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

[Chaosmancer]

Assuming that people live no more than 122.5 years at a maximum, that means that nobody who was alive then is still alive today. There is nobody left who was actually a part of it. It's very very unlikely that you'll even find someone whose parent was a part of it.

Do you really believe that people should carry a grudge over "what their great grandpa did to our great grandpa"? Isn't that just a blood feud?

You tried saying that two hundred years was not recent enough. Now we are saying no one was alive when it happened, so it doesn't matter?

You are aware that the effects of things like this can last far into the future right? I actually remember a fascinating study I heard about once, wish I could remember the name of the town, but there was a monastery in this one town, and not in any of the towns around it. And the monks of that monastery would teach reading, writing and math to the residents. That was over 150 years ago.

The town, and it's surrounding towns still exist, they still have the same climate, the same culture, they are in the same country and the same education system now. The town that had the monastery has a higher average income amongst residents of quite a signifigant margin. My brain wants to say it was a thousand dollars, but that could be wrong.

Going through the study, they could only find one reason for the disparity. The people in the first town had been exposed to a higher level of education earlier than the others. No one who was educated by that monastery is still alive, but the effect of it on the region is starkly noticeable.

So, yeah, 200 years for the effects of colonialism and the pillage of nations? Not quite enough time for those wounds to have healed and it be "a thing of the past"

EDIT:
More importantly, why should we talk about oppressions that were over centuries abo when there are oppressions HAPPENING RIGHT NOW that have nothing to do with slavery. Oppression like police brutality, wrongful conviction, uneven sentencing. Worry about THOSE. Those are here, those are current. Fight that battle instead of refighting a bettle we already one 155 years ago! There are people TODAY who need your help!

You are right. I will totally stop advocating for American slaves to be freed... well, actually I won't because prisons are still terrible, but since slavery isn't the issue and the fact of the matter that you can trace things like police brutality, wrongful convinctions, uneven sentencing, lack of representation in court, guilty pleas to avoid court fees, and many many other systemic issues to race and inequality... I think I might keep saying that we should work on that core issue. Seems like we won a battle, not a war.

Actually i think it's an awful and terrible example.

What you described is a REAL LIFE experience. We ere talking about fiction. You know, as not real.

You just described violence. Real violence. And the guys that did that to you are horrible persons.

It has nothing to do with fiction and the right of fiction (and art in general) to be able to do what in real world is rightfully prohibited doing.

Are you flipping serious? Like, legitimately?

You wanted an example of why your fictional entertainment should be more sensitive. All you want is to be entertained, why should you have to put in more work to be understanding and avoid hurting people's feelings.


So, I gave an example, an example where a group of people just wanted to be entertained. Why should they have been more sensitive? They were having fun and being entertained, why should they have tried to avoid hurting my feelings?


If you can see the problem with the second, why can't you see the problem with the first? Why is it okay to treat entire other cultures of people like naughty word, but it isn't okay to do it to a single individual?

Because I'm compulsively pedantic. Obviously racial oppression of black people is still going on but that is not the same as slavery.

Minnesota is in the north. You all know that right? This did not happen out of pro-confederate sentiment, it happened out of mindless hate.

Well, good news. No one has been saying WoTC is adovcating for the return of slavery. In fact, this thread is about the mistreatment of Far East cultures. We didn't even commit the crime of Chattel Slavery against them.

 

[Curmudjinn]

Seems to be a US thing. In continental europe theres also little to no issue with the term

As is the outrage tied to the term.

 

[MGibster]

Rather than explain, myself, I'll redirect you to this and this.

I get it. I understand the problematic elements of the noble savage. But, as I said, pretty much everything is problematic. Is the noble savage as a character untenable in any context?

 

[Azzy]

One role of fiction is to entertain, that not it's only role. Fiction can also provoke, inform, relate, synthesize and all manner of other things.

Yeah, I have to laugh (and cry internally) whenever some person on the internet complains that "x" new Star Trek show is pushing a liberal agenda. It's like, have you even watched any of the previous Star Trek series?

 

[Umbran]

More importantly, why should we talk about oppressions that were over centuries abo when there are oppressions HAPPENING RIGHT NOW that have nothing to do with slavery. Oppression like police brutality, wrongful conviction, uneven sentwncing.

