Racially diverse artwork in D&D...does it influence you?

[Cadfan]

That's because the Old West actually had Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Chinese characters showing up.

If you make a samurai movie in the style of a western, you don't throw in Black, Hispanic, American Indian, or even Chinese characters.

Samurai movies ARE westerns. Westerns ARE samurai movies.

 

[Seonaid]

Scots - indeed (I was born in Edinburgh).

No nonhuman races in Conan. I think the dominant Hyboreans get a bit more space than the other races - Shemites, Kushites, Cimmerians, Picts, Turanians etc.

My parents are Scottish on both sides all the way back. (I, however, am not.) As for Conan, the different ethnicities take the place of the nonhumans. If in D&D, frex, dwarves are stone-loving, underground-dwelling midgets, and any other types of dwarves (i.e., duergar) are given merely a paragraph of description each (as opposed to a whole section of a chapter), then to be fair, you'd have to describe SOME sort of human culture in more detail than the others. Then, if these are based on reality, the paragraph-only groups would get upset. This is why splats are better than having completely comprehensive core books. IMO of course.

And to get back to the main topic, the artwork should show this diversity because the publisher should want to encourage curiosity that leads to buying splats.

Samurai movies ARE westerns. Westerns ARE samurai movies.

Samurai movies are NOT westerns, and vice versa, by dint of locale. Whether or not they are the same in all other aspects is not germane.

 

[mmadsen]

Samurai movies ARE westerns. Westerns ARE samurai movies.

Wow, you totally missed the point. We all know they're the same "under the hood", but the superficial differences are very, very important to westerns being westerns and samurai movies being samurai movies.

If you have Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Chinese characters in the Old West, with heroes shooting six-guns, it's a western. If you have Japanese characters in feudal Japan, with heroes swinging katana, it's a samurai movie.

Can I imagine a red-headed Nordic samurai in a fantasy world? Um, sure, but what's the point? To make it feel as inauthentic as possible?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You've made a political statement which I don't think it's possible to discuss within the rules of ENW.

Actually, a few facts will tell us a lot.

Pioneer Fund is a known contributor to Jared Taylor's American Renaissance magazine- a monthly that repeatedly claims that non-white minorities pose a demographic threat to the United States and other Western nations, and whose conferences have been called " a who's who of American white supremacy" in the pages of British magazine, Searchlight (focused on exposing racism & antisemitism). Taylor himself has been interviewed and has espoused racist rhetoric, and has been slow to distance himself from the antisemitism of some of his magazine's contributors & guest speakers, like known Klansman David Duke.

That at least should make their stats & agenda questionable.

 

[Korgoth]

Doesn't matter. Original sin is not about whether you're a bastard. It's about whether your ancestor being a bastard condemns you to a shortened life of toil and pain. Elves are "unfallen." This is why they can return to Valinor and why they are greater than Men. They can do terrible things and make mistakes, but they do not bear an inherent burden of sin.

In the interview that you generously quoted, Tolkien says that the elves are not eternally immortal but just unthinkably long-lived. Further, I still maintain that if the elves were "unfallen" as you say, then they would be incapable even of venial sin without recapitulating the Fall, which would then potentially pertain to their descendants, etc. Adam and Eve did not sin before the Original Sin, now did they?

They are still not stark white man-grubs.

I've got my copy of Sturluson right here (Faulkes/Everyman/p16): "The dwarfs had taken shape first and acquired life in the flesh of Ymir and were then maggots, but by decision of the gods they became conscious with intelligence and had the shape of men though they live in the earth and in rocks."

Emphasis added. So I'm afraid that you're wrong here. It took me only a few minutes to look that up.

Listen to him:

*SNIP*

The Wikipedia reference does in fact come from reputable Tolkien scholarship. Basically, lots of people have known this about Middle earth for a long time, and it's utterly uncontroversial. The controversy is more about what that says about the subtext of the work and Tolkien's character, on which points I'm inclined to be charitable. The main letter which is typically cited is #176.

Thank you for the reference. The interview speaks of the dwarves still principally in terms of their language. It's a good source for your position, though not definitive.

Letter #176, which you also graciously cited, says this: "I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue...." That's all. Hardly definitive. When I think of the Jews I think of things like "Chosen People", "history's standardbearers of monotheism", "victims of unjust persecution" and so on. Tolkien seems to think of them primarily from a linguistic point of view... which is unsurprising. But "dwarves as linguistic Jews" is different from "dwarves as thematic Jews", if you follow me.

It's not petulance when you're right.

Rubbish. For one, there's nothing on any of your main points that definitively suggests that you're right. You have unilaterally decided that you're right (a lot like Wikipedia, maybe). Second, and more importantly, being right or wrong is irrelevant to civility. Allow me to suggest that you consider whether the attitude "I can be rude as long as (I have decided) I'm right" is really a mature attitude, or is something more like a child's attitude. I expect civility from you even if you're announcing your paragraph-length solution to Fermat's last theorem.

 

[Seonaid]

I have been mulling over the idea that "I cannot identify with X because it is not representative of me," and trying to figure out why that doesn't resonate with me. After the past few days, I have figured it out (eureka!).

For me, it's not that I can't identify with an all-white cast. It's that the creators of said cast chose to exclude people who look like me and act like me and think like me. It's not that I find it impossible or disagreeable to put myself in the shoes of a European-looking, broadsword-wielding Amazon in the northern wastes . . . it's that the people who allowed me to be that disregarded an entire portion of the population--my portion of the population. Now, if the only thing I can find is European-looking characters, sure I'll buy that core book, but I sure as heck won't buy any of the splat books and I sure as heck am not going to limit myself to the archetypes provided. And if there are many sources on the market, and one of them shows only European-looking people and one of them shows a variety, including "my type," I'll buy the latter (all other factors being equal).

 

[CountPopeula]

I don't think that being racially diverse means you need to have every government be a liberal democracy. And what I mean by reflecting our current values, for the sake of this conversation, doesn't extend past racial attitudes. And more specifically, it doesn't really extend past the artwork in the books, which is all that's really germane to the conversation.

I mean, yeah, medieval Europe was primarily white. There were blacks there, too, though. Maybe not a large number, but they were there. Sir Morien, Othello, the Moors in general. European and Mediterranean cultures also definitely had contact with Persian and Arabian cultures. Marco Polo had travelled to Cathay and met with Kublai Khan in the 13th century.

But what I find the most striking about this whole conversation is the number of people who can say "Okay, I can believe that there are goblins, and Dragons, and that there are men who can shoot fireballs from their fingertips and fight the gods themselves... but black people? Man, that just ruins the illusion for me."

 

[Imaro]

But what I find the most striking about this whole conversation is the number of people who can say "Okay, I can believe that there are goblins, and Dragons, and that there are men who can shoot fireballs from their fingertips and fight the gods themselves... but black people? Man, that just ruins the illusion for me."

This...I want to know if I can sig this.

 

[CountPopeula]

By all means, that would be awesome.

 

[Afrodyte]

but what i find the most striking about this whole conversation is the number of people who can say "okay, i can believe that there are goblins, and dragons, and that there are men who can shoot fireballs from their fingertips and fight the gods themselves... But black people? Man, that just ruins the illusion for me."

lol!