Entry d7: A Dire Whale of a Tale

    The project has really started to come together over the last few days. I have made the first of my posters for the event as well as sketched out the base ideas for the stand up figures of fantasy cartoon characters I plan to place at the library as well as at my school. Its progressing very well, but the other day a great dire whale of an idea struck me; Dungeons and Dragons is an art not in that it brings people closer, but in the way that it does this.
    I mentioned in entry d2 that Dungeons and Dragons is a living breathing art form because it brings a wide variety of people together, but I really didn't pick the meat from this idea. It wasn't until I was reading through my copy of the book The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. As I walked the endless labyrinth of passages I had previously marked as important, I stumbled across the blood smeared, inked up passage:

     "Olympe is not one for for affected charades, the way some people in the building are, to prove that because she is a well-brought-up-child-of-leftists-without-prejudices she is conversing with the concierge. Olympe talks to me because I have a cat, and that brings us into a community of interests."

                           (Elegance of the Hedgehog P.115)

    I stopped searching when I came to this passage as it inspired me to pick up my pencil, and I feverishly began to write my ideas. Dungeons and Dragons, is a game that I have in the past three years come to love very dearly. I will talk, debate, argue, and discuss this fantastic game for hours with anyone stupid enough to willingly enter a conversation on it with me, and yet the thing I had never thought of or taken into consideration was the community the game builds around itself, nor the way it seems to draw those cast out back in.

    A community of interests, a community that allows people to practice escapism so that they may for just a few hours be the hero, the one who always gets the girl, or the one who has the power to stand up for those they see as friends. In this fictional world, created by the dungeon master, and shared by the players characters, the players can hide from the cruelty of the harsh world, and for that time feel like others do.This is a beauty that is created by the game, an artificial and completely fictional scene, and yet it has the power to create such a very real beauty in this world of ours.

    Like 1920's America, Dungeons and Dragons seems to have the motto, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, as it is a shelter for all who seek to express themselves in an environment where no one will patronize them for their "strangeness" or their "short comings".  It allows for those with social stresses or social disabilities to feel the way everyone else does.

    Now I am not saying that everyone who plays Dungeons and Dragons is a geek, nerd, or social out cast; because they are not... and that's the beauty of the game! Its the bridge between cliches, the glue that builds communities of interest, and its in this creation of community that all those that play Dungeons and dragons help create beauty in our world. So for my event I want to help foster that beauty in all that attend my event. I want to extend a hand to those who have fallen into exile from the world, I want to banish the negative thoughts that surround the game like a challenge rating 3 bat swarm, to break down the walls that create the cliches of our lives, and most of all I want to build a community that is based upon acceptance and creative expression.

    Dungeons and Dragons is how I create Art, and as Paloma said "I want to be building."