3259

D&D is huge right now. Just enormous. It’s almost surreal how big it has become in the last few years, especially with young people. It’s not the same system that was released, it has way more contribution from a variety of different people and the player-base can be as varied as the population itself.

It’s a stupid statement for sure, but it’s not some “left wing take on DnD.” It’s one idiot’s statement who may be… anything, not some hot take at all.

3260

Or anything else.

3261

That’s fair enough. It can be true both that it was invented by someone with those views and appealed initially to people susceptible to those views yet now appeals to a much broader audience. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.

By analogy, if someone said that the US Constitution is a straight-up slaveholder fantasy with with a coat of paint, I wouldn’t say they were saying stupid shit. They’d be right. And wrong, too, I suppose, because it has been improved. And they wouldn’t be saying that everyone who ever participated in the political process was doing so because they were slavers.

3262

He said this:

3263

I’m sorry, that sentence is not meant to imply that the take is the singular belief held by the left wing.

It’s saying, “I’m amused by the take, which is left wing, that D&D is racist.”

If my phrasing was unclear, it was due to the fact that i wouldn’t have thought that anyone would believe that everyone on the left wing held such a belief.

3264

I think people read way too much into things.

If Ben Shapiro says something stupid, it’s a “right-wing take” to most of us, even if Ben Shapiro is literally the only person on the planet saying it. Because Ben is… right-wing.

Hell, we do this all the time in other threads. When the whole “kill grandma to jump start the economy” started it wasn’t a “right-wing” movement. It was like 3 or 4 random fucks on Twitter. The right-wing later adopted it, but it wasn’t the position of the majority by any means.

3265

We’ve lost a number of things to various hate groups. The Okay sign. A cartoon character, just a ton and ton of things to these groups. How do you think they do that, and why do you think they do that? It’s not accidental. It’s systematic, and they would love, love to try and take over a hugely popular game that has the attention of the young. They already do this exact thing by sneaking in their YouTube videos into YouTube’s playlists based on specific topics. This why so many parents have to keep an eye on what there kids are watching today, and this is part of white supremacy recruitment.

It’s not me reading too much into things, it’s being aware… of things like the Vampire Masquerade mess which hits what… the RPG space as well as Neo Nazis.

We’ve lost enough to these people, and that sort of thing always starts small. It’s always laughable right up until you can’t use the okay sign in pictures anymore.

So yeah, it does matter if it’s coming from actual liberal leaders with any kind of sway and and ability to spread it, someone who is “real” vs. some rando with a weird Twitter handle being repeated.

3266

Or assumes the account is actually a lefty trying to make fun of the right.

3267

This just seems like retconning knowledge of Gary Gygax’s political views back into the 1980s. How would we have even known about his views then? There was no social media, no consumer internet access, TSR didn’t have a blog. And they certainly weren’t going to pay money to just print whatever he felt like writing about.

We were teenage geeks who read Tolkien and wanted to fight dragons. The end.

(Based on the limited time I have for googling this, I’m not even sure what political views he held that made him such a monster. Apparently he was a libertarian, and a Jehovah’s Witness. And?)

3268

I don’t know why that matters. D&D was a bit like e.g. Heinlein’s sci-fi: it was designed to appeal to a particular audience, teen-age males. Not surprisingly, we all later learned a lot about Heinlein’s views that went far toward explaining the content of those books. That we didn’t know it at the time doesn’t change the relationship between the author and his work.

I don’t feel strongly about it; I just don’t think the original example of ‘liberal stupidity’ is actually stupid or even entirely wrong.

3269

It’s interesting seeing the reaction here vs. some fairly popular RPG folks on social media. The hot take of D&D being right-wing or whatever, is one of the end conclusions of the earlier “orcs are a racist construct” discussion.

I don’t know if I agree or disagree honestly. You can certainly find some problematic tropes surrounding orcs in fiction.

3270

Let’s be honest, this discussion still has a way to go. Orks in D&D is way less of a juicy topic than Orks in D&D based VIOLENT VIDEOGAMES PLAYED BY IMPRESSIONABLE CHILDREN. We could get some serious media coverage if we staged that twitter debate right and got it trending with the right hashtags.

3271

It seems to be a logically fallacious argument that kind of goes like this:
Racists portray some humans as monsters, thus, portrayals of monsters (in this case, orcs) is racist, because they end up talking about the same stuff.

The idea of a race of monsters is not inherently racist.

We’ve seen this kind of superficial assumption of equivalence in other cases, where similarity of terminology used is misinterpreted as two different ideas being the same.

Yeah, I honestly have no idea what kind of political views Gygax had, or why folks would think he’s racist.

The dude made a game.

3272

I believe this is the crux of the argument. The division is that for some folks the distinction between “racist person made this racist thing with this common fictional creation” and “non-racist person used this common fictional creation that carries racist baggage” is too fine to forgive.

3273

The idea of a race of monsters who are irretrievably evil and ought to be killed on sight is…pretty racist. It’s probably better that Tolkien invented monsters to be his baddies than if he’d chosen some existing race of people instead, but there isn’t really any doubt that the orcs in LOTR are the other.

3274

Orks aren’t a human race, so whatever you say about them can’t be racist.

“Orks ought to be killed on sight” is certainly speciesist, just like “Xenomorphs ought to be killed on sight” or “Great white sharks ought to be killed on sight”.

3275

Eradicating smallpox…totally racist.

3276

Seriously, what is this conversation?

Is killing all terminator robots racist? What about killing all alien invaders in Independence Day.

3277

Not sure about that one… in D&D Orcs and Humans can procreate, because there are Half Orcs. So aren’t they just a brutal, more physically distinct human race? (Elves too?)

3278

Horses and donkeys can interbreed, but they aren’t the same species.

Tolkien’s orks were supposedly corrupted elves, and elves were definitely distinct from humans (they were immortal, for one thing).

I suppose the origin of D&D orcs is whatever the DM wants it to be. Of note, orcs in Shadowrun actually are derived from humans, but they are treated sympathetically.