Mod Not:
Our present grows out of our past. And ideas of the past are propagated forward, and social forms and norms remain if they are not actively addressed.

Your continued denial of that is problematic, and has offended several people. Please leave the absurd assertion that today's racism has nothing to do with history elsewhere. It won't be accepted here again.

 

[Kaodi]

1. Framing ongoing social ills as interpersonal "blood feuds between their great grandpas" is not a useful way of looking at them. These issues are systemic, not individual. To try and approach the matter of reparations for colonial injustices by means of separating the colonizer and the colonized into millions of discrete individuals would be utterly futile.
2. It is utterly incorrect to try and separate the injustices done by colonial states in history and ongoing systemic racism. The latter follows from the former. The two are two aspects of the same problem, not discrete entities.

Collectives are abstractions. Individuals are real. There is too much crypto-nihilism disguising itself as "historical justice" these days. The past is not something bad that happened to us because we would not exist without it. If we would be better off not existing our lives are definitionally worthless . And if our lives are worthless they cannot matter . So in any philosophy based on the universal value of human life the concept of deriving justice directly from historical wrongs must be false .

Inequality arises alongside the necessity of existence and it should be fixed but it cannot be fixed with a philosophy that is fundamentally self-contradictory.

Anyway to get back to the main topic they should just slap a disclaimer on there and forget about it for now. A handful of people taking offence is not enough. I am not a big fan of the argument that they must be heeded because they are a "minority under threat" because that sounds an awful lot like "Oriental Adventures would be less racist if there were no Asians in the United States". And frankly any argument which could be logically drawn out that way must be fatally flawed in some way because diversity is supposed to be good. I believe it is good. One of the mottos of my country right now is literally "Diversity is our strength," and I am all for it.

 

[Azzy]

I get it. I understand the problematic elements of the noble savage. But, as I said, pretty much everything is problematic. Is the noble savage as a character untenable in any context?

To that last question, I don't know the answer to that.

Although I'm partially descended from the Huron (which as Native Americans/First Nation have had the "noble savage" lable applied to them), I have no actual connection to that culture and know nothing about it (I wish I did). I'm not in a position to make that judgement, I've never been maligned by that trope. I'll defer to the opinions of those whose people have been maligned.

 

[JEB]

To that last question, I don't know the answer to that.

Although I'm partially descended from the Huron (which as Native Americans/First Nation have had the "noble savage" lable applied to them), I have no actual connection to that culture and know nothing about it (I wish I did). I'm not in a position to make that judgement, I've never been maligned by that trope. I'll defer to the opinions of those whose people have been maligned.

Not of Native American descent myself, so I recognize that I have no authority to judge either... but wouldn't that theoretically depend on whether or not the "noble savage" character specifically evokes a real-world nationality that has had that label applied to them? A clearly Native American-inspired character would therefore be a problem and should be avoided, but Conan, who comes from a completely fictional society, seems much less problematic. (On that count, anyway; there are of course other problems with Conan that aren't relevant to this question.)

 

[Gradine]

EDIT:
More importantly, why should we talk about oppressions that were over centuries abo when there are oppressions HAPPENING RIGHT NOW that have nothing to do with slavery. Oppression like police brutality, wrongful conviction, uneven sentwncing. Worry about THOSE. Those are here, those are current.

Because this ignored a little thing called "causality". Police brutality and other forms of racial injustice did not spring fully formed from the forehead of Zeus to trouble us in this day and age. These things are an evolution, one with a direct line tracing all the way back to American (both continents) chattel slavery, if not further.

Modern policing and imprisonment are absolutely direct descendents of the enforcement of slavery.

 

[MGibster]

To that last question, I don't know the answer to that.

Although I'm partially descended from the Huron (which as Native Americans/First Nation have had the "noble savage" lable applied to them), I have no actual connection to that culture and know nothing about it (I wish I did). I'm not in a position to make that judgement, I've never been maligned by that trope. I'll defer to the opinions of those whose people have been maligned.

The noble savage trope isn't limited to Native Americans. I'm not sure why the opinion of a Huron is valid when discussing specific uses of trope, say in the case of Conan, while your opinion is unimportant. I find the idea that only certain groups of people are permitted to have valid opinions on some subjects to be ludicrous.