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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8502896" data-attributes="member: 59082">Oh, right. There are so many things flying around, and it is hard to tell what is what, and when we're actually talking about, I don't know, Orcs of Thar? <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=";)" />I'll explain further my views on "disclaimer-hesitancy" below...Yeah, I edited it - accidentally deleted something before posting.OK, that's reasonable - and I certainly agree as far as having the discussion goes.But here's my main hesitancy about over-using disclaimers, or over-explicating them with specific pointers about what is and is not problematic in a given work. While I think most people will agree that Orcs of Thar is problematic as it is so blatant, it isn't necessarily the case with lots of other products, or certain tropes in D&D that get argued over, again and again.So my suggestion would be to keep the disclaimers--at least on product pages--as general as possible. Something like, "Some elements of this work may be considered problematic and do not represent our current view on such matters." If you want to write articles or vlogs about specific works, more power to you. But I don't think WotC should be in the business of educating people on socio-cultural issues. From a purely utilitarian perspective, I think that would be counter-productive and lead to numerous--and even endless--arguments. I mean, we've seen that here with discussions around orcs and drow. We know we're not going to come to a consensus one way or the other, or at least the very same view on these topics, so why enforce a singular perspective? For instance, someone way up-thread said that Orcs of Thar put to bed the idea that orcs aren't inherently racist in their depiction or that there's no deliberate connection to specific peoples in the real world, as if it somehow represented all orcs in D&D. I don't think that's the case. This supports your view of discussing specifics, and not overly extending or generalizing from the particular to the universal. Orcs of Thar is Orcs of Thar, and that's all.Yes, but only when the apology comes from the person, not when it is asked for or, worse, insisted upon. If Bruce Heard wants to apologize, he should apologize. But we shouldn't demand it.But how do you enforce this? Do people need to stand in a line and say, "I like Orcs of Thar, but I recognize it is problematic so because of that, I can continue to like it."I'm being a bit silly, of course, but hopefully you get my point. I mean, I agree that a thinking person should be able to recognize the problems with Orcs of Thar, but I can't imagine how one would go about enforcing such recognition, or keeping track of whether that recognition has occurred or not. And a disclaimer doesn't guarantee any real understanding, no matter how elaborate.Snarf's a good cat.</blockquote>

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