|
Another reviewer called it a mixed bag and I’m in a similar league, which is unfortunate. I feel as if the other reviewers who went full five stars washed over the actual ethics for what ultimately falls short. I will break it down, talking about what we know with CoS, the meh, and the good. The meh is mainly about the new Strahd, the handling of Vistani NPCs, and with regards to non-binary identities.
CoS, while perhaps the most legendary adventure, is truly filled with problematic, tropey story elements. These are well-known issues and for those unfamiliar, there is a lot of gendered violence and misogynistic elements coupled with the racist portrayal of Vistani (a stand-in for Romani). 5e reloaded pulled some of this back but fumbled (there are also issues of disability presentation). I won’t get into the details too much (yet) to avoid spoilers for potential onlookers, but there are a few things to address here before continuing. I am being careful with my word choices, I understand some sentences out of place may seem shallow within a singular context, but I am asking you to read within the context of the paragraphs I write.
There is an idea that villains are villains for obvious, coherent reasons. They may not be immediately obvious to the players, but it should be absolutely clear to the DMs. Unless they are some chaotic, unknowing evil, etc. This is not necessarily in real life, but absolutely when it comes to fictional BBEGs. Of course, a conquering warlord who is a cishet man would be a misogynist, what else would we expect of a butcherer who sees people to be claimed and objectives to be won? There is a clear thread from A to B about precisely why a BBEG is a BBEG, even if this is not readily apparent to players. This logically extends to how said person would view interpersonal relationships and romance. For all the fiction in the world, bad people tend to be bad people through and through, anything else is a façade. This becomes a problem though because it typically devolves into tropes, the damsel-in-distress bs, the woman’s trauma serving as a storytelling point for men main characters, etc. That is without a doubt an issue within Curse of Strahd that I had my own issues tackling with.
Fortunately, we are in an age with a great community that produces great alternatives, thoughts, and approaches. Subverting tropes and expectations are primarily a good thing, but the problem is it can be shallow, not fully hashed out, and stops short, or ends up reinforcing different issues. So, that said, I was excited to check this one out, and then I was disappointed almost immediately.
At this point, spoilers, DMs should only be reading this.
The genderbent Strahd subverts tropes, only in the sense that it alters some tropes for some also questionable things and weird issues. This is mainly centering the writing’s Strahd as the core of my complaints. I will break this down into consent, familial obsession, and domestic violence. My problems are mainly within ethical consistency and a lack of explanation/transitions.
SVZ in this writing is historically very much the same. A soldier, a conqueror, etc. Essentially, not a good person even prior to becoming a vampire. What differs here is she is obsessed with keeping her younger brother, Sergei, unmarried to Tatyana, and then is driven paranoid by her advisors of numerous bad things that can happen. As a disclaimer, this paranoia is not explicitly supernaturally induced or anything, it looks very much like advisors made a bunch of paranoid claims, and Strahd took them to heart, so this seems a genuine feeling of Strahd’s. This paranoia drives her to the Amber Temple through Kasimir’s influence, leading to a Dark Powers Pact, and then after Sergei gets married, she assumes she can kill Sergei to free him for Tatyana and her imagined plots. She stabs him, has a moment of clarity that she screwed up, could not bring him to life, and then Tatyana was killed by a coup plotter, Lea Dilisnya. Strahd turns Lea into her first vampire spawn, then tortures Lea until she passes. Due to her anger and ill-temper, Strahd then proceeds to murder Tatyana whenever she is reincarnated (except recently).
Now, I am going to pause here to break down what became issues for me. The word is never mentioned, but this level of violent jealousy driven by paranoia came off as an emotional incest. Incest is not once mentioned in this PDF, it was absolutely my vibes upon reading. Killing your sibling’s spouse because of paranoia about taking said sibling away, it is hard to construe it into other ways. If Strahd had been a man and had a sister then did this to her husband, I think it would be more readily read as such, but that was not the case here. No TW, no explanation, nothing.
Another issue is within the topic of consent. I do not know if this was written as an in-joke, but quite literally on page 10, it states, “Vampires understand consent well, being unable to enter a home without permission from its owner. This trait is prominent in Strahd von Zarovich. She will not take on a new partner as a vampire spawn unless they enthusiastically consent.
Rather than locking her "harem" away in the crypts as initially written, they are equal tenants of the castle, each fixed with their own lavish rooms and material belongings. She spoils and devotes herself to her spawn; in return, they are dedicated to her. Together they make a mighty army of vampires.”
