with each other. Maybe you all hate each others' guts, but you're the only ones who understand what you all lost. This new age offers you all sorts of opportunities, and the people revere your knowledge and your power, but you're still drawn to the old clique, because for all their faults, at least they aren't . . . children.

Unfortunately, Dragons of the Sixth World is largely fixated on the present. The "main text" and the "commentary" may speculate about the dragons' mysterious history, but even when the speculation is validated, it's "blink and you'll miss it." Rather, each dragon is treated primarily as a force in the modern world. They have a web of plots and intrigues, and the attention is on the web itself, because the mind at the center is more or less unknowable.

So it's a little disappointing to crack open the chapter on Aden, the dragon that leveled Tehran, and read about the Kurds and the Islamic Unity Movement and Stepan Markaryan, the Albanian drug lord who has "possible links to Aden." It's all very useful for running a game, don't get me wrong, but the overall effect is more like a half-assed Middle East supplement than a dossier on an immortal mastermind.

The bulk of the book is a series of conspiratorial organizations, many of which would probably do all right on their own, without a dragon running the show. Like, as much as I love Lofwyr as a modern update to the classic dragon archetype, and as much as I love "dragon as CEO" as a really on-the-nose metaphor for the evils of capitalism, the Saeder-Krupp corporation would probably be exactly as terrifying if Wilhemenia Graff-Beloit and her coterie of celebrities, aristocrats, and investors were still at the helm.

Which isn't to say that the dragons add nothing. There's something thematic about the consistency of their presentation. All of these creatures will meddle in human affairs. They don't even question their right to do so. They range from aristocratic dragon supremacists to benevolently aristocratic draconic limousine liberals to guys who have a violent grudge against the modern world and are willing to overthrow governments for the sake of the trees. Plus, it's kind of fun to imagine a dragon doing human-style things - like Rhonabwy listening to choral music or Musaru trying to get invited to Europe's premiere old-money high society party.

Overall, I'd say that this book strikes a good balance between being entertaining as fiction and being useful as an rpg guide. I may have preferred a bit more gossip, but I can concede that it's vastly more responsible to put all these organizations and lackeys and abstract agendas in front of player characters than it would be to put them face-to-face with an invincible god beast with world-shaking powers of sorcery. ("Okay, guys,  you've tracked Ghostwalker to his lair. Roll initiative against the kaiju who soloed Denver")

Oh, who am I kidding. I live to be pandered to. MOAR DRAGON!

Ukss Contribution: The second-to-last chapter has a bunch of less prominent or powerful dragons. One of them was Perianwyr, who worked as a club promoter and had an uncanny knack for finding exciting new musical acts. That's an interesting enough character on its own, but later on in the OOC section about Rhonabwy's Allies and Enemies it says "He has been known to associate with the adult dragon Perianwyr, but this association is largely based on their mutual love of music than any draconic power playing."

I am obsessed with this relationship. Two dragons, bro-ing down over tunes.

(d20 Modern) Critical Locations

 I'm always just a little bit awestruck when I read a book, like Critical Locations (Eric Cagle, Owen K.C. Stephens, Christopher West) that actively aspires to be generic. It takes a special kind of audacity, one that disarms me before I've even begun to write. I could say, "This book is aimed at Gamemasters who need maps of generic locations where scenes of action and intrigue can play out" and that's not a catty piece of my internal monologue, it's a direct quote from the Introduction.

So, if you, you know, need a perfectly ordinary bowling alley or convention center or grocery store, you can flip to the appropriate section and there's a lovely full-page, full color map of the location and then on the opposite page, there's a description (in case you ever needed to explain to your players what a bank or a library was) and a sample NPC and either a new rule or a couple of adventure hooks (or sometimes both). It's not just a collection of generic maps, it's also a lucky dip rules expansion, where we can learn the rules for snow blindness (alongside the Arctic Research Station) or waking the neighbors with gunplay (with the Large Family House).

