beancounter
(I/Me/Mine)
Well, it's fairly new. Just give it some time, and someone will find something to be offended by.
Oriental Adventures, was it really that racist?
- Thread starter ryu289
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Well, it's fairly new. Just give it some time, and someone will find something to be offended by.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Man, "bibliography" has been used more broadly for decades now. Attempt to keep it to the more specific form you're talking about is a long-lost battle at this point.
MGibster
Legend
It might have been. I worked at Lonestar Comics for a while and it had multiple locations. Some products would do well in one location and not another. My store sold a lot of manga mostly to teenager girls and young women in their 20s but other stores couldn't sell manga for some reason.
That's insightful and pithy in a way I haven't heard before! Thanks for your contribution to the conversation.
MGibster
Legend
I'm going to take this somewhat seriously. This is the truth but that's perfectly okay. As the decades pass, social mores change and what was once acceptable isn't today. Movies that came out when I was a kid like Revenge of the Nerds, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club all contain material that most of us were cool with back then but many of us would balk at now. Last year, I was listening to a podcast where the hosts were talking about The Venture Bros., a cartoon for adults that aired on Cartoon Network starting in 2005, and they noted that the transphobic jokes revolving around Dr. Girlfriend were unfortunate. Sometimes change happens fairly rapidly.
Come on Irlo . . . won't you think of the white artists who can't make a living anymore? /s
More seriously, you can certainly create art and content based on cultures you don't have direct experience with or aren't directly connected to . . . . it's just that today you have to do a little more work than just blind, thoughtless appropriation. You have to do your research, do your best to get the details right, and make damn sure you aren't stepping into negative and harmful stereotypes when creating characters, cultures, and regions for your fantasy/sci-fi stories.
And, not surprisingly, plenty of creators manage to do just that. The problem with Oriental Adventures isn't that TSR dared to create an Asian supplement for D&D without anyone at TSR being of Asian descent, it's that they unintentionally perpetuated systemically racist stereotypes in doing so. That folks can't see the difference still blows my mind.
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Guest 85555
Guest
I haven't seen this show so not commenting on that specifically but I do think people forget these things are not a steady upward trajectory towards purity. The edgy shows in the 2000s that often ironically weilded a lot of charged language and jokes, were a backlash to the political correctness that had come before it (I think the debut of SouthPark is probably the starting point of this trend, but that is just going by memory). Some of the jokes that became commonplace in the 2000s, would have been unthinkable in the early to mid 90s. And a lot of the tightening around these things in the 80s was a backlash to the openness and gritty violence of media in the 70s. I think you tend to get more of a thesis, antithesis movement over time with media.
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Guest 85555
Guest
MGibster
Legend
Chicago Manual of Style for the win!Footnotes are better anyways
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Guest 85555
Guest
When it is right there on the page, it is so much easier to check (and a handy place for important information as well)
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