Headscratchers / Terrible Writing Advice

• Why does JP, in character, tell his audience not to make racist jokes in Humor Writing? It's not like he hasn't told people to use tropes laden with Unfortunate Implications in the past, or like not making them is taken as a given because there are popular, modern works that make them.
  • Maybe the idea is that writers using those tropes can deconstruct or avoid the implications. That's not really possible when using a racial stereotype as a punchline.
  • JP may be a rabid contrarian with delusions of grandeur, but he's not completely incapable of feeling shame. Plus, even if he weren't, he's still smart enough to be aware of the vitriol he'd justifiably get from the Internet if he did something that blatantly problematic.
• Why does the Villains episode only include the Evil Emperor, Dark Lord and Baron? JP's made many different kind of villainous characters before, which makes sense because fictional villains are varied lot, so why only have three characters who'd fulfill the same general role in the same general genre of Fantasy to discuss all tropes related to villains?
  • It would clutter the video if more villains appeared.
  • Them all being Big Bads of Fantasy stories may be an unfortunate by-product of such villains embodying most of the bad writing tropes discussed in the video (Orcus on His Throne, having no motivation, A Million Is a Statistic, etc). Having just one of them would serve the same purpose, but make the myopic focus even more obvious, and leave them with no one to talk to without bringing in Mooks, a topic for a different video, or villainous archetypes who are generally motivated, active, or personally hateable.
• Towards the end of Dungeon Master's Guide JP claims he expects to get real magic powers from DM'ing. Is that a joke about how some people take DM'ing too seriously? Are there really people who believe that?
  • Having watched the video again, and coincidently seen a different video about the Satanic Panic, if you listen closely you can hear JP say "the fundies" assure him that'll happen, so he's presumably referring to the Moral Guardians who claimed that D&D is Satanic, and some of whom claimed it grants players real dark magic powers. A rather odd Take That! to have in this series about writing, and somewhat esoteric, but I suppose you can't make comedy surrounding D&D without the Satanic Panic coming into it somehow.
• Why does McStabbypants only give Strongly Worded Letters when he was introduced as the person who tried to kill the leader of the ancient conspiracy?
  • Perhaps he concluded that violence was useless after said attempt and restricted himself to letters.