D&D 5E D&D Promises to Make the Game More Queer

[Xeviat]

You reached clear back to 2012 to find your examples. I'm not a huge movie buff (obviously) but since 2012 we've had Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek: Into Darkness, LeFou in Beauty and the Beast, Trini Quan from Power Rangers, Holtzmann from Ghostbusters, and Cynthia Rose in Pitch Perfect. I'm sure there's a ton of others I can't remember or have never seen. In real life, 37% of Americans attend church weekly or near-weekly, and only 4.1% identify as gay or lesbian, but if you were going off of media representation you'd probably guess the proportions the other way around.

Not to mention the also-large number of Americans who are atheists.

It would be nice to have D&D acknowledge that these people exist. It's not like they're not part of D&D's history after all.

And it would be nice to have D&D acknowledge polytheism too. Instead of some stupid boring fantasy priest who worships Vecna and calls on Vecna for healing and calls on Vecna for smiting and calls on Vecna for divination, how about a priest who calls on Apollo for healing and calls on Zeus for smiting and calls on Athena for divination? Y'know, like an actual polytheist might actually do if he lived back in ancient Greece? The number of people who are being properly represented by WotC's current religious tropes is approximately zero.

Well, when you start your thread about religious representation in D&D, I won't be there to say "but what about the *real world ethnicities*".

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So, is it equally crass when the male innkeeper has a female wife? What's the difference?

Well, historical appropriateness for one thing. If you're trying to play D&D in a poor simulacrum of medieval Europe, and you notice that innkeepers in medieval Europe often had wives, then you give your innkeeper a wife. You don't need to justify it on any other grounds.

But if you give your innkeeper a Siamese twin, or schizophrenia, or a gay lover, or a flamethrower, you're deviating from historical patterns and the players will presume you have a reason for it. Your reason could be game-related ("I think it would be interesting for this innkeeper to have a flamethrower!") or metagame-related ("I believe my players will be more comfortable if my game is inclusive towards LGBT folks"). Crawford is being pretty up-front about the fact that his agenda is metagame-related. As such, it shouldn't surprise anyone if customers who don't share the same metagame agenda have objections.

You could say the same thing about my half-serious proposal to include more monotheists and atheists in the game for metagame reasons: some people will object for metagame reasons. (Others will object for non-metagame reasons.)

 

[Hussar]

Not a negative spark necessarily, but judging by the standards of D&D's the pseudo-medieval backdrop, it makes the most sense to me, personally. Then again, I run my games a little like a Jack Vance novel, in which 100% of the NPCs are corrupt, scheming, or tyrannical.

As for presenting homosexuality is a positive light, I'm all for it, as long as it furthers the story in some way. The PCs having the choice to stop two gay blacksmiths from being burnt on the stake and dealing with the repercussions of their actions or inaction could be interesting. Preventing a grove of druidic terrorists, who see homosexuality as an act against laws of nature, from hunting down and murdering homosexuals could be, too.

What's the problem with just going to the blacksmith and buying a sword and the blacksmith happens to be gay? How is that "propaganda"?

Propaganda: "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view."

OK. If it isn't propaganda, please provide one case of homosexuality in medieval Europe that merely blended into the background and did not cause political or familial drama?

Umm, I'm pretty sure there were many, MANY cases of homosexuality in medieval Europe that blending into the background. However, since it's pretty hard to prove a negative, I'm not sure I can really provide proof. But considering things like Romans, Spartans, and probably far more, I'm pretty sure that homosexuality as a fairly mundane thing was hardly going to blow the minds of people at the time.

Do you enforce your female players to follow medieval European norms as well? Do you permit female adventurers?

 

[tombowings]

That's not what inclusion means. We want to see characters like ourselves portrayed positively. Maybe we don't want to be reminded of the negativity of the real world.

Do you include rape in your stories too, to create drama, to the discomfort of any players at your table?

Why not encourage homosexual PCs, then, since they're the heroes of the story?

As far as rape goes, yeah, I've included rape. How else do you explain half orcs running about? I've also included rape in an adventure in which a temple sought out the most beautiful virgin men & women in a city to use in a religion rite. The adventure began the high priest approaching the PCs to help with the kidnappings. The PCs weren't so into that and worked against the high priest to prevent as many innocent young men and women deflowered as they could.

 

[Hussar]

Oh, Hemlock, just a point about movies, because, like you, I'm not a huge movie buff, but, a quick google search shows:

Noah (2014)
Left Behind (2014)
Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

There. There's your three. They're all on my Netflix, so, I've actually watched them. Arguing that Christians are being left out of mainstream media in the West is a pretty tough row to hoe.

 

[MechaPilot]

You can't be serious about monotheism being a default assumption for characters in the media. At best, characters are assumed to be wistfully agnostic, occasionally "spiritual but not religious." If Avengers III has a scene of Iron Man getting a phone call in church telling him to suit up and get on the job, everyone will find that jarring because it's never been established or even hinted ANYWHERE that Tony Stark would even go to church in the first place. Furthermore, can you imagine the uproar if it Bruce Banner, Hawkeye, and Black Widow were all with him at church? You couldn't just say, "Of course they're all Christians. It's the default assumption until stated otherwise, right?" because everyone knows the opposite is true in modern media.

