D&D General The Human Side of D&D History - From Gary Gygax to Temple of Elemental Evil

[Future_Monkey]

Nothing I have seen that he's said strikes me as being among the worst or uncommonly bad.

Accusations of sexism in the 70s was quite common as there was an explosion of interest in equality in the workplace. If you get called out enough, it is also the nature of middle aged men to snap back with sarcasm.

I won't condemn the guy for having a few common, human flaws at the time.

I love how we're both-sidesing sexism in this thread.

 

[Future_Monkey]

I might agree with you if there was literally any attempt at pointing to those specific writings... Of course that's not happening and never really did in any serious or credible way.

Someone tried, you and others dismissed it as Gygax being sarcastic.

You also randomly included a twitter post from a person who is complaining about female space marines and wokeness, and said that Gary was right to say that he knew better about what women wanted than actual women or feminists.

 

[tetrasodium]

We’ve had at least two full threads pointing out specifics. In insane detail. If that wasn’t enough proof, then I don’t know what is.

Edit: and every time something is directly posted, the response is “he was joking”, “it’s out of context”, or “it was the 70’s and everyone was just as sexist!”

Trouble is that those "every time something is directly posted" it's tenuous at best & in no way supports the current comic code levels of reactionism, the disclaimer supporting them, or the claims themselves. That leaves us with an endless repetition of post 15 style attacks across the fence met with stonewalling & 72. Kinda weird to lob claims of sexism & such then stonewall & declare that you don't want to get into it when questioned for detail.

With respect, your reading of it being sarcasm is no more well supported than just taking it at his word.

If one is using sarcasm to negate or dispel an accusation, one needs to go rather over the top, to clearly indicate scoffing at what is being suggested as entirely unreasonable or preposterous. His passage does not do that. If it was sarcasm, I'd call it ineffective sarcasm.

No I'm not using that claim to "dispel an accusation" in any way, I explicitly asked for specific support for an accusation that was made. The tweet that alleged sarcasm★ back in post63 was embedded immediately after I wrote the words "Going to link this here because it nicely addresses this claim & you don't seem to have made any effort to support that bolded bit". The closest I might have come to shielding anything at all was to mention the ECOA of 1974 back in post 57 while questioning how accusations about gygax as a person are relevant to a book of d&d history [one largely about early d&d].

At the time I embedded the tweet I felt it was a decent choice of examples to go with what was effectively 'CitationNeeded' because the tweet was about an example that was raised in post 38 & the tweet had an excellent rebuttal that went well beyond mere implications of sarcasm. Kinda weird to ignore everything else in the tweet and that it came up alongside the request for support of a claim while jumping from that to questioning the presence of sarcasm as the tweet alleges while suggesting that I'm somehow shielding something.

So, the "club against their respective authors" are your words, not mine. I see it as merely acknowledging the reality of the man, rather than pretending at his perfection, or turning a blind eye to it.

Yes they are my words, but I didn't ask for any blind eyes to be turned. While we are waiting for support of the claim about gygax or the early d&d content itself that I initially called for we can use that same process being applied to gygax & early d&d to acknowledge the reality of how Jason Tondro's words dial in the focus on more recent publications.

As for Thaco the Clown - I'm sorry, I'm from that generation of gamers. I thought it was kinda funny.

My immediate reaction to thaco the clown was less "this is kinda funny" & more "that looks like a dog whistle". I got over it & don't think that I even posted to the threads on the topic at the time & my cursory efforts with the search function don't seem to show otherwise. Tondro's recent comments about grognards however make me question if my initial reaction was the intended one I should have walked away with though.

★ another poster who was not me also said something along the lines of "you need to understand his mind to see sarcasm in this" along with that gygax quote

@Future_Monkey not so random (see above), she said a bit more than that on it too.

 

[Umbran]

Except the the undeniable fact that I never once excused it. Not one single time.

There are always three texts: What the author intends, what is actually on the page, and what the audience gets from it.

There are many cases in which authors will try to soften or excuse someone's bad behavior without saying so explicitly. If your position resembled such attempts, that may be what the audience got from it.

 

[Future_Monkey]

@Future_Monkey not so random (see above), she said a bit more than that on it too.

Yes, I'm familiar with how stupid the anti-woke 40k crowd is. When he wasn't harassing people, or encouraging others to do so, I had the pleasure of watching Marshal Terfhamond say that he can't be homophobic because he was gay many many times (because we all apparently forgot Milo Yiannopoulos exists), before I finally deleted my Twitter account permanently.

 

[Future_Monkey]

Also, where do you get the gall to get mad about Thaco the Clown being some sort of insulting dog-whistle, while defending Gary Gygax's very explicit statement as some kind of sarcasm joke?

 

[Maxperson]

There are always three texts: What the author intends, what is actually on the page, and what the audience gets from it.

There are many cases in which authors will try to soften or excuse someone's bad behavior without saying so explicitly. If your position resembled such attempts, that may be what the audience got from it.

That's why I said many times very explicitly that he was sexist and I wasn't excusing it. If they read to respond and not understand, that's on them. Same if they just decided not to believe my words.

It isn't as if my words were open to interpretation as excusing him, which could happen if I wasn't very clear about what my words meant and were doing. You'd have to assume that I was lying in order to interpret my words in that thread as an excuse for his sexism.

 

[Umbran]

Also, where do you get the gall

Mod Note:
Folks, we need everyone to stay calm, cool, and collected here, and to not get personal with accusations. If you aren't up for that, please find a different discussion that doesn't heat you up. Thanks.

 

[Umbran]

If they read to respond and not understand, that's on them.

Honest question - are you more interested in moving forward and persuading, or placing blame?

Who it is "on" is great for the blame game, but not really constructive otherwise.

 

[Maxperson]

Honest question - are you more interested in moving forward and persuading, or placing blame?

Who it is "on" is great for the blame game, but not really constructive otherwise.

That depends on what we're moving on from. If I'm being told I was excusing his sexism, I'm going to push back on that hard, because I wasn't and don't appreciate the implication that I'm a liar about this.

In this thread I didn't post about being accused of excusing his sexism. That was tossed back in my face in a response to what I did say here, which also was not an excuse for sexism. This isn't about placing blame, it's about not accepting accusations of things I didn't do.