D&D General Demihumans of Color and the Thermian Argument

[Faolyn]

ABSOLUTELY.

And Icheb.

Poor Icheb.

I need to finish my rewatch of Picard.

 

[Steampunkette]

All these answers are way worse than her actually wearing it.

Never discount the horrid depths of a Thermian Argument.

 

[Umbran]

This seems to me to be kind of silly. Why do we have an emotional stake in peoples that are imaginary? To the extent that we invent fantastical creatures to inhabit fantastical worlds, why do we need to police our tropes or replicate our historical baggage in microcosm?

As the video you linked to states - "Only the implications and impact of that fiction actually matter."

Our fictions are not meaningless. They have impacts - both specifically on the audience, and on the culture as a whole. We are moved by fiction. Fictions make us think. Fiction is used to explore our moral and ethical codes, and to try to propagate those codes forwards, or to question or change them.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sure. Though I think saying "non-humans do not have human ethnic features" is fine. But this means they don't have European/white features then either.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with fantasy races with little to no resemblance to humans. Dragonborn are a good example of this. But a lot of the staple fantasy races - elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc. do look very human, and are therefore likely to have ethnically-coded features, even if the artist doesn’t consciously design them that way. You can avoid the most obvious features like skin tone easily enough, but there are other things, like facial proportions for example, that can unintentionally suggest an ethnicity. And in a world where whiteness is treated as the default, artists often end up unconsciously coding characters white if they aren’t consciously trying to code them nonwhite.

Furthermore, even in a hypothetical fantasy world where no races resembled humans - a setting populated entirely by dragonborn, warforged, thri-kreen, and other races typically considered “too weird” by the same people who complain of elves and dwarves being too human - would that be better? I don’t know. It feels to me like if there’s a problem of POC not being able to find characters that look like them, making sure white folks can’t find characters that look like them either is a worse solution than adding characters that look like POC.

 

[MGibster]

However, I do have an issue with every depiction of anything negative in a campaign being justified because of the type of creature, the culture or other aspects of in game universe as "a Thermian argument". In other words, sexist chainmail bikinis are IMHO stupid. But a campaign world that says "in this region women are treated poorly, it's a very patriarchal society", while not something I would do in my campaign is legitimate. Saying that a non-human creature does not think like a human, even if intelligent, is justifiable.

I ran a fun campaign where I combined 19th century American ideas about women as the defenders of home & hearth with Aristophones' Lysistrata. It was an all dwarf campaign and they were strict traditionalist with coverture, the legal doctrine whereupon a woman's rights and obligations are subsumed by their husband, in effect and the ability of "proper" women to participate in public life was severely limited. Brewing was about the only occupation that both men and women could participate in as equals. The dwarfs did take the idea of women being defenders of home & hearth both seriously and quite literally, as they were trained to fight and were the undisputed mistresses of siege warfare. This is important later.

So I deliberately created the setting with the ugliness of sexism because I wanted to tell a particular story about a society of staunch conservative traditionalist having to come to terms with the necessities of changing due to both internal and external pressures. The premise of the campaign is that the Grimké sisters, the most eligible bachelorettes in the mountain, send most of the men on a quest to gain their hands in marriage. The PCs return from their quest to find that the women have seized the government building and are demanding both the end to coverture and the ability to participate in civil life. After seeing the wide world for the first time while on their quest, the PCs now have to figure out how to balance tradition against the necessary changes for their society to thrive and grow.

I suppose I could have had the traditionalism of the dwarves expressed in a different manner. But that wasn't the story I wanted to tell.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm probably not as sensitive to it as I could be, but I also think we have made progress. It wasn't that long ago that someone threw a hissy fit at a game day because there was a mention of a lesbian couple. His reaction was that "it was supposed to be a family friendly game". In addition, some of the art is starting to show diversity, even if it isn't enough.

However, I do have an issue with every depiction of anything negative in a campaign being justified because of the type of creature, the culture or other aspects of in game universe as "a Thermian argument". In other words, sexist chainmail bikinis are IMHO stupid. But a campaign world that says "in this region women are treated poorly, it's a very patriarchal society", while not something I would do in my campaign is legitimate. Saying that a non-human creature does not think like a human, even if intelligent, is justifiable.

So I think it's two separate things. Some things can be justified by the setting. Having little differentiation in skin color, hair, facial features or chainmail bikinis is not on that list. Some of the things people would put on the Thermian list, I would not.

An in-fiction justification for something isn’t necessarily a Thermian Argument. Fiction should have some semblance of internal logic, and it’s good to have in-fiction reasons things are the way they are. It’s just that Wattsonian explanations don’t make good counter-arguments to Doylist critiques. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good, Doylist counter-arguments to be made. You may have a very good reason for why you chose to make a particular region in your setting highly patriarchal, and if so, great. Trying to defend the decision based entirely on in-fiction logic is not very compelling though.

 

[squibbles]

I don't mean this as an insult to anyone.

But there's something truly odd in people of the majority (in this case, white) telling people in the minority that their desire for representation doesn't matter, and that we shouldn't be asking for it whatsoever.

[...]

So, really, what I'm getting at is this.

Minorities need representation. It normalizes them, broadens worldview, and inspires them to see heroes that look like them, even if the race is different.

Racists use indifference to representation as a weapon. If you haven't seen this, its probably because you're not the target of it. Its real, and you need to believe us when we tell you that its real.

Hey, thank you. I'm mortified that this is functionally a thread of me "telling people in the minority that their desire for representation doesn't matter".

