What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Cordwainer Fish]

Yes, but the central motif reflects his own anxieties over congential madness, as both his parents died in mental institutions. As far as I am aware, Lovecraft would not have personally feared having an undesirable ancestry.

Lovecraft wrote "Innsmouth" amidst the horror of learning one of his great grandmothers was... WELSH!!!

 

[Minion X]

I reject the idea that that shows a "need" for slavery at all. In fact Scandinavia is a counter-example - as you actually point out!!! The small population was the result of the land's low carrying capacity with the agricultural techniques the Scandinavians used. Bringing in more people did not make the land more efficiently used - on the contrary, it created more mouths to feed on poor land. The slaves were brought in not at all out of need, but entirely out of greed - greed for their free labour, and from the fact that the Scandinavians could, and did, underfeed them and kill them when they weren't helpful, which wasn't as viable with other Scandinavians.

Let's be clear: the Vikings, glorified wildly by history, were violent, greedy people who operated by stealing from others, and helped set the stage for the worst excesses of later colonialism. Indeed with were "colonizers" themselves, and of a very unpleasant kind. They didn't need slaves any more than they "needed" the gold from Lindesfarne or wherever. Honestly you can make a better moral/ethical (or rational) case of justifying their colonialism in the British Isles (due to the crapness of the land they inhabited) than you can their slaving.

A genetic study made the news recently that showed a large influx of people occured during the early Viking age. While they obviously don't go into too much speculation about the whys and wherefores, the influx was traced largely to areas known for Viking raids, like the Baltics and Ireland. There were still enough thralls in the Nordics during the early Middle Ages that freeing them was a popular cause among the clergy, At that point, no one had been raiding or trading for slaves at a noticeable scale for almost two centuries, so obviously a lot of the people brought back from raids and slave trading were not starved to death or killed, and ended up as part of the local population. This has nothing to do with morals or ethics, it is simply an example of how slavery played out at different times and places. The Vikings were no worse or better than anyone else in their day and age, or human history up until that point. And people spread, conquered and were conquered all the time everywhere. Like the various empires of South America, the pastoral Bantu who spread across Africa and displaced, enslaved or exterminated countless tribes and peoples, the Celts and the Germans who spread in waves across Europe, the Huns and the Mongols across the great Eurasiatic steppes, the Yamato who crossed the sea to Japan and crushed the peoples who had lived there since the Stone Age. Even now I look at the world and wonder if we will seem any different to future generations.
And raiding was a perfectly normal activity before modern times, and is still a thing in many poor countries. Like how the great national epic of Ireland is about a cattle raid, but with magic spears and giant dogs, or how cattle herders in parts of Africa go armed with assault rifles to fight off thieves.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As far as I am aware, Lovecraft would not have personally feared having an undesirable ancestry.

Do you personally know any living overt racists? Do you know why the “one drop” rule and “paper bag” test were created? Have you not heard of how white supremacists have been reacting to the ancestral DNA results of white supremacists, including their own?

Here’s the key phrase: “fear & loathing”.

One of my aforementioned cousins who has- so far- not fully embraced antisemitism after the revelation of our shared Jewish ancestry has also not fully abandoned it as well. He’s lived with that knowledge for 20+ years now, and it still gnaws at him sometimes. It’s almost a forbidden topic around him.

And he’s never been as invested in his bigotry as HPL was in his.

 

[bloodtide]

Oh, for Pete's sake. Nothing is being removed, at least not from WotC's content. The material is still available for sale as pdfs. It's just not being updated to 5e.

Ok, but when WotC makes Thay "the only place in D&D where bad guys come from" for 6E it will have all the "bad" parts removed, right?''

Radiant Citadel is a recent publication inspired by a variety of real world cultures.

And how dare WotC use a real world culture as a base: it's always wrong and offensive. They got to fix this like they did for the the "wandering people" in Ravenloft and the Hadozze in Spelljammer.

 

[cranberry]

That removal or toning down of controversial/potentially bigoted material from a game leads down the path to facism is an amazing perversion of Niemöller’s admonition.

If you give some people an inch, they'll take a foot, and this has the potential to lead to a slippery slope. These kind of things don't happen over night. One day you wake up and find....

Boiling frog - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think it is very easy for people to completely dehumanize those they disagree with, oppress or otherwise persecute, regardless of time and place and what the perceived differences are based on. The NPC meme from 4chan springs to mind as an example of how people in a modern, enlightened society can find a way to cast ideological opponents as literally soulless extras in a world where they presumably are the real players.

Again, “dehumanizing” is not quite the same as defining someone as “not human at all.”

 

[Justice and Rule]

Ok, but when WotC makes Thay "the only place in D&D where bad guys come from" for 6E it will have all the "bad" parts removed, right?''

Is that actually a threat? Like, do they not make bad people come from places other than Thay now?

And how dare WotC use a real world culture as a base: it's always wrong and offensive. They got to fix this like they did for the the "wandering people" in Ravenloft and the Hadozze in Spelljammer.

I always find these sorts of cargo-cult admonitions to really show how deeply people don't understand the criticisms of what game companies borrow from cultures and what they don't.

If you give some people an inch, they'll take a foot, and this has the potential to lead to a slippery slope. These kind of things don't happen over night. One day you wake up and find....

Boiling frog - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If you give some people an inch, they'll take a foot, and this has the potential to lead to a slippery slope. These kind of things don't happen over night. One day you wake up and find....

Boiling frog - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

As was pointed out by another poster, the mindset of people hoping to minimize the continued expression of harmful content in RPGs is the polar opposite of people who want to supress knowledge of RW atrocities. Spelling it out: the former hope to reduce future harm (empathic). The latter want to erase the fact of past harm, some with an eye towards being able to replicate it in the future (sociopathic).

The Venn Diagram of these two groups’ goals have little, if any, overlap.

 

[Minion X]

Do you personally know any living overt racists? Do you know why the “one drop” rule and “paper bag” test were created? Have you not heard of how white supremacists have been reacting to the ancestral DNA results of white supremacists, including their own?

Here’s the key phrase: “fear & loathing”.

One of my aforementioned cousins who has- so far- not fully embraced antisemitism after the revelation of our shared Jewish ancestry has also not fully abandoned it as well. He’s lived with that knowledge for 20+ years now, and it still gnaws at him sometimes. It’s almost a forbidden topic around him.

And he’s never been as invested in his bigotry as HPL was in his.

I'm from Scandinavia and overt racism is rare here. In fact, I don't recall hearing a single adult ever demean someone based on their ethnicity, religion or sexuality while growing up. I have come to appreciate this a lot.
I think the bit about people taking genealogy tests and realizing that one of their ancestors was from Africa or was Jewish was mentioned earlier in this thread, which is why I noted that it would be unlikely for Lovecraft, who was from a wealthy Anglo-Dutch family and could likely trace every root of his family tree all the way back to Europe with utmost accuracy, to fear having an unknown African ancestor. Jewish ancestry would certainly be possible, but since the person in question would have converted to Christianity and left Jewish culture behind, it would probably not have caused him undue distress. I believe Lovecraft made it clear that he considered Jews, at least European Jews I presume, to be ethnically acceptable, but he despised their culture and religion, in part because he resented Christianity displacing native European beliefs. One of the terrible things about the Deep One hybrids is that they appear perfectly normal until later in life, whereupon they begin to change into monsters. I can't really draw a parallell between that and anything about race, but the parallell between such a metamorphosis and the late onset of congential insanity is pretty obvious.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then your analogy, that removing "red" from the crayon limits the colors you can use/the stories you can tell, is by your own definition completely false.

Sure it does. It limits you from using red.