D&D General “‘Scantily Clad and Well Proportioned’: Sexism and Gender Stereotyping in the Gaming Worlds of TSR and Dungeons & Dragons.”

[Vaalingrade]

This past couple of week has been distressingly eye-opening.

It's one thing to disagree with people about a game of pretend, but seeing just these streams of terrible stuff and disjointed, nonsensical defenses* of terrible stuff just rolling out of them.

I have new respect for what OSR fans have been dealing with for decades at this point.

*but not actually a defense, we promise, just asking questions

 

[Steampunkette]

I mean… a lot of autistic people get characterized in exactly that way. I am not autistic myself, but I do tend to act more on careful reasoning than on emotion, as a learned behavior due to some pretty rough formative experiences where acting on emotion had very negative outcomes. I think we should be very careful about characterizing the actions of characters that look, walk, and talk like humans with slightly restricted or exaggerated elements as “inhuman,” because chances are there are more humans than you think who do act in similar ways. Sometimes due to cultural differences, sometimes due to cognitive or developmental differences, sometimes due to individual differences. But the range of human behavior and expression is incredibly broad, and it’s very rare that a fictional species’ behavior and expression actually falls outside of that range.

Like, take the excellent post @Steampunkette made about ways to roleplay elves, dwarves, and halflings inhumanly. It was clever and inspiring, and all of the suggestions in it could make for great roleplaying advice. But none of it is really inhuman. Sure, the lengths of time in the elf suggestions or the poisonous spices in the dwarf suggestions are exaggerated. But crippling boredom is a real human experience, often tied to depression and other mental illnesses. Steampunkette herself caught that the dwarf characterization was ultimately an autistic stereotype. The Halfling suggestions sounded like they could have been describing my partner, who has severe social anxiety.

My point is, any way you might try to characterize a humanoid species as alien is bound to fall within the range of the human experience, because that’s what we’re all drawing from to inform our fiction. Therefore, the idea that if orcs (or whatever other fantasy humanoid species) have a rich, diverse range of experiences and expression, they’ll just be the same as humans doesn’t hold water to me. Every fantasy humanoid species is the same as humans. We can exaggerate or restrict elements to create a bit of exotic flavor, and I think it’s fun and interesting when we do. But we shouldn’t let the fear of them seeming “too human” stop us from giving them rich, diverse, interesting ranges of experience. If “alien” has to mean “homogeneous,” then I don’t want my fantasy species to be “alien.”

That is a good point, but allow me to offer another reason: We're speaking English.

If I were to describe elves as entirely too for humans to understand, you'd have no idea what I meant. (Neither would most elves, since I typed "Wwooo relowqwe" into a Quenya translator)

Not only are we limited by our own experiences, we are limited by the means of communication we have to express those experiences. The inuit have an amazing word in iktsuarpok. Which describes the particular anxiety of waiting for a friend to arrive and so you keep looking out the door/window/whatever to see if they're close.

Especially applicable to American experience checking the Door Dash app (or equivalent) when waiting for a delivery, though it's subtly different.

Yes. This was particularly spectacular when this person decided to lay into a poor female colleague who was from the Middle-East and had literally been arrested over there and roughed up, and who had friends who had been tortured, detained indefinitely without trial and so on, and implied the colleague didn't know what "real oppression" was.

Called it! I love my pattern recognition, it only ever lets me down rarely but in SPECTACULARLY bad fashion!

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I haven't seen too many examples in D&D art, but I've certainly seen examples of sexy female Orcs in art. Definitely something that became more prevalent once World of Warcraft came around. And most examples of an Orc woman she's dressed almost the same way they depicted other women in fantasy. Though its probably got some players more sympathetic to Orcs.

In some ways it's subversive from more traditional depictions of women in fantasy, maybe there's a bit about an expansion of body types that are seen as "sexy" as most Orc women are depicted as being muscular. But it still has many of the same things as we got before.

 

[Charlaquin]

That is a good point, but allow me to offer another reason: We're speaking English.

