I guess I'm dense. What's going on?John Carter's red martian might be the good guys, and the green ones are the bad ones, but, it's pretty obvious what's going on.
You're concerned that D&D -- a game about killing quasi-people of other races and taking their stuff -- might be tied to stories of pre-modern people who see foreign tribes as outsiders?But, you are perfectly right in that a lot of those old stories are pretty brutal on the social morals scale. And that is kinda my point. D&D despite it's age and popularity, is still predominantly a suburban male thing. Do we want to tie the game to stuff that is so obviously bigotted?
I'd find it more disconcerting if pre-modern warriors behaved like modern humanities grad students.
Wait, are you saying that's a good thing?And, at least where I grew up, they removed Merchant of Venice from the school curriculums.