Absolute Zero wrote:First off. Take a deep breath. Don't post in rage.
Second. I read your link. Once you calm down, I'd suggest rereading it in a detached and objective manner.
Now, there's a lot to unpack here. Starting with M:TG. I like that you chose the crusade card, and not the card that had dudes that looked like they were wearing KKK hoods and burning a cross in the background. I understand on it's face why you wouldn't have any problems with a card called crusade. Crusades are a touchy subject. The west largely downplays it as simply a war between religious factions. And to an extent it was. Except the portrayal of Muslims has largely been more inaccurate than the portrayal of the knights and holy armies. There's a lot of history, but I'm going to break it down simply. Brown people under one religion were in control of the Middle East. They had a very progressive society. They didn't oppress people based on religion; you were free to practice whatever religion you wanted. You just had to pay a tax. This aspect continued all the way up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But back on target. The brown people also had advanced mathematics (we use their numbers today this 5 is a Arabic number/character) and had clockworks and fire proof armor and a bunch of other really neat stuff that has to be rediscovered because of the Crusades and other problems after. The white people came angry that brown people were in their holy land and charging taxes for them to pray and war were declared. White people claimed the land as holy because their white washed savior came from there (they ignore that he was not white) and raged. They mostly lost. They won a few times, but mostly lost. Sometimes before they even got there. But when they did get there, hoo boy did they do some evil stuff. There's stories told gleefully about these holy knights killing women and children for sport, and playing a particularly gruesome game of tossing babies up and catching them on their pikes and lances. So, you might want to think about that as to why crusades might be considered culturally insensitive at the least and racist at the worst (I personally view it as casually racist, because most people probably are not aware of history).
OK. Over to D&D. There's a very specific subset of players who don't care about the backgrounds and don't look for depth in their games. We call them murder hobos, because they only care about killing everything. D&D is littered with casual racism, and if you reread that article, you'll see they point that out. Drow are inherently evil and racist matriarchal and all black. Something happened earlier in 5e, where some of the drow were forgiven and their skin lightened up; because black people are evil. Drow society looks like a caricature of what white men think a matriarchal society looks like. As more people in a variety of colors and genders come into the game to play, why should they not have representation? Why should they see the only matriarchal society that exists in almost all the settings as being evil where the women all abuse the men under them? Why should all of the non-white races be inherently evil and they all have to play a Drizzt clone to be able to play a non-white race? As for Orcs, their society makes little sense, aside from the fact they're based on caricatures of tribal societies. Humans are the best race. They're adaptive, they learn quick, they often get extra skills and feats just for being human. The explanation is that humans live shorter lives than the other races, so that makes them some how more adaptable and industrious. Orcs have the same life span. Why are they brutes and racist and incapable of making anything remotely good for armor or weapons? It's not like they live in an isolated society. Why is their -one- god evil? Humans have like 100 gods of varying alignments, Orcs get one evil god. Drow even have a good god.
Western fantasy is built on casual racism and us vs them. When you don't have the literal light skinned people being good vs the dark skinned people being bad, you have the industrialized people who live in large cities are evil and people who live in rural areas are bad. I'm not saying all of it is that way, but more than enough of it is, and a lot of the things that break those molds are recent editions.
You admitted casual racism is just as bad as racism. This is casual racism. And as more than just white men begin picking up and gaining interest in these things, they shouldn't feel alienated.
I'm sorry you feel your hobbies are under attack, but I've been playing D&D for decades, and I honestly do not see your problem here.
I'll give you two things. One, you're right, I shouldn't post in rage, but sometimes the dam overflows. Mine did today. Secondly, I did read D&D article and it's not as if they're taking anything away. I'm just tired of every single thing being accused of racism now. We are falling back to Sarkeesian's quote "Everything is racist, Everything is sexist, everything is homophobic and you have to point it all out". Honestly, if that's the case, burn it all down and start over. If you firmly believe that everything is problematic these days, and a lot of people seem to, lets just fire every nuke and reduce the world to glass. That's the only way to get all of it.
I'm going to have to take your word for the D&D racism thing. I have literally not read anything of the forgotten realms, the sword coast, any of it. I'm a DM and a writer, I use the system and make up the rest myself. But have you heard the phrase "If you go looking for something hard enough you'll find it"? That's what we're dealing with now. Lets go back to D&D for a moment. If you wanted to play an orc, go play an orc. There's literally nothing stopping you from doing so. Play an orc of any gender, worship whatever god you want, or none, pick a class, make something up for your backstory. I hate to say this but if you're incapable of doing that, then either your DM needs to help you or you need to find a new hobby. And if your DM says no, because orcs MUST be like this, THEN you might actually have a case. Most likely they're overly controlling asshat on a power trip but you might have just found yourself a racist. Get you a horse and rope and go to town. But that's not the games fault, that's the DM. Now that we have to fix the "problematic" orcs and drow, are goblins next? Gnolls? Perhaps we should grab the beasiary and just go page by page to make sure no one gets left out. Where does this END.
As for Magic the gathering, I heard about the card with the hoods. I don't remember what it was but when I heard all the details, yeah, that one's racist. That one is SO racist I can't believe it got through. It even had the card number 1488. But really, that should show just how NOT racist everyone else is that it didn't even trip in their heads that it was a dogwhistle, because THEY didn't hear it. Enough about that one those. As for cards like Crusade and Jihad, these are words in our vocabulary. They mean things. They are not soley attatched to the events of history, events that we look back on and regret (Well, some people do) but that doesn't change them. And banning the damn cards won't change it either. If we cannot handle having trading cards in a game because someone finds the words offensive then maybe we should go through the dictionary as well. I've heard people joke about that but maybe I should be expecting that to come through as well.
Racism is bad, and casual racism is just racism. Casual, overt, covert, they all have the same root words. The culture we are creating through is one that is literally looking for any excuse, anything that could be possibly construed as the slightest bit offensive. People are calling for Prowl to be removed because he's a police car. What if someone doesn't like the US overmilitarization? Should we get rid of all the seekers? What if someone finds Prime offensive because he's a semi truck, one of the biggest contributors to enviromental damage? Prime needs to go too, I suppose. This can't continue.
I know you wanted to bring this back to BLM. That is what this thread is about. But I don't see BLM going to companies like Hasbro and demanding these changes. Some people might be doing it in their name but I don't believe that for a minute. BLM has been out there fighting for real changes, not flexing their mob power to see how many people bow to them. I think this entire situation has gotten out of their hands and away from their cause just like this thread has. If there is to be any hope at all of making an actual difference, this needs to stop. This isn't helping BLM at all. It's actively rolling back everything they're working for by making more and more people hate them. Every person fired from their job over a slight in their social media, every person that loses their hobby to this outrage, every person that speak s up only to be shouted down is going to be one more person sent to the other side and standing against them. You don't want that. I don't want that. I want all this to stop before it gets any worse but I'm doing what I can and what I can do is getting nothing done. I'm just screaming at the wall as it's pushed down.
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
