Finally, something we can agree on.
I’d wager there are very few politicians that any company wants associated with their brand, and there’s more than one reason for that. The obvious one, of course, is that politicians are inherently controversial, and an endorsement by someone on the right (or left) risks alienating your potential customers on the left (or right). Best to restrict your corporate politics to lavish, unpublicised donations and remain blandly apolitical in your public-facing stuff.
There’s another reason, though, which is that politicians are nearly universally kind of awkward and off-putting, and they go about associating themselves with your brand then chances are the general public will start thinking your thing is awkward and off-putting too. Quelle horreur.
With all that in mind, I have to imagine Wizards of the Coast is less than chuffed by the revelation that Donald Trump’s running mate, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance—a real combo deal of avowedly right-wing politics and a stiff stage presence—is apparently an avid fan of Magic: the Gathering. That’s according to his wife Usha Vance, anyway (via Indy100). Do you reckon he favours the Hatsune Miku set?
Usha Vance was asked about her husband’s nerdier hobbies by Fox and Friends host Ainsley Earhardt. According to Earhardt, the question prompted some hesitation before she answered “He’s going to kill me for this, it’s Magic: the Gathering, which was a card game… It’s similar to Pokémon, that’s so popular now. And his boys are into Pokémon.”
Can America afford a Second Lady who doesn’t appreciate the myriad glaring and important differences between Pokémon and Magic? I leave that to voters to decide. But the potential vice prez’s wife wasn’t just making things up. Indy100 astutely notes that JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy also described his secret love for the game. “I could never tell my dad that I played a nerdy collectible card game called Magic,” wrote Vance, “because I feared he’d think the cards were satanic.” Indeed, apparently the kids at Vance’s church youth group “often spoke of Magic and its evil influence on young christians.”
Vance, a 40-year-old millennial, would have grown up in parallel with Magic, which debuted in 1993. The earliest editions of Magic featured pentagrams on cards like Unholy Strength and Demonic Tutor, but WotC began removing them around 1995. Why? In large part because the company had seen Dungeons and Dragons publisher TSR—which WotC would later buy—swept into the Satanic panic in the ’80s, when parents thought games like D&D were recruiting their children into Satanic cults.
D&D’s devils and demons had set parents like Vance’s on the warpath, and WotC wanted to avoid that controversy, so it began nixing the pentagrams and monsters like “demons” instead became “horrors.”
That doesn’t seem to have assuaged Vance’s father, though. Perhaps the effects of that upbringing linger, and that’s why we’re hearing about Vance’s passion for Magic from his wife rather than the man himself. Honestly? I find that a bit sad. Better to live in a world where people can be themselves unashamedly than have to contort to societal expectations they don’t really fit.
There must be something in the water, because this is the second time the Republican presidential duo has cropped up in our pages in as many days. Yesterday we detailed—with some exhaustion—Donald Trump’s appearance on a 1.5-hour stream hosted by banned Twitch streamer Adin Ross, which culminated in the pair sitting in a customised Cybertruck listening to crooning Elvis love songs. No, really, it’s even stupider than it sounds.
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