You know-- and bear with me here-- when you look at the way Dungeons & Dragons treats its mythological sources, the core rulebooks and the "Fake Europe" campaign settings aren't a whole hell of a lot better than Oriental Adventures. From a cultural perspective, Dungeons & Dragons is cheap trash. Being a D&D fan is like binge-watching Supernatural, writing your own fanfic based on each individual season of Supernatural, and then complaining that each season's bizarre tonal and continuity shifts have invalidated everything you wrote last season.
Cheap trash. But it's a lot of fun, and as a species we find meaning in what we engage with-- not the other way around.
Oriental Adventures is cheap trash, and it's rightfully being recognized for what it is... but I don't think the fact that it's cheap trash is the problem. The problem is that it's our cheap trash, filtering someone else's cultural heritage through our pop culture perspectives to turn it into cheap trash. And the problem is that we think the solution is for us to do it right, to do it respectfully, to filter the other culture's heritage through our academic perspectives to turn it into meaningful entertainment.
I don't want it done right. I want cheap trash. But... the key thing is, I want their cheap trash, their cultural heritage filtered through their pop culture lenses to make their cheap trash... that we are then more than welcome to dig through like the drunken, starving media raccoons that we are. I don't want faithful recreations of Chinese mythology in my D&D, I want to see real Chinese people treating real Chinese culture with the same care and respect that Gary Gygax and Eric Kripke treated their European source material-- which is to say, none at all-- and with the same consideration for Western sensibilities that early RPG writers showed for their potential Non-Western audiences.
And maybe I'm the wrong guy to ask, but I don't think pulling the original Oriental Adventures or the 21st century remake off the store shelves is going to bring us closer to that-- it's going to tell Western corporate media executives that products focusing on Non-Western cultures and narratives is risky and that the safe money lies in sticking with Western cultures and Western narratives and grinding them down a layer at a time until they're safe for modern liberal multicultural consumption.
The answer to Bad Art is never to destroy Bad Art. It is sometimes Better Art, and it is always More Art.
It's been two editions and more or less two decades since we've had an Oriental Adventures, and-- rightfully-- we're never going to get an Oriental Adventures again. But maybe instead of looking back and tearing down the Hollywood version of "oriental" D&D, it's time to finally see what the Hong Kong version of D&D, the Busan version of D&D, and the Tokusatsu versions of D&D would actually look like, in their own "middle kingdoms" with our Western traditions clumsily shoehorned in.
And then moreso, I want to see the Dungeons & Dragons that two middle-aged nerds from cultures I've never heard of make for eachother when they feel as safe as two middle-aged white nerds in Wisconsin did in the 1980s.
We have had a generation of white people making whitepeople trash, and we've had a generation of (mostly) white people trying (sometimes earnestly) to make BIPOC trash. Give me a generation of BIPOC making pure, unfiltered, authentic exploitative BIPOC trash... and I will pray to every one of my appropriated gods that I live long enough to see the cheap trash D&D produced by the generation after that. It will be amazing.
