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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8030173" data-attributes="member: 18">I think there's some muddled thinking here Snarf, that I'm slightly surprised to see from you!Lovecraft and Howard are out of copyright. There is no possibility of them being "removed from sale", because you can just download them, and they're historical artifacts at this point. Further, Lovecraft has rather been reclaimed in quite a cool way by minority artists, often from the very minorities who he treated as so alien and subhuman and so on, because I think in part there's a peculiar innocence and almost a lack of normal malice to his pretty extreme racism, and because what he wrote was sufficiently bizarre and peculiarly inspiring that it still had value.You say "when people realize", but people realized long, long ago. Lovecraft Country is a TV show premiering next month, with a black showrunner and black central characters, about racism in the South, but also about the Cthulhu mythos.So you can stop worrying about Lovecraft. People read it with a critical eye, and even actual racists find it's racism so odd that I doubt they get many thrills from it. Especially when, say, Lovecraft is painting the Scots and the Irish as drunken heathen degenerates with subhuman levels of intelligence. I know that even reading it as a kid in say, 1990, the racism was more mind-boggling than anything else. This made it very distinct from a lot of other stuff written in the 1920s-1950s where the racism seemed more malicious and sneering, and usually had a "superior" white man in some way lording it over darker-skinned people (who were discussed in less bizarre but somehow more nasty terms).Conan is not terribly popular today and tends to be seen as a historical artifact. Plus Howard upbraided Lovecraft for being super-racist in at least a couple of letters, which plays well for Howard being an artifact of his time and not particularly extra-racist. The racism in his work is certainly not remarkable, nor does it seem to paint everyone with dark skin as inferior or dangerous or the like (exotic, sure).TOS weakens your argument, because any fule kno it was progressive as heck for the time, and it's depictions of "imperialism" as you put it are mild as all-get-out, and further, completely obliterated by TNG and the stressing of the Prime Directive and the general open-minded curiousity and friendliness of TNG. Plus TNG has its widely-condemned super-racist second episode for everyone to talk about (even the cast condemned it, and way before it was cool to do so).It seems like the only one which aligns at all is Tolkien. Tolkien does contain problematic and somewhat remarkable racism (in that, literally all the dark-skinned people in LotR are baddies, entire races of them are baddies, and so on). Tolkien, is still, I believe, in copyright, and still profited from and has made tons of money. However, as you probably not aware, because hardly anyone is, most of this profit goes into the rather secretive/quiet Tolkien Trust (which holds the copyrights/royalties). A charity trust which then redistributes large amounts of money to other charitable causes, all of them ones which the broad left and most of the right will approve of. Charities often aren't allowed to say that they got money from Tolkien in public (some are), hilariously, but if you're involved with charities in the UK this is a big deal (and some other parts of the world too). If a big backlash against Tolkien's brief-but-definitely-racist stuff came out I suspect they might become a bit less secretive and point out how the money has been used.I also can't help but notice all your examples are from the 1960s and earlier, whereas OA is from the mid 1980s. I don't really agree with Kwan that it should be removed from sale and not even given away free, but I do think it is reasonable to point out that if you profit from something like that, whilst claiming to be progressive, that is kind of a bit much. I would suggest making it simply donate 100% of the cost to anti-racism charities focused on anti-Asian racism, and adding a health warning to it's DM's Guild page (if it doesn't have one already).</blockquote>

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