NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8497795">My feeling on this stuff is I am going to need the time and interest in a thing to examine it fully enough to really give any conclusion on it. So I haven't specifically weighted in on the products in question beyond my initial impressions (which I think is fair). I have only really been responding to other points that came up in thread that I felt I had enough awareness of to comment. I do think though, people need to understand that different people might come away from a product with different conclusions about how much of an issue it is (and people will have differing attitudes towards media that is older, especially if it reflects things that were in the broader culture at the time). And no one is obligated to examine a product they have no interest in reading. And even if people agree the book has outdated ideas, is racist, or at least crosses some kind of line, they are going to have differing views on how that should be handled because it is going to be balanced against other considerations (like freedom of expression and making sure people who want to buy a book from D&D's past can do so: whether that reason is to play the game or to analyze it for problematic content). Personally my view on old books is it isn't much of a surprise to find things in them that go against current sensibilities. You watch old movies, you read old books, you encounter statements that are bad, and as a reader I think your responsibility is to determine for yourself where you think that fits in terms of whether it was normal for the time, or not. But you also need to be able to engage older content and not allow that to be the only thing you see. Otherwise you are going to have a very hard time analyzing primary sources evenhandedly, and you are going to miss out on some rich culture. There are plenty of books I've read where the author inserts some idea that I find objectionable and it makes me do a double take, but I don't allow that to disrupt my enjoyment of it if there is other worthy content there (not saying this book rises to that level, as I haven't read it----just as a general rule I think we are much better off giving people room to determine for themselves how they are going to feel about old media with things in them people might object to now, rather than insisting people agree with conclusion X about them, or agree that something must be condemned and something must be done about it.</blockquote>

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