In it's own way, it's a beautiful thing. So functional. Such utility. You're GMing a d20 Modern game and you're confronted with the empty infinity of the imagination. The modern world? That's everything! Where to start? Not to worry, though, because Critical Locations will take you by the hand and say, "why not just start by describing a high school?"

Ukss Contribution: Given its premise and its pedigree, this book could have gotten away with being a lot more boring than it actually was. There was precious little surprise and delight, but it covered the basics admirably. Use the luxury yacht map to run a story about a gangster who sticks to international waters, the mansion map to tell a story of a rich guy trapped in his panic room by would-be kidnappers, the high school map in a game featuring a spooky librarian who just so happens to stock the occult books needed to solve the monster of the week mystery. It's generic, but it's not dull.

But it puts me in a bind because the stuff I love is a lot more whimsical and specific. What am I going to do, add canonical bowling or fast food to the world of Ukss? 

Yeah. Okay. Let's go with bowling. 

Some group of people, somewhere in this fantasy world, are going to have bowling alleys.

(Shadowrun 3e) State of the Art 2063

First things first: I gotta do a little rhetorical two-step where I say my favorite thing about a book is its format without sounding back-handed, because actually the content is pretty okay as well. . .

Nope. I can't figure it out.

My favorite thing about State of the Art: 2063 is its format. It's really more like a compilation of mini-supplements, each one detailing a niche topic that didn't quite fit in other recent Shadowrun books. Ostensibly, they are connected by the theme of being "relevant trends and technological developments in the fictional year 2063," but really they're just a grab bag. In fact, three of the five chapters are devoted to recapping specific chapters of out-of-print supplements. "Genetech" (Eleanor Holmes) was an update of the genetic engineering rules from Shadowtech, "Soldiers of Fortune" (Jon Szeto) reworked the mercenary culture material from Fields of Fire, and "Keeping the Rabble Out" (Peter Millholland) was 3rd edition's answer to the Corporate Security Handbook.

As a group, I'd say the chapters are plausibly on-theme, but some of them require more stretching than others. It's easy to believe that there have been significant new breakthroughs in genetic technology in the three metaplot years since the 3rd edition core, but there was nothing in the chapter that immediately leapt out to me as a must-have new discovery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that immunity treatments were depowered from where they were in Shadowtech:

>Didn't they used to offer full-spectrum immunity against everything, all in one neat package?
>Bespectacle

>Yes, until they found out it was impractical and didn't actually work . . .

Obvious retcon is obvious. Which is a shame, because full-spectrum immunity is easier for bookkeeping, more likely to actually prove useful in a game ("oh, sorry, you just bought immunity to anthrax, unfortunately you were exposed to the ebola virus"), and closer to the "genetically engineered superhuman" fantasy that draws people to these sorts of characters in the first place. I suppose the downside is that you then have to do your worldbuilding on the assumption that it's possible to buy a perfect immune system, but that . . . actually fits in pretty well thematically with your cyberpunk universe, so I don't know, blame mid-school simulationist/narrative game design, I guess.

The chapter on mercenaries was, by contrast, timeless in its subject matter, but could reasonably be argued to be topical in terms of the broader Shadowrun metaplot. Shadows of North America suggested a few potential border conflicts and insurrections that might offer employment to mercenary armies, though I suspect that they are less "current events of 2063" and more "the sort of thing that happens all the time."

That same chapter also attempts to draw a distinction between shadowrunners and full-on mercenaries, but doesn't quite hit the mark. However, I can't quite blame them. It's just the essential nature of the problem - there is very little difference between shadowrunners and mercenaries.

At the other end of the spectrum, the chapter on corporate security isn't even remotely plausible as being "state of the art." Oh, what, we're talking about the central premise of the game, referring to concepts as basic as defensive landscaping and putting a security light near a locked door, and I'm supposed to believe the Shadowland regulars are only hearing about this in 2063? Come on.

I liked it, though. It was useful for GMs to help create more realistic and challenging shadowrunning environments. I did feel, at times, that if I followed too much of the chapter's advice, I'd wind up with a target that was too secure, but the "Game Information" section anticipated that impulse and quite reasonably advised me to show some damned restraint.

