This blog post was created for my short-lived Dungeons and Dragons blog, The Suburban Ranger, during the Summer of 2022, where I wrote about various D&D-related topics, as well as fantasy and science fiction in general.
The article addresses a common complaint within D&D’s 5th edition regarding the ranger class, which has faced backlash from the community due to its apparent gameplay weakness, and lack of identity when compared to the other twelve playable classes. The purpose of this article was meant to defend the latter point, that the ranger classes’ identity is consistent with the archetypical ranger, which I define by identifying and categorizing the famous archetype as portrayed in both fiction and reality. This article highlights my skill as a writer and scholar by connecting multiple ideas, including gameplay design and the categorization of character archetypes found in many forms of media and reality, into a cohesive argument.
The biggest criticism I have with the paper is the grammar, which is possibly the worst it has ever been, in fact, I don’t recall even editing the paper at all. I think my intended audience was for the D&D community, but it became skewed as I tried to make it appeal to fans of fantasy fiction in general, ironically causing the piece to have an identity crisis. I attempted to make something less formal, evidenced by my random capitalization of certain words (because I believed it pops out to the audience better), but really this just contributed to my own laziness in the editing phase. Instead, to better reflect this mentality, I should have done a better job at condensing as there are many redundancies throughout the paper, as well as better explaining terminology (such as “5e” being short for “5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons”).
Overall, this non-academic paper was a good start for writing about topics outside of school. It wasn’t the first paper I wrote for the blog, but it is the only one I actually cared about. Similar to the Pikmin as Contemporary Nature Writing essay, this article showed me the limits of the written format, instead, the conception of this paper would have benefitted if turned into a video essay—that or simply breaking the article into two complementary, but separate, pieces, one to discuss the ranger archetype in general, the other to argue my defense for 5e rangers. Despite this, I am proud of the article. The graph I came up with, although amateur in design, provides a clear way to recognize and categorize the many different rangers found in media. This article pushed my skills as both a scholar and content creator by finding a niche talking point and then explaining it in a (mostly) clear manner.
Matthew Kajiwara-Hernandez 