So Far, The Dungeons And Dragons Movie Chooses Marvel Over Everything That Makes D&D Great

But what about the substance? What’s the story we’re telling? Every D&D fan loves a great monster to make attack rolls against, but these experiences and stories have the capacity to really move people and even speak to some delicate emotional parts of someone. Well, producer Jeremy Latcham’s comments at this year’s SDCC really demonstrated where they’re at with this. And, I think, saving final opinions for when I’ve seen this film in final form, Latcham’s comments stray close to an important element of the hobby right now that rightly deserves recognition and is perhaps not going to get it. Latcham told the audience at this year’s panel::

The theme that I think always binds us when we watch a movie is this sense of […] found family. Of finding like this group of people and kind of connecting with them and that’s what makes [Guardians of the Galaxy] Guardians, that what’s makes the Avengers the Avengers […] you look at like these groups that come together and the personalities clash and they face a giant obstacle and they have to kind of become a family over the course of it. I know it sounds like kind of you know, but I’m a very emotional guy, so it is kind of just the thing I love the most.

As if it were a playbill at the Met Opera: There’s the plot of the film for you.

Regardless, the subject of found family in relation to D&D is quite interesting to me, especially right now when the hobby has been so openly celebrated by queer community. Be it the countless individuals, myself included, who have had the experience of finding themselves in a roleplaying game, the phenomenon is not necessarily new; we’re just more honest about it. The fantasy realms of D&D and other games can rapidly become a place where we might meet our identities, sometimes for the first time, or be able to hide them without suffocating them into silence.

For roleplayers of queer identities, D&D is often the “action movie,” we’ll never get: a place where all the main characters can look and sound and dress like us. And it’s not merely the singular escape of one person, but rather the collective escape that we share with others. We can process our feelings about a world that wants us to not exist, yet we persevere. We can learn to form friendships and bonds with people after a lifetime of not having the best versions of ourselves put forward. That is a sense of “found family” that an Avengers movie can only provide by drowning it in headcanon—and even then, we’ll be accused of making everything about us when so little is. D&D is when it can be about us.

Video games have offered this as well, but in a roleplaying game where you’re seated around a table or a screen with other people, it is likely to be the first time you hear new pronouns directly used to refer to some portion of “you,” or refer to certain clothes your character may be wearing, gender-defined relationships you may have with other characters. It’s the first time someone may be called a “brother,” “sister,” “wife,” or “husband,” “she/her,” “they/them,” “he/him” and have it just fit in a way you could only dream it would. It is an environment where the language of gender becomes as playable as any stat block. Sometimes it’s just for fun. Sometimes that fun is you telling yourself something important. Something to keep listening to when the game’s over.

A modern movie about this hobby, this franchise, should be about that. We’ve had the perfect fantasy film already. So, if there’s talk of “found family,” we need to be aware of the people who are finding family and identity right now through D&D. It’s what’s going on in the hobby and has been going on since it started. I don’t know if that memo got to Latcham, Goldstein, and Daley.

That malleability, the sense of possibility, of getting to roleplay and explore identity with others, for those who are not merely misfits in high school, but misfits in society, often at the end of draconian legislative attempts to stamp us out of public spaces, is worth exploring. The table is ours. We answer to ourselves and the dice—and we can always fudge the numbers.

Be it queer-only actual play podcasts that chart out across epic adventures for hours at a time every week, or powerful new RPGs like Thirsty Sword Lesbians, the modern TTRPG renaissance is profoundly queer and, from the looks of things, this film is not brave enough to take the same chance. For now it’s concerned with being another Guardians Of The Galaxy. Hope you like classic rock, because it’ll likely be another skin-deep thrill ride more suitable for a theme park, perfect for all you Star Wars weekend fans.