It ranks with female sjws complaining about a sandwich special titled for example "gentleman smoke meat special. Yet ladyfinger cookies are exempt because reasons and feels

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1062136Yep. And you rarely hear the inverse, that undead (vampires and ghouls and whatnot) have pale skin, but they don't represent whites in a negative manner because... reasons...

Theres been some occasional bitching about "evil albinos." though. The two ghosts in the 2nd Matrix movie for example.

Quote from: sureshot;1062145It ranks with female sjws complaining about a sandwich special titled for example "gentleman smoke meat special. Yet ladyfinger cookies are exempt because reasons and feels

Because the SJW screed is allways one sided, untill it suits them...

Black people in comedy routines is racist. Replacing white characters with black ones is progressive. Black people in evil roles is racist. depicting a culture in their common garb is racist. But if you dont depict them right thats racist. If you dont have them in your movie, book, whatever thats racist. Black people calling out black people for not being black enough isnt racist. Black people getting makeup touchups to be black enough is racist.

And on and on and on and on ad freaking nausium.

Quote from: Omega;1062147Theres been some occasional bitching about "evil albinos." though. The two ghosts in the 2nd Matrix movie for example.

That's true. But I think it's more about their albino (minority) status than analogies with whiteness. It's been a while since I read the critiques though.

Quote from: Toadmaster;1062143Of course not, I believe the proper response to that is to accuse someone using that example of concern trolling.

It is a very technical dance that they have. :rolleyes:

Yep. Thus the attempt to redefine racism as "prejudice plus power".
It's (not surprisingly) similar to an abusive partner's attempts to redirect blame.

Quote from: Omega;1062147Theres been some occasional bitching about "evil albinos." though. The two ghosts in the 2nd Matrix movie for example.

The bigger crime that all sides should get behind is that the second and third Matrix movies exist.

Quote from: Omega;1062130SJWs are insane people. Anyone who kowtows to appease their demands is insane. Anyone who thinks they are one of them or buddies with them is insane.

That's the crux of it. You should not spend any time trying to appease crazy people or listening to what they say. There's nothing to be gained.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1062163That's the crux of it. You should not spend any time trying to appease crazy people or listening to what they say. There's nothing to be gained.

Unless, like me, you get paid to listen to crazy people.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1062164Unless, like me, you get paid to listen to crazy people.

In olden times they used to call that torture. :eek:

Quote from: Omega;1062165In olden times they used to call that torture. :eek:

Well, that or "bartending."

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1061997Probably don't want to go down that road if you want to stay on Team Goodperson, because if you can't hate ethnic subgroups in your country who are the same race as you, but diverge significantly from you in terms of regional dialect, religion, moral norms, education, politics, family structure, and diet, pretty much 95% of SJW fantasies have to be thrown out.

So it's settled. The orcs represent black people. Just like the Drow. And the Fire Giants. And the night hags. And the duergar. And the svorfnobberlings or whatever. And the xvarts. Gibberlings, too? IDK, reading the Monster Manual while woke is tough.

The elves represent the English (collapsed empire completely overrun by a far more aggressive, mercantile people, mentally living in a past where they were #1, extremly poor manufacturing productivity).

The dwarves represent the Finns (hardy, simple, live in the cold, women have beards).

I consider myself centrist/leftist, but I do recognize the unhelpful activities of the far left. It is possible to be bigoted against white people, and a growing feeling of victimization (even if irrational) is what helped Trump get elected despite him being yet another evil rich person who actively denigrates his own voting block.

Quote from: S'mon;1061999Gygax's orcs are initially still  Tolkien's faceless legions of evil, but they began to drift towards more of a "savage races" archetype, perhaps more in keeping with dnd's pulp fantasy roots. By 3e the transition was complete. You could call it a colonialist mentality if you like. But they were not given attributes of any real world human group, even though they took on the place of Red Indians in  cowboy pulps, Frazetta Apemen in Conanesque pulps, and so on.

In British games like Warhammer, orcs stayed cockneys, true to their classist roots in Tolkien.

Orcs have always been used as stand-ins for disliked ethnic groups or idealized myths. Cockneys, blacks, Asians, the noble savage myth, angelic paladins, the list goes on. It's really just a sublimation of tribalism.

