So, did he became racist because he read some text about Drows, or was he FUBAR way before ever hearing about d&d?
Yeah it's impossible to say, isn't it? But I got the impression he was a racist first and D&D just let him play out his sick ideas, potentially reinforcing them.
And here’s one with straight hair. First official monster manual depiction. Again, does this look anything like African-American caricatures, or is it an evil elf with black skin?
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You asked a question about a specific piece of art. I feel that due to the hair, it was extremely clearly derived from an attempt at a "black elf" (in the sense of the human race). So that shows, literally from the first piece of art, this was a problem.
I agree that this style, the comic-book, surprisingly mustachioed, style of Drow, didn't look like that. So we had two strands of art. But that's without getting into other issues Drow had with being sort of implied to be black, which I'm not going to go over here, because they've been covered at such length in previous threads.
Apparently My Little Pony is also
quite popular with neo-Nazis as well. People will find a way to project their racism into any game.
Definitely, and if they'd just been D&D playing without any actual ideological link, I'd say "Oh well, nazis gonna nazi". But they specifically enjoyed the whole justified destruction of inferior races deal, which has unfortunately been kind of a running theme in some D&D stuff, especially pre-1990s. It always grossed me out, but I even bumped into it with a player I played with (the "orc baby" incident I've often written about), who really should have known better. In defense of D&D, 5/6 people in the group disagreed with him (me and the rest of the players) and thought he was nuts. But I've seen plenty of people online who has similar opinions.
It's a bad example, period. Not only does it not match the description of drow as originally presented in 1978's
G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King (where that picture comes from), but as early as 1981's
G1-3 Against the Giants, it was replaced with corrected artwork (which had no problem showing an individual with black skin against a black background). Here's a comparison of the original versus the replacement picture:
EDIT: So I'm not sure why the linked image was posted at such a reduced size; right-click and choose "view image" for a non-eyestrain version.
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
On the contrary, I think it makes it an extremely good/interesting example.
Clearly people thought it was problematic on a couple of levels (both incorrect and potentially a bit racist) early on in D&D's history. Yet the same people published plenty of material that made closer passes to Drow = black people.