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Okay so I think honor in OA is basically two things: heteropatriarchial family structure and neoliberal human capital — but moreover, for me, these formations also speak to the way policing, in addition to race based oppression, exists in order to maintain what we call honor
Honor is in a sense the cultural shadow of the police state - if the police exist to maintain family structures, or caste, or race, or class (these things cannot be easily differentiated), then honor does work of policing. So the pleasure of OA is the pleasure of policing oneself
Honor is policing before force becomes necessary—and also the way that policing oneself within a fantasy space becomes a pleasurable act, especially given the context of d&d as being a space where policing is lacking or mostly player character owned. We enjoy winning at policing.
In the space of fantasy where police no longer exist, we find comfort in roleplaying the cultural and social policing of honor—our families and quest to attain greater human capital come to stand in for the police. We become “model minorities” which is to say neoliberal subjects
It is fun to play neoliberal subjects who police themselves in an effort to attain more value under capitalism because in the day to day we do this anyway, but we never actually see any results from our self policing in the grand way we do within the game.
In fact, we police ourselves through our honor (our adherence to neoliberal family and accumulation of human capital) so well irl that we actually disallow a revolutionary politics because of our “honor” — we disallow a just society to get a better credit score w family/society
But in the fantasy of OA, our self policing and adherence to the neoliberal capitalist order is marked by a value called honor (which yes is also very similar to a credit score in an American context — honor as credit score is maybe the best metaphor here)
So we increase our credit score in order to put us in a position where the investments we make in the neoliberal order might come to fruition. This is essentially the world that OA seeks to create — one in which your credit score matters and you can thrive under capitalism
And that’s what people fantasize when they fantasize about the East from the 70s onward — the East as an imagined fantasy space is the site of the actualization of the promise of capitalism and the promise of the police state - and its fun to win at both of these things
So rather than saying oriental adventures does not represent Asians I want to expand that and say it represents your average propertied middle class person who must buy into capitalism in order to survive and also indebtedness to family for making your survival possible
Anyway that’s my hopes for where discourse might be able to go . I want to make sure we’re not simply writing off the thing but also working to understand why people like it so much and to use that analysis as a way to better critique d&d, policing, race and capitalism