Racially diverse artwork in D&D...does it influence you?

[S'mon]

Why do you use "white," "black," and then "Chinese"?

I didn't want to say Oriental or Mongoloid, because thanks to Edward Said and co some people object to those terms. And Asian isn't a race. I could have said north-east-Asian but I wasn't sure everyone would know I meant north Chinese-Japanese-Korean, who do form a racial genetic cluster apparently.

Edit: And race is partly a social construct anyway; by most meangingful definitions there are several races in sub-Saharan Africa or east Asia. Genetically Barack Obama isn't really part of the same race as most black Americans, whose ancestors came from a smallish part of west Africa.

 

[S'mon]

spoD:
"Does being a comedy dilute the message that this world has no bigotry, or does it enhance it because we're too busy laughing to think twice about it?"

Not only no bigotry, but apparently no racial interbreeding either, or all that cosmopolitan diversity would soon be gone. It's OOTS, it's not supposed to make sense.

 

[S'mon]

The problem is that, in the United States, skin color plays a huge part in our history and society.

I'm not American, but I'm married to one, and slowly learning about US culture's unique take on race. One thing I've learned is that skin colour is a short-hand, it's not literally all about skin colour. Reverend Wright has skin lighter than many white Europeans from the Mediterranean area, but he's counted black because (a) he identifies as black and (b) because some of his facial features are just about suffciently African looking to make it plausible, although other people with similar features are counted white (eg Bob Barr). My American nephew-in-law is counted black because his dad's black, but he has dirty-blond hair! This kind of thing really confuses Europeans.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

That, and Japanese and Chinese people are about as distinctly different in appearance as Swedes and Italians. There is some overlap in both groups, but 'all Asians look alike' is a product more of ignorance than anything else. And heck, speaking of ignorance, how many ethnic groups of Chinese are there? I couldn't tell you.

There's more than 50 ethnic groups, even though in many cases those classifications were ones invented by the Communist Party who wanted to something like what Stalin did when he had all the different Soviet ethnic groups classified. And some of those Chinese ethnic groups aren't East Asian, but are more Turkic or even European related.

It's a strange fact that a Russian friend of mine felt that part of Canada (though it may have been the fact that the city we were in was mostly anglo-saxon) wasn't diverse enough because back in Russia he was around all these different East European and Central Asian ethnicities.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Mention as elements of the setting goblins, dragons, and wizards and you can from that readily accept the inclusion of a whole host of associated elements that are part of the common setting, like for example dwarves, giants, magic swords, knights in shining armor, deadly enchantresses, hideous flesh eating monsters, tomb dwelling undead, and all sorts of other things that are drawn from a common English/Celtic/Germanic mythology that runs powerfully in our imagination right back to Beowulf and the Arthurian romances.

The reason you are completely wrong is that we're talking about D&D, a game which has always included monsters and ideas taken from mythology around the world (often bearing no relationship to the "inspiration" except to steal a name), as well as much more modern science fiction and fantasy.

Where's the beholder in your supposed core tradition of English/Celtic/Germanic common mythology, eh? The illithid? Ghouls (Arabic monsters in the game because Gygax liked Lovecraft)? Isn't there a liberal element of Greco-Roman mythology wholly disconnected from this supposed basic tradition (hydras, chimeras, pegasi, medusae)? Gelatinous cubes? Ropers?

The fact is, your argument is nonsense. D&D started out as a mish-mash of everything Gygax liked that could vaguely be made to work in a medievalish setting. There is no Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic core mythology, and trying to argue that there is is just plain disingenuous.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

This is a good approach - though I'd probably make the campaign setting warmer than England, and the cultures would be a mix of sources rather than "These guys look 100% African, but act 100% Saxon".

Yeah, but - oh no! - then its culture won't look like medieval England much anymore! Now it's a setting which never existed in history, imagined as a result of disparate cultures meshing as they never did in real life!

I'm told that's a bad thing in D&D? For some people anyway. *shrugs*

 

[mhacdebhandia]

You know, it occurs to me that I never really answered the question in the topic, even though everyone basically knows how I feel about it. So I won't buy a book because it has racial diversity. But I might *not* buy a book I might have been interested in if it lacks any sort of diversity. It does depend on what it is. I read the Angus Thongs books even though the characters are all white... probably, I don't think they're actually described physically in any real detail.

I read most of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman before I realised that - unlike the normal default for English novels - the only characters whose ethnicity was described were white, and it was otherwise assumed that all the characters were black. It's interesting that I've wanted to read something like that for a long time, but even I didn't recognise it at first.

 

[Seonaid]

And Asian isn't a race.

Fair enough. But you could have said European, African, and Asian. That doesn't really encompass much, but your point would have been made.

 

[CountPopeula]

So excluding Africans from a King Arthur movie is flat-out racist?

Considering one of the knights of the round table, Sir Morien, is a black man... yes, yes it is.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Considering one of the knights of the round table, Sir Morien, is a black man... yes, yes it is.

Wikipedia claims Morien was the son of one of the Knights of the Round Table, Aglovale, who fathered him with a black Christian princess in Moorish lands.