D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Bedrockgames]

The Rome-Aztec comparison is I think also useful. Both Roman and the Aztecs were massive, powerful empires with bigass legions which dominated, destroyed (physically or culturall) and bullied other cultures, but had remarkable achievements as well. Both killed insane numbers of people for insane reasons on the regular. The Romans, however, got us to all read their history, and understand their insane reasons, and our own culture attempted to convince us that all the bad things they did either weren't bad, actually (lol), or were tiny in comparison to the good. But with the Aztecs, there were the "other", and their culture was destroyed (intentionally), rather than taught to most schoolkids for centuries, so they just seem like terrifying weirdoes. I'm not saying either was good - both cultures, even when you understand them, were pretty psycho, but if you understand one and not the other...

I really don't think this is our culture's view of the bad things to do with Rome. I think there has always been a duality to our appreciation of Roman culture. Its impact and its achievements were significant, but its heavy use of slavery, its destruction of Carthage, its oppression of many different peoples, its use of violence for entertainment, its persecution of the Christians and its mistreatment of the Jews and their eventual diaspora, are all well known. but the victors weren't the Romans, they were not the ones who wrote the history. It was the Christians, who were persecuted by Rome, who wrote the history (at least in our predominantly in our culture). I have long been interested in Roman history. There are always different attitudes in a given decade about it, but there usually remains a critique of it as well. Rome can be used to invoke positive ideas about civilization but it can be used in the same breath to invoke ideas about decadence, cruelty and oppression. And I think it is significant that in a lot of media the Romans are the villains (not all, but a lot): especially films set in Judea. If you read books like Roman murder mysteries (there is a whole genre dedicated to this), the issue of slavery frequently comes up. Even something that seems very 'pro-Roman' like I, Claudius (which is an outstanding miniseries, and the book is great too), spends most of its attention on the bad things. Even in the golden age of Hollywood: you have films like Spartacus which are about a slave revolt (which ends with a massive crucifixion on the Appian Way: this is not an effort to say the bad things of the Roman empire were not all that bad).

I can't comment as much on Aztec stuff, as I mostly was interested in Mediterranean and Chinese history.

 

[Umbran]

"politically correct to be protected" list)

Mod Note:
Dismissing a position as "politically correct" is not acceptable under our inclusiveness policy. You are done in this thread.

 

[el-remmen]

I can't comment as much on Aztec stuff, as I mostly was interested in Mediterranean and Chinese history.

You are helping @Ruin Explorer's point, I think. Good or bad we tend to know a lot about the Romans (and the Greeks) in a context and as part of a larger well-examined (though still fragmentary) history. The history of the Aztecs, such as it is, is mostly tied up with European contact and decontextualized customs and rituals that make that context much harder to imagine for the average person who cares enough to think about the cultures of ancient civilizations (though Aztec is not really "ancient" since is existed 1000+ years after Roman).

 

[Scott Christian]

As a comics scholar, who frequently writes about issues of race, gender, identity, and representation in superhero comics, I just thought I'd take a crack at the question, because the point of such work is not just to identify that something is problematic, but to think about it in multiple productive contexts.

Is there a list of contexts you use? I would imagine you approach this from a formatted perspective, hence, angling the context eye and then explaining it in a productive manner.

 

[Scott Christian]

You don't remember the 80's I do.

By the context of the time no one cared. There's worse in 80's pop culture eg movies.

Not saying it's right or wrong but you're injecting modern concepts backwards in time.

Doesn't work like that.

Personally I think the Mystara gaz series is a bit pants for multiple reasons thinly veiled reskins being one of them.

Here's your fantasy Mongol rip off, here's your fantasy Italian rip off etc.

Or context it's been 30+ years since that book came out. 30+ years before that book isn't that far removed from the events of WW2.

So yeah things can change very fast in a short amount of time.

This response to this :

I think this is a poor excuse, and simply untrue. People in the United States in 1988 (the date this work was published) were well aware issues facing Native Americans. The Wounded Knee Occupation took place in 1973 just two states over from Wisconsin, where TSR was headquartered. It raised country-wide awareness of the inequalities facing Native Americans.

Rather than seeing this as a product of its time, we should be seeing it as a product of centuries of subjugation of native peoples of North America. If Bruce Heard, the author, had healthy relationships with peers of Native American ancestry, I doubt he would have written something so cruel to native cultures. At the same time, we can't let people off the hook for publishing something with racist imagery and text just 33 years ago.

I was born in 1986 in the US. I remember watching a TV show in which a kid was chastised for wearing a feathered headdress and making warcries while pretending to be Native American. So these issues were known at the time, and reflected in the media.

TSR and Bruce Heard simply chose to disregard it.

It is interesting how quickly a person forgets, and how looking at things with a wide lens is extremely difficult. Extremely difficult.

From market drivers to consumer feeds, from paying homage to backhanding, from mores to perceptions - it's all very messy; a painting on a painting on top of another painting all on the same canvas. It's nice to have someone like the OP go back and look at one (or several) of the layers. It is also nice to be open to others' viewpoints.

 

[el-remmen]

Is there a list of contexts you use? I would imagine you approach this from a formatted perspective, hence, angling the context eye and then explaining it in a productive manner.

