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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kichwas" data-source="post: 5920199" data-attributes="member: 891">It goes beyond just this - many of the traits given to the 'evil' races of this brand of fantasy are taken from real world propaganda wars used to justify race wars. Orcs of D&D in some books of the 80s on into 3E had traits taken not from Native Americans, but from how Native Americans were depicted in 19th century propaganda to justify 'removal' campaigns, and early cowboy movies up into the 1960s. In at least one book, the reason Drow had black skin was the same as the reason churches used to give for Africans being dark to justify slavery in the US and West Indies. Other parallels to Asian exclusion or campaigns against Jews make a person really begin to wonder... who wrote this stuff like this, and why? What kind of 'escapism' was that for those authors?If they all used very inhuman traits, like monsters in horror movies, it'd be easier to see that escapism. But when they are given traits that come from propaganda of some very bad parts of recent western history... it can get very uncomfortable being in a room of gamers enjoying that form of 'escapism' when you yourself -ARE- a Native American and are keenly aware of how similar those Orcs are to the posters that used to be used to motivate attempts to wipe out your ancestors.That's not the form of escapism I'd want to pass on to my children, nor to the children of the people across the table from me who frankly, I and my kin have not been at war with for over 100 years.I sometimes end up wandering down dark lines of thought with this though - wondering what motivated the writers of early D&D to tread this path. They were writing in the early 1970s, at a time when the USA was just coming out of very harsh parts of the Civil Rights movement - less than a decade away from the end of segregation, and at a time when some of my kin were in 'resistance' (Wounded Knee II, and Alcatraz). And it almost feels like they wanted to 'keep the conflict going'.There have been various points in time as a player of fantasy games when I have simply had to get up and walk away - unable to explain to my friends at the table why, without starting an argument that would end in racial slurs getting thrown back and forth... thankfully because so many of them no longer -have- these tendencies in them, but also sadly because so few of them are aware of their own recent history.I want escapism too... But some things are not good paths to tread into escape. Simplifying races into lines of good and evil is actually a complexity added on, when it so closely parallels the recent real world past.Some forms of morality are not at all simple, and are best left as dead in the past.</blockquote>

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