The only chapter I couldn't quite place on the continuum was the one about metamagic. This is the only one of the mini-supplement chapters that was not based on a previous Shadowrun book, so it could fairly be called "state of the art" re: the game's rules, and it is a canonical fact of the setting that people are constantly researching new magical techniques. So it's not absurd on the face of it. It's just that two of the new metamagic techniques are Sympathetic Magic and Psychometry. You know, staples of European occultism.

The tricky part about magic in the Shadowrun universe is that sometimes it's a technological commodity and people do new things because they've discovered new techniques. And sometimes it's an ancient mystery, reborn from the turning of a cosmic cycle and people do new things because they are survivors from a previous age and the magic level has finally risen enough to allow them to use their old techniques.  "Charmed Life: New Metamagic" (Elissa Carey) doesn't really get into it, either way, but I wish it did because I find the tension very interesting. Lofwyr owns Saeder-Krupp and funds its magical research department. Is he doing so because he hopes to learn something genuinely new or is he trying to have an outlet where he can launder the magical techniques he hopes to monetize and disguise the true capabilities of dragonkind by passing them off as new advances in the science of thaumaturgy? Maybe he mostly does the second thing, but then his team of puppets accidentally makes a genuine discovery and in the brief window of time where he's freaking out about it, the research is stolen by shadowrunners who have no reason at all to suspect that they've stumbled onto something that nova-hot.

Something to think about, anyway. My verdict is that the new metamagic is plausibly "state of the art," but I'm not at all convinced that's why it was included in this compilation.

Which only leaves the final chapter - "Culture Shock" (Michelle Lyons). It's all about the pop culture trends of 2063 and I absolutely love that the Shadowrun team made space for this kind of low-stakes worldbuilding. Enough so that I'm willing to overlook Captain Chaos' introduction where he implies that his in-setting readers would be surprised by any of this stuff. I think it may be an artifact of the early 2000s, where you might still be able to draw a distinction between keeping up with pop culture folderol and being a terminally online computer nerd. 

As far as the specific content of the chapter was concerned, I found it a little shallow, but I appreciated the setting texture. The descriptions of the top ten moviess of the year were less interesting to me than what the curation of the list as a whole said about this culture's priorities and obsessions and if I had any notes for the chapter at all, they'd be "more sci-fi Roger Ebert, less sci-fi Buzzfeed".  I did find the trendy restaurant that served a wasabi martini to be suitably hair-raising, however.

(These are apparently real, but I have a hard time believing it was something from the author's lived experience. The description of Shinpi no Sekai says "oriental drinks are a specialty of the house" and my knee-jerk reaction is that the wasabi martini was a mad-lib attempt to come up with an example. My apologies to Mz. Lyons if she was really that hip in 2002).

Overall, State of the Art 2063 made me really excited to read State of the Art 2064. I'm eager to see what they can do with the format once they no longer have old 2nd edition books to cannibalize.

Ukss Contribution: This is silly, and it's going to be hard to incorporate, but there was one detail that stuck in my mind from the last time I read this book, ~20 years ago. As a security measure, some facilities will have walls that are mirrors in infrared while looking normal in the visible spectrum. This allows security forces with the right kind of occular implants to look around corners while unaugmented people waltz around unsuspecting. I'm not sure how practical that is in a world filled with trolls and street samurai (in fact, one of the Shadowland commentors reminisces about how they turned it to their advantage), but I really like the detail as something that genuinely engages with the idea of superhuman augmentation. These guys don't just have mechanical eyeballs, they have a new way of experiencing the world, of accessing information that other people are oblivious to. How would that change you? Would it make you something other than human?

(d20 Modern) d20 Future Tech

From time to time, I'll express an outrageous opinion like "my favorite books are audacious trash" and it will seem like a joke, even to me, but then I'll read a book like d20 Future Tech (Rodney Thompson and JD Wiker) and my honest reaction is "aw man, this isn't even a little bit trash, what am I supposed to do now?"