That's not what I think and not what I wanted to express.

I'm not really sure that I had a strong point to express other than to collect the thought fragments I had while reading the first half of Kobold Avenger's thread (before its tangent), because I kept thinking about the Thermian argument, the limitations of within-fiction explanations of things, and the switch-tracking that always happens between that class of argument and the representation one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So @Kobold Avenger started an interesting thread about diversity in D&D--in fantasy worlds broadly, really--and the degree to which 'races' that are not humans ought to be more representative of IRL humankind than they tend to be. I wanted to reply to that thread with a long and pedantic post, but at about 5 pages in it meandered into a long comic tangent about Dwarven luchadors (you do you, folks) so I am starting a new thread instead. A brief recap of that OP (if it's not still on the front page):


There are some pretty obvious practical ways to handle diversity--inviting players to be co-creators of the setting and the peoples that live in it, imagining settings that are diverse to begin with, or, in an established setting, having generally modern sensibilities about ethnic difference--but the elephant in the room whenever this topic comes up is that elves, dwarves, and what have you are imaginary. Their differences are constructed from nothing but pop culture, and they can be recreated as symbols for anything a prospective DM, author, or screenwriter wants.

Any argument about what they are/should be in any particular setting is, ultimately, a Thermian Argument or an ethics/politics argument. It's either:

1. The tradition of description of elves in D&D (or other property) is that they are XYZ; elves need to have XYZ characteristic or they aren't really elves.
2. Elves should inclusively represent diverse groups--thereby promoting equality/fairness--and should, therefore, be unbound by prior XYZ conventions.

This seems to me to be kind of silly. Why do we have an emotional stake in peoples that are imaginary? To the extent that we invent fantastical creatures to inhabit fantastical worlds, why do we need to police our tropes or replicate our historical baggage in microcosm? Either elves, symbolically, are just people (who arbitrarily live 1000 years), and there's no particularly compelling reason that they shouldn't look like anything that people look like. Or--alternately--elves are not symbolic of people, in which case they look like a specific thing that is purposively orthogonal to people and has no relevance to contemporary concerns.

Consider, for example, how little it matters what color the fur of a Tabaxi is. Tabaxi are about as anthropomorphic as it gets, but our diversity concerns are basically irrelevant to them. Consider also dragonborn, yuan-ti, hobgoblins, loxodons, and so on.

So, my thinking is that, unless elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes are different enough from humans that we don't care about their race-politics, they are symbolically just lumpy humans. And lumpy humans don't need a different color scheme. Moreover, we should be honest with ourselves that lumpy humans don't really add much to D&D/fantasy fiction beyond just... humans.


...FYI, my elves have four arms and camouflage patterned skin--they are a back-to-nature luddite sect of space aliens that used crystal tech to engineer themselves for arboreal fitness.

So... what about the whole topic gets you excited enough about it to create a thread? I'm just not really understanding what the point is here. Since demi-humans/humanoids/etc are all fantastical things that we have imagined, what is the point of putting artificial constraints on them?

I mean, does anyone CARE if people have Elves who have some features which are similar to those of, say, Asian people IRL? I just don't see how anyone can have an objection. Nor is it 'silly' to want to play a character who looks a certain way. Would you make an issue if my halfling wanted to wear polka dots because that isn't 'traditional' or something? I hardly think so! It might be noted as a quirk of that character, at most.

Overall I'm just not super thrilled with the logic here. I mean, it seems fairly plain to me why, say, a POC might want to play a brown-skinned character. It seems equally logical that ethnicities of non-humans might exist, and exhibit some of these sorts of characteristics, and that including such descriptions and groups might be a legitimate part of world-building, right?

So, there seems very little to discuss, overall...

 

[Umbran]

Saying that a non-human creature does not think like a human, even if intelligent, is justifiable.

Whether it is justified depends on what you're doing with it.

If you have included highly patriarchal society in your game - what are you doing with them? Are you using them as a backdrop to show how sexism is wrong? Or are you using them as a way to protray sexist ideas without addressing the harm they do? The former can be okay. The latter... isn't a good justification for having them be highly patriarchal.

 

[Oofta]

An in-fiction justification for something isn’t necessarily a Thermian Argument. Fiction should have some semblance of internal logic, and it’s good to have in-fiction reasons things are the way they are. It’s just that Wattsonian explanations don’t make good counter-arguments to Doylist critiques. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good, Doylist counter-arguments to be made. You may have a very good reason for why you chose to make a particular region in your setting highly patriarchal, and if so, great. Trying to defend the decision based entirely on in-fiction logic is not very compelling though.

If I have a patriarchal society, I have it for a reason. I'm not going to Red Sonja women (or anyone else) but many societies are patriarchal whether I like it or not and whether I think it's a good thing or not. There are certain stories - off the top of my head a riff off of Mulan - that can only be told with that kind of society.

On the other hand, for some people certain things do cut too close to home which is why I tend to avoid it or to make the societies "foreign". There's several areas I'm going to avoid unless I've run it by my players first. It's a complicated subject. Having a campaign set in ancient Rome that had accurate social standards could be problematic, or at least lead to questions of morality that personally I don't want to deal with in a D&D game for example. What I'm objecting to is that in the link provided there were aspects of the fiction that were implied to be "bad" because of in-world justification and that was the end of the argument.

Not sure how to explain it better than saying I have a patriarchal society because I think it's preferable and I'm indulging in my personal fantasy or I have a patriarchal society because it makes sense for the world logic.