It shouldn't be any surprise that people who think nonhuman characters in fantasy are just stand-ins for racial groups would produce racist caricatures when left in charge of #dnd products.
#dnd5e #Spelljammer #onednd #ttrpg #osr

Yawn. The hadozee are actually adapted from Star Frontiers (indeed, the OG material sources them as such).

But if you think any 'monkey'-esque race is supposed to be a stand-in for blacks. you're SUPER FUCKING RACIST.

Wait, so hadozee are now racist caricature because they reflect wokist views? Wow, my mind is blown. Okay, yeah, the happy monkey butler thing is awful and should be discarded.

The hadozee being so driven by wanderlust that they lost track of their homeworld is actually pretty interesting and provides a built-in epic campaign hook a la Battlestar Galactica's search for Earth.

For reference, this is what I said before:

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 31, 2022, 10:54:16 AM
Hadozee are racist now? Let me get this straight: they're saying Hadozee are racist solely on the basis that they're space monkey squirrel people and "monkey" is a slur against POC? And Hadozee bards are racist because... monkey bards are now racial coding for old racist minstrel shows (nevermind that the outfit is standard bard wear everywhere else)? And their new backstory is that they're an animal uplift that revolted against their evil creator... which is bad because they escaped slavery (I get that this kind of backstory is overused, but come on)?

That makes about as much sense as saying dwarves are a racist caricature of Irish Jews.

The hadozee aren't being depicted as inherently evil, or subhuman... they're being introduced as a cool new playable race. But they're racist because they very very loosely resemble a patchwork of piecemeal racist propaganda, despite the fact that they're portrayed as people just like everyone else?

Oh for fuck's sake. It's a furry furbait race! You want obvious racial coding? The roaches from TerraFormars are an obvious racist caricature, obviously made by a troll for the lulz, that you would have to be delusional to dismiss. If the hadozee spoke ebonics and were naturally athletic, that would be one thing (just look at the literal list of racial coding ascribed to the Martian roaches for comparison). But the 5e hadozee are described as driven by curiosity to become explorers, navigators, privateers, pirates, etc. Hell, "deck apes" is clearly meant to be an offensive slur and not a positive affirmation.

The claim of racism here is even weaker than the drow's curse of ham backstory. The Hadozee are not similar to racist caricature beyond pareidolia. If you see a character like Son Wukong and think "racist!", then you're obviously trolling for something to be offended by.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 31, 2022, 02:45:37 PM
The hadozee bard accusation is so flimsy. Google "bard pose" or whatever and you'll find numerous images of bards in similar poses where they balance on one leg or are shot between moves where one leg is bent and the other is nearly straight.

Here are some examples:
https://www.deviantart.com/pccasio/art/COMM-Ocarina-Bard-838150078
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/610941505677289037/
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/18g6g2
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/eqexmy/oc_so_excited_to_play_my_first_bard_and_somehow_i/
https://twitter.com/byelacey/status/1433533139951960068
https://images.app.goo.gl/JHd9pviQBCYXLZRL6
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Yawmyq
https://www.deviantart.com/samsantala/art/Faeraxx-Dragonborn-Bard-727287989

Wokies only started complaining when a monkey squirrel alien did the pose. Probably because they subconsciously associate any depictions of apes/monkeys with POC and are primed to think "Oh no, is this depiction a caricature of POC?"

Minstrel shows were bad because of the blackface and the denigration of black folks. If you look up black southern culture, some of the traditional dress for musicians looks similar: e.g. https://images.app.goo.gl/jMFB7QGUUuGHDCLj8

You have to keep in mind that the proponents of Critical Race Theory are the ones who believe in "Race" as an immutable concept and advocate to put one person above another on the basis of their skin color.  They have made being colour blind a sin.

It isn't difficult to avoid making fantasy races into racist caricatures. That's why my elves are plant people, my dwarves are rock people, and my orcs pop out of chasms in the earth holding weapons ready for combat.

I honestly can't imagine being so braindead that I could write something like this. Seriously, do these people have no self-awareness? Why even add the part about them being willing servants? How did they think it was going to go when they deliberately made a racial allegory and then in the same description, made them good slaves?

Do they even think about anything before they do it?

Its like they don't want villains in their games.  Like actual monster races that are irredeemable, always evil, take no prisoners, only good to be slain without any moral objection for doing so.

You know.  A true good and evil game kept simple for a reason.

I don't want to kill standard security guards at an enemy base because they might be decent people with families.  But what about a raiding band of humanoid pigs called orcs who just want to kill people so they can eat them as cannibals are known to do?  Those I can kill without a qualm.