It's a silly impulse, to be honest. It's pretty obvious what I'm supposed to do now - add new gadgets, spaceships, mechs, and robots to my d20 Future games, possibly curating the lists to fit with the needs of my specific campaign setting. Because that was the use case the book was intended for, and it does it competently, with no major mistakes.

I guess the suggestions about how you might go about mixing combat scales (character, vehicle, mech, and starship) are a bit . . . optimistic, but that's no great fault. If you're in a situation where the PCs are floating through space in their mechs, assaulting a star destroyer, you're probably already flying by the seat of your pants as a GM. The worst I can say about these additional rules is that they only slightly mitigate that problem.

The worst thing I can say about the book as a whole is that some of the new technology is pretty bland. Buy your ship a Stellar Navigation System, which gives a +6 bonus to "Navigate checks to plot courses in a starship." Okay. 

But even that complaint would be misleading. There's also a lot of non-bland stuff here. You can fire a dart with a built-in speaker that will play suspicious noises to distract any nearby guards . . . and I can't say definitively why that wouldn't work in real life . . . so it must be plausible? 

Anyway, once you've distracted them, you can keep them occupied with a well-placed superlube grenade and start wrecking the place with your light anti-tank pistol. After all, you're on a mission to capture a gallon of Hydromolecular Medium ("data encoded onto water molecules") so that you can drink it and learn the enemy's plans ("hydromolecular medium has replaced the printed word").

Unfortunately, the technology is still grouped by "progress level" rather than more coherent narrative themes, so all the best stuff exists as isolated one-offs (and virtually no thought at all is given to the staggering social implications of a world where people drink books instead of reading them), but encouraging a la carte worldbuilding is probably d20 Modern's greatest strength as a gameline, so I'm not about to start getting mad at it now.

Overall, this book is 96 pages that could have been seamlessly added to d20 Future. Since I liked d20 Future, I liked this book as well, even if there is a dark corner of my heart that would have preferred "d20 Future Trash."

Ukss Contribution: There are about 8 pages in the middle of the book that do in fact attempt to do some real sci-fi worldbuilding. Mostly, these pages are spent being wrong about the trajectory of cell-phone technology and optimistic about the level of customer service we can expect from commercial space travel, but there's a part in the middle about advertising that takes some admirably big swings.

Some of it is astute observations - ubiquitous surveillance and advances in biometrics allows for tech companies to serve you with precisely tailored ads, which can call you out by name.

And some of it is just kind of sad. In the distant future, the Energy Age, when humanity has cracked zero-point energy and molecular-scale fabrication technology, they're still going to be serving ads into your holograms.

But there was one particular idea that stuck out - "A byproduct of the talking product is the walking product: a robot built to resemble a product, which wanders throughout the store extolling the virtues of the product to shoppers. Though considered amusing and whimsical by some consumers - mainly children and thier parents - many others find them annoying."

This is precisely my favorite kind of science fiction because it throws my brain out of gear just thinking about it. Like, I turn into the supermarket cereal aisle and right in front of me is a box of Cap'n Crunch, but it has arms and legs and it's doing a little jig, desperately trying to draw my attention to the real boxes of cereal behind it. Is this necessary? Is it even useful? Am I more likely to buy a box of Cap'n Crunch after seeing this display?

I guess, on an emotional level, I'd be one of the people who find it amusing and whimsical, but on a practical level, I'd probably be annoyed by this fucking robot blocking my shopping cart. And in this hypothetical universe, I'd probably reference it frequently on my blog whenever I needed an example of something I was ambivalent about.

However, as someone who is writing a fantasy rpg setting (or, alternatively, as a GM who might run a sci-fi setting), I'm absolutely cackling with glee at the thought of depicting this gizmo. This is some real Douglas Adams shit, and a good example of why you should read all the way through your rpg books, even if the first 50 pages or so are mostly dry lists of equipment.

(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of North America

 Man, I have seriously spent the last two weeks compulsively doomscrolling. To the point where I was reading approximately 3-4 pages of Shadows of North America per day. Which is a shame, because I could really have used the escapism that comes from reading about a utopian future where the CDC is privatized, but allowed to remain functional as an independent non-profit research organization, because seriously, the megacorporations are monsters, but they live on this planet too and it's to no one's benefit that deadly pandemics be allowed to spread without any attempt at monitoring or mitigation. 