Claiming that orcs only represent black people and only in a negative manner is a very limited view. There is so much fanart of deliberately sexy orcs in faux tribal garb.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1062013So much bad rationalizations in that article. But I can't help going for the low hanging fruit...

The Drow matriarchy isn't a real matriarchy because Drow aren't real!

That's no excuse for being so lazy in writing them.

Quote from: SHARK;1062018Greetings!

You know, Ratman, your comments here reminded me with a good laugh, but also the irony--a long time ago, when I used to debate eager young liberals at my university, after some time, I lamented the fact that these people were *not* interested in facts, evidence, and truth. Time and time again, whether the debate was about women in combat, guns, foreign policy, biology, crime policy, social welfare policy--no matter how many facts were presented, none of it ultimately mattered. The liberals would always resort to a conclusive dismissal of your argument based on emotion and ideology--not facts, or truth. That soon led me to ultimately conclude that liberals, and liberalism--is really a kind of mental disease, a psychological disease of the mind that seems to totally *unhinge* them from any kind of reality. They are entirely incapable of comprehending reality in any meaningful way. Today's SJW's are merely the most recent "flavour of the month" incarnation of these people. Whether they go by the name of "Social Progressives", "Progressives", "Liberals", or "SJW's"--they are all, whether they realise it or not--they are all part of the post-modernist, Marxist soup. My buddies in the Marines would simply dismiss them "They're all just a bunch of fucking Communists!".

I say all of that as a context for seeing the depth of your comment. "The Drow are not real!"--even in this, our RPG hobby, the SJW's break with reality becomes frighteningly all too clear.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

You do realize you are denigrating half the voting block of the United States as mentally ill, right? The far left does not speak for the entirety of the leftist block, that's why they are called far left.

Are leftists perfect? No, but neither is the right. Both sides hold anti-science views. The left has people who believe nuclear power, GMOs and vaccines are harmful and the right has people who believe that LGBTQ+ is a mental illness and non-whites are genetically inferior.

But I digress.

Are the drow racist? Well, whoever cursed them with black skin was certainly a skinhead since the Eberron drow were always black and aren't predisposed toward evil. Are they fetishistic? Hell yes they are. Are they a remotely realistic matriarchy? Not really, to the point where I've read more realistic matriarchies in erotica.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1062115The real Aztecs, Mongols, Assyrians, Persians, Han, Comanche, etc had what we would consider inhumanly brutal cultures. The thing about all this hand-wringing is that if you were to put a society in your culture that actually functioned like a 9th-century caliphate or hell, even something that resembled Actual Rome more than Movie Rome, you'd have SJWs screaming about how racist and bigoted you were being.

I took history and anthropology in school and this is very true. Values today are very different from values back then.

Possibly the poster child for this sort of thing is The History of Childhood by Lloyd deMause. The basic premise is that all child rearing practices prior to the modern day were actually child abuse and that this is why people back then were homicidal and fought so many wars. While I think Lloyd is reaching here since we cannot really test that (and no, the statistics on spanking children causing more crime is not sufficient), he is right about child rearing back then being abusive.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1062171That's no excuse for being so lazy in writing them.

A crticism that's a far cry from Drow being "problematic".

And a very generic one that could be levelled at the whole of RPGs, not just Drow and Dungeons and Dragons.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1062171Possibly the poster child for this sort of thing is The History of Childhood by Lloyd deMause. The basic premise is that all child rearing practices prior to the modern day were actually child abuse and that this is why people back then were homicidal and fought so many wars. While I think Lloyd is reaching here since we cannot really test that (and no, the statistics on spanking children causing more crime is not sufficient), he is right about child rearing back then being abusive.

I read something a while ago on how you don't really find "civilization" without slavery until the beginnings of the industrial revolution, at which point productivity without slavery becomes increasingly feasible, plus there is rising demand for factory labor, which is urban and therefore plays according to different economic & demographic rules. I tend to stay away from moralizing history, because social norms and economic practices evolve for a reason. The fact that agrarian societies with little to no contact, from the Mexico Valley to the Italian peninsula, were built on forced labor, suggests that without modern industry, those who enslave will typically conquer those who don't. Okay, so what? This isn't off topic, I swear. If you reflect that in your typical fantasy-premodern RPG campaign, it's going to make people upset. I mean if you have a setting where every society has slaves of some sort, and the only people who don't, don't even have written language, metal-working, or domesticated animals, it's not considered in the least bit controversial, and should the players try to liberate the slaves, they will cripple the economy, the ability to field an army, and ensure conquest by the neighbors. Do such a thing, and you'll be accused of normalizing/celebrating slavery. And frankly, I would find playing a game in such a setting to be ponderously depressing.

