D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Mournblade94]

Deleted due to format

 

[Mournblade94]

You can love the material while recognizing that a lot of it is messed up and has no place today.

It certainly shouldn't be written today. But people reading RE Howard or Lovecraft is not a problem. Nor should the works be heavily edited. I highly doubt anyone is coming away from Lovecraft or Howard with negative opinions towards others. Especially in this day and age. Its just not a real problem that these books might make a racist.

 

[Mournblade94]

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying problematic works as long as you acknowledge they are problematic works. Pretending they’re not problematic is itself hugely problematic.

How does one go about this? Reading Conan and then shouting at the world there was a character that may have been racist depiction? Is it somebody's duty to go onto forums and blast they just read racism?

This is where the "recognize its problematic" gets absurd. I can recognize it but its not going to stop me from reading it, and I'm not going to go around denigrating the writers.

If I read a modern book (though I haven't really read a fantasy book published after 2018) with these tropes in it I'll be warning people. But I read alot of older writings not just fantasy fiction and this is par for the course. Its just how it was. Attitudes have already changed. At this point its just a characteristic of the books.

 

[Mournblade94]

If you tell me racism isn't problematic...You're someone with values I have no interest in understanding or excusing. It was problematic back then (just ask the majority of blaclk people living then) but accepted by the majority of those in power and its problematic now.There is no understanding that position because that position is literally anathema to who I am and discounts me as a human being... There's no reconciling that and you claiming its all perspective or subjective is frankly... insulting.

I don't think accepting that its Ok to read stories from the past with racist tropes is problematic in itself. It happened already. The authors are dead, and Lovecraft isn't getting money though I know the Howard Estate does through the license owner.

I don't the poster youre responding to is saying Racism is OK. Its not. And if this was a modern author they should be called out.
I also don't think people are enjoying Conan or Kull, or Bran MacMorn BECAUSE of the depiction of some characters. They're enjoying the stories.

 

[Mournblade94]

REH did not think he was racist. He believed the values in his stories where values he and his readers shared. He did not find anything questionable about what he was writing. If someone else does not find anything questionable, it can only mean they share those same values.

People Pick up what they want in any story. I would never in a million years ever recognize The Matrix as being a trans allegory. I love the Matrix. I saw it 10 times in 1999 and many times after. It never even occured to me and I don't quite get how it is now.

I never picked up on any racism in REH, but I don't look for it. I don't notice it. I'm not saying this as a virtue, I'm just saying when it comes to social tropes that I'm not familiar with I'm not going to pay any attention. That is not the same as endorsing it. Sometimes like in REH and Lovecraft, yes the Racism stands out. Sometimes like Tolkien I think it is alarmism and I don't see it.

But I'm going to stop enjoying the stories because they have an outdated philosophy baked in. A modern adaptation like the comics, tend to purge that stuff. Keep the original work how it is.

 

[Mournblade94]

Yes. And he was in print in the '90s, thanks, oddly enough, to White Wolf.

And Moorcock has published new works over the last 20 years, but his older stuff hasn't consistently been in print, AFAICT.

I remember talking to a girl my age who was into fantasy novels when I was like 17 (so in the 1990s!), and trying to explain Moorcock to her, and she's like "Oh you mean the crusty old dude who is in a bad prog band?" (Hawkwind, she specified, she was kind of a metal fan), and honestly, that's probably a good summary of the higher levels of understanding of him from most fantasy fans in my generation.

I've also had people, especially ten or more years younger just outright deny that Moorcock is of any importance, because they "know" that Tolkien started it all. Even if you point to specific things, some people can be very dismissive because it doesn't fit with their view of fantasy history, which is often wildly simplistic and is basically just:

1) LotR is published
2) [SCENE DELETED]
3) A Game of Thrones and Harry Potter are published (maaaybe some other '00s stuff if you're lucky)
4) and often then [SCENE DELETED] again until Brandon Sanderson or Sarah J. Maas appears

And this is actual genre fans!