The U.S. has one of the largest church-going populations in the western world; I don't see why it's in any way non-serious to assume that (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) a great many characters in film are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. Certainly not all of them are, but it would be fairly safe to assume a great many likely are.

And let's not forget that, in general, a character's religion is going to be of far less importance to a story than their sexuality will be. Generally speaking, who a character is romantically and/or sexually attracted to is going to play a part in most stories, because most stories include some kind of sex and/or romance. Meanwhile, religion in film really only comes up if the film is a horror film, or if the character is, or pretends to be, devout.

Also, if we're talking about characters in film being religious, we should probably concern ourselves with how genuine they are. The most famous church-going film character I can think of is Michael Corleone, who certainly should not be seen as being religious if we're considering adherence to a professed faith as part of depicting a monotheist.

Now, to your question about monotheists in media, Captain America has already been mentioned. Peggy Carter also likely was, since they were holding her funeral in a Christian church in Civil War. In Wonder Woman, the town they liberated had what appeared to be a Christian church, so many of those townsfolk were probably Christian. I would assume that Noah, from the 2014 film was a monotheist, but then I don't go to see many movies, and that wasn't one I saw. Superman goes to a Christian church to help him make a difficult decision in Man of Steel and actually talks briefly to a priest, which likely means that Ma and Pa Kent were both Christian. Batman's parents appear to be having a Christian burial in the early scenes of BvS. Daredevil is a notorious catholic. If the 2013 remake mirrors the old film, Carrie and her mother would be Christian (albeit non-conventional ones).

If you can even spot a character who kisses a menorah or wears a crucifix or goes to church, I'll settle for that too. Just any of the things that millions of Americans do on a regular basis, and Hollywood moviemakers apparently never do.

Now, now, let's not make assumptions about people we've never met. I'm Catholic and attend mass every Sunday (at least, I did before my father got so ill I had to quit work and care for him 24/7; I can't leave him alone long enough to go to mass anymore.) but you won't find a lot of monotheist characters in the fiction I write. You will find some. But, if I'm making an honest evaluation, I have one work of modern supernatural fiction that has two Japanese Catholics in it and one work of sci-fi fiction that has a Christian of non-specified denomination, but the rest of my work typically features polytheistic characters in a fantasy environment, or largely non-religious characters in a sci-fi environment.

 

[tombowings]

What's the problem with just going to the blacksmith and buying a sword and the blacksmith happens to be gay? How is that "propaganda"?

Because it contradicts the standard source material in order to fit a particular ideology.

Umm, I'm pretty sure there were many, MANY cases of homosexuality in medieval Europe that blending into the background. However, since it's pretty hard to prove a negative, I'm not sure I can really provide proof. But considering things like Romans, Spartans, and probably far more, I'm pretty sure that homosexuality as a fairly mundane thing was hardly going to blow the minds of people at the time.

Do you enforce your female players to follow medieval European norms as well? Do you permit female adventurers?

There may have been many cases in which people turned a blind eye or worked to keep their sodomy a secret, but that's not the same as blending into the background or providing a positive model.

As far as Greece and Rome, that's hardly medieval Europe. The acceptance of Christianity created many taboos that didn't exist before. However, in a Greek or Roman inspired campaign, I would expect homosexually to be comparatively commonplace.

Personally, I don't have much problem with female adventurers. Adventurers are exceptions to the norm, but they sure are given a hard time, similar to the treatment of Brian of Tarth.

 

[MechaPilot]

You reached clear back to 2012 to find your examples.

You said recent. It's 2017. 2012 is within the last five years. That's pretty recent. It's not like he talking about the priests from the Exorcist, or Charlton Heston's Moses.

 

[MechaPilot]

Propaganda: "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view."

I don't think that "homosexuals exist, and are people just trying to live their lives like everyone else" is a political cause or point of view so much as it is a basic fact.

OK. If it isn't propaganda, please provide one case of homosexuality in medieval Europe that merely blended into the background and did not cause political or familial drama?

You're asking people to provide evidence of a case where something from medieval times didn't cause any political drama, but was somehow noteworthy enough for the facts of it to have been passed down to us in tact from medieval times.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

As far as Greece and Rome, that's hardly medieval Europe. The acceptance of Christianity created many taboos that didn't exist before. However, in a Greek or Roman inspired campaign, I would expect homosexually to be comparatively commonplace.

Well, kind of. Not in a way that a modern American would recognize though. There'd be a lot less attention paid to who was "gay" and who was "straight", and a lot more attention paid to dominance: who was doing the penetrating and who was being penetrated. It might please the hobgoblin warlord to have his men "use" their defeated foes "like women," but if you tried to turn around and suggest that his men would therefore not be interested in nubile female slaves, you'd get laughed at or worse.

You're asking people to provide evidence of a case where something from medieval times didn't cause any political drama, but was somehow noteworthy enough for the facts of it to have been passed down to us in tact from medieval times.

That's not so much to ask, really. The fact that Henry VII married a woman (Elizabeth of York) didn't cause any political drama, but we know it happened, because non-dramatic facts get recorded in passing when we record more dramatic facts like the lineage of kings.