mitzi, late 20s, they/them | miscellaneous blog for the fandoms i don't have a dedicated sideblog for, my original writing, and whatever else catches my fancy | sideblogs (and main, it's complicated) in the pinned post | ao3
Could I ask where dungeons of the kind in D&D came about? Like they’re a cultural icon now, but I don’t understand their origins very well
The dungeon crawl is a pretty standard trope in 1960s and 1970s sword and sorcery fiction and its near ancestors. A lot of ink has been spilled about how Dungeons & Dragons has become so creatively insular that it's basically emulating itself, and while there's some truth to that, the claim that dungeon crawls are part of that is a misconception. That bit is lifted more or less directly from the contemporary literature which original flavour D&D was inspired by – modern commentators tend to miss that because nobody reads sword and sorcery anymore. If you look at Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Robert Howard, you'll see dungeon crawls aplenty; Conan the Barbarian* went on not a few!
Of course, that just kicks the can down the road a bit: if Dungeons & Dragons got the dungeon crawl from 1960s and 1970s sword and sorcery fiction, where did they get it from? That's a question I'm less qualified to address, since literary history isn't my area. I know there are several students of early to mid 20th Century popular fiction following this blog, though; perhaps a qualified party can weigh in?
* Yes, I'm aware that Conan the Barbarian was 1930s; I'm including him in the "near ancestors" of 1960s sword and sorcery fiction
For those unaware, Super Mario Maker for the Wii U disabled uploading levels in March of 2021, and is shutting down its servers entirely in April of this year. I don't know if there's a good estimate on how many levels have been created in SMM's lifetime, but in 2016 Nintendo reported about 7.5 million levels created by players, so the number is High.
In the meantime there is a community dedicated to taking every level that has yet to be cleared for the first time, and clearing it. Some of these levels take 6-10 hours of attempts to beat, and some of them use obscure glitches that no one else has discovered. Nevertheless, as of a few months ago there were less than 20,000 uncleared levels and currently there are less than 1,000.
Nothing remains but the most difficult platform experiences you can imagine. The community is confident they can "beat Super Mario Maker" but the deadline is fast approaching. It will be a tight race, and this is shaping up to be a potentially historic moment.
As of yesterday, all levels uploaded in 2016 have been cleared.
It's wild to think without Toriyama there would be no Dragonball and no Dragon Quest, and without them half of shounen and JRPGs as we know them today.
Anyway, if you don't vote for Biden to Teach Him A Lesson and Trump wins, I'm sure all the thousands more Palestinians killed in Gaza when Trump gives Netanyahu full steam ahead and pulls all diplomatic support for a ceasefire/peace process, the Ukrainians and/or other Eastern Europeans likewise genocided when Trump gives Putin everything he wants and pulls out of NATO, the immigrants deported and put in concentration camps, the protesters detained en masse under the Insurrection Act, the women who die from being refused divorces and reproductive care, the LGBTQ+ people legislated and harassed out of public life, the people of color murdered by fully sanctioned white supremacy, and the societies around the world affected by America's collapse into a theocratic fascist dictatorship will definitely fall at your feet in thanks and give you the Gold Medal For Twitter Social Justice. So yknow, that's very important.