It's fantasy. Fantasy is built on disturbing prejudice. Fantasy breathes, eats, and drinks disturbing prejudice.
So, either every single registered member of this messageboard is an immature fascist, sexist, racist and chauvinist pig; or we're able to distance ourselves from the tropes and clichés of the genre.
This.
Fantasy is built on legends and fairie tales, which existed to drive home the lessons of their eras. In most earlier eras, some of the most predominant lessons were "boys and girls are different," "boys fight wars and girls make babies," "people who speak different languages are idiot thugs," "slavery is our divine right," and "kings are just better than you."
D&D culls from this history. Every time we save a princess from a dragon, we're telling a tale of Christian conversion. Every time we kill something and take it's stuff, we're reliving Manifest Destiny. Not directly, not always conciously, but on some level, we're rehersing those lessons.
Now, I don't believe that D&D should at all be
bound by this history. The empowered women archetype may be a recent one, but it's one with a lot of resnonance in our culture, and it should be embraced. But the damnsel in distress is a more persistent archetype, and claiming that every time it is displayed is tantamount to sexism is being hyper-sensitive, at the least.
But take that Frazetta picture of the woman in the snow with the baby and the wolves. That's one of those situations adventurers might stumble upon in the forest, and have to help out with. Adventurers like Vadania or Lidda or Miallee or Alhandra, powerful women characters. The existence of the vulnerable woman type doesn't mean that the strong woman type doesn't also exist.
