On "twee"
Recently I posted about Stonetop, which stirred up a short exchange on the gay beholder server about whether so and so should play it or not. Someone referred to it as "twee", which sent the gears turning in my head. I started wondering, is Stonetop twee?
twee: affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint. 1
Twee usually means peter pan collars, skinny jeans, social awkwardness, being thin and/or white, banjos, having bangs, and being the kind of hipster who would never, EVER be caught dead experiencing a bodily function. Twee looks stiff to me. It is self consciously and performatively self denigrating. I think it's autistic masking at its finest. All that is to say, I'm a former card carrying twee girl, and I still wear Mary-Janes on a regular basis.
But is Stonetop... twee...? I've been inside the trenches, and my gut tells me that this would be an inaccurate reputation for this game to bear if taken at face value. When I think of a twee fantasy setting, visions of brave, tiny animals with sewing needle swords dance in my mind. Someone proposed a setting hack of this nature for Stonetop--which actually just turns it into Wanderhome.
Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy role-playing game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change. It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine. 2
Chubby bumblebees, sundresses, suspenders, and starry night skies. I can hear the stomp clap hey music playing already. That's a twee game! It would be difficult and possibly even anathema to the game's thrust to make it into something darker. It embraces a sense of childish wonder with clear throughlines to beloved children's fantasy novels.
Let's cut back to Stonetop. When opening Book II of the two-volume game, you're greeted with maps of its Western European-ish Iron Age-ish landscape, riddled with ruins and foreboding crags. The pages zoom in on your home, a more or less canonically anarcho-communist village where everyone works together. There are Fey nearby, but there are monsters farther beyond. You can pledge your soul to an agent of chaos if you did badly on PbtA's version of a death saving throw. There are textual routes within the setting that allow for human sacrifice, slavery, mass bloodletting, stoking of intercultural tensions, outright war, holy violence, imprisonment, corruption, and pestilence. Wow! Somehow, though... I'm gonna say it... If it had to fall on either side (the side opposite "twee" is one I'll get to in a moment) it falls on the twee side. Why?
Stonetop is really preoccupied with emphasizing that you, the player, are an important person with a home to protect. You are categorically, to begin with, a Hero who will Lead your Village into Prosperity. You can quite easily go down a darker road and even become a villain of your own story, but it should be an emotionally intense journey to get there. And, you know, there are chubby bumblebees here, too. Okay, well, not really, but there are goblin-esque creatures who live in wasp nests and carry pretend babies around in a pastiche of civilization. They'll steal your real babies, too, but the point is they live in wasp nests. Why is this twee? It just makes me think of the Hundred Acre Wood. Little details like this make Stonetop feel weird and sweet more than anything else. It could be twee, but I'm saying it in a loving way this time.
You know what else I think of as twee? Shadowdark. Why? Maybe it's a type of consumerist energy. When I look at it I think, "Aw... cute..." I can't explain this one thoroughly, but Shadowdark is twee.
Now I will pirouette to my other point, my impression of "not twee." I've played in a game with the folks commenting on Stonetop who inspired this post, and spending time with them hearkened me back to my wildfire suppression crew days. fluttery classical music plays in the distance as we begin the flashback scene... There were always several not-men in my firefighting crew, and we were queerer than most, but I was usually the only girl. I felt this difference quite strongly and really just wanted to fit in, given that I could end up camping or on the road with these people for up to 20 days. The folks I worked with were completely unhinged and loved dirty jokes. Our crew was relatively tame, something I pieced together from stories of other companies I can't put on this blog. Passing the time while waiting around for an inferno to happen entailed such hijinks as:
snorting instant coffee
performing Feats of Strength
talking about guns and the cool guns my coworkers owned
doing chainsaw care
giving each other (dubious) relationship advice
arguing about plant identification
really sexual humor, in every direction, with no one spared
listening in on what the Forest Service was doing
pretending to work while actually hiking to a scenic view
cue Kenny Loggins' Playing with the Boys
They were usually pretty jazzed if I joined in (with reservations related to my gender identity and personal safety, which was generally respected). The energy was very gross, but sometimes oddly wholesome. Dirt was a way of life. Sometimes I miss them. I'll mention again, this centers on the adventures of a former twee girl venturing into Jock territory. It's probably why I paint this as a beautiful (if testosterone-fueled) nature experience rather than the exploitative, dangerous, amphetamine dependent toxic work environment it often was.
SuperNatheQuest brought me back to the "nice" and funny parts of the job immediately. It's not really a world I'm often exposed to as my social circles in my IRL space tend to be non-men and/or men who are concerned with being conscientious around the, as my friend put it, "her/them crowd". I do think embracing grossness and sweatiness can be healthy, a vaccination against an over-tuned disgust response, even.
There's a certain kind of humor that would be mostly out of place in Stonetop, a game that takes itself fairly seriously and asks the player to do the same. What makes it adult in my eyes, though, is that it has wholesome elements but is not concerned with transporting you to a safe, pastoral haven. Most of the things the game tries to allow you to do aren't even, really, the topic of this post.
Ultimately, this post is just an exercise in getting some thoughts out of my head and onto my web space. I didn't necessarily come here to defend Stonetop; it's just that an offhand comment got me thinking. Most of all, I wanted to make more of myself and my thoughts known to folks I've been getting to know in the gay beholder zone. Did it work?