Nice summation in that video, it very much echoes what I said in my 'first ever' post here after reading this controversy on Enworld which is that to me it is glaringly obvious that if you see orc, drow, any dark pigmented creature, or anything simian and monkey like and your immediate first reaction is to point & shriek "Rayciss!"; You are a very deeply flawed and bigoted human being who needs to dig down deep and see where that comes from to automatically make those associations.

Psychologically speaking, this isn't really news. Those screaming the loudest about something are in many cases massively compensating for guilt about the same said thing. There is significant historical precedent for this.

It turns out the happy elf slave bit comes from older editions, actually. False alarm.

I'm going to focus more on the parts I disagree with. There were two claims made that I think are false.

1) The wokists don't understand metaphor.
2) The wokists don't understand morality.

I'll be coming back to the idea that orcs must somehow be a representation for black people, but I have to lay some track.

The wokists clearly have an understanding of metaphor. This is how they're able to detect racist and sexist right wing dog whistles that the right themselves are ignorant of. I remember seeing and hearing all kinds of arguments about how this or that thing that George W. Bush said was a secret dog whistle about criminalizing gays or banning abortion. Now these were actual positions on the right - extreme positions, but positions that real people held - which some people on the right would just come out and say openly, but somehow GWB was making secret dog whistles. Like he was afraid to say it, and had to speak in code, even though that's literally what his supporters wanted to hear.

If I'm being honest with myself, the 20 year younger version of me thought these arguments about secret right wing dog whistles were persuasive. Yet, the entire time, I remember the right were flabbergasted that the left were seeing these dog whistles. It was like the radical left had some sort of secret right wing codebook that the right themselves had been deprived of. Without the ability to perceive and understand metaphor, the left would not have been convinced they had detected secret dog whistles.

Next is the concept of morality. The wokists have a morality, it's just a very different morality. And yet, in some ways, it's very similar. This shouldn't be surprising, because wokism arose in a Judeo-Christian society. Coming from an outsider (that is: nonreligious) perspective, the concept of white privilege is very similar to the concept of original sin.

So to get back to the idea of orcs as a metaphor for black people. Those of us who are familiar with Tolkien understand orcs as a broader metaphor for the wages of sin. To the wokists, orcs represent white people assembling a caricature of every negative stereotype about black people as a secret racist dog whistle to other whites. In this way, the wokists understand orcs as a broader metaphor for the wages of their concept of sin, which is whiteness.

I think it's likely that metaphor may be all the wokists understand. They don't understand something so simple as an evil race of pigmen that you can fight on the hex grid in miniatures combat. They see nothing but metaphor. They can't conceive of orcs in any other way but a secret racist metaphorically encoding their secret racist dog whistles into the orc. In their mind, the orc simply must be a racist metaphor for black people. Because racists are secretly hiding among us, spreading their hate in order to keep white supremacy alive despite all the woke's best efforts to stamp it out.

I just got banned from rpg.net for pushing back on the idea that racial bonuses are in any way shape or form "racist". You have to either accept their ideological nonsense or else. They can't function without being shielded from any and all forms of criticism or alternative thought processes.

I hate where gaming and society in general is drifting towards and I fear it's going to get much worse before it gets any better.

Quote from: Corolinth on September 01, 2022, 03:32:29 PM
I'm going to focus more on the parts I disagree with. There were two claims made that I think are false.

1) The wokists don't understand metaphor.
2) The wokists don't understand morality.

I'll be coming back to the idea that orcs must somehow be a representation for black people, but I have to lay some track.

The wokists clearly have an understanding of metaphor. This is how they're able to detect racist and sexist right wing dog whistles that the right themselves are ignorant of. I remember seeing and hearing all kinds of arguments about how this or that thing that George W. Bush said was a secret dog whistle about criminalizing gays or banning abortion. Now these were actual positions on the right - extreme positions, but positions that real people held - which some people on the right would just come out and say openly, but somehow GWB was making secret dog whistles. Like he was afraid to say it, and had to speak in code, even though that's literally what his supporters wanted to hear.

If I'm being honest with myself, the 20 year younger version of me thought these arguments about secret right wing dog whistles were persuasive. Yet, the entire time, I remember the right were flabbergasted that the left were seeing these dog whistles. It was like the radical left had some sort of secret right wing codebook that the right themselves had been deprived of. Without the ability to perceive and understand metaphor, the left would not have been convinced they had detected secret dog whistles.

