I gather that there are people arguing about whether it's queerbaiting or not and I'm like...  it was weird and retrospectively embarrassing is what it was. They were aware that it drew them a lot of queer listeners, they played it up early on, and then they hit it big in the mainstream and it got dropped. Maybe that was an accident of timing and maybe it was deliberate. Whatever else you want to call it, it was tacky and bad storytelling. But I’ll always have plenty of great fics to read and think about what might have been. 

Queer listeners, looking at how Darryl and Henry interact: 

Matt and Will: 

[ID: Two John Mulaney screenshots. Queer listeners watching how Henry and Darryl interact: “you marked that one gay, right?” Matt and Will: “and it was like, “oh, no! was i supposed to?” /end ID]

At the time, I thought the joke was "Darryl thought the weirdest thing about his day was gonna be getting thrown through an interdimensional portal, but it's actually learning some surprising information about himself that he's gonna have to adapt to.” Turns out the joke was not that. 

“There is an aspect of toxic masculinity that puts forward death, revenge, and inherited responsibility as a personal journey.”

brennan and orion both say things regularly that feel like they’re reading dndads but probably aren’t. 

[ID: Tags that say #also worth pointing out #and i think you were the person who first explained it to me even though i did my own reading after #the massive massive amounts of racism tied up in the cuckolding trope #even if the definition as written doesn’t involve race it’s very much a part of the whole thing #tw kink mention #em be careful #long post /end ID]

yeah. 

For thoroughness, since it’s the last piece of this layer cake of garbage and I already have it written up... (Everything below is discussing anti-black racism and sexist tropes.)

I don’t know how it is in Faerun, but over here in the United States, both the slang and the kink meanings of cuckolding have very strong racialized aspects. Specifically, both are strongly associated with the premise of a white woman “cucking” her white husband with a black man. This scenario is presented as the most emasculating iteration of cuckolding for racist reasons: basically it represents the "failure" of a white man to control the bodies and sexualities of two different kinds of people that he's supposed to “own.”

Now before I go any further, cuckolding fantasies do not intrinsically have a racial aspect on a person-to-person basis. I’m sure there are plenty of people who enjoy it and have no racial component to their play. However, there’s really no denying that it’s possibly the most common and popular subgenre of this kink. Everyone from academics to black porn actors to white supremacists agree that these concepts are pretty strongly intertwined:

Donnell Alexander (2016): The Word 'Cuck' Has Always Been About Race: Inside the Alt-Right's Favorite Insult.

Zoe Samudzi (2018): What "Interracial" Cuckold Porn Reveals About White Male Insecurity. 

Dana Schwartz (2016): Why Angry White Men Love Calling People Cucks 

Damon Young (2017): The Racist Roots of 'Cuck' (the White Supremacist's Favorite Insult), Explained. 

Okay, so now to Darnell. Darnell is very much seen in the United States as a “black name”:

Freakonomics counted it among the “twenty blackest-sounding boy names.”

They discuss the name Darnell at around 10:30 of this great video about “Black-Sounding” Names and Their Surprising History. 

It’s here on this list from MadameNoire.com: Darius, Darnell, Dejuan And Other Names You Know Belong To A Black Man Off The Bat 

Discussed in this article: A brief history of black names, from Perlie to Latasha 

And is so widely considered a “black name” that it is used in psychological studies of implicit racial bias.

Just searching “Darnell” in Google images also illustrates a certain trend. Of the first 12 hits I get when I do that, 11 are black men.

Most people envision and portray Darryl as white, and to my knowledge, Matt has never said anything to contradict this or given any guidance otherwise to the artists doing official work. So we have Darryl, a somewhat conservative, very likely white, archetypally “alpha male” American man. And we have his wife Carol, who in the first episodes of this story, was “cucking” him with a man who had one of the most “black” male names in America. Whether intentional or unintentional, using that premise and naming that character Darnell evoked a very stereotypical, very racialized scenario.  To be clear: I’m not calling Anthony racist, I’m saying this trope that he invoked is racist. It’s certainly possible that in his life, he’s never picked up on the “Darnell is a black name” thing or the “cuckolding is racialized” thing. In theory, it’s possible he was thinking of the whitest dude he knows, who happens to be named Darnell, and it was all totally unintentional. If so, that’s... hella unfortunate, but our culture is so steeped in trash that sometimes we step in it without even realizing it. 

Since this is the first time I’ve laid out this part of the discussion in public, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to get anything or anybody attacked or canceled by bringing it up, I just want to articulate why I personally have always found this little subplot gets worse the harder you look at it. If anything, I just hope that maybe one or two people reading this re-evaluate whether the word “cuck” can be sufficiently stripped of its misogyny and racism to safely become a fun new thing you yell at your friends when they roll dice well against you. 

