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Message: <blockquote data-quote="teitan" data-source="post: 8525074" data-attributes="member: 3457">I think all these conversations are tantamount to telling people they are having "bad wrong fun" myself because it is the intent of the person perceiving it as much as the artist creating it. In cases like D&D Gygax didn't have racist intent nor did he encode racist tendencies into the work. The Drow for example are a negative photograph BUT some later artist chose to interpret "ebony black skin" and "inky black skin" with brown skin tones for Gygax's demon worshiping, incestuous, murderous, genocidal underground dwelling cultists. Yes there are less than reputable people who play these games and see these things but we also have the "seer sees, prover proves" psychological theory where if you go looking for something, you will find it and once you switch gears to looking for something else you will find that something else. The big example of that that we may know from pop culture is the number 23 or the 11:11 phenomenon. Once we notice the "pattern" or we are told there is a "pattern" we begin to see the pattern around us and it becomes a very real thing and of exaggerated importance as seen in the Jim Carrey film, The Number 23. This is not to say that there aren't historical antecedents of racism that are the roots of the archetype, most often rooted in the fear of the outsider and xenophobia but the strongest fears are based upon actual experiences, whether the fear is legitimate or not. Orcs for example, in Tolkien, are rooted, by his own words, in the Mongol hordes invading Europe under Ghengis Khan and there was a very real phenomenon to this fear as the horde was brutal as it tore across the country side, implanting on the psyche of the Western mind. This doesn't excuse the idea of portraying the Orc as Mongolians, but the imagery of hordes of invaders also by extension stretches to Nazis, the Persians, the Goths, and even the European push in the the Americas, Africa and Asia. The D&D Orc to me always seem to have more in common with the Visigoth, especially in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms where they would sometimes unite under a charismatic leader and go on raids into the less mountainous regions to claim resources before stretching themselves to thin and receding back to their homes. Some people will read D&D and be offended and we have seen this since the beginning, people have looked for reasons to find the game and its contents problematic while similar games with similar content, or even more extreme content, were largely left unpillaged. In the Satanic Panic D&D was drug over the coals as Satanic and about demon worship and TSR expunged such elements from the game while other games continued to feature these elements unscathed or mentioned because D&D had the "name". Then it was the butt of jokes and swept under the rug and people played Vampire who were cool. Now we have a similar movement to the Satanic Panic, which in itself was a moral panic. We have academics looking into things, talking about things like Critical Race Theory (which I am all for), and identity politics and understanding the origins of these ideas and their roots and then it, much like in the Satanic Panic, spreads to others who, having good intentions, begin to see things instead of taking face value and telling people how they are "wrong" or "doing it wrong". I had a Twitter D&D person block me because I had the wherewithal to disagree with their assertion that pre-2014 D&D players were all prejudiced grognards who didn't want female/transgender/POC players at their tables when you can look back through this very forum and see threads going back to 2000 where we discuss these things and ways the game can reach those audiences, from Blue Rose T20 being a project that could hopefully appeal to the LGBT crowd and BESM being a gateway product that could be wonderful for bringing in women who were a primary manga audience at the time with Shoujen and similar genres being big releases for that game (as examples). D&D has indeed had it's share of problematic content from the aforementioned Drow portrayals with traditional African skin tones instead of the black, inky skin tones intended by Gygax to the Red and Yellow Orcs of the Mystara setting. Books like Oriental Adventures though I think get a bum rap though because it was produced with an intention to respect and emulating the fantasy stories and materials available to western audiences from Asian producers. It is a valid discussion but has become exceedingly broad to discuss "problematic". Problematic would be portraying Nazis as "good guys" or literally using "Birth of a Nation" as the foundations of a campaign setting. It would be continuing to cast European descended actors in Asian or Native American or African roles and vice versa.</blockquote>

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