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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Phantom_Miria" data-source="post: 9848087" data-attributes="member: 7053811">I think that last part is something worth thinking about. These ideas indeed used to be very widespread in society, and existed at various levels of intensity and even awareness by the people affected by them, just like fantasy tropes and fiction have been widespread since forever. At a certain point it becomes hard to tell whether you can say something was never influenced at all by their existence.It's inevitable that a lot of tropes that make up fantasy, down from the foundation, couldn't have but co-existed and intermingled with racist ideas and backward ideas (to very various degrees) that were common in society at their time, just because they were all part of the zeitgeist that influenced everyone living in it. Pretty much all Sword & Sorcery is like that, because the very foundation for that was Conan and pulp stories from the 1920s and 1930s and, well... The public at the time apparently really liked the fairly obviously racist trope of the fair white maiden being threatened by a violent black man and saved by a daring white guy, and while I'm not American I understand that the underlining logic of this perceived sexual threat is also what was at the base of all the lynching that was common in the American South roughly at that same time.Edgar Rice Burroughs is another massive influence, not just for pulp and fantasy, but all fiction in general, and the man was a very open supporter of the most extreme takes on eugenics. Still, without John Carter of Mars I think we have neither Superman nor Star Wars... Or Dark Sun itself, Barsoom being a primary inspiration for Athas.On a much less blatant and more opaque note, there's the old polemic about Tolkien's Orcs, because while I'm certain that Tolkien had no ill intentions with what he made I think it's also fair to say that he thought of Orcs as the evil minions of destructive dark forces, and thus gave them traits that resembled the stereotypical image of a steppe nomad, one of the archetypal barbarian trope figures, commonly thought as a force of destruction for "civilized" people. This is a very ancient trope too, because enmity between settled cultures and nomads from the Eurasian Steppes goes back to antiquity. The Chinese historically fought confederations of steppe peoples for their entire history, but in the West the concept of the "barbarians from the steppes" eventually grew closer to one of the aspects of anti-Asian sentiments.Tolkien wasn't anti-Asian, his work had no anti-Asian connotations, but through an indirect relation between ideas that was born from the cultural environment he lived in, he ended up making his Orcs kinda based off a visual and aesthetic trope that was in turn associated with hostile stereotypes of Asian peoples. I do think, though, that there is an important degree of separation between Tolkien's Orcs and racist sentiments against Asian people, which passes through the generic trope of the "barbarian".In my opinion the degree of separation is what's important to consider between the fantasy tropes and the questionable influences they have likely inevitably been related to in the long history of fiction.I'm pretty convinced that if you really start digging you'll eventually find that virtually all ideas in fantasy can ultimately be find to have some sort of relation to some other kind of idea from decades ago that nowadays is very unsavory. My impression is that the feeling in recent years from some people has been to expunge everything that sticks out, but this only ends in my opinion with feeling like sanitization of content mixed with it being ineffective, since you'll bonk one perceived bad trope away only to have 30 other very similar relatives standing around and being ignored. See the controversy on Orcs being inherently evil, them being turned increasingly nuanced, which I kinda like anyway, only to have Gnolls step in as the disposable, always evil stock of enemies to be slaughtered mindlessly.Or how there was a whole discussion on bioessentialism a while ago, but while it's common sense to say that bioessentialism is unacceptable when discussing real people and anthropology, the argument loses its sense if one wants to fight the idea of bioessentialism in... A magical fantasy world where, unlike in our very own, there are multiple intelligent races of beings who are widely different mentally and physically. The point is that, first and foremost, racism is a factually wrong ideology, and humans on Earth are all just humans, "race" isn't even a proper scientific term that mean anything, let alone something you can try to slap universal traits on them. But in a world where there are Goliaths and Halflings I don't think you'd be promoting racism in real life by noting that the Goliaths should probably be inherently stronger than Halflings who weight a third or them (unless you wanna do game balance differently I guess).So, instead of trying to go scorched earth on anything that might have had negative implications or has a bad history that can be tied to it, I think it's better to recognize whether a trope is effectively inescapably tied to racist ideas, and they're usually pretty easy to tell apart (the aforementioned '20s pulp and Burroughs, we've fortunately been capable of having Conan, Barsoom and Tarzan in the modern world without the nasty baggage), whether they're instead just historically related but can be disentangled from the baggage to make them harmless, or if they're just fine on their own."Cannibal tribals" has been historically something that has been used against real human cultures to denigrate them and justify harm against them, but the trope by itself isn't about any specific culture in particular, in fact it's always completely incorrect in how cannibalism is actually practiced in real human cultures, so when abstracted away from anything human and placed in a fantasy world it can be made to lose all of the harmful effects it had when it was actually against real human beings. You just have to not do anything as spectacularly stupid as replicating real human cultures in the fantasy environment and then play all the "savage" tropes straight, then you're just doing it on purpose.I think it's perfectly possible to maintain the cannibalism of Halflings in Dark Sun without accidentally reinforcing any racist stereotype: the halflings don't look like any human culture but, like a lot of other peoples in Dark Sun, are a mix of many influences, including Giger visuals as you noted, and the cannibalism they practice isn't even properly cannibalism since they eat people of different races.I'd even argue that the "boil you in a pot" trope is salvageable, but since that's already more heavy-handed I'd keep it only for straight up monsters and enemies, to reinforce that degree of separation from anything that could be possibly related to real human cultures. Halflings in general might not be humans, but still kinda look close enough for concern.</blockquote>

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