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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6471884" data-attributes="member: 2067">There's a bit of weird nuance going on here that I think might be leading to a bit of talking past each other.You can make, for instance, the case that HP Lovecraft's racism is at the foundation of how and why he wrote about what he did and how he did. If nothing else, it was used by him to heighten the "fear of the Other" in his (presumably also pretty racist) intended audience. Lovecraft isn't Lovecraftian without bein' crazy racist.Authors don't control their imitators, though, and as society has moved on and has to some degree at least put the idea of racism into a corner and shouted at it to quiet down, those who work in a mode of "Lovecraftian Horror" might choose other elements from contemporary society to highlight the fear of the Other that leads to some of the horror in that genre. In fact, they kind of have to, because race isn't code for the Other in the same way that it was back in HP's social circle. An example of that being done pretty well is how Welcome to NightVale demonstrates how the people of Desert Bluffs or the people of StrexCorp are distinctly "Other" (while treating the more traditionally Lovecraftian Glow Cloud and Station Management as benign horrors). So, you could say that the genre owes its very existence to a deep and abiding racism, and also say that the genre has outgrown its roots and needs to keep recent if it is to remain relevant, which means, as of today, either omitting overt racism or being very subtle about it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  As D&D players, we do this all the time, of course. Every time I play my monthly game with my 6 interracial irreligious gay friends and with a woman playing the fighter, I am probably making Howard and Leiber and Lovecraft and maybe even granddaddy Tolkien all spin in their graves like kids on a teacup ride. The game undoubtedly would not exist without these influences, and it's easy to trace the lines of the game back to some really awful racism present in many of those old works (or the racism that is always present in ancient myth and legend, at least!), but that doesn't mean their disembodied ghosts get veto power over what my group thinks is a good time. And if we decided to use honor mechanics in our samurai game, it wouldn't be because Asians Are Exotic, it would be because we liked what the mechanic added to our gameplay that we wanted to highlight in that particular campaign, same as any other mechanic (and not ignoring the fact that part of the reason it exists is because of people being racist). Y'know, Nitrogen fertilizer feeds the world and Fritz Haber was a horrible, horrible human being. A things origins shouldn't limit them, but they shouldn't be ignored, either.</blockquote>

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