What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[cranberry]

I wish the DNA test I took was interesting, but it just confirmed what I already knew.

Except, I guess I'm a little more than 4% Neanderthal. I suppose that explains why my knuckles are always chaffed.

 

[Faolyn]

You're saying there is no way to make a story more interesting with slavery in DS. Are you standing by that assertion?

Are you saying that Dark Sun isn't interesting enough without slavery?

Tell me, what is so interesting about the slavery that makes it more important than the extreme lack of resources, the post-apocalyptic environment, the overwhelming presence of people and creatures with psionic ability, and the environment-destroying magic? Why are those things less interesting than slavery?

 

[Blue Orange]

I've read Ligotti. He's a bit too...abstract for me, I don't know? I recognize his skill but somehow his stuff doesn't...grab me? Personal taste, of course, and I won't deny he doesn't seem to be a virulent racist as far as we know.

I'd say Lovecraft was more influential than he was skillful. People got sick of werewolves and vampires and needed new monsters, and in he stepped (or, perhaps, Sandy Petersen, as most of the Lovecraftian monster depictions nowadays seem to resemble the Call of Cthulhu versions). His mix of sci-fi and horror was also perfectly placed for the rise of sci-fi in midcentury. And he got another bump when his stuff started passing out of copyright (or Arkham House stopped defending it effectively, I'm sure there's a story here I don't know.) A lot of it's luck, as it always is in the arts. But, you know, I'll feel superior to Lovecraft when I create a monster people are making plushies of 100 years later. I mean, I'm less racist than him, sure, but I wonder what future generations will make of my meat eating or carbon consumption.

 

[Autumnal]

@Blue Orange , if you’re going to write so much I agree with, I’ll just…why, I’ll agree with you! So there!

 

[Faolyn]

So, um, I’ve got Thomas Ligotti right here. I don’t know if you’ve read any of his work? (This is emphatically not any kind of trolling. Most people, even among horror fans, haven’t.). His work does the same, channeling the intense personal horror of finding himself in which every speck of order is only a transitory illusion over primal chaos, in which “there is no one to be, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to know”. His stories are filled with dangerous, revealing mirrors and mannequins, because they are the truth of our own selves that we can seldom bring ourselves to acknowledge except in symbols and nightmares. We are puppets of unseen forces, and we would all be better off if we’d never been born. And he means it.

Hey, thanks for those links. I haven't heard of Ligotti but I'll check out his work.

 

[Minion X]

The top tier of that chart has 4 slots filled out of 128.

The discussion isn't really to determine the exact ancestry of Lovecraft, but his perception of his ancestry. I cannot recall anything in Lovecraft's works that would hint at any fear in that direction, his prejudice is always very external and projected beyond his native New England environment.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Some kind fan has been good enough to put together Lovecraft's family tree. It's not very complicated and it's quite clearly WASP. I won't comment on your lineage, but if you are a dirt-common sod like me, it likely includes any number of bastards and people who slept around, but then again we are not from a line of wealthy New Englanders who trace their roots back to Hengist and Horsa.

You’re still not grasping the “one drop” rule. It’s not just a name. One infidelity, one lie revealed, one mistake or omission in any of those generations- or several before- could cost him his precious “whiteness”, and thus, the purity of his identity.

To illustrate: our family just discovered in 2021 we have some Peruvian ancestry- about 2%. It’s not from anyone in our recorded lineage, some of which goes further back than the HPL family tree you posted. If the “one drop” rule applied solely to Peruvians, we’d be Peruvians under it.

There’s a TV show here that explores & reveals the DNA and family histories of celebrities. They go back centuries. So far, not one person’s known recorded history been complete or fully accurate. There’s always gaps, misattributions, or outright fables in the records.

So if it were revealed that the family tree you linked to were proven to be “flawed”, either deliberately or by mistake? Ooops! Pure whiteness gone!

And to be honest, the idea that “dirt common sods” slept around and wealthy WASPy New Englanders didn’t is a laughable premise on its face. It’s as pure a fiction as “The Colour out of Space”. People higher up social ladders than those Americans HPL claimed as family clearly had extramarital affairs and pre-marital flings.

The discussion isn't really to determine the exact ancestry of Lovecraft, but his perception of his ancestry.

Again, fear & loathing are the operant factors. With 124 missing slots from just that single ancestral generation, the possibility that he’s not as white as he’d like to be looms as a scary prospect. The possible lack of purity would gnaw at him.

At this point, I think you & I are done.

