aramis erak
Legend
The illustrations almost never match the text. Conan wasn't shirtless much under Howard's writing. I've not read the later works by others.
Comfort withcross gender characters based on your gender
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The illustrations almost never match the text. Conan wasn't shirtless much under Howard's writing. I've not read the later works by others.
evileeyore
Mrrrph
No (or maybe yes). I'm talking about 20, 15, even 10 years ago where no one got upset over who was at cons, who was at someone's table, who was in what movie, etc, as long as they were decent people while they were about it.
Ideological Purity has infected the 'progressive' (extreme) left and now if your politics aren't 'correct', you get uninvited from cons, uncast from movies, etc, it's become untenable.
In other words it isn't enough to be egalitarian or inclusive, now you have be exactly, correctly inclusive, or the ideologues come for you*.
* I mean they kind of always tried, but now there are enough of them, in positions of power in media and other arenas, that it's an untenable thing.
I blame Marvel comics.
You're not talking about a different decade. You're talking about some projected fantasy world.
Bagpuss
Legend
Does that really put you off playing someone that doesn't share your own gender/ethnic/sexuality identity?
Over the years I've played a lot of human characters (mostly because I mainly played Cyberpunk, CoC and other none fantasy games), while straight-white-male is the majority of those (since it matches myself), I've frequently played characters of the opposite sex, different ethnicity, different sexual identity. I've never worried about being accused of an RPG equivalent of "blackface", and certainly not been accused of it, or would have expected to be.
I would have said the idea that you couldn't play a character of a different gender or race or get in trouble for it absurd a few years ago, but now with with stuff like "Digital Blackface" (I wish that was a parody), and white writers being warned off writing black characters. I don't know anymore.
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No one whose voice reached your ears. You mistake that for no one at all. Your "no one" includes Samuel Delany. He wrote an essay, twenty years ago, about his experiences at science fiction cons, and who did and didn't share tables with him.
More than ten and more than twenty years ago, MLK took an interest in whether dark-skinned SFF fans might see an occasional face as dark as theirs on the screen. When he heard that Nichelle Nichols was considering ending her role as Lt. Uhura, and pursuing her dreams of a singing career, he persuaded her to stay with Star Trek. Nichols says:
"I was offered a role on Broadway. I was a singer on stage long before I was an actress, and Broadway was always a dream to me. I was ready to leave Star Trek and pursue what I'd always wanted to do... Dr. Martin Luther King, quite some time after I'd first met him, approached me and said something along the lines of "Nichelle, whether you like it or not, you have become an symbol. If you leave, they can replace you with a blonde haired white girl, and it will be like you were never there. What you've accomplished, for all of us, will only be real if you stay." That got me thinking about how it would look for fans of color around the country if they saw me leave. I saw that this was bigger than just me."
Shatner, Nimoy and the rest of the team were decent people, or at least Nichols hasn't said otherwise. If she had quit, Roddenberry would have recruited some equally decent person to succeed her on the cast. Your "as long as they were decent people while they were about it" was NOT enough for her and for MLK.
What progressives (that's me!) call "representation" mattered to a little girl named Whoopi Goldberg. In her words: "Well, when I was nine years old Star Trek came on. I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, 'Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!' I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be."
You think that moment of enthusiasm, isn't the flip side of "upset"? Not "upset" as in throwing a tantrum; "upset" as in resignation and resentment, same way people were "upset" when they couldn't vote, couldn't marry across racial lines, and couldn't drink at the same water fountain as white folks. Same slow burn of resignation and resentment that almost every major character they saw on TV and in movies - even nonwhite characters, such as Othello - was played by white actors. (Orson Welles played Othello in 1951, Laurence Olivier in 1965.) White audiences in the USA wouldn't even watch "Charlie Chan" until a white actor played the title role.
"or the ideologues come for you" - That happens both ways. Yes, reviewers have opinions when a movie rewrites Chushingura to include Keanu Reeves as a white samurai, and individuals such as myself express agreement on social media. (Call me a purist; there were already movies of Chushingura, and AFAIK the Reeves vehicle added nothing useful to the existing body of artistic expression.) Similarly, in 2004 Ursula Le Guin objected furiously when a screen version of Le Guin's "Wizard of Earthsea" rewrote Sparrowhawk as white (he's explicitly dark-skinned in her book.) I raised my voice along with hers... that is, I posted on social media and I skipped the TV show. I guess you could describe a wave of posts on social media as "the ideologues come for you." IMO that's a overly dramatic, threatening description. That is, in contrast to...
