To me it's more simple than this.
First, DL is no different from JRRT's work, with has a more-or-less identical cataclysmic event in the Downfall of Numenor. But none of these critics of DL are out there attacking The One Ring, Adventures in Middle Earth, etc, or saying that people who enjoy the LotR films are endorsing genocide. There's a fixation on DL that (to me) is quite unexplained.
Very easily explainable.
One: Why would you assume that people who have read or played in Dragonlance are LotR fans?
I'm certainly not. And all that stuff was, as far as I can tell, from
The Silmarillion and not from LotR or the Hobbit. So why would people who are not die-hard fans know or even care about it?
Two: As far as I can tell, Eru Ilúvatar is not statted out to be Lawful Good for a system that has rules about what that entails and what happens if you act against that alignment. Nor does D&D say that gods are exempt from these alignment rules or that genocide should be considered acceptable if it performed by a god.
Three: I at no point ever said or implied that
you or anyone else were endorsing genocide. I didn't even say Weiss and Hickman were endorsing genocide. What I
said is that the "Gods of Good" in Dragonlance performed a massively evil act by committing genocide and shouldn't be considered to be good-aligned. If you're taking this
that personally, maybe you should just put me on ignore.
Edit: Four: This thread is on Dragonlance, not LotR.
Second, DL is a work of fiction (as is JRRT's work). It doesn't depend for it's narrative power on believing that there was an actual Flood decreed by an actual God. It depends, rather, on the reader being familiar with that story as a cultural artefact. Someone can be an atheist and yet understand a story that uses the tropes of the Flood to present the question of the relationship of human action, and political power, to self-destructive and self-defeating hubris. Not everyone will find the story compelling - they might think it's silly, or think that concerns about power and hubris are essentially obscurantist (eg a certain sort of Marxist might think that). But for anyone familiar with the story of the Flood, the story should be comprehensible.
Attacking it as a tale about genocide is just a bizarre misreading.
One: Nobody has said it's a tale
about genocide. It's a tale that
involves genocide that's being treated as an acceptable thing.
Two: We all realize that it uses the tropes of the biblical flood. I, for one, am trying to respect this forum's rules on not talking about real-world religion by keeping my discussion to
only the game. You're the one that keeps bringing up real-world religions.
Two-Point-One: IMO, if you have to say "this thing makes total sense
if you use this
other thing as context," when that other thing isn't even part of the source material, then the first thing still can be judged without that context.
Two-Point-Two: Just because something makes total sense if you use the other thing as context, it doesn't mean the first thing is exempt from criticism.
Three: Yes, it is a work of fiction. This is what
I've been saying for pages now. If
you can't separate the game from the real-world religion, then that must mean that you think Dragonlance shouldn't be discussed at all on these boards. If you
can separate the two, then you should have no problem addressing the genocide as it's own thing and not in how it was used in Abrahamic religion.
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