Or maybe call them “deep elves” instead of “dark elves.” It describes them better and has a mildly sinister undertone without the implicit racial ones.
I’m prepping for a new campaign I’m starting in the Fall. It’s the Skull and Shackles adventure path from Pathfinder 1st edition, which I’m expanding into a full sandbox. Lots of great stuff in there, but holy shit, it seems like every single female villain has sexual violence and/or rape in her backstory, including the ancient red dragon. To compound it, only the female villains apparently need a traumatic backstory to justify them being villain. They’re villains because they’re shitty people who like to hurt others, and that’s considered enough. The women all need some event that “broke” them and turned them into shitty people.
It is weird and gross, and this is from a campaign that’s only ~ten years old.
well it’s still happening I mealnlook at Disneys maleficent movies …and 90 percent of anything Mercedes lackey has ever written
Baby steps, WOTC, baby steps…
Just so we’re clear, the stuff they’re now walking back includes this:
I’ve no idea what race or ethnicity that is supposed to be representative of.
Good for you.
I’m not sure if you mean I’m not racist or if I’m just stupid. (Or both, a strong possibility.) Like, seriously, what’s that supposed to refer to in real life?
Well, that’s bait, I’d say, so I’m going to skip past it to…
It must be nice to be blissfully ignorant of the entire history of Jim Crow and minstrel caricatures.
Of course, the article I linked to some example, but who reads links, amirite?
I guess the European medieval dress threw me off, then. Not at all visibly reminiscent of Jim Crow or minstrel caricatures.
The image by itself might not be so bad, but combined with a backstory that boils down to “wizards enslaved and then civilized them,” and it’s pretty tough to ignore.
The backstory does point one in a direction, obviously.
I wonder; could you have that backstory if you made the imagery really, really obviously NOT black people? (Or not humanoid at all?)
I mean, it’s not as if I’m saying this sort of thing can’t be offensive (cough Watto from Phantom Menace cough.)
“Superior species enslaves and civilizes inferior species” is problematic no matter what. Making them happy little minstrel monkeys alongside that backstory just makes it particularly egregious.
Quite possibly. It might be best for WOTC and other similar outfits producing entertainment content, in whatever media, to just avoid the subject entirely.
I haven’t looked much at the 1980s version of Spelljammer (D&D fantasy spacefaring) or at the new version, but that appears to be a member of the Hadozee species. They look very similar to the Yazirians from TSR’s old science fiction game, Star Frontiers (which I have played), and I think are supposed to be a fantasy version of that species. I know nothing about Hadozee culture. In Star Frontiers, the Yazirians were the smartest of the playable sentient alien races. Spelljammer should have left them simply as smart (fantasy) space-faring aliens. I won’t be surprised if they revert to whatever the 1980s backstory was for the Hadozee, now that their weird slave-race version has sparked backlash. In the 1980s, the Hadozee were monsters, not a playable race,
It isn’t supposed to be any human race, etc. In D&D you can play a number of animal like races- cat people, goat people (satyrs), rabbit people, crow people, etc. That is a monkey person.
I do not get any IRL racial stuff out of that.
I see some people are getting a “jim crow minstrel” vibe from that, but there is no blackface or anything. The eyes, teeth , feet are all clearly non-human.
The backstory is problematic, sure.
There are other depictions of them. I would presume the “minstrel” represents a Hadozee Bard. There may be some cherrypicking going on regarding the artwork. The backstory of being a freed slave-race is the bigger issue to me.
Combine it all (back story, monkeys, and minstrel stuff) and it’s either deliberate allusions to racist imagery, or extremely coincidental inadvertent clear allusions to racist imagery. Either way, it should be rewritten and redrawn.
Typing on this phone is hard. I follow D&D on Facebook. I saw an announcement that they were redacting material on the Hadozee. I did not know why or what Hadozee were. Now my only question is how in the nine hells did that material make it to publication?
Well, according to one source, they came up with the Hadozee in 1982. In 1982 attention to this sort of insensitivity was nonexistent.