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

[BookBarbarian]

In the USA, especially in the part called the Midwest, no one would call you a slur like “Viking Scum” if you told them where you were from.

I m quite bothered that no one assumes I'm down to drink mead and go raiding once they find out my Scandinavian decent. I get tired of explaining to everyone I meet that that's all I want to do.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That said, RPG Drive Thru, in my opinion has the right to determine which products, the private company wishes to sell. This is not a Totalitarian Government forcibly removing and burning a viewpoint.....this is the right of a commercial enterprise to decide what products to sell, and how the enterprises wishes to respond to the viewpoints of it’s customer base.

To all...Should RPG Drive Thru be forced to carry a product against their will? How is that freedom?

Since you seem interested in a conversation about the issue, here is my perspective on the theoretical framework.

There is always a divide between the freedom from censorship we have vis-a-vis the state and the actuality that we have in practice. In America, this divide can most often be seen in internet conversations when someone says, "I have a First Amendment Right to do X" and then someone else says, "Well, unless it's the government, it's not the First Amendment," and then it carries on.

I'd like to concentrate on the second part- the practice. One way of looking at this is you can walk up and down the street saying the "F" word, and the government isn't going to punish you. But the reason that most people don't is because of cultural reasons, because they don't want to offend passerbys, they don't want children to overhear them, they don't want their family and employer to think of them as "that guy" and so on.

It's the same with the information we consume. We have the ability to consume media from all sorts of viewpoints, and the government can't restrict that speech. This is the "marketplace of ideas" concept- the best ideas win out, eventually, as we get exposed to them.

...but, what if we don't live in a facsimile of Luis Borges's Library of Babel? What if the majority of media we have access to is mediated by for-profit corporate entities? Oh. So while in theory we can get what we want, in practice the limits will be imposed on us by unaccountable corporations.

Now, if you are of a certain age, you remember that there was a long history of this type of public pressure being brought on corporations. Except ... not in the way we are using it now. The 80s-00s were some of the prime times of the moral majority boycotts in the United States. All sorts of things were done; from changing the P&G Logo (satanic!) and Starbucks (sexy!) to forcing Disney to repudiate certain things w/r/t sexuality. But just as important as the actual boycotts were the constant levels of harassment and abuse leveled at corporations, and the constant community pressure to enforce the status quo.

All of which is to say that there was an enormous amount of pressure on corporations and institutions to conform to a certain status quo; that this has changed over the past decade, but many people of an older generation remember when depictions of non-standard sexual orientation were considered forbidden. And this wasn't 30 years ago, either. The use of private means to enforce an orthodoxy is never a good history, and retreating to the point of saying that this is just private action ignore the realities of life; the government isn't printing the books or disseminating the information, private actors are, and if you force them to hew to a certain standard, you have private enforcement of your standards.

Looping back to your excellent question, no, I don't think any private company should be required to sell a product. On the other hand, I don't want people restricting the flow of information and using private IP-holders to effectively censor it. I am hard-pressed to imagine a case that I would support.

Now, I fully support (as I originally said) including a disclaimer or a full PDF that explains why this is problematic, and I fully support efforts to convince WoTC to donate proceeds to charity. But I am against any efforts to censor information. In the end, it might not be de jure censorship, but it is de facto, and it is wrong whether I disagree with the motives (such as people trying to suppress information about same-sex relationships in the 80s and 90s) or I agree (people trying to suppress racially insensitive material from the past today).


EDIT: If this isn't fully clear, I would analogize it to Gone With the Wind. That's a terrible movie (IMO). But while I support the inclusion of a disclaimer on the movie and continued conversations about why that movie is so problematic, I would be against any and all efforts to force private companies to remove it so that it could not be seen by anyone.

 

[toucanbuzz]

I'm 10 pages into comments, but please listen to the podcast with Mr. Kwan that points out the stereotypes first before you get upset about why they feel the book needs to go. It's 2 hours long and they don't get far in those 2 hours, so if you don't have the time, here's a summary of some points:

1. Written by white guys from America who had good intentions (to spotlight asian culture) but through lack of understanding actually diminished a culture by turning it into an absurd stereotype.
2. They explain why the term "oriental" is an outdated offensive term. It was once (perhaps still?) used by white people, in media and literature, to portray anyone from the "east" as one and the same and the "east" as a place of "violence, fanaticism, and needing to be saved."
3. Asians are all about honor and mysticism and martial arts.
4. Asians are about Dexterity, not Strength. The original book had Intelligence limits on certain types of asian characters.

I don't agree with completely erasing the book from history, but I do agree that HBO, Disney, and others are right to tag things as containing outdated and/or offensive cultural references. D&D can do the same.

 

[Umbran]

But we don't get to just blow it up and move on. The past happened. There was a time when Oriental Adventures was perfectly acceptable.

Meh. "It existed in the past, and so we must sell it forever," is not a convincing argument. There's tons of written work that doesn't remain in print and available for sale.

We have libraries to maintain literary history. The current market of sales is not the place to maintain archives of the past.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Okay, I'm on page two of this thread so maybe this gets addressed, but did people miss the part of the article that pointed out the bigger issue was that they took 3 or 4 cultures, mixed them together, then presented them as a single unit full of stereotypes?

That is also the issue with "oriental" as I understand it, the term presents Korea, Vietnam, China, Japan, Mongolia and a few other countries I can't remember as essentially being the same place with the same culture. It is a big beige splotch over top a rich and varied group of people, and that seems to be the issue.

Asian people are probably right to get upset at seeing their culture equated wholesale with an entirely different culture, as though there was no difference between them

 

[darjr]

@toucanbuzz thanks for that. I don’t think the book should be pulled either.

Disappointed in the vitriolic response of some.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Meh. "It existed in the past, and so we must sell it forever," is not a convincing argument. There's tons of written work that doesn't remain in print and available for sale.

We have libraries to maintain literary history. The current market of sales is not the place to maintain archives of the past.

Meh. This is an overly facile explanation that does not appear to have accounted for the internet. This isn't about buying a book "in print." Oriental Adventures is not available "in print."

The main issue with why more books aren't digitized and available for sell is because of tangled IP issues. There are no tangled IP issues. Now that it has been digitized and there is .pdf version available, there is close to 0 cost in continuing to make it available.

Are you going to be the curator of the library of forbiddden works?

 

[Voadam]

Meh. "It existed in the past, and so we must sell it forever," is not a convincing argument. There's tons of written work that doesn't remain in print and available for sale.

We have libraries to maintain literary history. The current market of sales is not the place to maintain archives of the past.

Good luck finding OA in a library.

 

[Horwath]

Okay, I'm on page two of this thread so maybe this gets addressed, but did people miss the part of the article that pointed out the bigger issue was that they took 3 or 4 cultures, mixed them together, then presented them as a single unit full of stereotypes?

That is also the issue with "oriental" as I understand it, the term presents Korea, Vietnam, China, Japan, Mongolia and a few other countries I can't remember as essentially being the same place with the same culture. It is a big beige splotch over top a rich and varied group of people, and that seems to be the issue.

Asian people are probably right to get upset at seeing their culture equated wholesale with an entirely different culture, as though there was no difference between them

Book is only 260 pages.
How large it must be to address all issues that you stated?

And it is made up fantasy that too inspiration from Asian cultures. Of course it will not be a carbon copy and that there will be some mashup with multiple cultures.

Faerun is close to medieval Europe, and it sure is not a copy of it. Nor should it be.

 

[Umbran]

Good luck finding OA in a library.

It took literally 30 seconds for me to find it in the Boston Public Library's website. Have a nice day.