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

[variant]

So when do we start burning the physical books?

 

[Unwise]

I guess for most of us cultural appropriation is a matter of cringe, not offence. When people try to do an Australian accent, I cringe terribly, same goes for pretty much anything about my country being represented by outsiders. I know my German friends cringe terribly at Hollywood's inability to portray their language or culture without cartoony language, lederhosen or underground warehouse raves. I can dislike a representation without labelling it as immoral.

Of course people who are subject to persecution may well find it more offensive than just cringey. Its tricky that the audience decides the morality of your art, regardless of the intent.

To what extent should we be tolerant to ham-fisted attempts to represent our cultures? If the person is not trying to cause offence, their attempt does not make them the bad guy. They want to represent our culture or at least an design-space inspired by it. They obviously have an interest in it. People don't write books about settings they are not passionate about.

I like Pulp adventures. If I run an Arabian Nights style adventure, or wrote a book about it, you better believe it is going to have flying carpets, evil vizier's with pointy-beards, djinni, swashbuckling street thieves, proud desert nomads, deadly dervishes, dancers that can charm any man, Sultan's with harems, eunuchs, an epic bazaar and sunken desert cities. I'd likely find attempts to make it "more realistic" on-the-nose, as we are representing Pulp Fiction, not any real culture.

Last time I ran an Indian Jones style 1940s Pulp game I admit the Nazis were caricatures (though I'm not sure who that offends), but no worse than the PCs "Jock Strongstone" the All-American-Hero or my wife's character "Busty LaRue" the Femme-Fatale. Come to think of it, an asian friend based his character on Shortround from Temple of Doom, which in hindsight was probably on-the-nose.

 

[Wulfhelm]

Yet, we don't call "thief" or "rogue" a mafioso. Or Medellin. No, we call them a thief or a rogue. And, let's not forget, EVERY class in the OA, barring wu jen, and most of the races too, are straight out of Japanese culture and language.

Classes? Well, not the barbarian. Or the monk.
And the races? The Korobokuru... well, Ainu culture was not "Japanese" during the time periods that inspire this settinng, and geographically extended over more than current-day Japanese territory. And the Ainu language is not Japanese.
Hengeyokai, no doubt. I'm unclear about what the spirit folk are supposed to be other than an "Eastern" stand-in for elves. (While I have an interest in Japanese history, I am not an expert on Japanese mythology.)

Other than that, I see your point. "Bushi", "Shukenja" and "Yakuza" should really have been fighter, cleric and thief, and "Kensai" should probably just have been "Sword master". However, in the other Japanese-themed classes we see a common in problem in D&D and its variants. Namely, designing classes along a narrowly defined archetype that describes both a profession and a very specific social position; "Samurai" being the prime example.
There were Chinese warriors, there were Chinese upper-class gentlemen (and they informed the much later self-identification of the warrior class in Japan as well as the more commonly used terms for the class usually called "Samurai" in the West), but there was never a social class that conformed closely to Japanese samurai.
Of course, such considerations have never stopped anyone from using terms like "Cleric" or "Paladin". To take these ideas into account properly in OA would have meant re-defining and changing the class system of (A)D&D, possibly by adding a layer of social and cultural position over the "adventure function" class. Considering that D&D and its descendants have not been able to do something like that in the 35 years past, I think it would have been positively too much to ask of a supplement of that age, and one which was hacked together in a few months from all I hear.

 

[Hussar]

It was filmed in China and in Mandarin, yet was not released there theatrically at all, nor was it released theatrically in Japan, so there was nothing to bomb.

Huh. Strange that I watched in the theater in Japan. Korea too as I recall.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) - Release info - IMDb

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) - Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...

www.imdb.com

You might want to check that.

 

[Wulfhelm]

Now, I was 22 when this book came out. So I had SOME level of adult sophistication, and I recall being wise enough to take anything that was in D&D with a HUGE grain of salt. So I never thought OA was in any sense a comprehensive, or accurate, reference to anything. In fact I recall comparing it to how things were depicted in the game 'Bushido', which a particularly oddball guy in our group ran religiously (he'd lived for a good while in Japan, but he wasn't Japanese, only THOUGHT he was). I didn't think that was super authentic either perhaps, but it was (at least as he presented it) probably much more so than OA.

Well, Bushido (we are talking about the FGU one, right) was arguably a bit better researched than OA. Also, by being very explicitly set in a Fantasy Japan, with no pretensions of pan-Fantasy-Asianism, it could easily steer clear of the cultural pastiche trapfalls. However, there were still some trapfalls of historical pastiche - for example, Sôhei and Yakuza basically do not belong in the same game.
That said, there was a number of idiosyncrasies and plain errors in Bushido as well. Examples are the divide between "Samurai" as a class and "Bushi" as the profession of fighter, when in reality "Bushi" basically means the same as "Samurai" and is indeed the more common term in historical Japanese; the mischaracterization of "Shugenja" as Taoist elemental wizards, the "Gakusho" and various other misnomers and misspellings. But again, this game is even older than OA.

