Maybe I should have said it with other words. D&D should seem ideologically neutral, or at least without ideological prejudices against any section of the consumers. We need enough diplomacy and delicacy to avoid possible troubles linked with the cancelation culture.
There are people who get offended if they see a character in a D&D book who looks like they could have a name like "Luis Carlos." That is, if they see someone they don't think is white enough.
So, how do you propose one should seem ideologically neutral in a situation like this? Do you do this by not having illustrations of people who aren't white? (and thus potentially offend and ostracize all non-white potential buyers.) Or do you do this by
including illustrations of people who aren't white? (and thus offend and ostracize a subset of white potential buyers.)
Or do you do this by making all humans asexual and make their skin color blue? D&D is now about Medium-sized Smurfs.
This is why you can't be "ideologically neutral" in cases like this. You literally can't have middle ground. You have: exclusivity, tokenism (which is really just a subset of exclusivity), and inclusivity.
Some times there are "jealousy" because when you show support to a group then other feel "forgotten" or desplaced. You could be losing clients because these don't feel "wellcome"
The key is to know how to introduce new things in the right way. For example Miss Marvel/Kamala Khan from the canceled Marvel's Avenger wasn't too popular, but the same character in the new videogame "Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls" is wellcome.
Ms. Marvel, from what I read on Wikipedia, was actually very popular and very well-reviewed. It just got review-bombed on IMDB--by the same sort of people I wrote about above.
Also, of all the newer, live-action Marvel shows? How many of them actually got a second season? I'm pretty sure it's just Loki, with another season of Daredevil: Born Again in the works. So the fact that Ms. Marvel only got a single season isn't really remarkable.
The consumer can't suspect the artist or author could suffer some ideological prejudice because then they will distrust her and they will not want to keep listening her. Let's remember the controversy about flower wars with the last DC animated movie "Tlaxcaltec Batman: Blood Empire".
According to Wikipedia, the controversy is that they showed the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs as being a really bad thing. Reddit says its because (a) Batman isn't white but he's fighting white people; (b) it's not historically accurate about showing how bad the Aztecs were re: sacrifice; or (c) because it's boring and relies on stereotypes. So... What about the controversy do we need to remember?
But anyway, Let's say you have an artist or author who has an ideological prejudice of some sort. People who agree with that prejudice will keep on supporting them; people who disagree won't. So what?
There are going to be people who won't buy the D&D playmat because it has two dudes kissing on it. There's also going to be people who won't buy it because they don't like the art, or because a happy beholder is just wrong somehow. There's probably a
lot more people won't buy it because who on earthy buys a playmat for D&D. So people don't buy it. Oh well.
