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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9847298" data-attributes="member: 18">Warhammer Fantasy notably included some shockingly racist stuff in the 1980s, which was racist even by 1980s British standards, and it's genuinely rather hard to understand what exactly GW thought they were doing there. What's even harder to understand though is when they essentially revisited all this stuff in the mid 1990s with that 5mm fantasy wargame (the name of which escapes me), and then repeated much of the same truly wild racism. Ill-informed or thoughtless or denialist people often like to say "Oh well, like the Empire satirizes the Holy Roman Empire, and Bretonnia satirizes medieval France, so it's fine to do the same to Japan or Arabia", but the key difference is that the Araby and Nippon stuff wasn't based on like, "old stereotypes" about cultures close to Britain, it was based on current ones about cultures far away - for example, Araby was full of terrorists (including suicide bombers), which is a post-1970s bit of Islamophobia, and it really was Islamophobia, because astonishingly, they just straight-up made the inhabitants monotheists worshipping a god called Allah (!!! - this was later retcon'd of course), and Nippon's characters were all named after 1980s and 1990s Japanese brands, and so on. They even tried to bring back "Pygmies" again, albeit this time going for racism against Amazonian ethnic groups instead of Central African ones. Jesus. Luckily those models got cancelled before they got produced (though still appeared in some catalogues iirc).TSR didn't necessarily do much better though, c.f. The Orcs of Thar and so on.I guess 1980s and early 1990s media was really wild re: racism/xenophobia/Islamophobia/orientalism etc., because you get movies like Die Hard (1988), which intentionally swerves racist/conventional xenophobic tropes (and even homophobic ones, by 1980s standards, but that's a long discussion), with for example, the brilliant nerdy hacker being a black guy, and the vengeful thugs being very "Aryan"-looking Germans, and the CEO of the Japanese-named company being a Japanese-American who is a fully American-accented unequivocal "good guy" and local rather than a cultural outsider (and a coked-up white American is a pure scumbag), and who actively makes fun of anti-Japanese xenophobia ("Hey, we're flexible. Pearl Harbor didn't work out, so we got you with tape decks." he jokes). It is xenophobic, but to Europe primarily. Contrast this with 1993's Rising Sun, which is wildly xenophobic towards Japan, wildly racist, and presents it's wild take on Japanese culture and corporations as sort of terrifying alien invaders.EDIT - If you want to hear some good stuff on Die Hard and Rising Sun, the Kill James Bond! episodes on both are hilarious and quite insightful (and also surprisingly not wrong for people mostly not born until after both came out). The Rising Sun one is paywalled but the Die Hard one isn't and is here: <a href="https://killjamesbondpod.podbean.com/e/kjb-holiday-special-die-hard/" target="_blank">KJB Holiday Special: Die Hard | Kill James Bond!</a></blockquote>

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