Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6680102" data-attributes="member: 4937">Comic book guys didn't have an occult scare causing a moral panic just about the time their intellectual property was gaining wide acceptance.  No occult scare, and D&D would be right up their with Marvel.  CBS cancelled the D&D cartoon despite it being one of the most popular shows in their line up, largely due to concerns about how dark it's material was.As it is, D&D is suffering the way the comic book industry did following its own moral panic in the 1950's.  It took a lot of image rebuilding and new intellectual property creation to recover from that.  In the 1950's, 'true crime' comics with brutal violence, sexual innuendo, and pulp style heavily objectified women were more popular than superhero titles and even the superhero titles tended to follow the general zeitgeist.  (As just one of many examples, the creator of Wonder Woman drew his inspiration for the character from his real life polyamorous bondage play, and admitted to filling the title with bondage and S&M innuendo.   Nor should it be overlooked that despite its sometimes silliness, one of the commandments of the comic book code was a very modern seeming, "Thou shalt not objectify women by exaggerating their sexual characteristics.", which could just as easily be a 21st century feminist criticism as 1950's puritanism.)   The fact that it was a moral panic filled with disinformation and exaggeration shouldn't obscure that there had been from the perspective of the average parent reason to smell smoke and suspect a fire.  The Comic Book code created the need for superhero intellectual property, and unleashed Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.  Once you had a whole generation of kids growing up with wholesome comics, complaints about the medium itself could reasonably fall on deaf ears.Something probably similar applies to RPGs.  Only after the medium establishes that it isn't geared primarily to the young and mainly engaged in shock and titillation is it going to be accepted as an art, at which point it is 'allowed' to investigate darker themes without provoking moral panics.  The lesson here I take away from all this is if you want to guide a new medium into acceptance and profitability, you should probably start with things with wide appeal rather than immediately hitting out for gritty and grim subject matter.   Imagine what it would have done for animation if Disney had made some of the darker anime rather than Snow White.  (In fact, the reason everyone thought Snow White would be a disaster, is that up to that point animation had largely been about crude lowbrow humor and racist jokes and no one thought it could do anything more.)   There seems to be this weird idea that because you can make art exploring dark themes, that only dark themes are art... as opposed to what Pixar for example does.The thing about non-dark themes is that almost everyone can relate to growing up, moving away from friends, and so forth.   Few of us can relate to violence and savagery in a way that doesn't border on voyeuristic.   You want D&D to get great movies and TV shows, make some D&D that has at a theme something everyone can relate to - like say Eric's troubled relationship with his dad, Presto's adolescent awkwardness, Sheila's and Bobby's fears of abandonment (orphans?  broken home?), or Diana's giddy crush when she finds a soulmate.   It was a great cartoon.  You could remake it into an even better one.</blockquote>

Verification