But my point here is you really can't please the SJWs, because you cannot portray history itself with strict, fact-driven rigor without coming under fire, reality is now a minefield when it comes to inspiration for fiction, at least if you want to please the screaming bluehair set. So IMO, the correct thing to do is not try.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1062176A crticism that's a far cry from Drow being "problematic".

And a very generic one that could be levelled at the whole of RPGs, not just Drow and Dungeons and Dragons.

I do level it at D&D in general. My blog focuses on lazy world building.

The Drow are "problematic" in several ways, which I attribute to laziness and I believe are not particularly difficult to rectify. There are saner tumblr feminists out there that draw drow porn (particularly femdom and male/male), so it's something that can be done without also alienating existing players.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1062177I read something a while ago on how you don't really find "civilization" without slavery until the beginnings of the industrial revolution, at which point productivity without slavery becomes increasingly feasible, plus there is rising demand for factory labor, which is urban and therefore plays according to different economic & demographic rules. I tend to stay away from moralizing history, because social norms and economic practices evolve for a reason. The fact that agrarian societies with little to no contact, from the Mexico Valley to the Italian peninsula, were built on forced labor, suggests that without modern industry, those who enslave will typically conquer those who don't. Okay, so what? This isn't off topic, I swear. If you reflect that in your typical fantasy-premodern RPG campaign, it's going to make people upset. I mean if you have a setting where every society has slaves of some sort, and the only people who don't, don't even have written language, metal-working, or domesticated animals, it's not considered in the least bit controversial, and should the players try to liberate the slaves, they will cripple the economy, the ability to field an army, and ensure conquest by the neighbors. Do such a thing, and you'll be accused of normalizing/celebrating slavery. And frankly, I would find playing a game in such a setting to be ponderously depressing.

But my point here is you really can't please the SJWs, because you cannot portray history itself with strict, fact-driven rigor without coming under fire, reality is now a minefield when it comes to inspiration for fiction, at least if you want to please the screaming bluehair set. So IMO, the correct thing to do is not try.

Not all the people who complain are loony far leftists. I do appreciate attempts at being "realistic" within a given context.

I think I mentioned this before, but it's relevant here. The Amazonian orc fiction I read engaged in some world building in which the beliefs and actions of the Amazons were laid out in a clear, unambiguous fashion. In standard D&D, half-orcs are at one point claimed to be smarter than regular orcs and this allows them to advance in some tribes; the story I read ran with that idea and added a matriarchal twist. While not cartoonishly evil, the Amazons aren't remotely moral from a modern perspective. They enslave humans, forcing both sexes to work and using the men in particular as sperm donors; this is in contrast to how Amazons are typically depicted in fiction. The Amazons seem to operate on a one-drop rule that doesn't distinguish orcs and half-orcs, assuming those categories apply in the fictional world. They are extremely sexist and racist in highly specific, ritualized ways: male orcs sit at the bottom of the social hierarchy, considered brutish, stupid and not allowed to reproduce; humans are physically weak, but cleverer and sociable compared to orc males which makes the men superior husband-slaves.

I would really like to see more world building like that rather than ham-fisted attempts at politically correct history.

The whole "civilization cannot exist without slavery" is a meaningless argument because it takes specifically Colombian-era slavery and retroactively applies it to all of history. There were many different forms of slavery that existed across history and even today, including paid slaves, slaves owning slaves, etc. Ancient Egypt, for example, had laws prohibiting the mistreatment of slaves due to what I can only assume was a mixture of compassion and pragmatism (happy healthy slaves work better). Slavery wasn't omnipresent either. The pyramids, for example, were constructed by guilds of paid laborers rather than slaves.

You don't have to world build to satisfy far leftists. World building is its own reward.

Fantasy tends to demonize slavery ...while valorising feudalism, the actual basis of most pre modern economies.