I'll also admit that I liked the altered title sequence.

[luinied]

[This is hardly the most important post I could make right now, but most of it is just copied from things I wrote elsewhere, making it one of the easiest posts I can make.]

So, thanks to mindy, I'm finally watching Community. I started with the fake clip show and some third season highlights (and the finale plot arc), and now I'm going through everything I missed. It's pretty great, and I say that as someone who has a very hard time getting into shows. It isn't perfect - it has its occasional lazy plotline, it doesn't do gender as well as it does race, and it can be inconsistent with minor characters - but for the most part it makes up for this with fun, cleverness, hilarity, and a mix of well-deserved skewerings and loving homages.

But enough people on the Internet have already written about how great Community usually is - I'm here to talk about how, despite having heard so much praise for it, the famed D&D episode is currently my least favorite by quite a bit. I'd honestly rather watch Bender's Game, which I'll admit isn't great Futurama but which is at least fun to watch as a D&D player. I can still be friends with you if you liked this episode, but, to sum up what bothered me:

• The study group is a bunch of very different people, but in this episode everyone but Pierce seemed to have the same motivation and opinions, with Annie, Troy, Britta, and Shirley being almost interchangeable outside of cheap jokes. This was fine in the chicken fingers mafia episode because of what that episode was, but D&D brings out people's differences, and, honestly, it isn't for everybody - ditch Jeff and Shirley (and Pierce) for Garret, and it might start to look like a real D&D group.


• On some level the episode seems to get that the attempt to save Neil is patronizing and poorly thought out, but there's no reversal or acknowledgment of this like there's been with various attempts to help Abed - instead, the episode ends up validating the group's zany scheme. At the very least Neil could have called Jeff on his amazingly insincere attempts to make up for his past callousness. Or, you know, anything that would have given Neil more character depth, because without that the show doesn't really provide an alternative to the fat-shaming it's allegedly against.


• Britta's attempts to fight racism in a fantasy world are played completely for cheap laughs, even by Abed. This really should have been the episode's analog to Abed's relationship with Hilda - funny, sure, but also a sign that Britta's taking the game more seriously than the rest of them, which in the end would be something Neil would appreciate. And one of the strengths of table-top roleplaying is that it can adapt to explore facets of the game world that weren't predefined as open for examination.


• D&D just isn't represented well. From the details of spells (come on, enlarge would be the better choice over shapechange for so many reasons) to when and which people roll dice to how often people's character sheets are referenced (though I'll admit I loved "additional notes") to how much damage a throwing knife can do, the episode just keeps getting things wrong. It would not have been hard to do this research! And I can't see a non-tabletop-roleplayer player seeing this episode and being any less likely to ask "so, who's winning?" to a group of people playing a tabletop roleplaying game, which, to me, is a clear sign that they fumbled their presentation of D&D.

(As I wrote these, I noticed a pattern of "I know Community can do better" emerging. And, dammit, it can! I feel similarly about the other second season plotlines that I've disliked - the Britta vs. Annie oil spill fundraising, the indistinguishability of female characters in the rowboatcop / trampoline episode, and most of the episode that followed the D&D one, especially the "lesbian" plotline. I would not nitpick a show I didn't usually like so much, but I also wouldn't still be watching in that case.)

But what really confounds me is that the Internet loved this episode so much. Really? Does it just come off very differently to a non-gamer? Are other people nostalgic for game nights full of people who didn't want to be there but who ended up uniting against a problem player? Were other people's expectations just so low that this episode was good by comparison? Seriously, please tell me - I think I got enough railing against the episode out of my system with the above that I won't feel the need to jump on anyone who liked it.