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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8612548" data-attributes="member: 6790260">To give you the exact words of his assertion--which, I will note, is him responding very specifically to people who were saying that literature written for children was, necessarily, inferior to literature written for adults--here is the full context of the relevant quote from On Three Ways of Writing for Children, emphasis in original:Note, here, that he separates "adult" as a term of approval (as in, "this fiction novel is superior because it is adult, rather than being merely for children") from its use as a purely descriptive term ("this adult fiction novel describes the life of...[etc.]"). You appear to be speaking of it purely in that descriptive sense, with which there is no issue; some fiction is written with children in mind, other fiction is written with adults in mind. Some children may enjoy some literature intended for adults, as I did when I was a kid, and some adults may enjoy literature intended for children, as we all of us do because D&D is very literally us writing our own fairy tales together.Indeed, I suspect, apart from some of the darker aspects that D&D can engender (e.g. greed, murderousness/callousness, tribalism), Lewis would actually have been genuinely delighted by the existence of roleplaying games and their culture of writing one's own fairy-tales with personally-invested characters at the helm. These elevate the fairy-tale fantasy even further. Instead of merely empathizing or finding common cause with the heroes of the tale, roleplaying games allow us to become the heroes of the tale. Instead of merely witnessing the moral choices of others and learning from them, we get to make moral choices in a safe, IRL-consequence-free environment. Instead of thinking words of encouragement or kindness for those who are struggling to do the right things for the right reasons, we ourselves struggle to do them.Surely it depends on what one means by "defanging it and cleaning it up." Half-orcs being the product of sexual assault was never positive nor productive, it was just a crappy idea that got retained because MUH TRADISHUNS, and we are all better for its removal.* Drow being exclusively misandrist, murderous, backstabbing dominatrices who are the only elf POCs (except the allegedly-few Noble Defectors, like the veritable mountain of Drizzt clones) was not particularly good for the game either, and a better, more interesting space of stories can be told when this race is more complicated. (It's not like we don't have plenty of enemies literally made of evil and/or madness still.) Failure to include the Realm of the Fae in D&D cosmology was an understandable but persistent error, to the point that even people who otherwise despise 4e recognize that its addition of the Feywild to the mix was an unequivocal good.So...frankly most of the "fangs" being removed are ones that were biting where they shouldn't have been, and much of the cleanup has been to produce a game that really does expand possibilities and the mythic/narrative space, letting us do more, rather than less.*Especially because it is totally still possible to have "my mixed heritage has mostly been a source of drama in my life" without any of the horrific-assault aspect. I would know. One of my players, currently on hiatus for health reasons, plays a half-orc who has a troubled family history with exactly zero assault involved. I was quite pleased with his cleverness on that front and have leaned into the story as a result.</blockquote>

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