Okay, the corporate support for an independent CDC was part of a scheme to weaken the WHO, but still . . . a world where the ultra rich need to provide a viable alternative if they want to sabotage the WHO . . . sigh.

Nah, I'm not about to wax poetic about how Shadowrun's cyberpunk universe is actually better than our grim reality. Because it's not, not really. UCAS President Kyle Haeffner is pushing an executive action that would restore full citizenship to 300,000 "provisional citizens" and that's sort of the opposite of our current trajectory, but what it really means is that their government destroyed the 14th amendment a generation ago. They've already experienced the low point that we're hurtling towards.

To the degree that cyberpunk seems preferable to reality, it's only because reality does not need to have a coherent narrative, whereas in fiction, every detail is included for a reason. For example, the book is making a thematic point about the bizarre pettiness of authoritarian nationalism when it tells us that Aztlan tried to unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico. 

And while I could worry at my anxieties by searching for parallels between the text and real life, that would be dramatically missing the point. Shadows of North America dabbles at social commentary, but it's mostly just a fantasy. Magic happened. Elves and Orks and Dragons appeared. Now North America has 13 countries instead of two. 

Which isn't to say the book lacks a political point of view, or that this point of view isn't worth examining, just that the fantastic elements are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. This future is not a natural, organic transition from present trends. There was a break in the normal flow of history. The Native Americans used magic to defeat the US and Canadian governments and this magic was so decisive that said governments abandoned millions of citizens, vital infrastructure, entire watersheds, mineral resources, and military equipment up to and including nuclear submarines. And then, afterwards, the US and Canada merged into a single nation, despite no one in the real world actually wanting this merger to take place (with one extremely dumb exception). 

Now, I don't want to make the mistake of thinking of this as a plot hole. There's a part of me that thinks that no government would ever surrender the headwaters of the Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Just from a realpolitik perspective, the government(s) you surrendered them to would have an unbelievable leverage. Stopping a hostile power from being able to unilaterally dictate land-use policy for your central agricultural region is something that is, from a security and sovereignty perspective, worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives. It's hard to imagine a magical ritual that's more destructive than that.

BUT, imagine it we must, because that's the premise of the book. Whatever the Great Ghost Dance was, it was more frightening than the prospect of mass famine as a weapon of war, more expensive than 10 million square kilometers of land, and more of a humanitarian disaster than the forced displacement of millions of people. And if it sometimes seems like the Ghost Dance, as described, was less severe than that, then I think we just have to imagine the Ghost Dance was worse than it was described.

This discussion is not just about justifying my suspension of disbelief, however. It's also a prelude to my main takeaway re: this book's editorial point of view. The glib version: decolonization won't make people any less terrible.

On the one hand, there is a certain cynical wisdom to this. We are all made of the same stuff and power is a hell of a drug. There is no reason to think that redrawing a few borders will automatically liberate people from racial and ethnic chauvinism, capitalist greed, or imperialist ambition. 

On the other hand - c'mon, what are you thinking, FASA, really? You're depicting the Tsimshian and the Tlingit as ruthless authoritarians who treat the Haida as second-class citizens, corruptly allow the Mitsuhama corporation to despoil their ancestral homelands, and who launched an unprovoked war against the Salish using a deadly biological weapon. Also, you claim that the fictional, future versions of these people will perform the ritual murder of slaves at their Potlach ceremonies.

And that last thing, in particular, is a good example of the dangers of doing research without actually engaging your empathy or awareness of context. Because there are documented occasions of that sort of thing happening, historically. And I imagine, that if you're reading a book about the cultural practices of the Tlingit people, it's a situation that will fix itself to your memory. But to have it happen again, in 2062, you have to ignore pretty much everything that happened to the Tlingit and Tsimshian in the intervening centuries. You have to assume, basically, that the white government of Canada was holding them back and that as soon as they were freed from the yoke of colonialist domination, they reverted to their true "barbaric" nature. It's gross, and irresponsible worldbuilding. Maybe even active slander.