If I were to describe elves as entirely too View attachment 388085for humans to understand, you'd have no idea what I meant. (Neither would most elves, since I typed "Wwooo relowqwe" into a Quenya translator)

Not only are we limited by our own experiences, we are limited by the means of communication we have to express those experiences. The inuit have an amazing word in iktsuarpok. Which describes the particular anxiety of waiting for a friend to arrive and so you keep looking out the door/window/whatever to see if they're close.

Especially applicable to American experience checking the Door Dash app (or equivalent) when waiting for a delivery, though it's subtly different.

For sure, language is a big part of what shapes our experiences. But, I do think that even if we could remove language as a factor and directly beam understanding of our thoughts and feelings into others’ heads, we would struggle even through this method to describe a fictional people with truly inhuman thought patterns and behaviors - at least assuming these fictional peoples are meant to be characters and not mere forces of plot, like in the xenomorph example @billd91 brought up.

 

[Gradine]

I haven't seen too many examples in D&D art, but I've certainly seen examples of sexy female Orcs in art. Definitely something that became more prevalent once World of Warcraft came around. And most examples of an Orc woman she's dressed almost the same way they depicted other women in fantasy. Though its probably got some players more sympathetic to Orcs.

In some ways it's subversive from more traditional depictions of women in fantasy, maybe there's a bit about an expansion of body types that are seen as "sexy" as most Orc women are depicted as being muscular. But it still has many of the same things as we got before.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0fc5d960-a801-49de-b676-62df75ad82ec.jpeg

Ah, but this can easily turn into the trope below, which is definitely a form of male gaze sexism.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ah, but this can easily turn into the trope below, which is definitely a form of male gaze sexism.

View attachment 388091

The real question is, why do human males look so much like women??

 

[Charlaquin]

I haven't seen too many examples in D&D art, but I've certainly seen examples of sexy female Orcs in art. Definitely something that became more prevalent once World of Warcraft came around. And most examples of an Orc woman she's dressed almost the same way they depicted other women in fantasy. Though its probably got some players more sympathetic to Orcs.

In some ways it's subversive from more traditional depictions of women in fantasy, maybe there's a bit about an expansion of body types that are seen as "sexy" as most Orc women are depicted as being muscular. But it still has many of the same things as we got before.

I see your green muscle mommy, and raise you a pig-nosed curvy mommy!

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Ah, but this can easily turn into the trope below, which is definitely a form of male gaze sexism.

View attachment 388091

Yes it could be that, but I've also seen an expansion of that same image where Elves and Dwarves are added into the mix. And the Female Dwarf is identical to the Male Dwarf, while the Male Elf is depicted as looking identical to the Female Elf.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The issue though is that the analogy breaks down because elves are a PC race.

If D&D elves are supposed to be aspirational, they shouldn't be a playable race. If they embody the good and noble rather than the full experience of human emotion, then they are alien and unplayable. it's already hard enough to get into the mindset of a species that lives a century before becoming an adult, let alone one who spends decades studying things like art or magic. They should be like celestials, pure and good with occasionally notable stories of those that fell to darkness.

But D&D has always treated them as pointy eared humans. With the full spectrum of alignment, motivation and emotion. Heck, two of the three iconic elf types are the "noble savage" elf and the "corrupted decadent" elf. They don't represent the Tolkien idea of humanity near perfected, they have the same range of emotions and experiences as humanity.

So why shouldn't orcs?

I don't think of elves as pointy ear humans at all. The whole point of playing an elf to me was to be a non-human character who had a completely different way of experiencing the world. In some editions they don't even sleep.

I am fine with any number of approaches to demihumans but there is nothing wrong with an approach that treats them as different from humans as neanderthals or other species of human were. We can quibble over how perfectly one achieves playing a truly non-human character. The point isn't to actually simulate being a fictional race of beings but to creatively explore it as best you can.

 

[CleverNickName]

I see your green muscle mommy, and raise you a pig-nosed curvy mommy!
View attachment 388094

Leed is best orc.