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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 8944673" data-attributes="member: 467">I'll reply to your initial reply that you linked.1. Hiding history is distasteful -- and dangerous. Letting gross and, frankly, not particularly good or creative things rot in the bin is perfectly acceptable.2. Agreed. There is no reason to specifically try and "fix" Orcs of Thar. Many, many works have come by since then and done a better job at trying to give "evil humanoids" cultures and stories worth engaging in.3. I doubt anyone would even notice it disappeared. But then, I also doubt people were buying it in enough quantity that its sales mattered much to anyone.On the broader debate of "questionable" D&D content and why it is an issue: Liek so much of popular culture some 40 or 50 years ago, D&D was made by people that grew up even earlier. What was socially acceptable was different and rightfully looked askance at today. It does not mean those people were horrible monsters. There is something to be said for "products of their time" -- especially when you consider not just time, but the microcosm of culture that produced them (dominated by middle class, middle American white dudes -- though not exclusively such).Nostalgia for those things, looked at uncritically, is the real problem here. Go back and watch some of your favorite movies from the 80s. There is some very cringeworthy material in there. Same with the books and music and, yes, games. That is the nature of social change over time. The thing is, we internalize a lot of this stuff and make it part of our identities and even if our larger philosophical perspectives agree with the idea that orcs in yellow face is bad, we respond negatively when something we identify with is called racist, because we feel like we are being called racist -- or sexist, or homophobic, or whatever. Even if the accusation is true and we know it is true, we still feel attacked in a visceral way.For something like Orcs of Thar, I think it is totally okay for people to petition WotC to take it down from DriveThru. And it is totally okay for people to oppose that request. And it is okay for WotC to make a choice based entirely around their bottom line, and for people to boycott WotC over that choice, etc ad infinitum. What we probably shouldn't do is make judgements about the moral character of folks on whether they would like to see Orcs of Thar pulled or not.</blockquote>

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