yave rant

as much as i'm not into into dave and bambi anymore, i've reminded myself of yave and. auuugh i need to get my thoughts out to the two people who will see this

the tl;dr for everyone who isn't in the bambiciv fandom: yave is a character planned to appear in this rpg called bambi civilization, which is an official spin-off of vs. dave and bambi (the fnf mod with the 10 minute song and the weird dude with the green hat), headed by the loremaker for vd&b and a d&b megafan. yave exists to be a conservative christian strawman, with his only personality traits consisting of being christian, being bigoted, and nothing else!!

now i understand that you need antagonists in a story, even ones that aren't in cohorts with the big bad (especially within the confines of dnblore). and i do understand that not all villians need to be redeemable. but do i think yave exists solely for the devs to project their trauma onto? absolutely. in the past mtm (he's the lore guy) admitted to basing rambi off of his own life experience (i would link the evidence but the old bcsv wiki is gone and it's not on wayback) and there's an entire part of the lore dedicated to "how fucked up religion is and how fucked up it can make people" so i don't think it'd be implausible that the christian bigot with no personality is not also a result of mtm's trauma mixed with his admittedly-kind-of-sucky writing skillz

and it would be fine if yave existed as a personal character. one mtm uses solely to pour his frustrations with organized religion into. but no!! yave is a character who exists to fill a single role and have no sort of development over the course of the story. and for a story that has pretty strong undertones of identity and self-acceptance, wouldn't it be important to at least have an accurate representation of those prejudiced views and how they might form in a person?

people joke about the "oh this person who's bullying you is probably doing it because they're struggling themselves" but. 9 times out of 10 it's true? that's just how humans develop. if a person grows up being taught that a certain thing is bad, they're gonna be more inclined to hate that thing. yeah, you can break out of it, but what if you don't? what if there was a sort of guilt forcing you to hurt others because you've been told all your life that "this thing is awful" and "anyone who supports it is a threat to you and your loved ones"? (it's almost like i'm describing someone who went through a traumatic experience)

i don't know. i don't really have specifically religious trauma so i don't personally know how skewed it makes your view of religion and religious groups. but i do know that strawmen, especially ones an author is projecting their own opinions onto, aren't usually the best thing to have in stories. you don't have to sympathize with people or characters like yave, but it's better to try and understand why they might be acting like that rather than assume they're too evil to learn or change