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

[Xenonnonex]

From the first page:


and


"Can bin outdated ideas and books." sounds like endorsing removing it from sale.

I am not that poster. Do not make the mistake of that comparison again.

 

[Danzauker]

I'd buy that too! To be honest i've always been more intersted in absurd and exotic settings over the most standard (give me Dark Sun and Eberron over the Realms all the time).

I'm thinking about opening another thread where we can share the most completely far-fetched off the head twisted mongrel nations and cultures we invented in our gaving career.

Come on, I'm sure everyone has something to tell.

Of course if this can done in a sensible and mature way...

 

[Guest 85555]

For example, let's take someone who is Irish. In years past there was a great amount of discrimination against the Irish Immigrants to the Americas. Now let's say a person today, who is 5th generation American sees a portrayal of their relative who immigrated. That relative was very intelligent and started a business which today has given their family a great amount of wealth. In a book, instead of portraying them as a smart individual who started a business, they portray that relative as a foolish individual who lost everything and died in a gutter. Even though it was long ago, it offends the family members today tremendously. It also can be seen to imply things about the family today, their family business, and the quality of those people in the family business.

I don't think people are saying folks should try to offend people. Whether OA is offensive or not, is a separate discussion. They are saying should a book written in a less sensitive period no longer be published. To use your Irish example, should Random House stop selling new copies of the Godfather because it portrays McCluskey as a corrupt Irish policeman? Granted he specifically doesn't drink, so it evades one negative stereotype, but the rest of his behavior is pretty stereotypical. Not to mention the whole book is about Italian mafiosos.

For me there are two issues here. One is the demand and pressure to get a publisher to take down a book because some object to it for moral reasons. I do consider that people pushing for a type of censorship. The other issue is there is this insistence running through the discussion that if you don't agree with the critique or if you don't agree with the assumptions of the critique that come from Said's Orientalism, you are bad or you are refusing to hear people. There can be honest disagreement about this stuff. Not everyone who has read Said thought he was right (and many agreed with some of his points, but not all of them). There can even be agreement, like I said before, but people may disagree on the best means to handle it. I really think we need more room for differences of opinion on this. I am fine with the criticism itself. People have every right to find something objectionable for whatever reason. I just think folks are losing sight of the fact that others don't have to automatically agree with your criticism (even if you believe it and feel it very strongly, and it gives you a lot of powerful emotions).

 

[Tallifer]

Perhaps censorship by Hasbro will increase sales for smaller publishers. They will not begrudge 5E its niche and market share, since other niches and market shares can spend their money elsewhere.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Why does the descent matter?
Someone with Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc. roots born and raised in the US is an American and thus his opinion on the word oriental is not more valid than the opinion of a "white" American or Native American or African American.
If you really would care about what "the Asians" think of it then you would inquire what those who grew up in those cultures think of it and not just those who look like they could have.

If there is no difference between all those folks, then why are you putting additional qualifiers there? Why call them African Americans? Or Asian Americans? or Native Americans. And why aren't white Americans called European Americans then? If your argument is true, then why aren't they all just Americans?

It's probably because European Americans decided that we are the majority and took the generic term for our own culture,while labeling everyone else because despite them being born and raised in North America, they still have culture specific to their heritage. For example, my Filipino neighbors, where the last 2 generations were born and raised here, still have a Filipino culture because they also live with the grandparents and were raised in a Filipino culture with heavy Filipino influence, and visit the Philippines every couple months. So yeah, I give them subject matter expertise when it comes to what can be offensive or not to Filipino culture even though they technically were born and raised here.

As a European white American who is 3rd generation here in the States, I've made the observation that white americans don't for the most part really care about their specific European ancestry cultures. Maybe one day a year on Oktoberfest or something, but otherwise it's not a real big deal. I suppose that's the luxury of having American culture be pretty much white culture. I think we as white Americans would be better served to open our eyes and look how every other culture, even those born and raised here, still place a decent focus on their ancestry culture, and understand why that is. And then don't make the same assumptions about them based on how we and other white americans act and things we take for granted.

 

[Aldarc]

@Bedrockgames, you misattributed the text of what you are quoting to me.

 

[Guest 85555]

@Bedrockgames, you misattributed the text of what you are quoting to me.

I am very sorry Aldarc. I don't know how that happened. I will fix it

EDIT: Fixed. Sorry again!

 

[Aldarc]

No worries. It happens.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You say "melting a variety of cultures together" like it was a bad thing.

To me that sounds anti-miscegenationist. It sounds segregationist. It sounds like a promotion of racial and ethnic purity as a virtue. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear from the nazis, the KKK, or axis-era Japan.

facepalm

Integrating cultures together and growing together is vastly different than looking at a far flung section of the world and defining it as a single monolithic culture.

You can't lump all of South America as being one culture, you can't lump all of Africa as being one Culture, you can't lump all of North America as one culture.

That is an attempt to erase people's cultures instead of appreciate them for what they are.

As an Italian, I’ll never be pissed at being equated with pizza and pasta. We have the best food in the world, let everyone know.

The mafia comparison is definitely annoying, though. It’s like comparing all americans to the kkk: kind of unfair.

Hold onto that feeling, that is what we are talking about.

Some people are really really tired of certain comparisons. It is kind of unfair. So, they are asking us to stop doing it.

I have heard people make valid complaints about the lack of representation in artwork and wish for more settings that aren't so Eurocentric. Until now, I haven't heard anyone argue that we shouldn't create settings inspired by Asia, though there's certainly room for debate over how such projects are implemented as evidence by this thread. But we can't complain about a lack of diversity or a lack of Eurocentric settings and then turn around and complain when someone creates a setting that isn't faux Europe.

And besides, can you imagine the howls of outrage if we took Kung-fu, katanas, and ninjas and attributed them to a European style culture?

Of course we should create things inspired by Asian cultures. We should just do so in a way better than we have in the past. More sensitive to the harmful tropes and making sure we aren't conflating two things that aren't the same.

In fact, it just hit me of a good example, Olrox was saying that he doesn't mind that pasta and pizza is associated with Italy, because he likes the food and the food culture. Imagine for a moment a book where the great Celtic tribes of England were the inventors of pizza and drank copious amounts of Beck's Beer (a massively popular beer in Germany).

None of that is right. And you might laugh and say "well it doesn't bother me" but let us say that that book went on to sell continuously for fifty years, and that people constantly stopped by your home town asking about the Celtic Pizza. And the company publishing the book made another, and another and another, then movies depicting the same stuff, then comics, then held conventions for Celtic Pizza. All pushing forward this warped view of your world. Can't you imagine, eventually, that it would start to aggravate you? That eventually you would tell them to at least admit that none of that is true, so people would stop associating these cultural things as being one and the same?

 

[Voadam]

I am not that poster. Do not make the mistake of that comparison again.

What mistake?

Are you saying the quote of you saying "Can bin outdated ideas and books." does not read as an endorsement of Kwan's request for the books to be removed? I have not gone over your later stuff again, so I do not know if you take different positions later, I just re-read the first page again after reading Chaosmancer's assertion and your statements seemed relevant.