Right from episode one of dndads, there are strong implications that Carol is cheating on Darryl. This is because originally, she was:

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

You might know all this already, but in dictionary terms, a “cuck” is a man whose wife is sexually unfaithful to him. When alt-right people call people “cucks,” they generally mean it in that sense: a man who is implicitly weak, powerless, humiliated, and emasculated because he does not control the sexuality of his wife. These days, cucking is also a kink or sexual fetish that eroticizes the humiliation of the cuckold. Depending on context, “cuck” can be interpreted:

In its original sense (a man whose wife has been sexually unfaithful) In its contemporary slang sense (a man who is weak, inadequate, or has been bested in some way)

In its kink sense (a man who enjoys consensually role-playing this sexual scenario)

It gets used on dndads mainly in its slang sense, although the kink sense also appeared during the BDSM episode (11.5). I think they’ve also alluded to Henry as a cuck at least once, and Rocks Rock and other material confirms that the Oak-Garcias have some kind of open arrangement wherein Mercedes sleeps with other men. 

I do want to acknowledge that there's some context to Anthony's use of the term, namely that “cuck” as an insult was leveraged against him extensively during Gamergate and his divorce from his first wife, so there’s presumably an element of reclamation here. That said, I don’t really think you can be “ironically misogynist” any more than you can be “ironically racist,” and reclaiming certain terms in your own home or social circle is different than doing it in a very public forum. All the other cast members have now picked up the tendency to say “cuck” and “cucking” all the time, and a lot of the listenership has as well, and that’s not great. It’s really easy to start out thinking “it’s okay for me to say this because I don’t actually believe it” or even “this is a kink I’m fine with so using it as an insult isn’t that bad.” It gets normalized, and you forget that it’s a term that is rooted in the assumption that a woman’s sexuality is her husband’s responsibility and that if he doesn’t control her adequately, he is less of a man because his wife has lost worth by having more sexual partners. A term that has been called “the alt-right’s favorite insult” because that view of gender and sexuality is still very much alive and well in the world in 2021, even if it’s not expressed out loud by anyone in your particular social circles.  Then the shock of the word wears off, and it just becomes part of your vocabulary, and you continue to live in a structurally sexist society, and you get rewarded with more and more attention for making more and more transgressive jokes, and suddenly a definitional in-joke for your entire show is that it’s funny to use a vicious misogynist term all the time. 

Right from episode one of dndads, there are strong implications that Carol is cheating on Darryl. This is because originally, she was:

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

Right from episode one of dndads, there are strong implications that Carol is cheating on Darryl. This is because originally, she was:

{ID: A discord screenshot from 9/24/2019 of reverendanthony, with line breaks from original. so the thing about the carol/darnell thing is i was trying to figure out what darry’s Big Flaw is cause it’s super obvious with the other dads (glenn needs to be a dad not a friend, henry needs to establish boundaries and lay down the law, ron exists) so Darryl initially hit me as this really macho alpha-male bullshit bro guy and so I defaulted to a frankly kind of lazy and problematic thing to try and put that machismo to the ask, which is “my wife is cheating on me” but as matt roleplayed darryl more and it brecame clear that he’s not a one-dimensional arrogant jock guy who is way too full of pride, i tried to shift it to “our marriage is bad and my wife isn’t emotionally available because she doesn’t fel she can talk to me about this stuff” /end ID] Anthony likely also revised the plan because of the massive backlash that Carol was getting from the listenership/fandom. Even Matt mentioned on a Talking Dad that his wife hoped people didn’t think she was Carol. People hated Carol so much, it was truly unreal. Yeah, her tone is not syrup-sweet when she says “I don’t care if you’re having a good time, just find our kid,” but Henry called Darryl an “alpha jock piece of shit bozo” at the top of his lungs around the same time in the story and nobody called Henry a bitch. (The secret ingredient is misogyny!) So Anthony decided to pivot, as described above. In the story, that meant that during the Four Nights arc, Carol left a voicemail revealing that a.) Darnell has a husband and b.) she wants a divorce. In other words, Darnell didn’t start out as gay, but Anthony made him “gay” (gave him a husband) to eliminate the infidelity aspect. That’s version 2.0 of the Wilson marital dynamic: Carol didn’t cheat.  From a storytelling perspective, it seems like a significant chunk of listeners didn’t catch the pivot. Maybe because it went by fast, or because they thought “well, having a husband and a good marriage doesn’t preclude Darnell being involved with Carol, bisexuals in open marriages exist” or because they remember the scenes where it was a thing and other characters were alluding to it and didn’t realize it got retconned, who knows. There’s plenty to explore with the basic premise of infidelity in the Wilson marriage as we know it, whether it’s the journey toward accepting that you’ve grown apart from your childhood sweetheart, the pain of acknowledging that it’s time to move on, the challenge every parent faces of being honest with your kids about your emotions and struggles without making them feel like they’re responsible for your emotions and struggles…   That said, I don’t think that’s where they were going with Darryl and Carol. Note that in the original setup Anthony describes, it’s not that Darryl would feel let down or betrayed, but that Darryl’s “machismo” would be threatened. The point wasn’t to explore Darryl’s emotional growth, the point was to emasculate Darryl and to see how he would respond to that emasculation. He would be humiliated. He would be a “cuck.” This is not what unpacking toxic masculinity looks like, in my book. But that’s my editorializing. My real point is that this pivot happened in an ambiguous way, but it did happen, and while it’s possibly unclear how or why if you’re only listening to the actual show, clarity on that point - as with so many plot elements - was available behind a paywall. And now here you have it. 