I don't have a specific list of contexts. It is more like the contexts emerge from research and theorizing. And the multiple contexts may not necessarily be all applied at once or applied by one scholar. That is part of how scholarship works, no one person can think it through from all possible productive angles (or even know what they are at any given time), but various scholars working over time come to theorize, consider and apply them.

So for example, a guest writer on my site for public comics scholarship recently wrote about the design of Mary Jane Watson's wedding dress in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987), within the context of the AIDS crisis and public attitudes towards people with AIDS, given that the dress was designed by an actual black gay designer, who appears in the comic, and died from complications from AIDS just before the comic saw print. In another essay, I write about the general arc of the Black superhero in DC and Marvel from the 1960s to today using the introduction of Tyroc in Legion of Superheroes and its vision of an "ideal future."

I am sharing links to those examples because they are public and not behind a paywall like most more developed and peer-reviewed scholarship.

Not sure what you mean by a "formatted perspective."

 

[Scott Christian]

I don't have a specific list of contexts. It is more like the contexts emerge from research and theorizing. And the multiple contexts may not necessarily be all applied at once or applied by one scholar. That is part of how scholarship works, no one person can think it through from all possible productive angles (or even know what they are at any given time), but various scholars working over time come to theorize, consider and apply them.

So for example, a guest writer on my site for public comics scholarship recently wrote about the design of Mary Jane Watson's wedding dress in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987), within the context of the AIDS crisis and public attitudes towards people with AIDS, given that the dress was designed by an actual black gay designer, who appears in the comic, and died from complications from AIDS just before the comic saw print. In another essay, I write about the general arc of the Black superhero in DC and Marvel from the 1960s to today using the introduction of Tyroc in Legion of Superheroes and its vision of an "ideal future."

I am sharing links to those examples because they are public and not behind a paywall like most more developed and peer-reviewed scholarship.

Not sure what you mean by a "formatted perspective."

Thank you for the links. I will definitely check them out! It's all fascinating to me.

And thanks for explaining your process. It is appreciated.

I do have a question, and am treading lightly so as not to come across as combative. But do you ever worry about using a context, then having other scholars apply it, and in doing so, you (and others) redefine a work that creates negative connotations about the creator? I guess I am asking, do you contact the creators to see what their thoughts are?

 

[MGibster]

Is pretty funny, because I guarantee you would not be saying that to any non-white person whose ancestors had been in the US for three generations. I'd love to see you IRL saying to some Japanese-American that, because his great-grandfather was the last family member who lived in actual Japan, he doesn't get to count himself as "Japanese-American".

This might be an Americanism, but when most of us refer to ourselves as Italian, German, Dutch, or some other ethnicity what we really mean is that this is where our families came from. Most of our ancestors were emigrants after all. It's very common for Americans to refer to themselves with hyphens such as Mexican-American, Japanese-American, German-American, etc., etc. and usually you won't get flak from anyone for saying that. I have ancestors who came over to what would become the United States more than 250 years ago from the southern part of Scotland and the Orkney Islands.

While I don't identify myself as Scottish-American, you're right that generally we wouldn't tell anyone they were wrong for calling themselves Japanese-American, German-American, or Whatever-American. But being a German-American, Japanese-American, or Whatever-American doesn't mean you're Japanese, German, or Whatever. If I were to go to Glasgow and proclaim myself Scottish, I imagine the Glaswegians at the pub would be slightly bemused by my decidedly American accent, my lack of interest in the Rangers F.C., or my lack of fear at taking a stroll at night with a big wad of cash in my pocket. i.e. They're not going to see me as Scottish they're going to see me as an American and I think that would be a fair assessment.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Or imagine a RPG set in a fantasy world which is not a 1:1 reflection of real world history...

Yes, designers, sadly, often (over)use real world countries as basis for their fantasy ones, but why does the use of country X as inspiration automatically have to mean that country Y and Z also need to be used?

So far I have not heard any complain about that when a RPG uses Vikings as inspiration that they also have to use Navarra or the Papal States, etc...

The point is that if you explicitly take someone’s RW culture to model some country/tribe/species in your game but then you overlay it with big chunks of another RW culture’s aesthetics, religion, etc., to a great extent, it’s going to tick people off. Especially if those two RW cultures have a long history of confrontation with each other…within living memory, no less.

So Kara Tur had Chinese culture- and probably, other regional cultures- entirely overlaid by Japanese culture.

Now imagine an Arabic setting where everyone is clearly Israeli. (Or vice versa- either way, people will be put off.)

Or a Crusades setting in which the Islamic empires are all replaced by offshoots of Christianity.

Or- refining my earlier example- an American frontier setting in which all of the indigenous peoples were Caucasians.

You do see how that would ruffle feathers, don’t you?

 

[MGibster]

I think you are helping @Ruin Explorer's point, I think. Good or bad we tend to know a lot about the Romans (and the Greeks) in a context and as part of a larger well-examined (though still fragmentary) history. The history of the Aztecs, such as it is, is mostly tied up with European contact and decontextualized customs and rituals that make that context much harder to imagine for the average person who cares enough to think about the cultures of ancient civilizations (though Aztec is not really "ancient" since is existed 1000+ years after Roman).

In graduate school I took a course on Mexican history because I realized I knew more about ancient Greece and Rome than I did our very important neighbors to the south. I don't exactly regret my choice, it turns out Mexico is pretty damned cool, but I did miss out on a course about medieval magic.