This took me through a whirlwind. How does a conqueror, a murderer, someone who appears emotionally incestuous, fully aware of enthusiastic consent and romance? Was Lea Dilisnya an outlier then? What about all the times Strahd butchered Tatyana prior to falling in love with her? Does consent only involve entering people’s homes and vampirism and not murder? It just felt weirdly disconnected. If Strahd was on a path to reform or something, sure but that is not made clear in my reading.
There is a line in the beginning of the book, which appropriately addresses, “if you are here because you want to play a vampire horror campaign without women as the sexual victims of powerful men, then let's chat. (We're over it, y'all.)” Like, yes, absolutely, but a woman being repeatedly butchered over the course of centuries until her butcherer falls in loves with her is okay because she’s not a man? Sergei becomes an emotional incest victim of Strahd and Tatyana just becomes a victim of Strahd until this incarnation as Ireena. I don’t know in the ways that this is an improvement outside of it no longer being sexual victims. Torture and repeated murders are fine, but our murderer draws the line at being a monster regarding consent.
Not just that, isn’t it sexism to suggest that a woman (Strahd) because of paranoia and the inability to regulate emotions, killed Sergei? Quite literally is Strahd’s killing of Sergei under the hysterical woman trope? Isn’t it ableist to suggest that it was just a paranoid delusion egged on by advisors? None of this becomes a satisfactory answer. If this is from a feminist lens, it is a very shallow, western feminism. The Strahd here is the worst part of this writing to me and its at the beginning. That's unfortunate because the rest of the book is way above this, but you may assume otherwise on this reading. We need clearer lines as to why, we need more solid explanations about why these contradictions or hypocritical moments exist.
There are two broad ways to approach villains in the BBEG case. Either it is a villain that makes sense (clearly this is a bad person doing bad things) or chaotic beyond comprehension (unreadable, loves chaos, etc.). The chaotic type of villain does not make sense in this setting. In the OG sense, a conqueror being a terrible person who likes the theatrics of etiquette, but ultimately people are just pawns, is a straightforward pos villain, right? Even when it is tropey and obnoxious, it is clear cut. Strahd, at their core, is the first. Strahd is an evil person who enjoys etiquette, which gives the deceptive appearance that Strahd may not be that bad (he is). There is not any obfuscation to the DM, we know Strahd is bad, but what do we make of a Strahd that tortures and kills and happens to be a model citizen with regards to consent? The only rational conclusion is to hand wave the weird ethical mismatch.
What we have is a villain borne of an ill-temper that was influenced by paranoid delusions and dark powers. We can either interpret her as a victim of circumstance (OG Strahd was not) or that she brought this upon herself by her inability to manage her emotions (which… is not a good look if this is a feminist take on CoS). Personally, conquerors being victims of circumstance does not sit right with me. A conqueror is inherently evil.
Now, I ask, what would she have done if it was not for the paranoia getting to her? She could have ignored her advisors, but why was their commentary effective without the influence of the supernatural? This ties two things together that ultimately end up ableist at best. She succumbed to paranoia, made a dark pact, then killed her brother assuming the dark pact would help. The Dark Pact did not even explicitly state it would, so we must assume she drew those conclusions herself, and then it comes to the story of a person whose paranoia led to this specific moment. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Macbeth, but the ambiguity here leads to a lot to be desired. Even though this is for DMs, the lack of specificity makes me feel otherwise. Tell me the Dark Powers were doing this from the get-go, that it was their influence on the advisors, etc. The only downside then is Strahd did not have autonomy and is not the reason for her own misfortune, but under the intense influence of the dark powers.
In OG Strahd, there is no question about why he did this. He is a conqueror who got jealous of Sergei and did what he knows best: kill his way to his wants. Strahd here? I’m asking myself, really? Why? It would have made way more sense of Strahd to have killed Tatyana, then for Sergei to take the leap. It could be easily envisioned as, “I did this for your own good, she just-“ and the horrors of Sergei doing what Tatyana originally did? But to keep in line with this western feminism, she had to kill Sergei, and then it was only okay to butcher Tatyana in her reincarnations, which makes me just go, what?? Its ethical inconsistency leaves a lot to be desired and interrogated if we want to portray a good villain that doesn’t fall into a trope of, maybe mental illness or emotional dysregulation was the villain. This reads as the hysteric woman trope still due to certain ambiguities. We have a villain that does not make sense and there is no discernable effort in making the senseless make sense here.
