It is no absurdity to point out that the argument that was made in the 1980's by those under the influence of the Satanic Panic that
"This game will influence the behavior of the people who play it"
is the same as the ones made that portraying a race or stereotype in D&D will
"Cause the behavior of the people who play it to reinforce racial stereotypes"
In both cases, the claim is that behavior will be changed. That actual harm will be done. The behavior in question might be entirely different, but the ARGUMENT is exactly the same.
Are we seriously pretending otherwise? I cannot do that. It is manifestly untrue. No matter how insulting people may find it. It is the truth.
In fact, the argument that D&D race/alignment/portrayal will harm others is rooted entirely in belief and is non-falsifiable. I cannot prove that it will not. One cannot prove a negative.
I have yet to see any evidence, even just anecdotal, that it will. I have read the reasoning. It just doesn't ring true. I am very aware of the en-vogue theories. I just find they are not convincing and they ask that I take much too many of their claims on faith.
The argument that has the most merit is: "It makes me uncomfortable and it makes others uncomfortable." Okay. But...so did the demons and devils back in the 80's. They made a large segment of the population uncomfortable.
WOTC has taken the same action in both instances...because it is the product of the same thing.
No, you are misunderstanding two points.
First off, you can't compare this to the Satanic Panic of the 80's because that was ridiculous
not because of the idea that D&D could influence you, but that people thought it could allow you to do impossible things: cast spells, summon demons, etc. That was part of why it's not comparable to what is being talked about.
The second part is that you are conflating "behavior" with "attitude". This is common mistake and you see it most often when people talk about video games, and how they don't have any effect on kids. The fact of the matter is that video games (and D&D) won't change your behavior: it won't get you to shoot up a school, it won't get you to murder your friends for XP, or any of the other big ridiculous behaviors.
It
can, however, influence your attitude. Playing violent video games, for example, can
desensitize you to violence. Similarly, if you play games with stereotypes
you become less concerned about those stereotypes in real life because the game normalizes them. The idea that media influences your attitudes is so proven that it's almost inarguable: we have commercials for a reason, and we have propaganda for a reason. Pop culture matters, and D&D is absolutely pop culture, even if how you absorb it (roleplaying) is drastically different from how you may absorb other parts of pop culture.
Will bad depictions in D&D make you an instant racist, burn a cross, commit a hate crime? No. But it'll probably desensitize you to other bad depictions, make you care less that they are there, and generally influence your attitude so that those depictions are normalized in your mind one way or another. It doesn't make you do things, but it can make you tone-deaf to the things around you by making them seem at least "alright", which is why you get offensive stuff like
Bright. And Bright's not
trying to be racist, but the problem is that it is dealing with bad tropes and in trying to work with those tropes (even subverting them) it comes off as ridiculously offensive.
And at the worst, it'll have people defend that stuff because it was normalized for them and they just don't see why it's offensive. And I'm not talking about the people in this thread, but to give an example... okay, Mortal Kombat. Everyone knows that one, right? Well, when they released their 2009 game, Sonya Blade looked like this:
Well, when the next game came out in 2015, she looked like this:
And when that happened, there was something of a minor naughty word fit with some of the fans. They said they were making her ugly, they were "desexifying" her and all sorts of stuff. That wasn't just being guys being stupid and horny, but them reacting to basically being shown that what they liked before maybe wasn't that great. They had been taught that the former image was alright, and when the latter came out they felt like they were being told they were wrong. And that's the sort of naughty word you get: if you just let stuff sit, you let it fester and entrench itself. Video games has a problem with objectifying the naughty word out of women, and hell even TTRPGs have had that problem: we all have seen chainmail bikinis on covers before. You normalize something and it becomes harder to change when you know it's probably not a great thing to have.
That's the sort of attitudinal change that happens in things like D&D if you just let bad stuff sit. Again, no one is likely to go out and murder someone for Gruumsh. But you can tell people that stereotypes are cool in D&D, and if they are cool in D&D, people will be more okay with them in real life. That's the influence of pop culture.