 

[Minion X]

You’re still not grasping the “one drop” rule. It’s not just a name. One infidelity, one lie revealed, one mistake or omission in any of those generations- or several before- could cost him his precious “whiteness”, and thus, the purity of his identity.

And to be honest, the idea that “dirt common sods” slept around and wealthy WASPy New Englanders didn’t is a laughable premise on its face. It’s as pure a fiction as “The Colour out of Space”. People higher up social ladders than those Americans HPL claimed as family clearly had extramarital affairs and pre-marital flings.

At this point, I think you & I are done.

I am familiar with the one drop rule, it's on all the hot sauce bottles. And by bastards in the family tree I mean literal gaps with unrecorded fathers or suspect listed fathers. And while on the subject, there was an interesting genetic study in Sweden that checked for genetic continuity in families, and it did reveal that infidelity that led to concealed extramarital children in the family line was far rarer among high-status families than low-status families.

Yes, I believe we have both presented our opinions on the interpretation of the Deep Ones. To sum it up, you believe that Lovecraft was influenced by the fear of finding you have undesirable ancestors, while I believe that it shares the same theme of lurking insanity that pervades the body of his work and which derives from the personal trauma of his parents' institutionalization.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You’re still not grasping the “one drop” rule. It’s not just a name. One infidelity, one lie revealed, one mistake or omission in any of those generations- or several before- could cost him his precious “whiteness”, and thus, the purity of his identity.

To illustrate: our family just discovered in 2021 we have some Peruvian ancestry- about 2%. It’s not from anyone in our recorded lineage, some of which goes further back than the HPL family tree you posted. If the “one drop” rule applied solely to Peruvians, we’d be Peruvians under it.

There’s a TV show here that explores & reveals the DNA and family histories of celebrities. They go back centuries. So far, not one person’s known recorded history been complete or fully accurate. There’s always gaps, misattributions, or outright fables in the records.

So if it were revealed that the family tree you linked to were proven to be “flawed”, either deliberately or by mistake? Ooops! Pure whiteness gone!

And to be honest, the idea that “dirt common sods” slept around and wealthy WASPy New Englanders didn’t is a laughable premise on its face. It’s as pure a fiction as “The Colour out of Space”. People higher up social ladders than those Americans HPL claimed as family clearly had extramarital affairs and pre-marital flings.

Again, fear & loathing are the operant factors. With 124 missing slots from just that single ancestral generation, the possibility that he’s not as white as he’d like to be looms as a scary prospect. The possible lack of purity would gnaw at him.

At this point, I think you & I are done.

I think Lovecraft, if he was worried about hidden ancestry would have been concerned that he might be secretly part Irish or some other non-english group. His racism was very New England, and while it included racism towards black people too (there was no shortage of anti-black racism here). It was different from southern racism as a lot of it was also about different white ethnicities and the purity of New England aristocratic bloodlines. Any number of non-English drops of blood would have polluted his identity in his mind I am sure, and probably something he would have thought easier to slip through in the family records.

 

[Perambulator]

Of course that presents other problems. Including elements of other cultures in your game while divorcing them from their historical context is seen by some as the worst kind of cultural appropriation. i.e. It's still problematic. And this goes for all of you talking about creating a fantasy world influenced by other cultures. We've had people on this board argue strongly that you shouldn't use real life cultures as any kind of basis for your fantasy settings. This also highlights the, uh, problem, with the word problematic is that it's so vague. If I tell you a work of fiction is problematic, you have no idea what I might be talking about.

I have a player who is arachnophobic, which I found out in the middle of a game session when the PCs were fighting giant spiders. In the middle of play, I paused, asked the player what was happening, and asked if we could continue if I remove all descriptions of the spiders? She said yes, that's what I did, and then I never included spiders in any game she was in. I have another friend who battled eating disorders when she was younger. It's a topic she just doesn't want to deal with and it'll never be dealt with in my game while she's a player. No problem. But it's okay for a publisher to include those elements in their game even knowing some people don't want it.


When I worked at the archive, I used to assist visitors with genaological research. Mostly I was teaching people who were new to the research where to find and how to use the tools that were available. Very quickly, I noticed a lot of African Americans ran into a wall with the 1860 census. For those of you not in the United States, the 1860 census was the last census ran by the government where slavery was still the law of the land. This wasn't always an insurmountable wall, but researching further back became a bit more complicated and uncertain. You could really see something was robbed from them.

As to your arachnophobia player, I would then introduce a spider who'd sympathize with her. Upon learning of her phobia he would tell her, "Sorry, but this is what I am. What I resent is your stereotyping me, and I would appreciate your treating me as an individual."