Sometimes I think about the fact that last year, a minor messaged whoever runs the dndads twitter and asked questions about the safety of the discord server and was just fed straight-up lies in response. Like "we've turned over our mod team" where I guess this meant "occasionally, mods get so disgusted that they quit and leave, so technically our mod team is different than it was" or possibly "for a minute we talked about making all the mods reapply, but it was really just a formal way to get rid of somebody who got bullied off the server before we enacted the plan, and as soon as she left we lost interest." Or, re privacy and safety for minors, "it has been mentioned several times that a good rule of thumb is to edit discord's setting so that you can only receive messages from friends," whereas in fact I looked into this at the time by searching literally all the combinations of "DMs" "settings" "friends only" "privacy" or "private" and there were no posts in the discord that included any combination of those words and mentioning changing your DM settings. From anyone. Ever. Then I remember how many of my other thoroughly-receipted conversations ended with basically: "But you don't have all the facts." "Which are?" "I love them." And I think, yeah... I'm gonna take the energy that I could have used to try to get people to understand why this isn't okay, and instead I'm gonna go take the dog for a walk.

Hey, those listening to the newest Episode of Dungeons and Daddies (episode 67). Intense drowning trigger warning from 19:45 to 21:30. Stay Safe!

No Lifeguard On Duty

So apropos of a totally separate conversation involving some people who deeply misunderstand the First Amendment, I was reminded of the attempted policing of the tags during the height of this discussion and had some thoughts on that. At the end of the day, you have to step back and look at the setting of the conversation. Is there some kind of defined boundary within which this conversation is happening and somebody who is in charge of what happens inside that boundary and who gets to be there? If so, it makes total sense to expect that there are rules. If the rules aren't being followed, you can reach out to the person in charge. If the person in charge don't get things under control, you can leave that space. All totally fair. That's a system working as intended. Social media in general? Twitter hashtags? Tumblr tags? There is no 'in charge.' There is no defined boundary within which a certain set of conversational rules apply and will be enforced by an outside referee. You have every right to express your preferences about how people conduct themselves, but what you are talking about is not the rules, it's etiquette. There is no lifeguard on duty. I'm not saying "posts that try to keep negativity out of the tag don't belong in the tag," because my whole point is that telling each other what goes in there doesn't work. What I am saying is that when you're in a space that is unregulated by design, trying to regulate that space is the least efficient way to control your experience within it. You're going to wear yourself out trying to terraform the whole planet. Just put your astronaut helmet on instead. If the platform doesn't offer sufficient tools to accomplish that, maybe it's not a good platform for you. This isn't a request for anyone to do anything differently, we're not even in an active discussion at this point anymore. It's just a bit of unsolicited advice being expressed into the void on the off-chance that it might make somebody else's life easier. If you are counting on a boundary that is everybody else's responsibility to maintain, you are going to be putting a lot of energy into making sure everybody else knows what you expect. If that's what you want to do, you can do it, but I think it's likely to get frustrating. Setting up a contained space where you can define the rules, finding a space where somebody maintains a set of rules that meet your needs, and/or using the built-in tools like blocking tags and users, will work better. In other words, I don't have a guaranteed way to keep you from seeing me say things you don't like. That button is on your screen.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Apparently in the uncut episode, Anthony does talk about boundaries and how dark stuff has gotten. Given that he took several years to actually read the PHB, I'm not exactly assuming it was based on a real safety tool and not just something he pulled out of his ass, but I'm going to give him credit for actually trying to have that discussion at the table. And zero points to Freddie for cutting it.

