Neverafter: Mirror, Mirror And No Place For A Prince And Princess

To Ragh; or, On Fatness

Hi! Below is an actual play mini-essay. These are written as part of a personal writing practice of thinking critically about actual play. I hope you find this reading engaging and know that all I write reflects my own interpretations rather than as an official representation/canonization of these shows.

Ragh Barkrock may be one of the most beloved NPCs in Dimension20. It would be easy for Ragh, a bloodrush player good enough to potentially play professionally, to be presented as hypermasculine. In fact, the freshmen year art for Ragh, when he was antagonist rather than beloved ally, showed him in a muscular, inverted Dorito shaped body typical of a jock.

He's, obviously, built, and his cut jaw and cheekbones only bolster that image. As Ragh comes to terms with being gay at the end of Fantasy High, his countenance changes. When we see him again, the new art reflects a chubbier, happier Ragh.

The show aligning weight gain with acceptance and happiness already works against prevailing stereotypes that use weight loss as a quick metaphor for improving yourself and being the "real you." Moreover, connecting Ragh's acceptance of his sexuality with what seems like a larger comfort in his own body is a strong indictment of hypermasculine gay culture. As Gabriel Arana writes, gay men "must reconcile their sense of masculinity with their failure to conform to its heterosexuality." Not doing so has negative mental health outcomes, as Arana points out, and contributes to a culture that devalues fat queer people (see the popular "no fats, no femmes, no Asians" that often is touted in masculine gay subculture).

All of this, I think, is why Ragh's art for Junior Year was particularly impactful for me as a fat queer person. If being a gay man (or half-Orc, in Ragh's case) means having to situate your life in relationship to failing compulsory masculinity, then it seems there is an inherent queer aspect to embracing, celebrating, and showcasing a beloved NPC in an explicitly fat and happy body.

Ragh is still strong and he is still fat. His body radiates a commitment to the power of fat bodies to exist in spaces they are often violently unwelcome in, such as gyms. Existing in gyms and sports spaces as fat people means dealing the "impossible standard that rejects nearly all of us" and upholds a diet culture rooted in impossible, Eurocentric and colonial body standards. In TTRPGS or actual plays, there is a unique opportunity to think about how bodies might exist in worlds different from ours, to imagine bodyminds as otherwise. However, as queer critics like Paul Preciado have noted, sci-fi and fantasy representations of cyborgs and other transformative bodies often lean into "fixing" disabled people or moving gender nonconforming bodies more easily towards technologies upholding a normative standard rather than questioning the standard all together.

Spyre is a world that deals with similar issues to ours, even without direct one-to-one correlations, so it, too, is a place where the narrative and artistic choices should be examined in how it helps us interpolate the world the audience resides in. From the Applebees cultish adherence to a deity-based nationalism to the various representations of parental neglect and abuse and every side story in-between, Dimension20's flagship show does not shy away from difficult realities even when recasting them through fantasy. Ragh, as a half-orc gay son of a disabled single mother, then, I see the arc his fat body goes through as meaningful and intertwined with his self-acceptance and queerness. He moves away from the toxic masculinity engineered into his blood rush team to instead pursue coalition comraderie with his friends to the point that he and his mother end up joining a communal living situation with those friends and their parents. Ragh's body expands as his family does, as his ties to community do, and to me, the gift of his fatness is the invitation to expansion that it holds out to us as viewers.

Moodboard

the emo kids

stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life

I love the library

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

Oisin: “Liked my Ping Pong ball trap? Figured you all wouldn’t be clever enough-“

Riz: “I’m gonna eat your fucking family, dude”

Oisin: “What?”

Riz: “I killed and ate your grandma’s boyfriend, I just killed your grandma and like six of your aunts and uncles and cousins, im going to eat them all and you. You got siblings at the Middle School?”

Oisin:

Riz: Gugkak family tradition, fucker

no but if sandralynn dated bobby dawn her taste in men is hysterical cause so far her known dating history is -cleric of sol -literal devil -werewolf with a wild past turned kindly school counselor -gilear

Neverafter: The Curdled Web

CW: Spiders (Though I won't be too descriptive.)

AH, this was such a fun battle! I really love how much the crew put into the setup of this episode. From the ambient lighting, the domes' screens with the webs and spiders, then the boss mini coming down from the center was so cool. Seeing all of the players reacting to that was such a joy. It shows how much time and dedication they put into these campaigns. Always going after more and better than the last one.

Speaking of the boss though, I can't express how much I love that Ylfa immediately was like, "She's like me and I can help." Even while doing her best to help defend her friends and Scheherazade. It's quite interesting at the end with her moment with her hand on the book. And her questioning her story and how she is always afraid in her story while in the Neverafter she could at least be with Ylfa. I thought that was so sweet and it really shows us more about the nature of the book.

I'm so glad that the group was having some better roles this time around, plus making some really smart moves in general. It was so different from the first battle though in a way, for the storyline at least, it almost feels necessary to have had the players experience a TPK as it allowed for the characters to grow and adapt to the world around them.

I can't wait for this Wednesday, I'm quite curious about where our heroes will be going and who they will run into.

Side note, I did finish Mischief and Magic. I will be posting about that sometime this week, maybe even tomorrow. Now, I am off to the stars.

Consider: A generally lighthearted buddy comedy movie about two characters, out of whom one is british and the other is american, who meet by happenstance and need to join forces to achieve some mutual goal, going from resentful strangers genuinely going "ugh why are british people like this/why are americans like that" to doing that as jovial roasting between good friends. But instead of it being two white dudes, it's two women, of whom one is British Indian and the other is Native American.

And peppered between the lighthearted banter and a running joke about peoples' confusion about the word "indian", every once in a while there's a brutally dark joke of either of them pointing out - and bonding over - their own generational trauma and the horrors of colonialism.