It's not totally blank. People do bring him up. And Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe and a few others. You can definitely win some nerd cred by doing so, but equally, people can be just bizarrely dismissive about the influence of honestly any SF/F writer who isn't Tolkien.

Audible has the Full Elric Saga available. The new ones are there too. All about the Von Beck family and the Black Swords.

 

[Mournblade94]

Maybe?

I can't speak for anyone else, though, I bought Moorcock's books in the White Wolf edition because I'd heard about them. If I'd just seen them on the shelves in the bookshop in 1994 (and I do remember which bookshop and which part of the bookshop I found them in! Amazingly the bookshop still seems to exist, even), I would have been like "cool covers" and probably not bought them based on the blurbs.

So I think you kind of need that cultural connection.

Fantasy, as a genre, I think is vastly more generally read and popular now, in 2025, than it was in 1995 or 1985, indeed I think the big change started post-2000, with the triple-punch of the LotR movies, Harry Potter fandom (which brought a lot of adults and young adults back into reading fantasy, even as JKR was amazingly still denying it even was fantasy - separate discussion lol), and A Song of Ice and Fire Books starting to go mainstream due to how exciting they were even before the TV show (and obviously the TV show magnified this effect massively).

But the difference is, people who came in with these waves didn't tend to have much knowledge of the history of fantasy, nor necessarily an awareness that there even was one. It didn't help that many newspapers and magazines were contemptuous of fantasy as a genre in the 1990s and before, and only that triple punch really stopped that attitude being viable (but some critics were still trying to pull "all fantasy is just juvenile wank-material for zitty teenage boys" as late as 2011, c.f. the NYT's early reviews of the GoT TV series). So instead of critics talking about older fantasy novels, they acted as if fantasy basically didn't exist until the triple-punch, with the sad exception of the frankly should-be-forgotten (imho!!!) C.S. Lewis books. It was particularly face-palm-y because in many cases fantasy novels had been filling out their best-sellers lists for decades, even getting reviewed sometimes, but had the NYT, say, really noticed? Naaah (this is where someone links that insanely snobby review of The Colour of Magic).

I think the only thing to do is politely tell people about older fantasy novels and the history of fantasy, and be maybe a bit of a bore about it, but not offensive/rude, because one thing people on the internet do love, is to be right, or to know stuff others don't and that they can explain (I am not immune to this!). And just pray you're not in some Reddit thread with a bunch of HP or Sanderson fans who refuse to accept that there was really any fantasy between LotR and GoT.

The Witcher at least Geralt is practically whole cloth Elric of Melnibone right down to the potions. The stories are different, but Geralt is directly a rip off of Elric.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How does one go about this? Reading Conan and then shouting at the world there was a character that may have been racist depiction? Is it somebody's duty to go onto forums and blast they just read racism?

this is something I don’t really get. It feels kind of like a purification ritual for coming in contact with something deemed unclean

 

[Bohandas]

People Pick up what they want in any story. I would never in a million years ever recognize The Matrix as being a trans allegory. I love the Matrix. I saw it 10 times in 1999 and many times after. It never even occured to me and I don't quite get how it is now.

It's not a very good allegory. The allegory is broken. Assuming that the Matrix itself represnets the gender binary the only character who actually works as a trans allegory is Cipher, who wanted to reenter the Matrix but with a different identity. The other characters would more properly correspond to some kind of agender or gender non-conforming

 

[Clint_L]

It certainly shouldn't be written today. But people reading RE Howard or Lovecraft is not a problem.

Did I suggest that it was?

Nor should the works be heavily edited.

Did I suggest that they should be?

I highly doubt anyone is coming away from Lovecraft or Howard with negative opinions towards others. Especially in this day and age. It's just not a real problem that these books might make a racist.

Did I suggest that it was?

I have no idea what you thought you were responding to when you quoted me.