WotC Dungeons & Dragons Fans Seek Removal of Oriental Adventures From Online Marketplace

[Umbran]

The slope must seem slippery when one chooses to be bedfellows with slime and muck.

Mod Note:

If you want to start insulting people, you can recuse yourself from this discussion before one of us does it for you.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Not being aware of a small fringe group of people complaining isn't a fault of mine. It's not reasonable to expect people to be aware of, or take seriously, every fringe group of gamers shouting that this or that offends them.

And that's why it's taken 30 years for the idea to gain any traction. But now the "small fringe group" has gotten larger. Large enough for the idea to start being taken seriously. So look on the bright side... you've had 30+ years of unrestricted access to this book while the small fringe group wasn't able to get anyone to get anything done.. Be thankful for that! I hope you've run plenty of enjoyable OA campaigns in all that time!

 

[Guest 6801328]

There is absolutely no way that a book called "Oriental Adventures" should be published today.

But isn't offering the PDF on DMsGuild basically "publishing"?

Nobody is saying we have to burn old copies. Nobody is saying you can't sell these on the 2nd hand market. They're just saying, "Maybe WotC shouldn't continue selling it."

 

[Derren]

And that's why it's taken 30 years for the idea to gain any traction. But now the "small fringe group" has gotten larger. Large enough for the idea to start being taken seriously. So look on the bright side... you've had 30+ years of unrestricted access to this book while the small fringe group wasn't able to get anyone to get anything done.. Be thankful for that! I hope you've run plenty of enjoyable OA campaigns in all that time!

No, they haven't gotten larger. They are just exploiting the situation that everyone is afraid of appearing racist and do everything to show that they are not.

 

[Guest 6801328]

No, they haven't gotten larger. They are just exploiting the situation that everyone is afraid of appearing racist and do everything to show that they are not.

Evidence?

 

[Higgs]

So; naming a book Oriental adventures is racism?

damn, we got some nice racist then.

While that's not really the point I was getting at....yeah. Thirty five years ago I don't think it was (in fact I always looked at OA, Maztica, Al-Qadim, etc.. as attempts to be more inclusive, not less) but with our better understanding of how media impacts people I do look at them as potentially problematic and worth updating. If you're not certain what's problematic about OA, give that dude's podcast a listen that's linked in the original post..

I don't know what "damn we got some nice racist then" is supposed to mean.

 

[darjr]

@wingsandsword also you may want to have a more in-depth conversation with your friends. I was raised to not rock the boat. To stoically carry things silently and move on. And I’ve had conversations with others in my same boat from Japan and China.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think it's problematic to connect 'descent' or 'heritage' to culture as a way to talk about who has the authority over, or access to, representations of that culture. It smacks of racism frankly. What about a child of African descent, or European descent that was raised in Japan, or China by a Japanese or Chinese family? Are they not Japanese, or Chinese, culturally speaking? Cultures should undoubtedly be treated with respect, and if anyone wants to use real-world cultural elements in fiction, be it a game, or a novel, or whatever, they should be deeply informed about and respectful of that culture. What shouldn't even be on the menu though, is a conversation about how the way a person looks, or who their parents were, should have any impact on their 'fitness' to write about a culture.

This is not an apology for Oriental Adventures btw, far from it. But there's a point (to use OA as an example) where the notion that only 'Asian' people or 'Asian' gamers should be allowed to comment on or produce 'Asian' fiction runs into serious trouble. Not because OA was a sensitive treatment (it wasn't) but because many people want to use race as the dividing tool. You're not 'Asian' so you don't get to say anything carries with it some pretty ugly notions of what you actually mean by 'Asian' there, in many cases anyway. Not only are there some ugly racist undertones there, but if you're talking about, say, primarily Japanese or Chinese culture, why is being 'Asian' the tag we're using? Why are Filipinos, Hmong, Pacific Islanders, and Malaysians all in the mix there?

I'm sure someone is going to find something in my post to shout about, so let me just restate my core belief here: fictional treatments of real world cultures should be deeply informed and respectful. I don't think broad region descriptors have very much to do with deep knowledge and respect though.

 

[Guest 6801328]

But there's a point (to use OA as an example) where the notion that only 'Asian' people or 'Asian' gamers should be allowed to comment on or produce 'Asian' fiction runs into serious trouble.

But is that what we're talking about here?

 

[Orius]

Well, as soon as the Black, Asian or Hispanic cultures of the world produce a product that stereotypes White cultures in a less-than-informed way... you will be more than free to complain about it.

Well, as some people have said, Japanese pop culture sometimes mangles Western culture a bit. I've seen it here and there in video games, and while I'm not really into anime or manga, what little I've seen has occasional mistakes. There's enough that TV Tropes has a few tropes covering these things, here's one I can think of:

Anime Catholicism - TV Tropes

So you are watching an anime and here comes a 12-year-old boy in some interesting, religious-looking robes and... wait, this pre-teen is supposed to be a Catholic priest? But, 12-year-olds can't be priests! That isn't typical Catholic priestly …

tvtropes.org

There's other little things I occasionally notice, like people in a society that looks Western will bow. Or sometimes they'll show levels of social deference that I think is supposed to be normal in Japan but not in the west. I'm not really bothered by these things though. See for me, I'm seeing as the result of an emerging global melting pot rather than some sort of ugly cultural attack.

Now sometimes, there are Christian looking religions in this stuff that are portrayed as villainous, and while that would piss off the Satanic Panic folks, I'm not bothered by it because I understand the history behind it. Christian missionaries were active in Sengoku Japan, but were banned in the Tokugawa shogunate. Tokugawa Ieyasu didn't trust them. Of course I know the Western side of the story, and I can't really blame him. The Church was using Spanish and Portuguese colonialism as a front in the Counter Reformation rather than addressing the underlying problems that led to the Reformation in the first place. The shogunate later suppressed Christians hard, but from what I've read, they were in part being blamed for underlying problems that were the result of social inequalities.

Oh I am on the "censorship" side of the debate here. I'm seeing more and more examples of what seems to be little more than orthodoxy from those who claim to speak for sensitivity. They complain how there's no mature debate on these subjects, but there's no tolerance for any sort of dissent. So how can one have a debate? I often disagree not because I seek to oppress, but because I think they're going about it wrong. I can afford to be wrong more than we can afford me to be right, and I can live with being wrong. Debate in a healthy open society needs devil's advocates as a defense against complacency or false consensus, and what I'm seeing is the decent rational people being silenced leaving reactionaries and radicals shouting at each other.

I think I'll bow out of this debate. It's not going to be any different than the last dozen or so debates, everything has already been said, and it's just going to balloon into another 100 pages of people shouting at each other. I don't have time to plow through all of that.