Next is the concept of morality. The wokists have a morality, it's just a very different morality. And yet, in some ways, it's very similar. This shouldn't be surprising, because wokism arose in a Judeo-Christian society. Coming from an outsider (that is: nonreligious) perspective, the concept of white privilege is very similar to the concept of original sin.

So to get back to the idea of orcs as a metaphor for black people. Those of us who are familiar with Tolkien understand orcs as a broader metaphor for the wages of sin. To the wokists, orcs represent white people assembling a caricature of every negative stereotype about black people as a secret racist dog whistle to other whites. In this way, the wokists understand orcs as a broader metaphor for the wages of their concept of sin, which is whiteness.

I think it's likely that metaphor may be all the wokists understand. They don't understand something so simple as an evil race of pigmen that you can fight on the hex grid in miniatures combat. They see nothing but metaphor. They can't conceive of orcs in any other way but a secret racist metaphorically encoding their secret racist dog whistles into the orc. In their mind, the orc simply must be a racist metaphor for black people. Because racists are secretly hiding among us, spreading their hate in order to keep white supremacy alive despite all the woke's best efforts to stamp it out.

First your last claim, to wit that the wokes are trying to stamp out racism/sexism/etc.

The woke ARE racists, sexists, etc.

It's why they see an Orc and think Black People.

It's why they think we non-whites need the white saviour.

It's why they can only see race/sex/sexuality/etc.

It's why they are writting racist stereotypes, from What If Miles Morales was Thor to this new shit.

As for Dog Whistles... If only you can hear them...

As for morality... Sure, they have one, a twisted one where racial/sexual/etc discrimination is fine if it's directed at the correct target.

It's why they produce shit like Coyote & Crow, the woke equivalent to Myfarog.

Tolkien basically invented orcs as a trope. The name has an old etymology, but that's irrelevant to the trope he codified. Tolkien created and used orcs because he needed faceless mooks that the heroes could kill without worrying about the morality of their actions (compare how Tolkien included a scene where Sam briefly wonders how a brown-skinned southern boy came to be in the army of Sauron). Being a Catholic, Tolkien couldn't accept the idea of an inherently evil race and so struggled with the design of the orcs up to his death. (I think he has a point, mostly in the sense that coming from an agnostic POV I don't believe that an evil race can logically or logistically exist because evil is to a large degree subjective (e.g. pretty much all civilizations prior to the rise of civil right were horrifically evil from a modern POV) and even by the most universal definition of evil no species could survive very long could engaging in nothing but evil behaviors. An intelligent species has to engage at bare minimum in a ton of altruistic behavior in order to survive and thrive, and has to brutally punish behavior that threatens the safety of the tribe.)

Modern non-woke gamers don't struggle this way. They use orcs as a blatant gamist convention: they want guilt-free slaughter. Altho it certainly seems pathologically grotesque that our entertainment is violent crime fantasy, there's no evidence that this affects our real life behavior. Most people seem to be able to recognize that the sort of murderous kleptomania typical of fantasy gaming is not permitted in real life. (Not that there aren't sick people who play games as an outlet because they secretly want to live power fantasies in real life, but most players seem to just do it for a combination of novelty escapism and their own lack of imagination to do anything the game doesn't tell them to do.)

Some of the ways that writers have tried to expand on or ham-fistedly justify what is ultimately a game convention have been cringy. "What do we do with the baby orcs?" is a question as old as the hobby itself. (For what it's worth, I think if you get to the point where you ask that question then you should really fire the idiot who designed orcs. They're a game convention, so they shouldn't have women and children in the first place!) Other authors have tried to reinvent orcs as the fantasy equivalent of klingons. Often by coding them as the author's ill-educated stereotype of Native Americans, which is cringy af. Sure, uncreative and incompetent authors have piled on racial coding at random: Celtic fashion (e.g. red hair, blue body paint), Viking fashion, Native American stereotypes, etc. Outside of the most incompetent generic schlock (e.g. WarCraft 3), the orcs were not literally meant to be stand-ins for these groups. Sure, there was some manifest destiny shit inherited from insensitive pulp fiction tropes, but those have been constantly relaxing for decades. Especially when the 80s and 90s, coasting on the successes of the civil rights movement, saw the rise of diverse heroes intended to shatter stereotypes and provide genuine representation. A lot of it was clumsy af, but they were genuinely trying at least.

Wokies bizarrely seem to think there was no progress, or even passage of time, between Martin Luther King's speech and Trump's presidency. (Sure, things aren't as great as they could and should be, but there was clearly a lot of progress.) Not only that, but they think that orcs are a racist caricature of black people whose presence reinforces racist attitudes. An assertion that isn't backed by science.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on September 01, 2022, 04:01:16 PM
First your last claim, to wit that the wokes are trying to stamp out racism/sexism/etc.

