Yes, in the broadest sense. There is certain assumptions people make about most classes (feeble wizards, dumb barbarians, greedy rogues, holier-than-thou paladins, etc.) Some of these can be viewed in the same light that people view real world professions, such as popular views on lawyers, supermodels, and cops.Are classes stereotypes?
I've never heard any serious conversation about the useful generalizations that humans make in order to process information that refers to that process as making use of stereotypes. As laid out earlier, stereotypes are by definition bad things. This is not debatable.
Perhaps try explaining how classes are or might be stereotypes, rather than just stating that they are. Just asking the question and expecting someone else to do the heavy lifting is lazy, or possibly rhetorically shady if the point is to set up a future reply. I'll even get you started, here's a common definition of stereotype:
1. a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
Yes, in the broadest sense. There is certain assumptions people make about most classes (feeble wizards, dumb barbarians, greedy rogues, holier-than-thou paladins, etc.) Some of these can be viewed in the same light that people view real world professions, such as popular views on lawyers, supermodels, and cops.
It's a different question to ask if such assumptions hurt the game, but class does assume a lot about a character, hence stereotype.
@Voadam, then I may be misremembering how easily I found his tweets, since I barely scrolled down his Twitter feed and found some examples he posted. Still. Less than 30 seconds of detective work.
"If you disagree, you have clearly never had a piece of pop culture harm you. Books like this take my culture, oversimplify the nuances that make it beautiful, mash it together with other cultural reductions, and present it as THE WAY others should view our stories."
Second, the second period, I found that absolutely absurd. It's not THE WAY, it's ONE WAY to tell a story. I keep supporting the fact that mashing cultures together in a fictional literary work is perfectly normal. Sorry if someone disagrees with me. It's my opinion and I defend it.
But isn't that just using definitions to say one thing is bad, and the other thing is fine? A good thing is a generalization, and a bad thing is a stereotype. Why? Because you've defined them that way!
I think, pace Umbran, we tend to overlook how often we rely on generalizations/stereotypes. Not just of other countries and places that we aren't familiar with, but even our own country. Here, let's try a few examples:
A. If you grew up and spent your whole life in Arizona, what is your conception of New England? Do you have a meaningful way to understand the difference between Maine, NH, Vermont, Mass, Conn., and RI? On the other hand, if you grew up and spent all of your life in Maine, how do you view the American Southwest? Is it all cactuses? Is it Sedona? Do you think about the differences between Las Cruces and Flagstaff? Between the area near the Rio Grande and the base of the Rockies?
B. If you live in New York, what do you think of when someone says, "California?" LA? San Francisco? Northern California and Southern California are very different, and there are additional differences (San Diego to LA, Sacramento to San Francisco). And that's before getting to the mountains, or the inland empire. And when I said New York, you probably thought city, right? What about upstate?
I could keep going, but you get the idea- Southern Florida is completely different than Northern Florida, the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades is drastically different than the part east of it.
Our minds constantly make these generalizations- these stereotypes, based on media, based on information that we are given. And that's fine! So long as we recognize that these shortcuts are being made, we should be okay.
Again, as Umbran pointed out, the real harm usually only occurs when we apply them to people.
I got exactly the opposite impression. I got the impression that the moral was supposed to be that white people are bad and that the whole thing was a centuries late allegory about European colonialism and/or the westward expansion in America.