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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8525308" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I don't think that's what it means today.  I think it means that it has problems.Lovecraft has great stories.  The fact that if I try to read The Horror at Red Hook I'm going to be slapped in the face with his bigotry and hangups is an obstacle in enjoying his body of work in general.  His poem To Templeton and Mount Monadnock is quite a good poem, and one I found myself revisiting for inspiration when I recently climbed Monadnock again, but there are bits of racism, glorification of "New England's race" and Anglo-Saxons in there which are a bit of a fly in the soup.  I shared the poem with the person who climbed with me, but as that person is not white or of anglo-saxon descent, I did have to offer a disclaimer.  Which was saddening.R.E. Howard was less racist than Lovecraft, to my understanding.  Some of the text in Solomon Kane's adventures in Darkest Africa are still yikes-inducing, even though he befriends N'Longa the shaman/sorcerer, and there are passages where Kane reflects on their fundamental equality and shared humanity, which communicates a much more egalitarian view than I had expected.  These things complicate my relationship with the material, and make it take more work and consideration of how I use or recommend them.I love the hell out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books (or at least the first six or so of them, especially the initial trilogy), but the fact that John Carter fought for the Confederacy and the preamble tells us that everyone, including the family slaves, "adored him", always brings me up a little short, and again creates an obstacle to sharing these works with others.Similar with Firefly or other Whedon works.  Joss has turned out to be abusive.  I don't want to support him as a creator.  This means I need to put a little more thought into how I enjoy or use those works.I (I hope politely) disagree.  Problematic means there are problems with it which need to be addressed, that complicate enjoying it.  Portraying Nazis as good guys or using Birth of a Nation straight up as a storyline wouldn't be problematic.  They'd be trash.  Those campaigns would need to be totally revised or chucked in the bin.  "Problematic" is a lesser category.I always recommend Lloyd Alexander's wonderful Prydain books, from the 1960s.  Although the fourth one is a bit more mature and was a bit of a struggle for me as a kid, compared to the others.  I got into these soon after getting my first D&D set, and Prydain is a setting I've used for gaming inspiration more than once.</blockquote>

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