(I’ve spent so long thinking about this that the ideas have twisted around on each other, and it’s hard to distinguish my premises from my conclusions. Where can I start? What exactly am I trying to prove? I guess I’ll try to put things down in the manner I find most satisfying. This will turn out to be the most long-winded manner possible, because my favorite thing in the world is the sound of my own voice.)

To review,

A few years ago I wrote some “diachronic analyses” comparing four Dungeons & Dragons books: Ravenloft, the original 1983 vampire-slaying adventure; House of Strahd, its 1993 AD&D update; Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (2006), an expanded version of the same adventure for Third Edition; and Curse of Strahd (2016), a differently expanded version for Fifth Edition. In each book, the part before you enter Castle Ravenloft, the many rooms of Castle Ravenloft, and in particular the contents of the castle catacombs have the same general form, and in some places remain identical over the decades—but that just makes the details that change all the more fascinating.

To finish saying what I was saying, I needed to say something about Boris Karloff’s character in The Mummy (1932). But I never got around to writing that part.

First I had to write this post about Harley Quinn. The post is too long, and I can express its sentiment in one sentence: A lot of people find it convenient to believe that a symbol (like a comic book character, or a word) means or at least can mean exactly one thing, but they are wrong, because the process of using symbols always makes them mean many things. I might find it useful to refer to this misapprehension of singular, consistent meaning as “monosemism,” and the fact of multiple, shifting meanings as “polysemism,” but if I don’t get around to actually using those words in this post, I should go back and delete this sentence.

So far, so pretentious. Can we say something new about Ravenloft yet?