D&D General Old School DND talks if DND is racist.

[Zardnaar]

I draw similar lines. I think the Quarians have so many things going on that the "Roma/Gypsy" stuff is a bit eye-roll-y, but it's not the dominating factor. They're these amazing technologists who managed to BSG themselves, as you say, and that is the dominant impression, especially in ME2/3. I'm not here to condemn you for liking the Quarians - I'd have to condemn myself too!

I think there are a lot of "fake problems" from some people (not you) in this thread, like "OH ORCS CANT BE EVIL NOW!?!??" and stuff but it's not real. No-one is saying that. They're saying "Orcs shouldn't align with a bunch of racist stereotypes" and/or "Orcs shouldn't be relentlessly depicted as evil because there are too many counterexamples in D&D". And yeah, we can all blame Drizzt if we like, but Drow are in a similar position. Personally and honestly I actually think Drizzt "held the Drow back" though, for two reasons:

1) He's SO LAME oh my god. Even when I was a kid my "Lame-dar" was pinging him hardcore. But he spawned this legion of fans with people a bit older, and countless imitators, and became a meme before we used that word. This annoyed DMs all over the world, and was unfairly transferred on the general concept of "non-evil Drow", when in fact the problem was "Drizzt-imitator".

2) The portrayal of the Drow in the '90s books got so fetish-y and ridiculous, as a result of Drizzt books that it became much harder to even conceive of a "good Drow" who wasn't a goddamn joke.

This is all Drizzt's fault!

Yeah the Drizzt thing was a bit over the top. Iiked some if the books.

What I find funny is we're all racist and wrong yet somehow the Drow got over and are popular.

Tasha's white washed the crickets. I would have turned a negative into a positive how often do you see dark skinned being portrayed as suave, sexy, intelligent vs gang bangers. Well that's also the Drow.

Hell rewatched The Wire recently. Great show but it would offendd all these new D&D players it seems yet it seems so relevant now.

Art needs to be offensive sometimes as well. That's the whole nuance thing as well.

 

[Minigiant]

Quarians barely match any real world people. Allthey have is being a nomadic race and having an accent. Both are pretty benign as connections to real humans if that's it and there is no direct negative aspects attributed to them.

It's like if you make a race of underwater people have Jamaican accents as one ofyour core "Side of Good" races.

Really it comes down to not being nonchalant about creating villains. Especially if the majority of an intelligent race is villainous. It doesn't fly with 2020s mentalities. People who want to be silly, not think, and "just play" need to seclude themselves or buy products of authors who put in some work.

 

[Zardnaar]

Quarians barely match any real world people. Allthey have is being a nomadic race and having an accent. Both are pretty benign as connections to real humans if that's it and there is no direct negative aspects attributed to them.

It's like if you make a race of underwater people have Jamaican accents as one ofyour core "Side of Good" races.

Really it comes down to not being nonchalant about creating villains. Especially if the majority of an intelligent race is villainous. It doesn't fly with 2020s mentalities. People who want to be silly, not think, and "just play" need to seclude themselves or buy products of authors who put in some work.

This was the other one.

Volus

The volus are an associate race on the Citadel with their own embassy, but are also a client race of the turians. They hail from Irune, which possesses a high-pressure greenhouse atmosphere able to support an ammonia-based biochemistry. As a result, the volus must wear pressure suits and...

masseffect.fandom.com

Jew caricatures?

They sound like their breathing equipment. One of them a banker in Mass Effect. Pretty thin to hang a stereotype on imho.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah the Drizzt thing was a bit over the top. Iiked some if the books.

What I find funny is we're all racist and wrong yet somehow the Drow got over and are popular.

Tasha's white washed the crickets. I would have turned a negative into a positive how often do you see dark skinned being portrayed as suave, sexy, intelligent vs gang bangers. Well that's also the Drow.

Suave/sexy/intelligent goes along just fine with racism sadly.

I literally was reading about anti-Chinese racism in the UK in the 1800s, and that's basically how the racism starts out - initially everyone is like "Oooh who are these guys?! Ooooh they have good food! Oh they did my washing cheap and efficient cool!" but then people start on with "These sexy sauve Chinese dudes are stealing are white women with their sexy ways". I wish I was kidding, but that is literally what they were saying. And the we get all these "Chinese mastermind" villains like Fu Manchu, who are extremely intelligent and suave, and they're not conventionally sexy, but they're magically make white women like them (which is a racist development of the earlier idea).

Equally Arabic people have often had incredible racism directed at them, whilst simultaneously they're regarded as intelligent and/or sexy - again this is usually spun as a negative. Black people were frequently cast as not intelligent by racists (as an excuse to keep in bondage, and then later, to prevent them from voting or the like), but also cast as sexy, even "magically sexy" (let's not even discuss how gross that is when slavery is involved), and later, when there's still incredible anti-black racism in the US, black men in particularly were often portrayed as sauve, good talkers, and so on - and again this spun negatively, as like "trickery" rather than competence and a positive trait.

There is an element of backfire, which I think you're trying to get at. By making the Drow SO sexy/sexualized, by making them so cool (in how they dressed, how they fought, even, in the Menzoberranzan supplement, the kind of music they like - which seems to be basically techno/industrial just pre-synth), they got players thinking why I am playing a lame elf who lives up a tree in a forest, when I could be playing a badass elf who lives in cool dangerous giant city underground (which even seems to have neon lights in some depictions!), listens to techno, has magic powers, and fights with cool pistols and badass dual-wielding and so on?

Also, you seem to be saying "Just spin it as positive", but think about the Vistani. They were an attempt to do precisely that. It's a dangerous goddamn game.

This was the other one.

