Search results

I think it is very easy for people to completely dehumanize those they disagree with, oppress or otherwise persecute, regardless of time and place and what the perceived differences are based on. The NPC meme from 4chan springs to mind as an example of how people in a modern, enlightened society...

I can't say that I am convinced that miscenegation is the central theme of Shadow over Innsmouth. It seems to fit the recurring theme of personal body horror that you see in stories like Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, The Rats in the Walls and Pickman's Model, which I...

If people did exercise their brains a bit more and did not make frivolously inappropriate comparisons between people they disagree with over one point or another, and people who commit crimes or outright atrocities, it might go some way to create a less polarized society.

I objected to comparing Lovecraft to a rapist and a sociopathic child molester and necrophiliac. It is both inappropriate and inaccurate. Besides, Lovecraft does have a prominent place in D&D and the literary genres it draws from, his prejudices do not change that. However, Wizards of the Coast...

In Warhammer 40,000, the heroes are never really people with actual power. Instead you have heroes who fight on the periphery of the Imperium, like Space Marines, Rogue Traders, Inquisitors and military commanders who simply do their best to shield mankind there and now. The real power in the...

It would make more sense to merge the substantial holdings of the baroness with the royal holdings. Kings really depend on the holdings of them and their families to support them. The logical thing to do would be to marry off the second child in a politically advantageous match, like a foreign...

Note that while Lovecraft was prejudiced (and very much so), he never actually harmed another human being (at least as far as I am aware) or even do something like engage in politics with the intention of enforcing his prejudices in society. Both of the people you mention are criminals who...

I was thinking of fantasy literature and roleplaying games, not mainstream media (though maybe Vampire embraced some of the MTV aesthetic?). And regarding early fantasy literature, that is part of the point I was making. Back in the 30s, a bit of racism was practically a selling point to the...

A lot of the stuff that is being aired in this thread isn't really anything new. Racism and whatnot has always been a sensitive topic, but I feel that the preferred solution until relatively recently was to avoid racism by not including black people, which also applied to fantasy literature and...

Even if Wizards of the Coast decided to put out a new Dark Sun sourcebook, would it be the same without the art by Brom?

I'm pretty sure that large-scale plantation slavery is only really profitable if you have a steady supply of working-age adults that you can ruthlessly exploit until they drop dead. Incidentally, there were sugarcane plantations around the Mediterranean before the industry moved to the Americas...

I don't think the Teutonic Knights considered the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians to be anything but sub-human, and the former were largely displaced or exterminated and replaced with German colonists in the European Crusades. I also cited some other examples, like the casteless of India or the...

Maybe we need safe spaces to trivialize things in order to deal with them, like fiction and games. Roleplaying games is a safe place to do trivial, stupid or silly stuff with serious issues without harming anyone or trivializing the experiences of actual people (or looking like a fool in...

A history professor whose lecture I attended described it as Latin America and the Caribbean having a scale of blackness and whiteness, as evidenced by historical personages like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas and Joseph Bologne, whereas the US quickly developed its black-and-white "one drop does it"...

Yes, the famous American arrogance. Kind of like how this thread would make it out that D&D was somehow ever dark and brooding when even Dark Sun and Planescape look like Disneyland compared to, say, Warhammer.

Was there any particular difference between slavery in the US and slavery in the Caribbean or Latin America? I had the impression that the latter two churned through people at a greater rate, given that they consumed the vast majority of the slaves brought over as part of the transatlantic slave...

Not to nitpick, but I think slavery at times may have stemmed from a need to literally import people. Scandinavia for example is extremely barren and has historically had a small population relative to its size, so it makes perfect sense for the Vikings to raid for people and force them to come...

Well, the Western "scientific" concept of race at least. While it did make use of morphic differences between different human populations which exacerbated the difference between slaves and non-slaves, you get something similar in all cultures. Like how Russians literally call Muslim Caucasians...

It's kind of hard to say what has happened or hasn't happened throughout the history of the world, but now that I think about it, race-influenced slavery isn't entirely unique to slavery in the US. While the caste system in India isn't exactly slavery, it does come quite close as it severely...

As far as I can recall, most games also put slavery in the hands of evil societies like orcs or dark elves, which kind of oversimplifies things, but also makes it, if not family-friendly, then at least a non-controversial evil, like environmental destruction in The Lord of the Rings.