The woke ARE racists, sexists, etc.

It's why they see an Orc and think Black People.

It's why they think we non-whites need the white saviour.

It's why they can only see race/sex/sexuality/etc.

It's why they are writting racist stereotypes, from What If Miles Morales was Thor to this new shit.

As for Dog Whistles... If only you can hear them...

As for morality... Sure, they have one, a twisted one where racial/sexual/etc discrimination is fine if it's directed at the correct target.

It's why they produce shit like Coyote & Crow, the woke equivalent to Myfarog.

No contest about the wokes are racist. That's all they think about is race. However, I never claimed they were trying to stamp out racism or sexism. I said they see themselves as trying to stamp out white supremacy. They're absolutely fine with racism, as long as it's the "right kind" of racism. Their entire morality is built around it.

Quote from: Corolinth on September 01, 2022, 03:32:29 PM
I'm going to focus more on the parts I disagree with. There were two claims made that I think are false.

1) The wokists don't understand metaphor.
2) The wokists don't understand morality.

I'll be coming back to the idea that orcs must somehow be a representation for black people, but I have to lay some track.

The wokists clearly have an understanding of metaphor. This is how they're able to detect racist and sexist right wing dog whistles that the right themselves are ignorant of. I remember seeing and hearing all kinds of arguments about how this or that thing that George W. Bush said was a secret dog whistle about criminalizing gays or banning abortion. Now these were actual positions on the right - extreme positions, but positions that real people held - which some people on the right would just come out and say openly, but somehow GWB was making secret dog whistles. Like he was afraid to say it, and had to speak in code, even though that's literally what his supporters wanted to hear.

If I'm being honest with myself, the 20 year younger version of me thought these arguments about secret right wing dog whistles were persuasive. Yet, the entire time, I remember the right were flabbergasted that the left were seeing these dog whistles. It was like the radical left had some sort of secret right wing codebook that the right themselves had been deprived of. Without the ability to perceive and understand metaphor, the left would not have been convinced they had detected secret dog whistles.

Next is the concept of morality. The wokists have a morality, it's just a very different morality. And yet, in some ways, it's very similar. This shouldn't be surprising, because wokism arose in a Judeo-Christian society. Coming from an outsider (that is: nonreligious) perspective, the concept of white privilege is very similar to the concept of original sin.

So to get back to the idea of orcs as a metaphor for black people. Those of us who are familiar with Tolkien understand orcs as a broader metaphor for the wages of sin. To the wokists, orcs represent white people assembling a caricature of every negative stereotype about black people as a secret racist dog whistle to other whites. In this way, the wokists understand orcs as a broader metaphor for the wages of their concept of sin, which is whiteness.

I think it's likely that metaphor may be all the wokists understand. They don't understand something so simple as an evil race of pigmen that you can fight on the hex grid in miniatures combat. They see nothing but metaphor. They can't conceive of orcs in any other way but a secret racist metaphorically encoding their secret racist dog whistles into the orc. In their mind, the orc simply must be a racist metaphor for black people. Because racists are secretly hiding among us, spreading their hate in order to keep white supremacy alive despite all the woke's best efforts to stamp it out.

I think the left often conflates two things which, while superficially similar, are significantly different. Definitions get contentious when you're talking about literature, but for the sake of clarity, I'm going to refer to them as "metaphor" and "allegory".

Allegory is the placing of a fictional gloss over something which has an essentially concrete existence in the real world. So for example, "Animal Farm", which essentially retells the history of the Russian Revolution through talking animals, is an allegory.

Metaphor, on the other hand, is using fiction to make concrete something which is more of an abstraction in the real world. The One Ring, which represents the corrupting influence of power and the desire thereof, is a metaphor.

I don't think its controversial to say that the left understands allegory extremely well. They produce an awful lot of them ("The Crucible", "Avatar", etc.) In fact, I would say they're so into allegory that they see it where it doesn't exist. Lefties think that fantasy races are an allegory, whereas the Pundit would argue they're more of a metaphor. I don't know if I agree in the specific case of Tolkien's orcs, though. I honestly think they're mostly just there because the goodies need a physical threat to contend with.

The sense in which it's correct to say that the Left has no morals, is in the fact that the "morals" of the Left have no universality to them. They're increasingly open about the fact that they don't see anything wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, or killing, if its done in the name of what they regard as the correct faction. The morality of the modern Left is increasingly just a morality of naked power, which I think it's fair to argue isn't worth calling morality at all.