I'm pretty sure that the motive was just "let's translate this stuff we read in an anthropological text into sci-fi terms," but I strongly doubt the objectivity of the source (it describes Potlatch as "a contest between materialistic families to see who could destroy the most wealth" which is a big yikes from me). And the choice to make these particular people act in this particular way struck me as uncomfortably racialized.

My main point of evidence - the Confederation of American States. Look, Oklahoma was a territory and Missouri stayed with the Union, but even with those additions, the roster of successionist states tells a very specific story. Thoroughly unconvincing narrative ass-pulls aside ("The easiest way to start a fight down here is to call someone a Confederate rather than a Confederationist" - yeah, sure), these guys are very clearly recreating the Confederacy. And yet, "The days of General Lee, chattel slavery, and cotton plantations is long past."

Now, I think we can all agree that this is an extremely necessary bit of grace, but I want you to focus on the sigh of relief you felt when you learned this wasn't going to be as bad as it could have been. Why didn't the Tlingit and the Tsimshian get a similar experience?

In the book's defense (though I want you to know in advance that this is meant to be the sort of weak, tenuous defense that sets up a criticism later on) it is laboring under something I choose to call "The World of Darkness Problem." If you're deliberately setting out to create a bleak, cynical world, then on some level inclusion means finding bleak and cynical takes on the people you're including.

And if you enjoy the overall work, I don't think you necessarily want your representation to be an exception to the mood. "Sorry, Tlingit, you're not allowed to be rat bastards because we think you're too precious for that. Villain-core is for white people only." Like, being bad is part of the fun. I know, as a bisexual man, my Vampire: the Masquerade characters are always one or two poor choices away from being offensively stereotypical sex freaks. It's something I take pains to tamp down, but I get the appeal.

The reason I call it "The World of Darkness Problem" is because it's extremely difficult to do the fun kind of villain-core on someone else's behalf. Particularly for a marginalized group, there is an expression of badness that reflects the group's repressed frustrations and may enable catharsis via a villainous character, and there is an expression of badness that reflects the dominant group's hurtful beliefs about the people they oppress, thereby validating that oppression in the eyes of bigots. Are you a skillful enough writer to thread the needle? Probably not.

There is not a doubt in my mind that there are some Lakota roleplayers out there who would relish the opportunity to play xenophobic border patrol special forces that hunt down and terrorize white mages who trespass in the Black Hills. Now, imagine meeting these people and saying to their face, "Before you drop in and make a mistake that gets you scalped, scan these notes on the major shadow players."

I mean, damn.

I remember, approximately 20 years ago, when I first got this book, the premise intrigued me. There was a sense I had that the land did not have to (and probably shouldn't have) given rise to America, and that there were other nations that could have grown out of this soil, if not for the interference of the Europeans. And so, a new map of the continent, one where the borders surrounded indigenous names, was something I was eager to see. Looking back, I was racist enough that I framed it as "what would the Sioux or the Ute or the Pueblo Indians look like if they founded modern states." But I think, as Eurocentric as I was, both my curiosity and FASA's wildly out of pocket worldbuilding were premised on a benign idea - that these people should have been given a chance.

Where Shadows of North America loses me is that Shadowrun's apparent answer to "what would they have done if they got the chance" is apparently "they'd have screwed it up, just like everyone else in this cyberpunk universe." I don't think that's something the writers have earned.

Ukss Contribution: This is a tough one for me, because I don't think this book is malicious. But it is sloppy and careless, and I don't think there's a level of naivety that excuses you from promulgating racial caricatures. I was a bit offended on behalf the Tsimshian and Tlingit, but even then I'm sure the process was just "one of these Native American Nations has to be really dysfunctional, for balance" and they just drew the short straw.

I think, a year ago, I'd have let this one pass with just a finger wag, but part of the doomscrolling that so delayed this post was the Trump administration's attack on Native American citizenship, and it really doesn't feel good being lenient, given the circumstances.