I sit here this morning, dappled sun coming in the window.

I have the house to myself, so Amon Armath blares from my laptop’s speakers as my two cats chase each other around the house, pouncing and rolling.

Reader, I have a bit of a tangent today. It’s about cats.

And kicking ass.

Our two cats are brother and sister. They’re a bonded pair and if I think about a world in which they didn’t live together, I get real friggin sad.

They love to play fight and it’s incredibly amusing to watch. This isn’t unusual for cats – they love pouncing on things, hiding around corners to attack your leg, etc.

This kind of play fighting sharpens their very real skills. Yes, they’re having a hell of a time, but they’re in training, just in case they ever need it for the “real deal”.

Are humans that much different, though?

Without any prompting or outside context, kids will often indulge in play fighting and wrestling. They’ll chase each other around in a game of tag. Just like cats, these games mimic the hunting of prey and the defense of the self.

Personally, I abhor violence. Since my frontal lobe has been fully developed, I’ve never been in a “real” fight. I actually think I’m really good at disarming tense situations and have done so a good number of times in the past.

(Remind me to tell you about the “Welcome to hell, brother” dude on the bus sometime. 🤣)

Yet I go to my local karate dojo 2-3 times a week to let people willingly hit me and indulge in a more structured form of play fighting. I take pride in how my front kick is progressing and spend time while not there thinking about what I can improve and what to do with that one guy who overwhelms me in sparring.

I think it’s a pretty good bet that people on this list have some semi frequent depictions of violence themselves. If you’re rolling initiative and swinging swords, you’re imagining violence. There’s a good chance you never want to experience it in real life, but you’re willing to explore it in a place that has rules and boundaries (we go in turn order, roll a d20 to attack, no one is allowed to actually swing a club at the table).

I think one of the functions storytelling fulfills is the same as training. We get to explore these dangerous situations in a safe way, perhaps better preparing us for if it happens for real.

There’s a certain class of person, often a dude, who treats violence as it’s some great inevitability. They glorify it in ways that seem weird to me. But as we also see in our dragon games, we can talk our way out of it, walk around it, and do other things to avoid it completely.

So is violence inevitable? No. Is it possible? Yes. I don’t think anyone is playing DnD solely to get ready to sword fight (hell, I don’t train because I actually want to fight either), but it’s interesting to see how the exploration of violence through play and story is encoded in our minds.

Talk soon,

-James

PS. Pippin, the sister cat, is now laying beside my leg as I write, purring, like she didn’t just commit war crimes on her brother Gandolf and then promptly take the smelliest crap ever in the litter box. I just thought you should know.