I'm pretty sure you know what this poster is saying. Passive aggressiveness never wins the race.
From my perspective, dismissing an entire style as "Disneyfied" without actually explaining what is meant by that--because
I genuinely don't know what is meant by it--is the passive-aggressive thing.
People have been criticizing D&D art for...about as long as there has
been "D&D art." Back in the early 3e days, it was mocked for being "dungeonpunk," with plenty of specific examples of both flawed and simply
different art. 4e, likewise, got flak for being all sorts of things with its art, often simply echoing other complaints about it. Now we get...what, one or two pieces of cover art that use bright colors, a somewhat softened stylized look, and a variety of species and depictions, and that's "Disneyfied"? If that's the case,
Disney hasn't been Disneyfied for decades, and the term is mostly worthless "this thing is like X which I think is bad."
It's fine to say, "I don't like this soft style and all the bright colors, that doesn't fit with the picture I have of pseudo-medieval Europe." You would be mostly talking about
your picture, though, not the actual lives of people in High Middle Ages Europe. The modern "
dung ages" pop-culture conception of the Medieval period is often--not always, but
often--severely lacking in historical accuracy, just in ways different from the previous highly-romanticized perspective (often driven by the Arthurian romances and overall culture of "courtly love" stories). As that analysis page link discusses,
some parts of medieval life were really, truly gross and awful. But other parts of it were not at all like that, and they absolutely delighted in the use of color and form and style as much as people of today, it was just harder for commoners to come by.
Consider, for instance, the Italian
commedia dell'arte, which used brightly-colored costumes for its various dramatic personae (particularly
Arlecchino, better known to English-speakers as
Harlequin.) Although the
commedia dell'arte proper did not arise until the Italian Renaissance, traditions of improvisational theater and colorful, mask-wearing performance date back to
at least the Roman Empire, and have antecedents in the "morality plays" of the High Middle Ages. And, contra what some have said in this thread, those brightly-colored signs and such are in fact completely in line with Medieval marketing ideas: many people were illiterate or only minimally literate, so locations would invest in painted signage with easily-recognized symbols, often in bright colors so they could be seen from a distance. If one could acquire a
magic sign that actually
glowed with color, I guarantee such things would have been of interest to Medieval shopkeepers.
If you think D&D should have a "real is brown" and "dung ages" type aesthetic, cool--but don't express it with pejoratives and trivializations of
equally valid artistic choices.
Edit: I started writing this well before the red text, only just recently hit send. Hopefully the rest of the content is worthy of discussion despite that.
