I'm starting to think Paizo was right to announce that they're not going to include slavery in any form in any of their products anymore . . .
I was thinking the same thing.
Here in 5e Spelljammer, the hadozee are monkey-like not-slaves who enjoy being slaves (on spelljammer ships). They love serving their masters (the elves). But their masters dont even respect the hadozee. It is something like a "voluntary" slave race.
This is sickening.
It isnt that writers cant handle the topic of slavery well. For some reason, the reliance on D&D "traditions" and the immersion in "traditional content" seems to skew the ability to handle these sensitive topics well.
5e has writers that care about these issues. This makes the publication of this slavery content, all that much more glaring.
I suspect the hadozee descriptions got passed the cultural sensitivity consultants because the artwork for the hadozee includes the reallife spectrum of human complexions. There are blond White hadozee as well.
But in this case, it is the narrative itself that is off − and parrots problematic racist tropics when handling the slavery theme.
There was zero reason to inject the creation of a slave race into the origin story of the hadozee. And no reason to have "saviors" liberate them. And no reason for the hadozee to experience "joy" when serving their masters on spelljammer ships. And no reason to have their masters disrespect the hadozee. All of this is such a self-inflicted wounded.
And while not all images of hadozee have human dark complexion, the one they feature does, and with minstrel-esque instrument and costume.
Yikes. There was no reason to go there in the first place. It is like when trying to squash down a racist trope in one part of the D&D tradition it ends up popping back up somewhere else in the D&D tradition.
Maybe it is better to avoid the topic of slavery?
At this point with slavery untouchable, Dark Sun, like the Spelljammer planet Fyreen, might as well be hurled into the blackhole. Which is disappointing, because the Dark Sun setting was one of the last settings that was truly free from the oppressive (and sometimes racist) D&D gods.