I don't know what people are calling for. But if they are not calling for substantive change in what is permissible, what is the purpose of the thread?
<snip>
It is one thing to analyze something for content deemed problematic, and another to call for it to be censored. But it feels like things are shifting and it is becoming less and less acceptable to creatively engage things that some might see as problematic.
<snip>
I consider myself pretty educated, but I have to admit I find this stuff very difficult to navigate. It is like you don't know where to step and what is going to be deemed an issue. And I do think that stifles creativity .
I think it's fairly obvious what the purpose of the thread is - it's to discuss the question asked in the title ie
do orcs in fantasy gamaing display parallels to colonialist proganda?
As far as you, as an author, not knowing how to avoid "problematic" material eg racist and sexist tropes, well that's one of the perils of authorship.
But I think your use of "acceptability" is misplaced. The racism of the pulps wasn't
acceptable to people of colour at that time. It's just that few white people listened to them when they voiced their objections. There's an extent to which that state of affairs has now changed, and objections by people of colour to racist tropes are being taken more seriously by a wider range of white people. Are you saying you wish this wasn't so? If not, then what are you saying?
If someone is seeking to call back to the pulp genre, it may not be to your sensibilities, but I think is leagues different than if he is doing it because he has a disdain for women (and I think reasonable readers can see that distinction and make a judgement on their own about).
<snip>
But if the intent is clear, I don't think this kind of element needs to be excised from the hobby (I can certainly see why it wouldn't be in a new edition of D&D, but this thread isn't just about D&D). And I am not saying people have to like random harlots in their tables. What I'd hope is there can be games that have that kind stuff, and their can be games that don't, and people make up their own minds.
If someone wants to call back to a racist and sexist literature, why is that a good thing?
Or if you think it's
not sexist and/or racist, then make that case.
An homage doesn't become in good taste, or cleverly ironic, or respectably nostalgic, or whatever else it might be, just because an author wishes it to be so. Pointing to an author's desires isn't a defence of the work as a work.
It is been a while since I read Lird of the Rings but just by memory, it seems like that connection isn’t clear from the book alone.
Huh? The stuff about orcs is all in the books. I've not read any Tolkien letters or biography and have no real interest in doing so. But it's not rocket science to read a book in which (i) blood and inheritance are central obsessions and (ii) the heroic types are from "the west" and predominantly white and (iii) the largely nameless hordes of evil are dark-skinned, bandy-legged and scimitar wielding, and notice that those tropes have fairly obvious racist overtones.
With JRR Tolkien, I think it is even more murky because in most accounts I’ve read of him personally he fidnt seem particularly racist by the standards of the time. Again though I could be missing something.
I am just saying, can see where someone might think he is invoking something else, or simply drawing on the shape for convenience/aesthetics, without any thought that it is meant to the group of people it might be associated with.
This is why - like [MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] - I am not interested in JRRT's mental states. I'm not trying to decide whether or not he was a racist. I am talking about his works, which - I think quite obviously - draw upon and reproduce tropes of dark-skinned scimitar-wielding vicious and violent hordes.
I mean, perhaps for convenience and without any thought about it, JRRT decided that describing his villains as dark-skinned and "slanty eyed" would clearly evoke a recognition of their villainy in his audience. But how is that a
refutation of the claim that he is drawing on racist tropes that evoke racist ideas? It's an acknowledgement of that very fact!
I think we are establishing guidelines that are well intentioned but maybe misguided. I can totally understand trying to eliminate unsavory and racist themes or concepts from one's work (I do that myself, I don't want to be racist toward anyone). But when we start looking for things that are not immediately obvious unless you dive into the history of a genre, then I think it gets a lot sketchier.
<snip>
Any trope that comes from a culture is going to have traces of something bad from that culture initially. How pure do we need to make every trope?
<snip>
And one of the larger problems is it feels like the content isn't getting better or more interesting, it is just getting cleaner and less problematic.
I've honed in on the sentences because I'm trying to identify what you are actually claiming.
It seems that you are saying eliminating racist (perhaps also sexist, etc) tropes will make fiction less interesting. If that
is your claim, maybe you could make it a bit more clearly and provide some reasons. If that's not your claim, and if the question
How pure do we need to make every trope? is intended as a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one, then can you clarify what you are claiming and what you are puzzled about? And what is misguided about trying to avoid certain tropes that are evocative of racist (perhaps also sexist, etc) ideas?