It's a distinction without a difference, one which I think you're artificially propping up in an attempt to defend the indefensible. Quite simply, there is no justified criticism to be made of the hobby as a whole because one thousand people choose to buy a CoC game, and anyone who feels to the contrary has no right to expect that their position be validated by others as reasonable.
No, it's different and whining about how it isn't misses it.
They're not, and you need to find it within yourself to accept that. They're demanding that you validate their feelings of persecution (i.e. they're being gatekept out of the entire hobby) because a mere one thousand people are paying for something that one person thinks is immoral. One might wonder why that person isn't capable of sufficient empathy as to realize that liking something problematic doesn't make you a bad person. But to them it does make you a bad person, and even one thousand such people taints the entire hobby enough to drive them away from it.
Yes, totally, minority players are asking me to validate their feelings of persecution and that's totally less valid than your own feelings of persecution. Totally.
Yes, you did, and that's completely obvious from reading what you wrote. When you make a declarative statement about "bad tropes," which no definition and no presentation of "in my opinion" or "to me" (which are not assumed), then you are positioning yourself as the sole keeper of those virtues. I'm just pointing out that you're not.
Can you point to the post? Because I suspect you can't.
Again, you overlook that the quoted post was one person ranting "everyone else is selfish because they won't think about my feelings!" Which of course ignores the fact that such a sentiment is far and away more selfish than anyone else. Why you keep ignoring that is beyond me, but it's not painting your points in a good light at all.
It's literally trying to describe how a minority feels. I'm sorry that hurts you feelings, but that's what it is. Again, this whole thing lacks empathy for what it is to be a minority in the hobby.
It's not worth listening to carefully; exclusionary rhetoric never is. Saying "everyone needs to do what I want" isn't virtuous, even if it's falsely framed in a context of "you're paying for a game I don't like, which means you're either evil or ignorant, and so I don't feel welcome." It ignores the self-evident truth that you can like problematic content without being problematic. There's no painting that as a statement asking for empathy when the statement itself contains none.
No one is being excluded, though. No one has been shunned, no one has been persecuted. We're talking about fiction. This is why this argument is so dumb: there's no risk for people like you being kicked out of the community. None. There is risk of minority players feeling uncomfortable about this stuff because we've literally had minority players remark on it.
What's desperate it acknowledging that you got caught in a "gotcha" (to use your words) and then trying to say "but not really" the way you are here. To repeat, no one is saying there's nothing problematic about slavery, which is what you falsely accused them of, as though the people arguing against you were longing to go back to the antebellum American South. They're saying it's not problematic in the context of a role-playing game; and even then they're actually presenting it with far more qualifiers than that, noting the context and presentation, as well as how it's only in certain games, etc.
I didn't? Trying to address your points is not concern trolling. I didn't bring up the topic,
you did.
But you characterized it all as people saying "there's nothing problematic about slavery." I don't need to set a gotcha for you; you're doing just fine on your own.
There are literally people debating how problematic slavery is. That doesn't mean they think slavery is
good.
Leaving aside that you're one again deliberately misrepresenting my argument, presumably because you have no substantive counterpoint to it, you're once again concern-trolling here. Knock it off.
lol
Dude, you took this entire thing off-topic to go to a post you misread so that it hurt your feelings. This is the most concern-trolling you could possible get.
Again, you're literally presenting your own bad arguments as mine, and then responding to them. It's a tired old technique for refusing to engage with the actual substance of the debate, and isn't something that people do in good faith. They said that one thousand people paying for a game they don't like makes the entire hobby unwelcoming to them; it's self-evident that their reason for that is because they think those one thousand people are bad people paying for bad content, and so impugns the entire hobby. That kind of anti-inclusive thinking needs to be called out wherever it's encountered, along with the people defending it.
You're really locked into a battle of words against yourself, man. I'm not presenting my arguments as yours, your arguments are just really bad. Maybe you should take a break.
A story element's role in history absolutely does matter when you're using historical elements in your fantasy world. It certainly doesn't have to be, but historical verisimilitude is a perfectly valid reason for it to be there. All those other elements you mentioned are also valid. I use them at least as often as I would use something like slavery. My favorite RPGs make a strong point of including those kind of historical elements as much as the gameplay itself makes practically possible.
The interaction argument may be valid for some individuals, but I do not buy into it as a universal issue.
But Athas doesn't really
reflect any sort of history. You talk of "historical verisimilitude", but not all ancient societies had slavery or used them in the same way, and Athas is more based on Sword and Sorcery fantasy, which is distinctly
not historical.
And you say that those elements are valid, those aren't ones that you are pitching for in Athas. Those are way more important, yet they do not break "historical verisimilitude". This argument would be more honest if we were just trying to compare it to Howard, because that's where it
really comes from, with a bit of Hollywood.
It depends. Do we all agree on what the problematic parts are?
Do we all need to, or is there a consensus? In the last thread we had someone trying to pitch Lovecraft as not really racist before they got banned. Do we need to consult them on the matter?
At the end of the day, it will fall to side arguing and convincing. To me, it feels a bit like one side already thinks it has lost that.
