User:RD/9k/Law-Chaos axis (Q60,21)

Main entry

6021. Law-Chaos axis

      -> in the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons alignment had nothing to do with Good and Evil and this was actually bordering on historical materialism; it was a mechanism for studying how fantasy history progresses. a Lawful/Chaotic distinction is outright originally intended to set up situations like an empire versus unruly peasants, or "built on the ashes of fae bones". a video creator tried to explain this by saying "in World War II, Britain won't ally with the Nazis", specifically meaning in this case that regardless of who is Evil particular nationalities or populations join up to defend some particular order or against a particular structure or ideology. Lawful/Chaotic is a lot like the Cold War: if capitalists are on the side of Law then unions are on the side of Chaos, although if a workers' state is created Bolshevism is the side of Law in its own region and the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy is the side of Chaos. to be Lawful is simply to be on the side of a particular civilization or in modern terms an assembled Bauplan, while to be on the side of Chaos is to be against some highly specific order. the major "mistake" made with alignment across various fantasy media as time went on is to not realize that civilizations can be plural and to universalize Law as belonging to the whole universe rather than there being several different centers of Law such that in something like the Wings of Fire setting with different coalitions of warring dragons, you would have to be aligned to Lawful-A or Lawful-B, a single universal "Lawful" doesn't actually exist. why people make this "mistake" is complicated, but it seems connected to the choice to treat Law/Chaos as a strict cosmically-metaphysical slider where Chaos tears open all the rules of reality similar to an SCP anomaly. although fantasy can be anything, this seems like a bad choice if you want people to understand fantasy populations simply as periods of history where populations are in conflict and not as inherently Good or Evil. this mere transformation of Chaos into an alchemical quality of the universe inherently spawns implications that certain groups of people are the universe's favorites and certain groups are not, and like, trying to fix that by saying "they need to be balanced, we need both of them" is just both-sidesing medieval politics. if we literally thought that way about medieval England there would have been an ongoing controversy up to today about whether creating Liberalism and getting rid of monarchy was actually a good idea. as well, we'd be both-sidesing global empire and whether it's okay to keep people marginalized into tiny areas of l—... oh wait, we already do that every day. tabletop RPGs reveal a whole lot about Europeans, don't they?

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