So the description of drow fit here? Clearly the larger females are representative of black widow spiders but people claim it’s about misogyny. You know, all those tales of sadistic giant women out there.
decadent, intelligent sadists. I hear drunk dudes yell that at minorities all the time.
Or gnolls? Canabalistic demon worshipping savages. But when you apply lazy to them or a bugbear now it hits too close to home?
I get your point or maybe your motive but I simply think it’s a Rorschach in most cases and people are locked and loaded and ready to find it.
for what it’s worth, I don’t like forced alignment of sentient species on the material plane. I am fine with evil societies that usually produce evil or lazy monsters with some that escape and are more free to be heroes. Free will and all that.
But it does not matter how alien you make the humanoid, folks map it onto some real world thing. Disingenuous nothing.
and when you say “word for word” you mean a single phrase? how many phrases in a row do you see in stat blocks that refer to negative stereotypes about people?
this group is “lazy” or that group is “greedy” that group is “violent.” So we cannot use those generalizations for monsters in the game?
hard pass.
THIS is exactly why I hate the fact that the discussion has been hijacked by the folks who want to expand the issue to include biological morality.
1. Since when are drow females larger? That's news to me. Now, the fact that the only matriarchy in the game is evil, men hating women who enslave men and worship a black widow spider goddess is pretty on the nose when you want to talk about misogyny. This is pretty much the textbook description of feminism in the 1970's. Add on the whole Ham thing and it's just seriously icky.
2. You hear drunk dudes use words like "decadent, intelligent sadists"? You have some seriously well educated drunk dudes in your area.
3. Who is complaining about gnolls? Please. I'm really, really curious. When did gnolls become an issue? What in the gnoll description copies, nearly word for word, racist treatises?
4. No, folks don't "map it onto some real world thing". They really don't. No one, AFAIK, is worried about describing gnolls as evil. Nor bugbears AFAIK.
5. As far as "word for word" goes, there are two points here. Firstly, why are you stuck on the stat block? There's a lot more to monster descriptions than a stat block. Now, if we're talking about the full monster description, I'll defer to
@Doug McCrae, who has repeatedly posted exactly what the problematic language is. If you don't know it by now, please, I ask you, take the time to read what's actually being written before replying.
6. A monster being greedy or violent or whatnot, is perfectly fine. You'll note that no one really has an issue with Red Caps here. The reason there isn't an issue is because the description of Red Caps isn't directly quoting, again, practically word for word, racist texts of the recent past.
The reason that it is so hard to have this conversation is that people are conflating a bunch of different issues, other people are trying to expand the issue infinitely without any end game in sight, and still other people are weighing in without actually having done any background reading into the issue. No wonder we get people saying things like "hard pass". I get it, it's confusing as all get out. I'm very much of the opinion of solve the real problems now that are affecting real, living people, right now, and worry about the other, mostly hypothetical stuff, later.
