If there is one creature that’s Always Evil, it’s definitely the chihuahua…
In theory, you’re correct. The problem is that if you tell people the former, they’ll automatically infer the latter; if you say, “those guys are dumber than us” then many - most? - people will think, “…then we should treat them all like idiots.”
Would you lynch an orc?
Say that in your game, all orcs are inherently evil. Say that you’re hunting down an evil orc warlord, and your fellow players decide, for logical gameplaying reasons, to dress up as ghosts with pointy hats and hang him from a tree. Would you go along with them?
Of course you wouldn’t, because while in context, it’s not an evil thing to do, it takes the form of an evil thing. Likewise, treating all members of a race as worth killing may not be evil, in context, but it still takes the form of something evil.
What? No, torturing a thing and delighting in its fear IS an evil thing. That’s the whole point of lynching.
Would my wizard put on his pointy wizard hat and fireball some evil goblins? Yes.
Would my fighter put on a pointy hat and torture evil goblins? No.
Would I watch a movie where the character blows up a theater full of evil gremlins? Yes
Would I watch a movie where the character tortures evil gremlins for fun? No.
You never answered the question, though. Do Independence Day and Gremlins promote racist thinking? Do they create an atmosphere where racism is okay? Do the Always Evil Aliens and Always Evil Gremlins create a problematic situation that should have been avoided with better writing to make them nuanced and multifaceted antagonists? Are the attitudes expressed towards the aliens and gremlins stand-ins for real life attitudes towards human ethnic groups?
I will say that, although I think orcs usually (not always, but usually, and certainly in the image we were discussing) embody the “dark-skinned brutish subhumans threaten white civilization and especially white wimmin” racist tropes, I’m less convinced that having sentient species that think and behave according to alien moral codes is irredeemably racist, any more than having problems that are mostly solved through lots of murder is irredeemably terroristic.
I mentioned that I’m running a campaign with deep-sea shark people. Way I’m running them:
-They find the idea of mass warfare, as humans etc. conduct it, completely horrific.
-Slavery is absolutely taboo.
-They find the idea of killing and eating another humanoid to be unremarkable.
-Torture as entertainment is just fine with them.
-They’re obsessed with visual decoration, since seeing color is a rare treat in their native environment; being near the surface means they just can’t get enough of splashing color on everything.
My goal is to make them sufficiently alien and threatening that the PCs can have fun killing the snot out of them, but not tying them in to traditional racist tropes.
It’s been a while, but do either of those movies spend any time at all telling us about the culture and civilization of the aliens/gremlins? Are we told by a reliable, omniscient narrator that the aliens are evil to their core and that while there may be an occasional human sympathizer among them, that alien will be an outcast for its regressive ideas? If the answer is no, then the comparison doesn’t really work.
Was that argument made? I thought the suggestion was that you are getting defensive about a hobby that you love, not that you’re “too white” to see the problem.
Though I do have a genuine question for you: do you, in a general sense, agree or disagree with the notion of institutional racism? Forget any specific expression of it - just the general idea that American racism has been baked into almost every facet of our culture over the course of several hundred years.
Granted, I don’t know how YOUR games play out but, in mine, that would be an extremely weak argument. The DM doesn’t just tell the players all about monster culture and how many are outcasts or whatever, the players create a story and learn about the critters by playing the game and interacting with them. ID and Gremlins are the stories of the characters interacting with the aliens and gremlins. We see, in those stories, that the aliens are uniformly on board with eradicating a sentient species with whom they can communicate and that the gremlins are all on board with a life of malicious mischief up to and including murder. No exception or nuances are made in either case. I’m personally able to enjoy those stories without demanding from the writers and producers an omniscient recounting of their culture. I can play D&D and enjoy the story we make interacting with the monsters likewise.
But we are told a little about the culture of the aliens from ID. We know that they travel about, finding planets and stripping them of their resources with no regard for the sentient species already living there. If I say that a D&D race roams the lands, pillaging settlements for all their shit and without regard for the people who live there… well, we’d have a pretty typical description of orcs in a lot of games, really.
“This is a very typical response of someone brought up on a culture steeped in systematic institutional racism but who rarely faces the sharp end of the stick.”
The “defensive towards your hobby” remark was from someone else and I replied that I had no issue with pointing out problematic stuff (i.e. Drow), I just didn’t agree with the assessment of this particular thing (the depiction of orcs in a specific painting was racist)
I do. I don’t agree with every instance of someone pointing at a thing and saying it represents racism.
To be fair, we’re not told that in D&D either. The Monster Manual says that a creature’s alignment listed in the book is the default but can be changed to suit the needs of the campaign. If you wanted to put Lawful Good orcs in the game that’s a viable option.
…I’ll also say that a bunch of little nasty dudes who steal stuff, torture helpless people/animals and exist in a chaotic state Gremlins-style would work just fine as goblins or kobolds or similar. You probably wouldn’t want one as a PC race if that’s what your goblins are like but they’d make fine low level antagonists. Would that makes them problematic or in-game attitudes towards them representative of real world racist attitudes?
Sure, but that’s literally the rule for everything. The DM has absolute fiat to change whatever they want, from fluff to mechanics. You can append “unless the DM says otherwise” to every single paragraph from every single book from the last five decades, but that doesn’t make for useful analysis.
Okay. Putting context aside again, do you agree that it is often/sometimes the case that privileged people have trouble identifying institutional racism in the places where it intersects with their own experiences, even if they’re perfectly willing and able to identify it elsewhere?