However, there is one important aspect here: You speak of your enthusiastic "not-Japanese" friend's appreciation for the game; nowadays many would probably just call him a weeaboo. (Or has that term shifted to positive self-identification like Otaku? I don't keep up with these things.)
The thing is, he was in any event likely more qualified to judge these things than the two podcasters who kicked off this whole nonsense. He was also likely more qualified than some random US citzen who happens to have Japanese grandparents.
It is annoying and baffling to me how people who are up in arms about this issue somehow think that cultural and historical expertise are genetic traits. It is doubly annoying when they don't understand how this is different from representation in movies and TV. The fact that a monolingually English-speaking American whose last name is, say, Huang, is not inherently any more qualified to write a supplement based on Three Kingdoms era China than a monolingually English-speaking American whose last name is Smith should be obvious to anyone. The fact that an American of any last name who is literate in Chinese and has a degree in East Asian History is more qualified than both of them should also be obvious.
Of course, it should be likewise obvious that Emma Stone is not qualified to visually represent a character with Chinese and Hawaiian grandparents. (Even for people who understand you cannot get too nitpicky with who you select to represent such varied ancestries.)

That is what truly annoys me about this whole "scandal".

 

[Hussar]

So when do we start burning the physical books?

Yeah, that's helpful.

"We're going to put a disclaimer on these books because, well, frankly, we're a bit embarrassed about them"

Yeah, when do we start burning books.

Bit of a leap there no?

 

[Hussar]

Classes? Well, not the barbarian. Or the monk.
And the races? The Korobokuru... well, Ainu culture was not "Japanese" during the time periods that inspire this settinng, and geographically extended over more than current-day Japanese territory. And the Ainu language is not Japanese.
Hengeyokai, no doubt. I'm unclear about what the spirit folk are supposed to be other than an "Eastern" stand-in for elves. (While I have an interest in Japanese history, I am not an expert on Japanese mythology.)

Other than that, I see your point. "Bushi", "Shukenja" and "Yakuza" should really have been fighter, cleric and thief, and "Kensai" should probably just have been "Sword master". However, in the other Japanese-themed classes we see a common in problem in D&D and its variants. Namely, designing classes along a narrowly defined archetype that describes both a profession and a very specific social position; "Samurai" being the prime example.
There were Chinese warriors, there were Chinese upper-class gentlemen (and they informed the much later self-identification of the warrior class in Japan as well as the more commonly used terms for the class usually called "Samurai" in the West), but there was never a social class that conformed closely to Japanese samurai.
Of course, such considerations have never stopped anyone from using terms like "Cleric" or "Paladin". To take these ideas into account properly in OA would have meant re-defining and changing the class system of (A)D&D, possibly by adding a layer of social and cultural position over the "adventure function" class. Considering that D&D and its descendants have not been able to do something like that in the 35 years past, I think it would have been positively too much to ask of a supplement of that age, and one which was hacked together in a few months from all I hear.

Umm, you realize the "Korobukuru" and "Hengeyokai" are Japanese words right? Bush, Shukenja, Yakuza, Kensai (literally sword saint) Sohei and yakuza are, again, all Japanese words. The equipment section is nearly 100% Japanese - the armor even uses the Japanese names for the parts of the armour.

Like I said, they pretend that Japanese is the only culture that matters.

 

[Mirtek]

Not every old chinese guy is an antiquities dealer with magic artifacts and mastery of the five-finger death strike technique.

But only that's the Shop keeper worth interacting with in a fantasy RPG. The normal dealer of mundane stuff is often not even worth the most basic description.

Players: We go out to buy a couple of ropes, hooks, blankets and rations for our expedition into the mountains
DM: Ok you spend 3 hours browsing the various stores. Make a roll to see whether you can negotiate some discount

The ordinary peddler not even gets a most basic description in this scenario

 

[Mecheon]

I'm unclear about what the spirit folk are supposed to be other than an "Eastern" stand-in for elves. (While I have an interest in Japanese history, I am not an expert on Japanese mythology.)

I get the idea they're vaguely supposed to be a catch-all for figures like Kaguya or half dragons the like, sort of less 'elves' and more 'half-elves'. But their whole lack of any big flavour like that is one of the reason I'd probably look at ditching them

 

[Wulfhelm]

Umm, you realize the "Korobukuru" and "Hengeyokai" are Japanese words right?

The latter is, and I thought I had made that clear enough. The former is (spelling aside) a Japanese word in the same sense that Djinni or Manitou are English words.

Bush, Shukenja, Yakuza, Kensai (literally sword saint) Sohei and yakuza are, again, all Japanese words.

Yeah, I know it was a long post, so maybe this got muddled, but it would be kind of you to read it again before you respond. I know that all these are (again, spelling aside) Japanese terms.