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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Medic" data-source="post: 8745237" data-attributes="member: 7035835">Everyone unintentionally allows what they say and do to be colored by the paradigm from which they evaluate reality. True, there is no such thing as "apolitical" literature. But, the gulf between a work meant to entertain and an expressly political work is so wide that the two should not really be evaluated in the same light.J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist who, despite participating in an armed conflict and openly expressing his views on numerous occasions, focused on creating a fictional world rich with myth and linguistics. His beliefs, while present and clear, are fairly unintrusive. Compare against George Orwell, who fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, whose explicitly partisan body of work still influences political discourse to this day.I do not judge the merits of Lord of the Rings by how well it explores ethics or sociology, much in the same way that I do not assess Animal Farm on the basis of how potent the prose is or how much fun I had reading it. I could - but neither work was tailored to that purpose.Bringing this back on topic, the common theme that I am seeing with many of these complaints is that the Dragonlance setting was crafted by a pair of Mormon demiliches from their crypt in Utah, and how their antiquated views do not have a place in any modern Dungeons & Dragons merchandise. Being something an enthusiast of Abrahamic lore myself, this is normally where I segue into the same tired spiel about how cultural pieces are not only the product of their period, but their environment and the society from which they originate, and how we must appraise them through this lens, and what have you, but I feel that I've rambled enough.[ISPOILER]I don't even like Dragonlance.[/ISPOILER]Their existence.</blockquote>

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