Fear of Girls, a D&D Documentary

FhnuZoag writes "Google Video is hosting the short film 'Fear of Girls', written and directed by Ryan Wood. The film is a hilarious 'documentary' dealing with a pair of self-declared elite table-top roleplayers. The film has already appeared at a variety of fringe events, but here's a chance to see it for free and online from a server that probably can survive a slashdotting." Allright, so it's not that funny, but since I'm off to play D&D this afternoon, it tickled me.

Comments

Re:my experiences with AD&D

[MutantHamster]

I think the issue may have been less with AD&D and more with you being an idiot.

Re:Pretty Damn Good Quality

[kfg]

KFG's Revelation:

If you can't laugh at the serious stuff; and if you can't take the trivial stuff seriously, you've missed the point and are going to have a hell of a time making it through life.

Insert whatever serious/trivial stuff suits you, such as work/play, religious/secular, etc.

Along the way you may discover the First Corollary; that the only difference between the serious stuff and the trivial stuff is whether or not you take it seriously or laugh at it.

KFG

eh, it was just OK

[AlterTick]

My friends and I actually watched this last night just before our (somewhat) monthly RPG. I thought it managed to be both too exaggerated and not weird enough at the same time. I think part of the problem was that the guy with the glasses obviously was just an acting nerd pretending to be an RPG nerd. The other guy had the proper mild, deadpan-earnest delivery one would expect from a real RPG nerd. The guy with glasses kept contorting his mouth into some buck-toothed nerd caricature and chewed the scenery like a veteran bad actor from theater club in high school. The homo-erotic "subtext" was so ham-fistedly exagerrated that it was robbed of all meaning. Basically, he acting and writing was so mediocre that I basically watched the whole thing thinking "I'm watching two guys pretend to be nerds, poorly". The one moment of inspired humor in the whole thing was the "dueling prayers" at the dinner table. That actually made me laugh.

Seriously, if they wanted to do an actually funny RPG nerd bit, they should've done more research. Take a video camera to OrcCon, or GenCon, or even find a local RPG store that has the traditional "tables in the back" and go watch those guys. I can think of half a dozen real life RPG nerd incidents that, if simply reenacted, would be three times as funny as some ham actor dork spasmodically lifting his shirt and rubbing his chest in a poorly simulated homoerotic frenzy.

Internet dissemination

[Jolhid]

Things like this is why you have to love the internet. Where would this type of independant film get such a large audience even just 10 years ago? Public access TV? A small town film festival? Doubtful.

Re:Fear of girls?!

[brokenarmsgordon]

There's nothing like fighting stereotypes with stereotypes.

Girl by appearance or girl by action?

[AlpineR]

Until I read your comment, it didn't even occur to me that someone would assume I was female just because I played a female dwarf on WoW. So finding that 50% of female characters are played by males seems like a big "Duh" to me. I figured players picked their character based on appearance or the personality of the role, not based upon their personal gender preference. Would you assume that J. K. Rowlings is a man because she writes about Harry Potter?

The bigger surprise to me is that so few females play male characters. I question the survey -- it just seems too one-sided. If the result is real, then maybe it's because females have no choice in most games and are forced into female characters. So when they do get a choice, they overwhelmingly play as females.

AlpineR

Re:Girl by appearance or girl by action?

[Minwee]

Having played WoW, I question why anyone would choose from the male characters available at all.

Those have got to be the stupidest looking collections of polygons I have seen since E.T on the Atari 2600.

Re:my experiences with AD&D

[John Hurliman]

It's also possible that kids who enjoy street racing might be fond of a street racing video game, instead of two video game fanatics that decided to start street racing after the latest Gran Turismo came out.

Re:Fear of girls?!

[Ptraci]

We don't need to be "given" equality. We already have that.

What we deserve and damn well better get, is respect.

Re:Pretty Damn Good Quality

[Wavicle]

Your comment assumes people get zero enjoyment out of their hobbies.

Re:Fear of girls?!

[Grail]

The worst part is, if you don't "come out" and explicitly state that you're a guy playing a female character, you'll end up getting chewed up and spit out of your guild when someone "finds out" that you're a guy in "real life", and they've spent all this time being nice to you (sending you equipment upgrades, running you through BRD and LBRS where noone else wants to go anymore).

People get so attached to those purple-skinned breasts and somehow assume that they're going to get lucky if they be nice to the character ingame. Then they hear you on Team Speak or see your picture on the guild website and get all angsty because they might be "turning gay".

And saying, "no" doesn't help either - "you don't have to run me through BRD for the fifteenth time tonight, go get some sleep" translates to, "I love you and care about you, and I want you to know that soon I want to make sweet love to you." Then when they say, "but I love you" and you say, "um... I'm a guy", that translates to, "I'm a raving homosexual and I am going to abuse you in so many horrible ways, and while I'm at it I'll rip apart the very fabric of your reality and leave you standing naked in the street, both metaphorically and literally."

Go figure.

Re:incorrect

[Golias]

If I am going to play a game where I am looking at someones ass all day, it's going to be a female ass.

It seems that a lot of guys who play female characters feel, very strongly, they need to tell everybody in the world that they are doing it "to look at the cute female asses" while playing the game.

Look, just say it. It's fun to play with gender roles.

That explanation is a lot less sad than obsessing over the posterior of a CARTOON for hours on end.

Re:Fear of girls?!

[ultranova]

Unless you are actually "roleplaying", and not out to kill and have fun, who gives a flying as to which character sex someone else selected?

And if you are roleplaying, well... I'm not really a great wizard capable of snuffing dragons with a mean glare and a snap of fingers, so since I'm already roleplaying something I'm not, why would gender be the hanging point ? Most people don't seem to have any trouble switching species and playing elfs and half-orcs and halflings, so why would female be such a taboo character ?

Or is it simply the fear of being thought as a homosexual or somehow "lesser" man that makes this a special case ?