Volus

The volus are an associate race on the Citadel with their own embassy, but are also a client race of the turians. They hail from Irune, which possesses a high-pressure greenhouse atmosphere able to support an ammonia-based biochemistry. As a result, the volus must wear pressure suits and...

masseffect.fandom.com

Jew caricatures?

They sound like their breathing equipment. One of them a banker in Mass Effect. Pretty thin to hang a stereotype on imho.

Yeah that's definitely a stretch. I don't think anyone really bought into that.

 

[Azzy]

If you want orcs to be just humans with bad dental work go for it. I don't see the point. If you can explain how they can fill a niche without being just a different human ethnicity feel free to share.

That's an interesting understanding of nuance, but whatever. As for niche, this nuance allows them to fill different niches depending on their location, surrounding civilizations, etc. This is far better for worldbuilding and creating verisimilitude.

Until then, have a good one.

You as well.

 

[Minigiant]

This was the other one.

Volus

The volus are an associate race on the Citadel with their own embassy, but are also a client race of the turians. They hail from Irune, which possesses a high-pressure greenhouse atmosphere able to support an ammonia-based biochemistry. As a result, the volus must wear pressure suits and...

masseffect.fandom.com

Jew caricatures?

They sound like their breathing equipment. One of them a banker in Mass Effect. Pretty thin to hang a stereotype on imho.

Also a weak connection as a weak race from a poison world would use breathing devices and focus on noncombat roles. Especially if they are under a warrior race.

They are like the Dvar in AOE. Small commercial aliens in suits would be a full on trope if SF was bigger.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm pretty sure Oofta and others are explicit about how they're looking for a simple, no-thought-needed antagonist. That that, in fact, is specifically the "niche" that they want orcs (and other races) to fill, and losing that means orcs (etc.) no longer have a "niche" and thus for some reason need to be eliminated.

My alternative is to put orcs in a slightly different niche. Orcs are them. You know, the historical enemy we've been feuding with forever and we're not sure what started it but we're pretty sure it's their fault. And they're different to us - they are green. If the PCs are the McCoys, the orcs are the Hatfields. If the PCs come from a settlement in the shadow of a keep on the borderlands that's been raiding and raided for a hundred years the orcs are the folks on the other side of the border who have been raiding and raided for a hundred years on/by where the PCs come from.

From a Watsonian perspective they are the simple, no thought needed antagonist. From a Doylist perspective they let me give the PCs an obvious historic antagonist that even if they know I do this they don't need an excuse to fight. Are orcs evil? To them "human" means much the same that "orc" does to a human. Sometimes their leaders are evil, sometimes the orcs are coming this way because of what they're running from, and sometimes the orcs are the ones defending themselves because the human leaders are evil. In practical terms they have a strength buff because the ones you're most likely to see are the fighters - and a charisma debuff because orc.

And on a tangent this is very similar to the way Tolkien actually used orcs in The Lord of the Rings. The Great and the Good talk about how they're evil and a twisted mockery and a faceless horde. But every time orcs appear they are disagreeing with each other, and they talk like the enlisted British troops Tolkien served with in WWI.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And on a tangent this is very similar to the way Tolkien actually used orcs in The Lord of the Rings. The Great and the Good talk about how they're evil and a twisted mockery and a faceless horde. But every time orcs appear they are disagreeing with each other, and they talk like the enlisted British troops Tolkien served with in WWI.

Yeah I think that's a serious misunderstanding of Tolkien.

They talk like people Tolkien didn't like and didn't get along with. Tolkien writes two groups of people as talking like two British working-class groups. The lower-status hobbits (including Sam) talk like "country folk" - the sort of working class people Tolkien grew up alongside and got on with very well. People who were farmers and carpenters and so on. Their disagreements are minor and and easily resolved (like with Farmer Maggot). The "good" working class as they were regarded by a lot of British society at that point. Whereas the Orcs talk like, well, basically they're from the East End of London or similar. They talk like people from a big city, who work in factories, or on docks, or the like, as part of the great industrial machine. These are people Tolkien didn't like - he was in the trenches with both kinds, but I don't think it's an accident one kind became good hobbits, and the other evil orcs. Plus, these working class people were seen as "bad" working class people by a lot of British society, particularly the rarefied sort Tolkien was involved with.

He's using them talking like that to negatively characterise them - because they talk like people from the worst part of a big city - and their disputes are resolved by violence and involve petty bickering and so on (there's a lot more of this in the books than the films, even, note).

So they are a contra-point to the hobbits, but they definitely aren't intended to be some sort of "oh they're just like us really" deal. On the contrary, that stuff is meant to show they're bad.

 

[Haffrung]

Suave/sexy/intelligent goes along just fine with racism sadly.

That's expanding the definition of racism so widely that it can be applied to virtually any depiction. Give me half an hour with such a broad brush and I'll come back here with a persuasive argument that gnomes are anti-semitic.

We're back to the argument that depicting any group with strongly defined traits = morally harmful. And if that's your cause, you aren't fighting against the colonial hegemony of racist Western culture; you're fighting against how humans tell stories. You'll have to re-imagine every saga, myth, and drama in every culture. That'll be a heck of a fight.

 

[Remathilis]

That's expanding the definition of racism so widely that it can be applied to virtually any depiction. Give me half an hour with such a broad brush and I'll come back here with a persuasive argument that gnomes are anti-semitic.

We're back to the argument that depicting any group with strongly defined traits = morally harmful. And if that's your cause, you aren't fighting against the colonial hegemony of racist Western culture; you're fighting against how humans tell stories. You'll have to re-imagine every saga, myth, and drama in every culture. That'll be a heck of a fight.

You don't need an hour, you'll find that argument with a 30 min Google deep dive.