Outside of that, let’s talk Vistani! To tackle CoS’ writers’ consistent failure to properly set the Vistani in either, not a racist stereotype, or racist stereotype lite, we have had a lot of community responses do cool things to make the Vistani an important part of the setting without the weird racist stand-in elements. I think this writing attempts to do the same, except two problems:
In CoS, Ez is a Vistana. This is powerful, she is easily one of the best NPCs, and her being a Vistana makes the Vistani that much more relevant. In Van Richten’s guide, this is retconned. To wash over the crimes of her family yet keep them in cause of “tragic backstory”, her family is not Vistani, they just pretended to be to do crimes. While that concept in general is not bad, it creates a unique harm. It goes from Vistani having an amazing, potentially fated ally NPC representation to not having one, just one who was raised in the mockery of the culture. I think this was ultimately a terrible idea. The writing chooses to embrace the rewrite.
Not only does it choose to embrace the rewrite, but it also then changes Madam Eva from being half-Vistani, to not being Vistani at all. If we were to take this writing wholesale, that means there are no meaningful Vistani NPCs to the greater plot. The Vistani become more of a backdrop. There’s important Dusk Elves, there’s important Barovians, etc, etc, but the only crucial Vistani. are no longer. They are NPCs who are, at best, dressed up in the culture and use the culture as a backdrop. Do we see how this could be a problem too? Like, cool that we got the ones in town more fleshed out, but that is a drop in the bucket considering how quick the tavern scene is.
Of course, we still have Luvash and Arrigal, but the writing doesn’t even mention Ari as being the swap-out for Arabelle. (I do love the Lake Zarovich arc though). Outside of those two fictional concerns and critiques, I also have a problem with regards to gender. Every instance of being non-binary or fluid reads very much as an aesthetic, like a fun “oh, if you want to take it a step further.” It means nothing more than just a character option. What is a struggle here is that there is an analysis of Baby Lysaga that shows depth and comprehension, even if it was just in a binary way, but if that had been extended out more across the writing, it would have been great.
For me, I am agender, my testing of how writers treat trans identities in CoS is situated in what happens to the Dusk Elves. In OG Strahd, all the women (mind you, trans is not conceptualized in this writing, so we are discussing cis) are butchered in an act of genocide. Most community resources have not tackled that well and this has not either. For a book that engages gender and non-binary identities, to get to the dusk elves and simply go, “Strahd ordered Rahadin to slaughter all the men to reduce the Dusk Elves’ ability to proliferate.” As page 136.
Again, let us pause. Strahd is a shapeshifter in this writing and can come off as any gender. Yet when Strahd (consent understander) wants to commit a genocide, identity is thrown out the window. “Acting in genocide, she ordered Rahadin to slaughter all the men of the dusk elf clan to significantly reduce their ability to proliferate. She warned the survivors to never reproduce lest the carnage continues.”
So, all the men get killed and we ambiguously are told the survivors are warned to never reproduce, suggesting there are people within the Dusk Elves still capable of reproducing with one another or perhaps with non-Dusk Elves? It could have been covered as “slaughter all those capable of seeding” as corny as it sounds if we didn’t want the alternative of “slaughter all those capable of bearing children”. Although I mention this in terms of gender, the reality is also despite whatever sexual organs we may have, it does not guarantee the ability to procreate. I have zero issue moving away from how it was originally written, but this feels like such a drop. If we understand trans identities, we understand the problem of "slaughter all the men" with the implication that the men are only cis. I believe absolutely that was not the author's intent, but when we lack specificity, we give way to the status quo, however much we dislike it.
Those are my main gripes. I am indifferent to the Ireena/Ismark swapping storylines, it doesn’t sit well with me and that is only centered on Ismark being a child who is now the one needing the safety of the church. I also struggle with understanding the “why” for things. It feels like explanations are all over the place and if I want to understand one specific thing, I must read a few various parts of the book. It is okay to repeat information if it helps condense the need to jump around the book. The layout and dissemination of information could have been better. There were also no bookmarks in the PDF. I understand it is a long task, I have bookmarked PDFs myself, but it's just a massive jump for accessibility.
Outside of the meh, the writing is good. I love the look, the art is good, the layout is so nice and legible (I am begging others to make their work as legible as this), it gives interesting alternatives and analyses. This is a useful resource to provoke more thoughts on how we approach reshaping adventurers as written, but it falls short in a few ways that are critical to imagining more. Gender swapping is not enough, especially if it introduces additionally bad tropes. It is unfortunate because truly it is just the above negatives that weigh this down so much for me.
|
Log In 