If you dare to cast someone who *isn't* a white man, *other* ideologues may come for you, and *those* ideologues sometimes use rougher tactics. Some fans responded to Finn, in "Force Awakens", with cries of "white genocide" and calls for a boycott. Okay, I disagree but those are legitimate, non-criminal expressions of opinion. Milo Yiannopoulos, however, didn't just express opinions on the casting of Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters. He faked Twitter posts to look as if they were from her account (saying horrible things). He encouraged his fan base to troll her, and they did. For example, sending her pictures of her face, but altered to imply sexual humiliation. About a month after Twitter permanently banned Yiannopoulos, someone (I'd bet my thumbs it was an "ideologue" who shared Milo's ideology) hacked her personal website, decorating it with images of her passport and driver’s license, naked photos, and a photo of a dead gorilla. How efficient: a death threat, and the ape slur, neatly combined in one image!
(shrug) I don't expect to change your mind. If you see Samuel Delany as "no one", as in "no one got upset"; if you object to people with MLK's ideology gaining "positions of power in media and other arenas"; if you point your wrath for them, rather than at the people who harassed Jones; then you and I are at different ends of the range of participants of EN World. I'm writing more for anyone in the middle. For anyone who shares my hope that what Delany wrote in 1997 about science fiction, will someday no longer be true about D&D.
Jester David
Hero
13 years ago. This thread came, and a solid majority said they had no issue. A good 60 posts were made and discussion died.
Now. A good 150 posts in a week and the number of uncomfortable people has increased as gender is suddenly a disputed topic.
How the
did the D&D community move backwards in terms of gender politics?!?
Now. A good 150 posts in a week and the number of uncomfortable people has increased as gender is suddenly a disputed topic.
How the
did the D&D community move backwards in terms of gender politics?!?
Bagpuss
Legend
A fairly solid majority still have no issue.
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billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
That's not really true. Gamers have always been pretty fractious. John Kovalic may have been writing for comedy when he wrote "Understanding Gamers" as part of his Dork Tower comic series (parodying Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics) but he skewered some aspects of the community when he pointed out that wargamers look down on role players who look down on LARPers, etc - and everyone looks down on Furries. This has probably been there since GenCon went from a war-/boardgaming con to including D&D. The dominant community has always grumbled about newcomers in some way shape or form. It may have been the different aesthetics of the Vampire crowd, the LARPing that rose in prominence with Vampire, the ubiquitous Magic players in all of the hallways at the Mecca Center, the kids playing Pokemon, new editions of games, and whatever.
But there's a difference now that I've spotted. In most of those cases, there was grumbling - much lower levels of hostility. But then for many of those adjustments, even most, the difference is in methods of gaming and less about who is doing the gaming, who is storming the gates to be let in to the community. The backlash against feminism in gaming, in particular, is far more virulent than the backlash against anything else I've seen enter the gaming community. If there's a change that I can put my finger on - it's that one, the hostility and I mean really vile hostility that you didn't see at other gamers because they played different sorts of games.
Bagpuss
Legend
Actually looking back it comes up at lot... (I am sure there are other posts I've missed due to the search parameters)
2016 - When a man plays a woman. 154 posts
2010 - males playing females and the other way around, opinions? 318 posts in a few weeks.
2009 - How do you feel about players making PCs of the other gender? - 110 post but with a Poll! Only 10% were uncomfortable and 40% loved it. (But the poll allowed for multiple responses so not sure it counts the same as the current poll.
2008 - Cross-gender PCs 117 posts
2008 - Beginner's Guide to Cross-gender PCs - forked from above just 20 posts on advice.
2002 - roleplaying across the gender line 290 posts in a couple of weeks.
Then as now the main concerns/objections were a fear of stereotypes or the "sex doll" thing that was mentioned earlier (which I think are pretty fair concerns to have especially if you've had bad past experiences), but it always seems to be a hot topic issue, so I don't think that much has changed to be honest.
They don't all end well (there are some prize posters in some of the threads), mods posts seem to end a good number of them.
If someone would quote me for Riley37 I think he would appreciate the research, wouldn't want him missing out.
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Eltab
Lord of the Hidden Layer
Always glad to help. Although I'm sure there is an 'unblock' button too.
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