Of course you see where I’m going with this - I’m not trying to awkwardly angle you into a ‘gotcha.’ From where I’m sitting, this looks like a blind spot in action.
I guess it boils down to this: why is D&D immune to the effects of institutional racism? If we can acknowledge that the racism embedded in nearly every aspect of society is what drives the issue today, why would a bunch of fantasy tropes conceived fifty years ago somehow not be part of it?
I wanted to quote this because it’s a hugely salient point that might have been buried. It was called The Doll Test and it is directly applicable to what we’re talking about here. If the majority of “good guys” are white and the majority of “bad guys” are not - and it doesn’t matter what flavor of non-white they are - it’s harmful to all children who are exposed to it.
Never said it was. I pointed some out earlier.
Also way ahead of you on that one, once again, having pointed out numerous times now that I think it’s an issue that the main dark-skinned PC race in the PHB are a race of elves who are literally color coded as evil in the game’s lore.
You definitely have. And you also, rightly, pointed out that Drow weren’t designed to be African analogues. It was just tone-deaf nerds from the 70s. But even though the intent was innocuous, it’s problematic today.
So why the problem with making that exact leap to all the other evil races? Nobody ever really sets out to contribute to institutional racism - its self-perpetuating nature is one of its most insidious traits.
All anybody is saying is that “some people are born bad and have to work really hard to overcome their degenerate nature” is a shitty message for anybody to hear. It’s a message that real people in America hear about themselves and their families as soon as they’re old enough to understand English, and it sucks to have it echoed in popular culture. It doesn’t matter that it’s just a game. It doesn’t matter that the DM is free to change it. It doesn’t matter that there’s no ill intent. It’s still shitty for it to be codified in a game about being a hero.
For the record, I have no real problem with a DM if they want to include savage orcs and goblins in their games. Zero problem. But in a scenario where the choice is “make the decision that orcs are nuanced people with free will to be good or evil” or “make the decision that orcs are bloodthirsty murder-machines,” I’m fine with the deviation being the latter.
Because I disagree in some of those cases.
No offense, but that wasn’t even the issue for most of the last day’s worth of posts. It was started over whether a painting of some orcs was racist or not.
One other point about D&D is that it’s mostly not a visual game. I’ve always known the races of my characters and those of my party members, but I’ve almost never known their skin colors. Sometimes not even for my own characters.
Now, granted, the group I play with are all white in real life. And we probably do assume, by default, that humans of unspecified color are white. But that’s a problem completely independent of the game.
For those who feel that fantasy orcs are problematic (and I would agree that regardless of intent of the writers or players, the racial undertones of how they are conceived in Dungeons & Dragons and similar classic fantasy roleplaying games is evident), how do you feel about how various monocultured, humanoid alien “races” are treated in science fiction, and in particular the portrayal of Klingons in the various incarnations of Star Trek, which are essentially space orcs, at least in The Next Generation and subsequent shows and films?
Stranger
I’m watching DS9 now with my kids, and Quark’s portrayal doesn’t make me happy. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s cringey. On the other hand, the Bajorans have a relatively complex society with competing factions and different norms within the society, and that’s a lot better.
Overall, it’s the same Star Wars Planetary Biome problem I mentioned way back when: it’s much more interesting when a species is as complex as humanity. When an entire species is reduced to a single viewpoint, culture, and personality, it’s no good, and it feels a bit like a projection of our tendency to reduce real-world racial groups in corresponding ways.
I’ve been rewatching that show as well, and I actually think that Armin Shimerman (and the other actors playing Ferengi characters) does a great job at taking a role that was clearly intended to be primarily comic relief and turn it into a more nuanced character, especially given that the Ferengi are a transparent and monsterous characture of Ashkenazi Jewish culture from the slavish worship of profit above all else to the devotion of memorizing obscure and arbitary ‘Rules of Acquisition’ to demonstrate cultural prowess. But I’m really more interested with regard to this thread in the discussion of Klingons given their protrayal as instinctually brutish and graceless warrior figures akin to fantasy orcs, and that in Next Generation and subsequent shows Klingons were predominately cast from black actors.
Stranger
First, yeah, Shimerman does a great job. His complex relationship with Odo and Cisco is really well-done. It’s the Ferengi as a whole that bother me for reasons you get at.
As for Klingons, yeah, I hadn’t really thought about it, but reading about the 1967 show, apparently the makeup styles they used for Klingons had names like “Negro 2” and “Mexican 1.” That’s, uh, that’s not great.
The original series Klingons were more Ming-esque, including a pseudo-Fu Manchu beard and upswept eyebrows and tan-ish coloring; hey, at least they didn’t attempt an accent. But they were portrayed as being cunning and cleverly deceitful; a worthy, thinking opponent. The original cast movies changed their physical form and made them somewhat more brutal but still highly intelligent adversaries. However, when it came to The Next Generation, it morphed Klingons into often animalistic murder-grogs of whom even the best (e.g. Mr. Worf) have to constantly fight against his instinctual nature to leap into a fight in order to prevent blasting a hole in the viewscreen or ravishing a woman who growls at him. Aside from being very one note, it also harkens back to a “less civilized” portrayal of a human-like race with brutish characteristics and, whether intentional or not, played largely by black actors. Given the current discussion (from which this is something of a tangent but follows the same line of complaint) it seems like this is also a problematic trope which is all too common, and not just in Star Trek although that is the most obvious and popular example.
Stranger
I’m not an enormous ST fan, and barely remember any portrayal of Klingons other than Worf from TNG. From what you say, it sounds pretty bad.