Somebody forwarded me the list of what they officially warned for in this latest episode, and all I can think is... what gives you the right? What story do you need to tell that's so important that you deserve to invoke these incredibly painful topics in your ttrpg comedy podcast? What tools are you using to ensure that this is being handled safely at the table? What precautions have you taken to ensure that you are minimizing the potential harm to your listeners? Did you actually get somebody who knows what they're doing to do the content warnings this time? (I can tell that you didn't, because 'profanity' is still on the list. Content warnings aren't MPAA ratings.) In other words, are you being even the slightest bit careful and thoughtful in how you approach this? Stories about these topics can and should be told. They can even be explored in the context of ttrpgs and actual plays. But when we've recently hit a full year of people telling you to get your shop in order on the content warnings, because you're seriously hurting people, and you have made no visible moves to do so while the show itself has gotten even more dark and brutal and cruel... all I can conclude is that you want to tell a story about trauma but you don't give a shit about people who actually live with it. Fucking tourists.

And if these incredibly painful topics are pertinent to the lives of any of the cast, then I am so sorry that you went through that, but this is not a safe or appropriate way to process it.

Somebody forwarded me the list of what they officially warned for in this latest episode, and all I can think is... what gives you the right? What story do you need to tell that's so important that you deserve to invoke these incredibly painful topics in your ttrpg comedy podcast? What tools are you using to ensure that this is being handled safely at the table? What precautions have you taken to ensure that you are minimizing the potential harm to your listeners? Did you actually get somebody who knows what they're doing to do the content warnings this time? (I can tell that you didn't, because 'profanity' is still on the list. Content warnings aren't MPAA ratings.) In other words, are you being even the slightest bit careful and thoughtful in how you approach this? Stories about these topics can and should be told. They can even be explored in the context of ttrpgs and actual plays. But when we've recently hit a full year of people telling you to get your shop in order on the content warnings, because you're seriously hurting people, and you have made no visible moves to do so while the show itself has gotten even more dark and brutal and cruel... all I can conclude is that you want to tell a story about trauma but you don't give a shit about people who actually live with it. Fucking tourists.

Somebody forwarded me the list of what they officially warned for in this latest episode, and all I can think is... what gives you the right? What story do you need to tell that's so important that you deserve to invoke these incredibly painful topics in your ttrpg comedy podcast? What tools are you using to ensure that this is being handled safely at the table? What precautions have you taken to ensure that you are minimizing the potential harm to your listeners? Did you actually get somebody who knows what they're doing to do the content warnings this time? (I can tell that you didn't, because 'profanity' is still on the list. Content warnings aren't MPAA ratings.) In other words, are you being even the slightest bit careful and thoughtful in how you approach this? Stories about these topics can and should be told. They can even be explored in the context of ttrpgs and actual plays. But when we've recently hit a full year of people telling you to get your shop in order on the content warnings, because you're seriously hurting people, and you have made no visible moves to do so while the show itself has gotten even more dark and brutal and cruel... all I can conclude is that you want to tell a story about trauma but you don't give a shit about people who actually live with it. Fucking tourists.

this weeks new dndads is incredible, but also incredibly brutal. There are some excellent laughs, but the back half of the episode also got me crying and there were parts where I couldn’t even multitask or draw while listening, I just sat there with my hands over my mouth. 

all that to say, please make sure to check the content warnings this week. The regular profanity, violence, and sexual content warnings apply, but this week also includes emotional abuse, violence towards children, animal cruelty, and body horror. And I’m going to list some slightly more specific warnings below a cut which may be considered spoilers or are definitely considered spoilers. This episode has a lot stacked on top of each other, and I feel like any small additional warning might help someone be more prepared, so I want to give people that chance to be ready or even wait for the transcript if they have to. 

Please take care of yourself first. I’ll be listening to the episode again later today and I’m willing to provide a summary for anyone who feels they need to–or simply want to–skip this episode. 

I also encourage people to add other possible warnings to this post, or message me and I can edit some more in. 

More specific warnings include: 

Keep reading

i really do look forward to a time when i am not aware of this stuff and not talking about it anymore. i still have friends who are breaking away from the situation and needing to talk to me about it, so it stays pretty fresh. there’s also a lot of stuff that’s gone down that isn’t public and may or may not ever be, and the tension around that is hard to detach from when it’s out of my hands and just kind of hovering out there. it’s a garbage situation. nobody will be happier to see me gone than me. a good way to facilitate that is not to send me angry anon messages when i haven’t been active for weeks. i do want to unpack what you’re unhappy about, but i also would have been happy not to talk about dndads this month.